You meet people through people, and the more well adapted you are socially, the more people you meet and befriend, and the more you value your interpersonal relationships.
We're on Slashdot here. Not everybody is socially well-adapted, but we still want to find the girl/guy of your dreams. It only makes sense to use modern technology here.
But yea, why not? Take two people who are lonely enough to try an online dating service, give 'em 500 questions to answer, and match up the people whose answers are similar. Seems like a no-brainer. That's all most people want in a relationship anyway, and it's immensely soothing to date someone who shares your interests.
It's not just about being "lonely enough to try an online dating service", online dating is actually a very good way of meeting the right person. There are plenty of couples who meet in a bar/disco/college/elsewhere, physical attraction happens, sparks fly, they fall madly in love, date, have sex, marry (or in whatever order you'd like to do that), and then discover they have nothing in common.
Online dating allows you to explore interests, personality, and whether the other person is even functionally literate, before the physical stuff gets to mess things up.
And it's immediately obvious who's availlable and who isn't.
It's too easy to lie online, they're both guilty of it, and now they're going to pay the consequences.
It's just as easy to lie in real life. Or did she really give all het bank info to some guy she'd never even met in person? Because that would have been even more stupid than giving that info to someone she did meet in person.
Online dating isn't any more dangerous than other forms of dating. This would have been just as likely if they'd met in a bar or something.
Let's face it, some people are stupid, and some people take advantage of that.
Odds are extremely good for beyond human AI, given no restrictions on initial and early form factor. I say this because thus far, we've discovered nothing whatsoever that is non-reproducible about the brain's structure and function,
And yet we've found it extremely hard to reproduce the brain's structure.
and given that nowhere in nature, at any scale remotely similar to the range that includes particles, cells and animals, have we discovered anything that appears to follow an unknowable set of rules, the odds of finding anything like that in the brain, that is, something we can't simulate or emulate with 100% functional veracity, are just about zero.
While we haven't found anything that's "unknowable", there's an enormous amount of stuff in nature that's still very much unknown. And the workings of the human brain are very high on that list.
The problem here is: the fact that something is theoretically knowable doesn't imply it will be known within 20 years. There are lots of things that scientists have been looking for for many decades that still haven't been found. In the early days of computing, scientists realised that the brain was just a really big computer, and that computers would soon be as intelligent as we are. So far, they have been proven wrong. The main thing we've discovered is that intelligence is far more complex, and even far harder to define, than we ever thought.
And it's not just that. Many AI researchers have abandoned the idea of "Strong AI", for various reasons. For one, it's too hard to tackle at once, it's too hard to define, even. And for another, even if human-like AI was possible, why would we need it? We've got 6 billion humans already. What's far more useful to us is AI that's more controlable than humans, and very good at the things that we're not good at, either because they're too hard for us, or because they're too boring or dangerous. And once you start restricting yourself to very specific applications, developing the AI becomes a lot easier. Lots of progress is being made. Not towards human-like AI, but towards practical machine intelligence.
Human-like AI will not happen by 2029. It may not even happen this century. I don't doubt it's theoretically possible, but there are far more useful things we can do with AI, and far easier things too. And even those are hard enough to achieve. Hopefully we'll see a lot of progress towards those goals in the next 20 years, and I'm sure AI will continue to outpace human intelligence in a lot more specialisations than it currently does (because there are a lot of specialised areas where AI is already superior to human intelligence, and chess is merely the most famous example), but we will not see the kind of versatile allround intelligence that humans have.
And perhaps that's fortunate, because once that happens, it'll take only a few years before human intelligence is obsolete.
My first joystick was a simple metal stick with a big, fat, red knob on the end. It's used in a very different way than later joysticks that fit your hand and fingers exactly, has a fire button under your index finger, another button under your thumb, etc. But it's still a joystick. A primitive one, but a joystick nonetheless.
When I read the title, my first thought was: "I thought most controllers for consoles have one or two joysticks." The joystick may be dead on the PC (with its superior mouse), but it's alive an well on controllers. It shrunk, that's all, but it's basically the same thing.
Nothing is more beautiful in my eyes than a machine which does it's job well day after day. It's simple, it's rugged, it's the best laptop series that was ever produced. You bring up a good point: is this ultra-thin ThinkPad still as rugged and indestructible as its lumpier relatives?
Well, since it appears that you choose to be bound by the rules when you play D&D (maybe you just need to find a group/DM that is willing to bend/ignore some of the rules?)...
Or simply play with different rules that don't need so much bending.
I've bent, changed and ignored lots of rules over the years, but a good system shouldn't need that. Either by leaving everything open and up to the GM (like Fudge), or by providing good rules for everything. Like GURPS, although that still has some issues in some of the details. Still, its problems are nowhere near the scale of the problems I've had with (A)D&D over the years.
The Neocons aren't Republicans by any definition of the term.
Not by any definition? Not even a definition as outrageous as "members of the republican party"?
Or did you refer to the definition of "neocon"? Because if you don't consider any past or present members of the Bush administration to be neocons, I'm kinda interested in what your definition is.
Just pointing out that this is one of the more bizarre denials I've seen since Comical Ali.
... there is plenty of "analog" going on. The disc spins. It wobbles a little bit, the track spiral isn't exactly center, your whole drive is vibrating from the 15 120mm fans you have hooked in, all these will let the laser linger too long or too short on a "pit", weakening some spots and strengthening others.
And yet all of that has nothing to do with converting the music to analog. The machine may be a big rotating, vibrating, tumbling mess, but the data is digital, whether it is in MP3 or on CD. And assuming your CD writer isn't a crappy piece of junk, it will manage to get that digital data onto the CD. And no matter how much it wobbles, vibrates or lingers, the quality of the music will be unchanged because it is digital. That's the entire point.
I'm looking for something almost exactly like this for a MythTV box, but powerful enough to act as a small mail/web server (has to run Java servlets). I'm not sure those amazingly cool VIA processors are really powerful enough for what I want, but I do like their low power consumption for a server I'm going to have permanently turned on in my living room.
Seconded. I knew very little about recent hardware until Silent PC Review taught me almost everything I know. Although AnandTech is also pretty good, and has some very helpful people on its forum.
Oh I don't know. I'm in the market for a new case and I've noticed that there's no good guide for what to look for in a good case. SPCR has one. Ofcourse it's dedicated to silence, but they also keep an eye on other useful features, like cable management. Conclusion: get an Antec, preferably a P182 or a P150/Solo.
As for the PSU's A good PSU will save you a LOT of heartache. The things I recently learned about this are: A 300W PSU is plenty for most people, the Seasonic S12 line of PSUs are among the quietest and very reliable, Antec PSUs are not so reliable, and keep an eye on the efficiency of your PSU.
Same with a good MB, but a PSU affects more components.
But a motherboard is more complex. A PSU simply has to work and not fail.
Anyway, here, I learned that the Gigabyte P35-DS3 line is pretty good.
Note that I'm not in any way a hardware expert, but perhaps someone else will have some use for this information.
Wrong. Your CDR drive has to convert that digital signal coming from the rest of the computer into an analog signal.
We're talking about burning to CD, not burning to vinyl, so there's no conversion to analog. That conversion happens in the amplifier (just like if you were playing the MP3 directly or even the original CD), and only after that will your standard analog loss kick in.
(This gives me a great idea to make more money from audiophiles: a vinyl burner for your PC, so you can magically add "warmth" to your downloaded MP3s!)
If you want to insist on hard definitions, instead of the thinly disguised tribalism of the US political system, then liberals should be the ones who want as little government interference as possible on people's personal freedoms, whereas conservatives would want it to enforce conservative values.
At least, that's the way it works in most of the rest of the world. Ofcourse lots of economic liberals tend to be socially conservative, whereas social liberals are often economically socialist.
And then there's the difference between libertarian capitalism and libertarian socialism.
Everyone buys political clout, that's how the system works. Lobbying = legalized bribery. That doesn't make it right, though. It makes it wrong. Apparently up til now the gaming industry was one of the few groups ethical enough not to give in to this corruption, but now they're giving in. And politicians and parent groups are to blame for this corruption of our game industry!
I'm afraid I can't be bothered to find the link, but there's an XKCD comic about how geeks are always ready for sudden explosions, shootings and sword fights when waiting in line at the post office.
I do not know about India or China, but in Soviet Russia (where I am from) the anti-American propaganda worked in this way: they basically told us more or less the truth (which I verified later) about bad stuff in US, like US indeed turned out to have more unimployed or homeless people compare to what we had in Soviet Russia.
But what they never told us is all this good stuff about US The truth is often the most effective lie.
(in Soviet Russia a bus driver had 3 times higher salary than a researcher in a government lab). I'm not sure I'd actually disagree with that, though. 3 times higher may be a bit much, but I don't object to boring, tedious but necessary jobs getting higher pay than exciting innovative work.
I thought 4 years was a bit young for Lego. I recently gave my niece a big lego box for her sixth birthday. It included designs for lots of different models, and she wanted to build the most difficult one: a fire truck. So I spent all day coaching her in how to follow the instructions, but she did all the work. I don't know if she's disassembled it again and built something else out of it. I hope she did, but since she's living on the other side of the country, I don't see her very often.
You're right. I remember that yellow castle, but I've never owned it. I had the grey one, which was still great. I'm still not sure whether I think the large grey wall segments are a good idea or a bad one, though. They're a good example of the shaped custom elements that you can only use for one particular function (wall in this case), but any building needs walls, and I've built an enormous number of different castle designs with them that I probably wouldn't have built from the yellow set. Seemingly restrictive custom elements can definitely stimulate creativity.
So what if you can't build a car out of them? I loved building castles. Still do. In fact, if I'm ever rich enough to design my own house, it's going to look a bit like a castle.
Slashdot Mirror
True. You don't have to hope for destiny to do its job anymore.
We're on Slashdot here. Not everybody is socially well-adapted, but we still want to find the girl/guy of your dreams. It only makes sense to use modern technology here.
It's not just about being "lonely enough to try an online dating service", online dating is actually a very good way of meeting the right person. There are plenty of couples who meet in a bar/disco/college/elsewhere, physical attraction happens, sparks fly, they fall madly in love, date, have sex, marry (or in whatever order you'd like to do that), and then discover they have nothing in common.
Online dating allows you to explore interests, personality, and whether the other person is even functionally literate, before the physical stuff gets to mess things up.
And it's immediately obvious who's availlable and who isn't.
It's just as easy to lie in real life. Or did she really give all het bank info to some guy she'd never even met in person? Because that would have been even more stupid than giving that info to someone she did meet in person.
Online dating isn't any more dangerous than other forms of dating. This would have been just as likely if they'd met in a bar or something.
Let's face it, some people are stupid, and some people take advantage of that.
Speaking as a guy who married a girl with a very well-paid job, this characteristic could also be increased after marriage.
And yet we've found it extremely hard to reproduce the brain's structure.
and given that nowhere in nature, at any scale remotely similar to the range that includes particles, cells and animals, have we discovered anything that appears to follow an unknowable set of rules, the odds of finding anything like that in the brain, that is, something we can't simulate or emulate with 100% functional veracity, are just about zero.While we haven't found anything that's "unknowable", there's an enormous amount of stuff in nature that's still very much unknown. And the workings of the human brain are very high on that list.
The problem here is: the fact that something is theoretically knowable doesn't imply it will be known within 20 years. There are lots of things that scientists have been looking for for many decades that still haven't been found. In the early days of computing, scientists realised that the brain was just a really big computer, and that computers would soon be as intelligent as we are. So far, they have been proven wrong. The main thing we've discovered is that intelligence is far more complex, and even far harder to define, than we ever thought.
And it's not just that. Many AI researchers have abandoned the idea of "Strong AI", for various reasons. For one, it's too hard to tackle at once, it's too hard to define, even. And for another, even if human-like AI was possible, why would we need it? We've got 6 billion humans already. What's far more useful to us is AI that's more controlable than humans, and very good at the things that we're not good at, either because they're too hard for us, or because they're too boring or dangerous. And once you start restricting yourself to very specific applications, developing the AI becomes a lot easier. Lots of progress is being made. Not towards human-like AI, but towards practical machine intelligence.
Human-like AI will not happen by 2029. It may not even happen this century. I don't doubt it's theoretically possible, but there are far more useful things we can do with AI, and far easier things too. And even those are hard enough to achieve. Hopefully we'll see a lot of progress towards those goals in the next 20 years, and I'm sure AI will continue to outpace human intelligence in a lot more specialisations than it currently does (because there are a lot of specialised areas where AI is already superior to human intelligence, and chess is merely the most famous example), but we will not see the kind of versatile allround intelligence that humans have. And perhaps that's fortunate, because once that happens, it'll take only a few years before human intelligence is obsolete.
My first joystick was a simple metal stick with a big, fat, red knob on the end. It's used in a very different way than later joysticks that fit your hand and fingers exactly, has a fire button under your index finger, another button under your thumb, etc. But it's still a joystick. A primitive one, but a joystick nonetheless.
When I read the title, my first thought was: "I thought most controllers for consoles have one or two joysticks." The joystick may be dead on the PC (with its superior mouse), but it's alive an well on controllers. It shrunk, that's all, but it's basically the same thing.
Or simply play with different rules that don't need so much bending.
I've bent, changed and ignored lots of rules over the years, but a good system shouldn't need that. Either by leaving everything open and up to the GM (like Fudge), or by providing good rules for everything. Like GURPS, although that still has some issues in some of the details. Still, its problems are nowhere near the scale of the problems I've had with (A)D&D over the years.
Crippling limitation has always been a staple of (A)D&D. I've never been able to create the kind of character I wanted to play.
Not by any definition? Not even a definition as outrageous as "members of the republican party"?
Or did you refer to the definition of "neocon"? Because if you don't consider any past or present members of the Bush administration to be neocons, I'm kinda interested in what your definition is.
Just pointing out that this is one of the more bizarre denials I've seen since Comical Ali.
... there is plenty of "analog" going on. The disc spins. It wobbles a little bit, the track spiral isn't exactly center, your whole drive is vibrating from the 15 120mm fans you have hooked in, all these will let the laser linger too long or too short on a "pit", weakening some spots and strengthening others.And yet all of that has nothing to do with converting the music to analog. The machine may be a big rotating, vibrating, tumbling mess, but the data is digital, whether it is in MP3 or on CD. And assuming your CD writer isn't a crappy piece of junk, it will manage to get that digital data onto the CD. And no matter how much it wobbles, vibrates or lingers, the quality of the music will be unchanged because it is digital. That's the entire point.
It could be high-tech Luddites sabotaging the internet to stop evil porn. I expect the transatlantic link to be next.
I'm looking for something almost exactly like this for a MythTV box, but powerful enough to act as a small mail/web server (has to run Java servlets). I'm not sure those amazingly cool VIA processors are really powerful enough for what I want, but I do like their low power consumption for a server I'm going to have permanently turned on in my living room.
Seconded. I knew very little about recent hardware until Silent PC Review taught me almost everything I know. Although AnandTech is also pretty good, and has some very helpful people on its forum.
But a motherboard is more complex. A PSU simply has to work and not fail. Anyway, here, I learned that the Gigabyte P35-DS3 line is pretty good.
Note that I'm not in any way a hardware expert, but perhaps someone else will have some use for this information.
We're talking about burning to CD, not burning to vinyl, so there's no conversion to analog. That conversion happens in the amplifier (just like if you were playing the MP3 directly or even the original CD), and only after that will your standard analog loss kick in.
(This gives me a great idea to make more money from audiophiles: a vinyl burner for your PC, so you can magically add "warmth" to your downloaded MP3s!)
If you want to insist on hard definitions, instead of the thinly disguised tribalism of the US political system, then liberals should be the ones who want as little government interference as possible on people's personal freedoms, whereas conservatives would want it to enforce conservative values.
At least, that's the way it works in most of the rest of the world. Ofcourse lots of economic liberals tend to be socially conservative, whereas social liberals are often economically socialist.
And then there's the difference between libertarian capitalism and libertarian socialism.
I'm afraid I can't be bothered to find the link, but there's an XKCD comic about how geeks are always ready for sudden explosions, shootings and sword fights when waiting in line at the post office.
But what they never told us is all this good stuff about US The truth is often the most effective lie. (in Soviet Russia a bus driver had 3 times higher salary than a researcher in a government lab). I'm not sure I'd actually disagree with that, though. 3 times higher may be a bit much, but I don't object to boring, tedious but necessary jobs getting higher pay than exciting innovative work.
I thought 4 years was a bit young for Lego. I recently gave my niece a big lego box for her sixth birthday. It included designs for lots of different models, and she wanted to build the most difficult one: a fire truck. So I spent all day coaching her in how to follow the instructions, but she did all the work. I don't know if she's disassembled it again and built something else out of it. I hope she did, but since she's living on the other side of the country, I don't see her very often.
You're right. I remember that yellow castle, but I've never owned it. I had the grey one, which was still great. I'm still not sure whether I think the large grey wall segments are a good idea or a bad one, though. They're a good example of the shaped custom elements that you can only use for one particular function (wall in this case), but any building needs walls, and I've built an enormous number of different castle designs with them that I probably wouldn't have built from the yellow set. Seemingly restrictive custom elements can definitely stimulate creativity.
So what if you can't build a car out of them? I loved building castles. Still do. In fact, if I'm ever rich enough to design my own house, it's going to look a bit like a castle.
We're going to fucking kill Iraq!