There is no such thing as a psychopath. it is not a recognized diagnosis and it hasn't been in a long time. it's just one of those words pseudo-psychologists throw around. I had the same problem with The Corporation (the documentary). I don't mean to split hairs, but it betrays ignorance.
no one has mentioned how completely unbeleivable the stat is. there's no way 39% of internet users are deleting cookies. I would say 20% know what cookies are - at most. I'm sure some people are blocking cookies because they set their ie security to "most secure."
might also protect you against the mind reading capabilities of the device:
"Active Denial Technology (ADT) provides an effective nonlethal active-response mechanism to disperse, disturb, distract, and establish the intent of intruders."
"forcing evolution" is a misleading term, but the parent thread's question is still valid. to re-phrase:
are we inadvertantly selecting for traits in other species?
put this way, it pretty obvious that the answer is yes. i guess the real question is: are we doing it to animals that most people will recognize and care about, and are we affecting them in ways we can see?
the parent thread really down-plays the importance of our accidental artificial selection of bacteria. this is way more relevant to human life than tuskless elephants.
I noticed the article is under a tab on the page labeled "fun." It's fun making tools perform tasks that they aren't designed for, at least it's fun for some people. people who used to watch MacGuyver.
I read the whole article. the author seemed to be very concerned about avoiding the addition of non-spam-filter functionalities. it's kind of a cool thought experiment - along the same lines as "can I unscrew a screw with a butterknife?" or "can I make a superior wiresless antenna out of a tin can?" or "could the professor really have made a radio out of a coconut?"
in this case it's even more interesting in a way because you are playing with an agent that sort of seems to think - or at least it has behavior. it's distantly related to questions like "how did bacteria designed for a marine environment evolve to live on land?" or "how do we get rid of all of this kudzu?!?"
I thought it was pretty cool. now please excuse me while I make a moped out of a bike and a blender.
Lots of expensive, custom made parts. Dangerously powerful magnets cast in polyester resin. The dude looks like he's working in a professional level workshop.
Oh yeah, I'll just get right on this. Now if only I had a local metalwork shop... or a garage... or, y'know, some tools.
It's cool that they figured this out, but it's not like sodium is an abundant or renewable resource. Electrolysis just requires energy which you can get from anywhere.
What else is like this? there are games where you pick a response from a list of 3-5 options and there are games that detect keywords. Keyword detection may seem like natural language as long as you stick to the scripts but it's not the same thing. you could say "I'm going to shove this silver key down your throat" and the character would just say "the silver key is to the east"
Also, drama doesn't just mean talking about messy divorces instead of swords (btw, when the old guy gives you that rusty-ass sword in the beginning of Zelda, is that a Dramatic moment). It means dynamic relationships between characters. in most current game scripts the characters have very static relationships with maybe one twist somewhere along the way ("I'm Revan?!? wow that changes things almost imperceptibly!)
I sort of doubt that the natural language detection will be good enough for this new game to work, but isn't it time we had some games that take risks?
This criticism has been mentioned a few times and I think it's true. better graphics don't necessarily make better games, and it's getting more and more apparent as graphics get better. game geeks have been lamenting the hollywood mentality and lack of creativity of game makers a lot recently. I think there are two main components to this trend:
1) it isn't that people don't like lo-fi games, they just don't want to pay a lot for them. If a game seems simple, no matter how creative/complex/addictive it is, people expect to get it for free. how much would you pay for very best real-time puzzle game ever made by man? $5 tops?
2)I may be totally off here, but it seems like game geeks aren't necessarily the one who spend the gaming dollars. There is a certain contingent of people who go and buy every reasonably hyped new game as soon as it comes out (just as there are those who buy every new CD within a genere as soon as it comes out). Games like driv3r get made because there are people who will buy them based on the shiny hubcaps in the cutscenes. It isn't that they're stupid, they just value newness and shinyness over geekiness.
Trying to fix the gaming industry is like trying to make people stop liking explostions. Maybe the game industry is big enough now to support an indy sub-industry. we could have our own asshat indy gaming festivals and sip lattes in a charming small town where the locals hate us.
IMHE a lot of the people who own the best TVs, DVD players and cable boxes are the same people who live on minimum wage (or less). I'm not saying financial investment in TV watching is inversly proportional to wealth, but it's not directly proportional either. If there is one group who would be targetted by analog TV being killed, its NPR listeners.
jesus, what a whiner. we need tiny, dopey looking electric cars, and an exoskeleton for your grandma might be nice. That way she can take herself to the bathroom. I'm sure 95% of the ideas were dumb, but what do you expect? Raise your hand if you've ever been to a trade show that wasn't mostly garbage.
I just wish pages for complicated mods had such detailed instructions with so many pictures. This one I think could have been described in a sentence or two.
Re:Museum of Science Exhibit - More Info
on
Filling Up On Algae
·
· Score: 1
it's been there for years. every time I walk past it I'm like, "hey that's a good idea." but there's also sort of a hoplessness, since nothing like that will probably ever be impleneted untill we run out of oil or we can't breathe at all anymore.
the big problem here is that I lose stuff. What happens if you lose your card? you fill out forms? get treated like a terrorist? get denied basic services? can't access your bank account? and what about identity theft?
i don't feel like getting treated like a criminal just because I'm irresponsible. losing your car keys or your bank card can be a big pain, but this RealID thing opens up whole new levels of potential hassle.
plus, what if THEY screw up? maybe "if" is the wrong word. what happens to people whoose information is lost or corrupted by the system? worse, what if a detremental error slips in? I just hope no one has the "convicted sex offender" box erroneously checked.
all of these problems all ready exist, but I think this RealID system has the potential to concentrate them and magnify their consequences.
You will each receive an identity disk. Everything you do or learn will be imprinted on this disk. The Master Control Program regrets that it cannot be responsible for Identity disks lost or stolen. if you lose your disk, or fail to follow commands, you will be subject to immediate de-resolution. That is all.
My mom gave me a copy of Darwin's Black Box and I've read the first 100 or so pages. It isn't at all what I was expecting. The tone is rational, thorough and intelligent, not knee-jerk apologetics.
So far the basic argument is that it's easy to conceptualize step wise changes in a macroscopic level, like:
light sensor -> cluster of light sensors -> eye
or
beele -> beetle with poison -> beetle with concentrated poisen sack -> bombardeir beetle
But actually the changes are so profound on a molecular level that they'd never occur by chance (or at least we'd have some evidence of intermediates)
The most obvious problem to me is that this argument could also be used to prove that poodles and mastifs and bulldogs are not derived from the same common ancestor. They are so different and there are so many molecular changes separating them that they cannot be thought to be related. Even a creationist would have to agree that theese animals are all from a common dog ancestor since the divergence has happened while humans have been on the planet.
Another argument he uses is "irreducable complexity." Some systems depend on every component to function so they can't have arisen by chance - in incomplete system would not function at all. The example he uses is a mouse trap which relies on every part to kill mice.
The problem I see with this is that it ignores changes of function during evolution. Evoltion is not directional, it can take circuitous routes.
an example he uses is a bicycle factory. The analogy to mutation is errors in bicycle production. Each mutation can cause a part of the bike to be duplicated or put in the wrong place or some similar transposition, but that's it. So how, he asks, can you evolve to bike to a motorcycle by making small stepwise changes? A caveat is that the changes must be improvements to the bicycle.
there are several problems with this analogy. The most glaring is the restriction that changes must all be beneficial. If resources are abundant enough, neutral and even harmful mutations will likely be tolerated. to go back to te analogy, if bikes are in high demand, many people will buy bikes with slight manufacturing defects. changes in production that alter wheel size or gear ratio might be more preffered by some customers and less preferred by others.
Another big problem is the lack of flexibility in this analogy. There is some validity in comparing a mutation to a slight error in bicycle assembly instructions, but bicycles are not organisms. In an organism, a small change can cause a big difference. This is especially apparent with mutations in developmental genes which can cause radical changes to the appearance of an organism as well as its overall gene expression.
Some mutations can also be completely silent and may not be noticed until another mutation exposes them. if two genes are functionally redundant, one may be mutated randomly without affecting the organism. eventually it could be deleted, or even assume some new function.
anyway, that's what I've gotten out of the book so far. maybe I'll even finish it.
Most of the question answer pairs go something like this:
Nature: If elected, how will you balance [some issue - e.g. the environment] with [some conflicting issue - e.g. industrial growth]?
Candidate: I plan on a adressing [issue one] without sacrificing [issue two].
sadly this is probably too late on the board to save anyone the trouble of actually reading the pseudo-interview, but hey, I tried.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no such thing as a psychopath. it is not a recognized diagnosis and it hasn't been in a long time. it's just one of those words pseudo-psychologists throw around. I had the same problem with The Corporation (the documentary). I don't mean to split hairs, but it betrays ignorance.
(IANAPsychologist)
it seems like a good idea, but then so did kudzu
no one has mentioned how completely unbeleivable the stat is. there's no way 39% of internet users are deleting cookies. I would say 20% know what cookies are - at most. I'm sure some people are blocking cookies because they set their ie security to "most secure."
might also protect you against the mind reading capabilities of the device: "Active Denial Technology (ADT) provides an effective nonlethal active-response mechanism to disperse, disturb, distract, and establish the intent of intruders."
certainly there are instances where the line is grey and the police in charge of these devices have inappropriately chosen to use them
s ox/arti cles/2004/10/22/postgame_police_projectile_kills_a n_emerson_student/).
yeah, like when that redsox fan got shot in the face with a pepper spray pellet and died.
(http://www.boston.com/sports/baseball/red
"forcing evolution" is a misleading term, but the parent thread's question is still valid. to re-phrase:
are we inadvertantly selecting for traits in other species?
put this way, it pretty obvious that the answer is yes. i guess the real question is: are we doing it to animals that most people will recognize and care about, and are we affecting them in ways we can see?
the parent thread really down-plays the importance of our accidental artificial selection of bacteria. this is way more relevant to human life than tuskless elephants.
I noticed the article is under a tab on the page labeled "fun." It's fun making tools perform tasks that they aren't designed for, at least it's fun for some people. people who used to watch MacGuyver.
I read the whole article. the author seemed to be very concerned about avoiding the addition of non-spam-filter functionalities. it's kind of a cool thought experiment - along the same lines as "can I unscrew a screw with a butterknife?" or "can I make a superior wiresless antenna out of a tin can?" or "could the professor really have made a radio out of a coconut?"
in this case it's even more interesting in a way because you are playing with an agent that sort of seems to think - or at least it has behavior. it's distantly related to questions like "how did bacteria designed for a marine environment evolve to live on land?" or "how do we get rid of all of this kudzu?!?"
I thought it was pretty cool. now please excuse me while I make a moped out of a bike and a blender.
Lots of expensive, custom made parts. Dangerously powerful magnets cast in polyester resin. The dude looks like he's working in a professional level workshop. Oh yeah, I'll just get right on this. Now if only I had a local metalwork shop... or a garage... or, y'know, some tools.
It's cool that they figured this out, but it's not like sodium is an abundant or renewable resource. Electrolysis just requires energy which you can get from anywhere.
What else is like this? there are games where you pick a response from a list of 3-5 options and there are games that detect keywords. Keyword detection may seem like natural language as long as you stick to the scripts but it's not the same thing. you could say "I'm going to shove this silver key down your throat" and the character would just say "the silver key is to the east"
Also, drama doesn't just mean talking about messy divorces instead of swords (btw, when the old guy gives you that rusty-ass sword in the beginning of Zelda, is that a Dramatic moment). It means dynamic relationships between characters. in most current game scripts the characters have very static relationships with maybe one twist somewhere along the way ("I'm Revan?!? wow that changes things almost imperceptibly!)
I sort of doubt that the natural language detection will be good enough for this new game to work, but isn't it time we had some games that take risks?
This criticism has been mentioned a few times and I think it's true. better graphics don't necessarily make better games, and it's getting more and more apparent as graphics get better. game geeks have been lamenting the hollywood mentality and lack of creativity of game makers a lot recently. I think there are two main components to this trend:
1) it isn't that people don't like lo-fi games, they just don't want to pay a lot for them. If a game seems simple, no matter how creative/complex/addictive it is, people expect to get it for free. how much would you pay for very best real-time puzzle game ever made by man? $5 tops?
2)I may be totally off here, but it seems like game geeks aren't necessarily the one who spend the gaming dollars. There is a certain contingent of people who go and buy every reasonably hyped new game as soon as it comes out (just as there are those who buy every new CD within a genere as soon as it comes out). Games like driv3r get made because there are people who will buy them based on the shiny hubcaps in the cutscenes. It isn't that they're stupid, they just value newness and shinyness over geekiness.
Trying to fix the gaming industry is like trying to make people stop liking explostions. Maybe the game industry is big enough now to support an indy sub-industry. we could have our own asshat indy gaming festivals and sip lattes in a charming small town where the locals hate us.
IMHE a lot of the people who own the best TVs, DVD players and cable boxes are the same people who live on minimum wage (or less). I'm not saying financial investment in TV watching is inversly proportional to wealth, but it's not directly proportional either. If there is one group who would be targetted by analog TV being killed, its NPR listeners.
jesus, what a whiner. we need tiny, dopey looking electric cars, and an exoskeleton for your grandma might be nice. That way she can take herself to the bathroom. I'm sure 95% of the ideas were dumb, but what do you expect? Raise your hand if you've ever been to a trade show that wasn't mostly garbage.
contrarywise, it's a neat trick for getting corporations to fund negative PR against corporatism.
I just wish pages for complicated mods had such detailed instructions with so many pictures. This one I think could have been described in a sentence or two.
it's been there for years. every time I walk past it I'm like, "hey that's a good idea." but there's also sort of a hoplessness, since nothing like that will probably ever be impleneted untill we run out of oil or we can't breathe at all anymore.
Kill Microsoft!! Yeah Wal-Mart!!!
how's that again?
the big problem here is that I lose stuff. What happens if you lose your card? you fill out forms? get treated like a terrorist? get denied basic services? can't access your bank account? and what about identity theft?
i don't feel like getting treated like a criminal just because I'm irresponsible. losing your car keys or your bank card can be a big pain, but this RealID thing opens up whole new levels of potential hassle.
plus, what if THEY screw up? maybe "if" is the wrong word. what happens to people whoose information is lost or corrupted by the system? worse, what if a detremental error slips in? I just hope no one has the "convicted sex offender" box erroneously checked.
all of these problems all ready exist, but I think this RealID system has the potential to concentrate them and magnify their consequences.
You will each receive an identity disk. Everything you do or learn will be imprinted on this disk. The Master Control Program regrets that it cannot be responsible for Identity disks lost or stolen. if you lose your disk, or fail to follow commands, you will be subject to immediate de-resolution. That is all.
I'd say it's more ambivalent whining than a vicious backlash.
saying that you don't understand something isn't the same as proving it false. 'sayin
So far the basic argument is that it's easy to conceptualize step wise changes in a macroscopic level, like: light sensor -> cluster of light sensors -> eye
or
beele -> beetle with poison -> beetle with concentrated poisen sack -> bombardeir beetle
But actually the changes are so profound on a molecular level that they'd never occur by chance (or at least we'd have some evidence of intermediates)
The most obvious problem to me is that this argument could also be used to prove that poodles and mastifs and bulldogs are not derived from the same common ancestor. They are so different and there are so many molecular changes separating them that they cannot be thought to be related. Even a creationist would have to agree that theese animals are all from a common dog ancestor since the divergence has happened while humans have been on the planet.
Another argument he uses is "irreducable complexity." Some systems depend on every component to function so they can't have arisen by chance - in incomplete system would not function at all. The example he uses is a mouse trap which relies on every part to kill mice.
The problem I see with this is that it ignores changes of function during evolution. Evoltion is not directional, it can take circuitous routes.
an example he uses is a bicycle factory. The analogy to mutation is errors in bicycle production. Each mutation can cause a part of the bike to be duplicated or put in the wrong place or some similar transposition, but that's it. So how, he asks, can you evolve to bike to a motorcycle by making small stepwise changes? A caveat is that the changes must be improvements to the bicycle.
there are several problems with this analogy. The most glaring is the restriction that changes must all be beneficial. If resources are abundant enough, neutral and even harmful mutations will likely be tolerated. to go back to te analogy, if bikes are in high demand, many people will buy bikes with slight manufacturing defects. changes in production that alter wheel size or gear ratio might be more preffered by some customers and less preferred by others.
Another big problem is the lack of flexibility in this analogy. There is some validity in comparing a mutation to a slight error in bicycle assembly instructions, but bicycles are not organisms. In an organism, a small change can cause a big difference. This is especially apparent with mutations in developmental genes which can cause radical changes to the appearance of an organism as well as its overall gene expression.
Some mutations can also be completely silent and may not be noticed until another mutation exposes them. if two genes are functionally redundant, one may be mutated randomly without affecting the organism. eventually it could be deleted, or even assume some new function.
anyway, that's what I've gotten out of the book so far. maybe I'll even finish it.
...then whate happens to the other sock?
what does Keaneau Reeves have to say about this?
Most of the question answer pairs go something like this: Nature: If elected, how will you balance [some issue - e.g. the environment] with [some conflicting issue - e.g. industrial growth]? Candidate: I plan on a adressing [issue one] without sacrificing [issue two]. sadly this is probably too late on the board to save anyone the trouble of actually reading the pseudo-interview, but hey, I tried.