Isn't this like the billionth Slashvertizement for SheevaPlugs? They're neat and all, but I think at this point everyone here knows about those things. I'll probably get one if I can ever think of a use for it.
Here's how that math works, Kurzweil explains: The design of the brain is in the genome. The human genome has three billion base pairs or six billion bits, which is about 800 million bytes before compression, he says. Eliminating redundancies and applying loss-less compression, that information can be compressed into about 50 million bytes, according to Kurzweil.
About half of that is the brain, which comes down to 25 million bytes, or a million lines of code.
What's so crazy about that?
There's nothing really crazy about that - you can totally compress the genome to something pretty small. Even simple zip will work great on it - it's highly repetitive and very redundant.
However, in order to actually model the human brain, you have to account for the universe. You would need to create a virtual environment that accurately models the interactions between everything from atoms to proteins to little tiny quantum effects that we don't even understand yet.
Here's a computer analogy: we're a highly complex program running on top of the universe's most convoluted operating system (literally, the universe itself). Ray Kurzweil is saying that because we have the source code to the "human brain" program, we'll be able to port it to x86 in ten years - despite the fact that we don't actually have any reasonably accurate universe emulators running on x86*.
*besides Dwarf Fortress, but Tarn Adams is keeping it closed source.
That June, Nifong was disbarred for "dishonesty, fraud, deceit and misrepresentation", making Nifong the first prosecutor in North Carolina history to lose his law license based on actions in a case.
The first in North Carolina history to lose his law license based on actions in a case (which is far more damaging than spending a day in jail). That's pretty damn good odds!
"Who gives a shit if those nine people were innocent? Next year is an election year, and I'm running on a tough-on-crime platform! I need a 100% conviction rate, come hell or high water!
"By the time their appeals have wended their way through the courts and they've been found innocent (probably sometime next decade), I'll be a senator or a mayor or a governor and nobody will care that I wrongly convicted Joe Blow all those years ago."
Or at least that's how I imagine all those prosecutors think. After all, there are zero consequences to their political careers for prosecuting someone unjustly, and yet there are repercussions for going "soft" on criminals.
Yeah, you hafta recite the Chant of Damnation* at least once every time you go through the Ritual of Restarting in order to appease the machine spirit.
Failure to do so is the leading cause of bluescreens (little known fact!)
*You know, the one that goes "Damn Windows, damn Microsoft, damn Gates...."
Yeah that's nice, but in the real world what happens is that the big company digs through their patent portfolio, finds one that your remarkable new widget might possibly be infringing on, and sues you. It doesn't matter if your remarkable widget is actually infringing on the patent; that's something that the courts will decide about five years and several million dollars down the line.
So instead of fighting it, you agree to a licensing deal - you license the big company's patent and pay them X% per widget, and they don't sue your pants off. Everyone wins except for you.
That's because the homeschooled adults with bad social skills are the ones he notices; he's never realized that the homeschooled adults with good social skills exist, because it never occurs to him to ask adults with good social skills how they were schooled.
Dear God, not just you but also a sibling Anon both failed to read past the first line. I can understand not R-ing TFA, and sometimes even skipping TFS, but not even RTFC you're responding to? That's a new level of lazy.
Nice attempt at dodging the question. Are you seriously saying you would help someone who took your personal documents in redacting them so they could leak them on the Internet?
I'm not sure how it's dodging the question; I thought my response was kinda obvious.
Look: it's not a choice between "leak the documents" and "don't leak the documents". The only options you're being offered are "leak the documents without your input" and "leak the documents with your input".
If the release of my personal documents might lead to the potential death of hundreds of civilians and there was no way for me to stop the leak outright, then yes of course I would assist in the redaction process. I like to think that any human being with an ounce of empathy would choose potentially saving lives over having an "I won't help you evar!" hissy fit.
But honestly, I bet you anything the Pentagon has already analyzed the documents and located the majority of the places where civilian identities might have been compromised - after all, where do you think they got that "hundreds of civilians" statistic? They just decided that the potential loss of those civilians was acceptable, because every body can be used as a round against Wikileaks.
After all, you're familiar with these thousands of files so I'm sure you can put in the man hours to enable me to release them all to the public. Face it, you'd say "No, none of this stuff should be released so consider all characters in all files redacted."
Okay, and then the response is "Sorry, the majority of this stuff is getting released whether you want it to or not. Do you want a chance to help redact the truly sensitive parts, which you would know far better than me?"
Do you still say no?
Even if you did agree, you'd still remove more than he wanted you too and he'd just release the rest anyway.
Yes, but he would have an idea of what you consider to be truly sensitive information* - and hey, he might just respect that if it makes sense.
I really think a lot of the outrage we're seeing here is an expression of the fact that Wikileaks has the United States Military by the figurative shorthairs, and it makes a certain class of person feel impotent (generally the same people who feel large and potent when they look at our gigantic military budget, I bet). They just can't get over that, and respond with bluster and hot air and unsourced claims of civilian casualties.
*because, after all, he's got the completely unredacted documents; if you try to cover up the really embarrassing stuff, someone will notice
Well honestly, there's also a difference between "quality" and "expressiveness". XKCD's stick figures are completely expressionless; their thoughts and feelings come almost entirely from the text. If you blocked out all the words, there would be no joke in almost every comic - and the rare comics that use art primarily to express the storyline are kinda messy and badly paced (like this one).
Hyperbole and a Half, on the other hand, has art that's only marginally better than stick figures but is far more expressive even without words - just look at the first comic sequence from this recent post.
In both cases, though, the comic is engaging and stimulating enough to encourage your mind to fill in the blanks - the expressions on Allie's face, the snarky things that Black Hat says, all work towards providing you with enough material that your brain can interpolate the rest of the content it needs. I would argue that this is the primary motivation behind the effect the researchers at Rice University noticed - engaging and entertaining content encourages your mind to work and fill in the gaps, with boring content your mind just doesn't care so you notice the fuzz and gaps.
I've actually noticed something like this - when I'm wandering around by myself, I tend to listen to music over my Bluetooth headset, which has terrible quality (it's only designed to receive voice signals, after all). I also listen to it at a low volume, in order to not destroy my hearing:). I usually know which of my songs is playing, but sometimes those two factors conspire against me I lose the thread of the music; I have to cup the headset to my ear in order to catch up to the song. What's weird about this is that while I don't know what song is playing, I can't figure out what the lyrics are or what the beat is or really understand what's playing at all; once I've identified the song (even if the conditions are otherwise exactly the same) I can follow along perfectly. Once my mind knows what it should be hearing, it can of provide me with a much clearer song than the real input I'm getting.
I like how a completely unsubstantiated claim by a journalist about the contents of some freely available documents "settles the case".
Tell me, are you confused as to why we're still in Iraq after George W Bush announced that the Mission was Complete? That settled the case, after all! It's the President, not just some reporter!
Thus the "comprehensive list" that I referred to is one that the Taliban (and/or other enemies) are compiling, not some handy-dandy list to which someone can simply point.... That stated reason that the NYT and other news agencies are not even referencing a single name in particular or location in any document as to where this information can be found is to avoid placing said persons in jeopardy -- that is, more jeopardy than they are already in anyway.
Like I heavily implied, that reasoning is specious bullshit. It's been weeks now. Our enemies in Afghanistan have already sucked all the useful information out of those documents; there's no operative reason not to cast more substantial criticism against Wikileaks now. We should see people saying "In this document on this page, you guys didn't redact someone's father's name and now he's in danger". Instead, all we're getting is vague statements that Julian Assange "has blood on his hands" and that "hundreds" of civilians were put in danger.
Do your goddamn jobs, reporters! Don't just parrot the government's line that "civilians have been killed"; find out which ones, find the document excerpts that killed them, and nail Mr. Assange with it. If he's responsible for the deaths of hundreds of civilians, he deserves to have their names and the pages he revealed that killed them beaten into his skull by every radio station and every newscaster. Don't be shy; if he's been the cause of a significant number of civilian casualties, you'd be totally in the right by executing the man in the court of public opinion, and you'd have the support of almost every mainstream government and non-government organization.
Of course, this takes more effort than just uncritically repeating what your next anonymous source at the Pentagon said, so I'll probably have to wait for the Daily Show to talk about it.
If they're on every page, then it would be easy for you to provide the filename and page number for the very first mention of a civilian informant? I mean, it would be trivial: "Page 1 of the document named 'secret military stuff.txt' identifies an American sympathizer in Afghanistan, and puts his/her life in danger".
Surely you, the honorable Anonymous Coward, wouldn't exaggerate for effect?
Where? Where in the documents are these civilians outed? It's been weeks now, and I haven't seen anyone say "these are the locations in the documents where a civilian was outed".
Look, if these accusations are true, there's no problem with you posting where the civilians were outed. Like I said, it's been weeks - every intelligence agency in the world knows where the civilians are outed in the documents by now, so there's really no harm in pointing it out so I can look for myself and maybe come up with a real count instead of "hundreds".
It would be more accurately paraphrased as "Think of the innocent civilians you have outed."
Which ones? I mean, this stuff is online somewhere - where, then, in these documents have civilians been outed as collaborators? I mean, I see people saying this over and over again. Surely, if they exist, you can point to where in the documents they've been outed? And if they've been outed, pointing it out wouldn't hurt - after all, they've been outed for weeks now.
When you own three mansions each in a very nice, quiet neighborhood, you're using far more of the police's time and money than someone who rents a shitty rathole. When you have a bunch of stock options in the market, you're using up far more of the SEC's time and money than someone who keeps their savings in a sock under the mattress. When you drive a huge hummer or an expensive sports car, you're wearing down the roads far more than someone who is too poor to afford to drive. When you have made your money by employing cheap laborers who come in to work on busses, you are implicitly using far more public infrastructure than your laborers.
Being wealthier almost inevitably leads to using more public resources, which means you should commensurately pay more in taxes.
You're probably right, especially since this is probably not going to be used in spinning media. I just think the concept of converting disk momentum back into electricity in order to power emergency shutdown maneuvers is so awesome I had to put it in there.
Not necessarily - you can still read the contents of RAM relatively accurately for up to ten minutes after the power goes out as long as you're quick about extracting the sticks and applying some cryogenics (a spray from an upside-down can of compressed air works pretty well). Presumably, when they sense that the power is cut these hard drives convert the momentum in the spinning disks into enough electricity to zero out the onboard encryption key, which would take moments and render the contents unrecoverable.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't this like the billionth Slashvertizement for SheevaPlugs? They're neat and all, but I think at this point everyone here knows about those things. I'll probably get one if I can ever think of a use for it.
There's nothing really crazy about that - you can totally compress the genome to something pretty small. Even simple zip will work great on it - it's highly repetitive and very redundant.
However, in order to actually model the human brain, you have to account for the universe. You would need to create a virtual environment that accurately models the interactions between everything from atoms to proteins to little tiny quantum effects that we don't even understand yet.
Here's a computer analogy: we're a highly complex program running on top of the universe's most convoluted operating system (literally, the universe itself). Ray Kurzweil is saying that because we have the source code to the "human brain" program, we'll be able to port it to x86 in ten years - despite the fact that we don't actually have any reasonably accurate universe emulators running on x86*.
*besides Dwarf Fortress, but Tarn Adams is keeping it closed source.
Really? Because the United States is doing pretty well at "jail for everyone" - we've got the highest incarceration rate of any first-world country.
From the Wikipedia article:
The first in North Carolina history to lose his law license based on actions in a case (which is far more damaging than spending a day in jail). That's pretty damn good odds!
"Who gives a shit if those nine people were innocent? Next year is an election year, and I'm running on a tough-on-crime platform! I need a 100% conviction rate, come hell or high water!
"By the time their appeals have wended their way through the courts and they've been found innocent (probably sometime next decade), I'll be a senator or a mayor or a governor and nobody will care that I wrongly convicted Joe Blow all those years ago."
Or at least that's how I imagine all those prosecutors think. After all, there are zero consequences to their political careers for prosecuting someone unjustly, and yet there are repercussions for going "soft" on criminals.
Yeah, you hafta recite the Chant of Damnation* at least once every time you go through the Ritual of Restarting in order to appease the machine spirit.
Failure to do so is the leading cause of bluescreens (little known fact!)
*You know, the one that goes "Damn Windows, damn Microsoft, damn Gates...."
Yeah that's nice, but in the real world what happens is that the big company digs through their patent portfolio, finds one that your remarkable new widget might possibly be infringing on, and sues you. It doesn't matter if your remarkable widget is actually infringing on the patent; that's something that the courts will decide about five years and several million dollars down the line.
So instead of fighting it, you agree to a licensing deal - you license the big company's patent and pay them X% per widget, and they don't sue your pants off. Everyone wins except for you.
That's because the homeschooled adults with bad social skills are the ones he notices; he's never realized that the homeschooled adults with good social skills exist, because it never occurs to him to ask adults with good social skills how they were schooled.
I believe it is because you use assignment far more than equality, so they made the more common case easier to type.
Dear God, not just you but also a sibling Anon both failed to read past the first line. I can understand not R-ing TFA, and sometimes even skipping TFS, but not even RTFC you're responding to? That's a new level of lazy.
I'm not sure how it's dodging the question; I thought my response was kinda obvious.
Look: it's not a choice between "leak the documents" and "don't leak the documents". The only options you're being offered are "leak the documents without your input" and "leak the documents with your input".
If the release of my personal documents might lead to the potential death of hundreds of civilians and there was no way for me to stop the leak outright, then yes of course I would assist in the redaction process. I like to think that any human being with an ounce of empathy would choose potentially saving lives over having an "I won't help you evar!" hissy fit.
But honestly, I bet you anything the Pentagon has already analyzed the documents and located the majority of the places where civilian identities might have been compromised - after all, where do you think they got that "hundreds of civilians" statistic? They just decided that the potential loss of those civilians was acceptable, because every body can be used as a round against Wikileaks.
They had to kill those informants to save them.
Okay, and then the response is "Sorry, the majority of this stuff is getting released whether you want it to or not. Do you want a chance to help redact the truly sensitive parts, which you would know far better than me?"
Do you still say no?
Yes, but he would have an idea of what you consider to be truly sensitive information* - and hey, he might just respect that if it makes sense.
I really think a lot of the outrage we're seeing here is an expression of the fact that Wikileaks has the United States Military by the figurative shorthairs, and it makes a certain class of person feel impotent (generally the same people who feel large and potent when they look at our gigantic military budget, I bet). They just can't get over that, and respond with bluster and hot air and unsourced claims of civilian casualties.
*because, after all, he's got the completely unredacted documents; if you try to cover up the really embarrassing stuff, someone will notice
Yeah, I really wish he'd asked the White House or Pentagon for help in redacting these documents.
After all, they're the ones who are best placed to check that sort of thing, right?
Surely they would have wanted to minimize damage to the troops, right?
Surely they wouldn't want to just cover their asses, right?
Oh wait he did and they said no.
Hmm.
Well honestly, there's also a difference between "quality" and "expressiveness". XKCD's stick figures are completely expressionless; their thoughts and feelings come almost entirely from the text. If you blocked out all the words, there would be no joke in almost every comic - and the rare comics that use art primarily to express the storyline are kinda messy and badly paced (like this one).
Hyperbole and a Half, on the other hand, has art that's only marginally better than stick figures but is far more expressive even without words - just look at the first comic sequence from this recent post.
In both cases, though, the comic is engaging and stimulating enough to encourage your mind to fill in the blanks - the expressions on Allie's face, the snarky things that Black Hat says, all work towards providing you with enough material that your brain can interpolate the rest of the content it needs. I would argue that this is the primary motivation behind the effect the researchers at Rice University noticed - engaging and entertaining content encourages your mind to work and fill in the gaps, with boring content your mind just doesn't care so you notice the fuzz and gaps.
I've actually noticed something like this - when I'm wandering around by myself, I tend to listen to music over my Bluetooth headset, which has terrible quality (it's only designed to receive voice signals, after all). I also listen to it at a low volume, in order to not destroy my hearing :). I usually know which of my songs is playing, but sometimes those two factors conspire against me I lose the thread of the music; I have to cup the headset to my ear in order to catch up to the song. What's weird about this is that while I don't know what song is playing, I can't figure out what the lyrics are or what the beat is or really understand what's playing at all; once I've identified the song (even if the conditions are otherwise exactly the same) I can follow along perfectly. Once my mind knows what it should be hearing, it can of provide me with a much clearer song than the real input I'm getting.
Soooo... does this mean that if modern games actually had better gameplay, people wouldn't care so much about the graphics?
Surely not! That way lies madness and a complete inability to sell the next generation of consoles!
(and NetHack! The horror!)
I like how a completely unsubstantiated claim by a journalist about the contents of some freely available documents "settles the case".
Tell me, are you confused as to why we're still in Iraq after George W Bush announced that the Mission was Complete? That settled the case, after all! It's the President, not just some reporter!
Like I heavily implied, that reasoning is specious bullshit. It's been weeks now. Our enemies in Afghanistan have already sucked all the useful information out of those documents; there's no operative reason not to cast more substantial criticism against Wikileaks now. We should see people saying "In this document on this page, you guys didn't redact someone's father's name and now he's in danger". Instead, all we're getting is vague statements that Julian Assange "has blood on his hands" and that "hundreds" of civilians were put in danger.
Do your goddamn jobs, reporters! Don't just parrot the government's line that "civilians have been killed"; find out which ones, find the document excerpts that killed them, and nail Mr. Assange with it. If he's responsible for the deaths of hundreds of civilians, he deserves to have their names and the pages he revealed that killed them beaten into his skull by every radio station and every newscaster. Don't be shy; if he's been the cause of a significant number of civilian casualties, you'd be totally in the right by executing the man in the court of public opinion, and you'd have the support of almost every mainstream government and non-government organization.
Of course, this takes more effort than just uncritically repeating what your next anonymous source at the Pentagon said, so I'll probably have to wait for the Daily Show to talk about it.
If they're on every page, then it would be easy for you to provide the filename and page number for the very first mention of a civilian informant? I mean, it would be trivial: "Page 1 of the document named 'secret military stuff.txt' identifies an American sympathizer in Afghanistan, and puts his/her life in danger".
Surely you, the honorable Anonymous Coward, wouldn't exaggerate for effect?
Where? Where in the documents are these civilians outed? It's been weeks now, and I haven't seen anyone say "these are the locations in the documents where a civilian was outed".
Look, if these accusations are true, there's no problem with you posting where the civilians were outed. Like I said, it's been weeks - every intelligence agency in the world knows where the civilians are outed in the documents by now, so there's really no harm in pointing it out so I can look for myself and maybe come up with a real count instead of "hundreds".
Which ones? I mean, this stuff is online somewhere - where, then, in these documents have civilians been outed as collaborators? I mean, I see people saying this over and over again. Surely, if they exist, you can point to where in the documents they've been outed? And if they've been outed, pointing it out wouldn't hurt - after all, they've been outed for weeks now.
When you own three mansions each in a very nice, quiet neighborhood, you're using far more of the police's time and money than someone who rents a shitty rathole. When you have a bunch of stock options in the market, you're using up far more of the SEC's time and money than someone who keeps their savings in a sock under the mattress. When you drive a huge hummer or an expensive sports car, you're wearing down the roads far more than someone who is too poor to afford to drive. When you have made your money by employing cheap laborers who come in to work on busses, you are implicitly using far more public infrastructure than your laborers.
Being wealthier almost inevitably leads to using more public resources, which means you should commensurately pay more in taxes.
I know, and I only found out about it recently. I still think it's really awesome.
You're probably right, especially since this is probably not going to be used in spinning media. I just think the concept of converting disk momentum back into electricity in order to power emergency shutdown maneuvers is so awesome I had to put it in there.
Not necessarily - you can still read the contents of RAM relatively accurately for up to ten minutes after the power goes out as long as you're quick about extracting the sticks and applying some cryogenics (a spray from an upside-down can of compressed air works pretty well). Presumably, when they sense that the power is cut these hard drives convert the momentum in the spinning disks into enough electricity to zero out the onboard encryption key, which would take moments and render the contents unrecoverable.