Here's journalistic integrity for you: a story that reports you cannot reach.org sites posted on and read from a.org site. That's like posting: "you are unable to read this message." Way to go guys.
I hope you use that land. You can do quite a bit living off of 5 acres. Do what myself and my girlfriend do: plant crops. Over time, increase your food intake from your fields and less from the supermarket. Save yourself a ton of money. Self-reliance in this situation is Very Good.
YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO MASTER THE COCK
on
Glade 2 Tutorial
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· Score: -1, Troll
So, I'm back in Chicago. Unlike Des Moines, when you take a deep breath here, you inhale tons of carbon monoxide and other pollutants. I missed that.
Hey, I have two grandparents in the hospital, one because she's "certifiably insane," (and she's been that way for decades, its just that no one ever had the never to say so) and the other because of complications resulting from pneumonia. It's good to know that insanity runs in the family. In addition to Parkinson's Disease, I have a mental breakdown to look forward to. Man, my last few years are gonna be fun; I get to be a crazy guy who shakes uncontrollably while shouting [insert obscure Gilmore Girls reference] "Oy with the poodles already!"
Ever read any of the Riverworld books? Because those are some great books.
OK, I was supposed to call somebody, or some people when I retuned home, but I forgot who I was supposed to call. This is because: A) You told me to call you during finals, and you not pertaining to my English term paper, the whole thing slipped my mind, or, B) I hate you. So, sorry... or, I hate you. Whichever one pertains.
If these cards are getting so powerful at computations then why do we need a Intel/AMD processor at all? Just make a graphics card with more transistors and drop the traditional processor...
Do you understand why these so-called GPUs are so fast at doing graphics and mathetmatics geared towards graphics? Because they are Graphics Processing Units. They are not general computers. They are designed to do one thing and one thing really well: the math for 3D graphics. They would be terribly slow at general computing because general computing is not all 3D graphics. Generalized computers, such as your Pentium, are good at doing a lot of things but nothing in particular all that well. Sheesh, you'd think someone who reads/. would know better... or not.
Why are the machines so bad? They don't really mistreat the humans, at least no more than humans mistreat each other.
You *really* need to watch "The Second Rennaisance", parts 1 and 2. They're two episodes from the Animatrix that explain the history of how machines were first oppressed by man then they turned. At first, the machines tried very hard to cooperate with humans, but humans were too close minded to deal with them. Typical bigotry. Eventually war broke out. When the humans poisoned the sky, the machines sought other energey sources. This is when they began harvesting the humans for experimentation (very explicit in the Animatrix). The torments suffered on humanity are arguably justified for man's treatment of the machines at first, but nonetheless... it's very clear why cooporation isn't going to happen.
I highly recommend everyone really watch the Animatrix episodes, particular, "The Second Renaissance" (2 parts). The insight it sheds on the relationship between humans and the machines is incredible and frightening. When you watch the second half, you will understand exactly what the humans are fighting for. Prepare to be disturbed.
"If you can see a way through those things and really pick out the good stuff... any Christian could apply those things to life and grow from it."
Comments like these really make me wonder how a lot of these people think. To observe in this fashion is like looking at reality through a polarized lense polarized to your own personal tastes. Reality consists of many things and to interpret it without recognizing the whole is futile.
Furthermore, it's interesting to note that one of the central messages in The Matrix is that you're living a lie if you refuse to see what's right in front of you just because it doesn't fall within the perceived framework of your reality. "Picking out the good" and only growing from "the good" is what people still jacked in do.
i would also be interesting to see AI researchers reply to this comment.
One thing that I've always wondered about AI is how do you get away from the man-made principle. Granted, we're going to trigger the catalyst in some way, but no matter what, humans write code. Even if that code wrotes code itself, you're only really adding layers of indirection.
Someone else made a post about "artificial consciousness" and how that ought to be the goal since intelligence may be far more complicated. The begs the question: is an organism conscious before it's intelligent? (Or are those two really the same thing?)
Another question is of course whether or not we are intelligent or even conscious. This delves into the whole free-will question I think. We're trying to create things that mimick intelligence, but perhaps that goes nowhere because all animals simply follow a set of instructions.
The placement of atoms in the universe is a direct result of their placement and movement in the instantaneous moment before, all the way back to the Big Bang. With that in mind, can it not be said that the thoughts in our minds are the result of events before our existence and the way our thinking plays out is the only way it could have played out? In that case, free-will and intelligence and consciousness are all illusions and AI as we think it ought to be is impossible.
Leave it to computer researchers to form a circular link back to centuries old philosophy.:)
Have you ever handed a cashier a note and had them examine it with an expert eye to determine if it was real or not? Obviously if you hand someone a piece of monopoly money, they're going to know right off the bat that it's "not real". But if I hand a clerk at Subway a counterfeited 20$USD, nobody is going to know it until the bill falls into the hands of someone who's paying attention. By then, it's covered with finger prints. Now this will make it more difficult to make similar-looking currency, but I don't see how it solves the problem.
Artificial Intelligence Is Magic
on
AI Going Nowhere?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
People who do perform illusions and escape tricks have been doing things mostly the same way for decades. Magic tricks may change slightly, but all the basic principles and tricks are the same. There's no real evolution, just adaptation to please the crowd.
Now, with that in mind, let's look at artificial intelligence. AI has always been about trying to convince an audience that a machine is thinking. This is demonstrated by the very existence of the Turring test and many products (such as the Aibo, Furby, etc) that try to mimick emotions. If the audence is entertained, amused, or convinced, the AI is considered good. Bad AI is when the audience can see right through it.
Artificial intelligence is magic. It's a trick. It's an illusion.
It is no surprise then that AI hasn't really advanced. The trades of showmen are practically unchanged for hundreds of years. Razzle-dazzling an audience involves technological advances, but it remains unchanged. Even in the cases where "artificial intelligence" is used to aid in medical diagnosis ("expert systems") or manufacturing are really only following man-made logical structures. The computers aren't thinking, they're only doing what they're told to do, even if indirectly. The end result is impressed people who think the machine is smart.
Of course, you don't have to take my word for it. If you want to see how badly AI is going nowhere, I hightly recommend reading The Cult of Information by Theodore Roszak. While his focus is not on the fallicy of AI, it covers it in context with the much broader disillusionment of computers by society.
Now, what does AI need in order to progress? Probably AI creating other AI. Something with a deeper embodiment of evolution. As long as it's man-made, it will never be intelligent, just following a routine. Of course, I am going to stop right here... I am not qualified to offer a solution these obstacles.
This is a bad idea. I don't think I need to explain why here -- that's preaching to the choir. The question is what to do about it and I think it's simple:
If you go to an online vendor, and you notice they're located in Califorinia, go someplace else.
There's countless online retailers and even if plenty of them are located in CA, you've got plenty of options left over. From time to time, it may be inconvenient, but it shouldn't be that bad.
Remember that if you demonstrate that new taxation like this increases revenue for the state, others will follow. Slashdot has got to represent a significant portion the online market: let's make sure other states don't do the same.
I'm staying in a cabin (Lighthouse Point) this weekend at Cedar Point. Does anyone know of any unguarded wireless access points around the island? I'll need to get my fix while I'm there.
Real good guys. Great, way to go.
on
SCO DOS'ed
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· Score: 1
Sure, make the Linux/open source community look like a bunch of hackers (ergo terrorists) in the face of the mainstream. When other businesses consider using Linux, they'll consider the risk of being DDoS'ed by a bunch of pissed off lamers. Way to go -- this really helps.
I have recently become the owner of a 15" TiPB 867. This machine is a fantastic machine -- I've loved it since the day I took it out of the box. This machine has a very special property: the design is mature, having been around several years, and has undergone many revisions. As a result, most of these little annoyances have been worked out already.
The moral of the story? Avoid pilot or first revision/generation hardware.
...reasons for why really old software/hardware is still in use today. Many people complain that businesses are using heavily outdated software and hardware. These complaints claim that using outdated tools indicates lethargy on the part of the business or organization. However, that is not always so.
Idealy, when programmers write code or engineers design systems, they do it with the ages in mind. While plenty of software developers think that code is throw-away, there are some like myself who like to write enduring code. Perhaps a lot of these ancient systems were just designed so well that their obsolescence is still a long ways off. In that case, the oldest software and hardware is probably to be the most coveted. You usually don't find systems or software today that lasts for decades (and if you're on Microsoft's leash, you're lucky if your software lasts for a year).
It'd be really interesting to see the results. Are these systems really good or are the owners just really lazy?
What SCO clearly do not understand and what the judge hopefully will, is that there are many common algorithms that when implemented, may have identical code. For example, if you were to have 100 coders, all with similar education, and told them to impliment Bubble Sort, I'd bet you'd venture afterwards that 70-80 of them plagerized somebody's code. While I cannot begin to speculate what kind of algorithms were implimented in code SCO claims was stolen, there's a very strong chance the similarities are coinincidence.
A situation like this arose in a couple assignments in computer science courses I've taken. This one professor I had, who was super anal and also did not understand this principle, accused myself and some of my peers of copying each others' code. His evidence for our "cheating" was that our programs all had some almost identical code save for variable names and some functions. Now, the kids I was accused of helping to cheat or cheating off of were people I had never before interacted with until we found ourselves in the prof's office. However, the professor had done the usual thing of teaching basics, here's some algorithms, here's how you do this, here's how you do that... and because some algorithms are so intuitively implimented, the product can look the same. I mean cripes, how do you expect every student to do mutexes or handle deadlock in completely unique ways? Some things have one correct way or being done!
We explained this to him numerous times, but it seemed with every assignment, different segments of the class were being accused of cheating. Unfortunately for some, they were not able to properly explain this phenomenon.
Either SCO is really dumb or they fully expect the judge to not understand it either.
What would also be really neat is if iPods could record. I could definitely see how having a 10-20Gb minirecorder could be really useful for classes. I've always wanted to be able to record lectures and play them back later with a high degree of ease. Laptops OTOH are not too well suited for this and you need a lot of space for a full course load.
I agree that RH is moving things in a good direction; can't say I agree that they're getting it right.
They are most certainly "getting it right". When I can plug in a printer and have it working in 4 mouse clicks, or my Palm, or whatever else, I'd say things are in pretty good shape. While Windows isn't largely usable, it's better than most OSS default desktop environments. RedHat's modifications and clean-up certainly clears Windows right out of the picture -- it'd say is more in league with OS X as far as usability goes.
Sorry to hear that you've discovered how terrible GNOME really is.
"Out of the box", it's unusable. I don't know what they were thinking with the default Sawfish configuration or the arrangement of the Mac-like menu bar across the top and the tasks list on the bottom. The UI is a travesty and doesn't work in an intelligent way. The technology on the otherhand is good. See, I am not saying KDE sucks or GNOME sucks... they simply do not have good default configurations.
RH users, who don't seem to realize that what GNOME and KDE are on RH doesn't necessarily represent reality.
You're missing the whole point. It is a good thing that a distro tweaks or renovates a UI to make it better. Like I said, KDE and GNOME's defaults are REFERENCES. They are a possibility, but they are meant to be refined for end-users.
MIT's Project Oxygen is a very similar concept. It's meant to create intelligent environments that respond to your routines and commands as well. Naturally, Oxygen seems to be far more complete, but less likely to fall into the hands of just about anyone. Check out their site, it's a great read.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's journalistic integrity for you: a story that reports you cannot reach .org sites posted on and read from a .org site. That's like posting: "you are unable to read this message." Way to go guys.
5 acres out in the country.
I hope you use that land. You can do quite a bit living off of 5 acres. Do what myself and my girlfriend do: plant crops. Over time, increase your food intake from your fields and less from the supermarket. Save yourself a ton of money. Self-reliance in this situation is Very Good.
So, I'm back in Chicago. Unlike Des Moines, when you take a deep breath here, you inhale tons of carbon monoxide and other pollutants. I missed that.
Hey, I have two grandparents in the hospital, one because she's "certifiably insane," (and she's been that way for decades, its just that no one ever had the never to say so) and the other because of complications resulting from pneumonia. It's good to know that insanity runs in the family. In addition to Parkinson's Disease, I have a mental breakdown to look forward to. Man, my last few years are gonna be fun; I get to be a crazy guy who shakes uncontrollably while shouting [insert obscure Gilmore Girls reference] "Oy with the poodles already!"
Ever read any of the Riverworld books? Because those are some great books.
OK, I was supposed to call somebody, or some people when I retuned home, but I forgot who I was supposed to call. This is because: A) You told me to call you during finals, and you not pertaining to my English term paper, the whole thing slipped my mind, or, B) I hate you. So, sorry... or, I hate you. Whichever one pertains.
If these cards are getting so powerful at computations then why do we need a Intel/AMD processor at all? Just make a graphics card with more transistors and drop the traditional processor...
/. would know better... or not.
Do you understand why these so-called GPUs are so fast at doing graphics and mathetmatics geared towards graphics? Because they are Graphics Processing Units. They are not general computers. They are designed to do one thing and one thing really well: the math for 3D graphics. They would be terribly slow at general computing because general computing is not all 3D graphics. Generalized computers, such as your Pentium, are good at doing a lot of things but nothing in particular all that well. Sheesh, you'd think someone who reads
This has been mentioned on /. more times than any human can count since the movie was released. This story is -1, Redundant.
A themeable windowing system!? Yikes! What will these hackers think of next?
Why are the machines so bad? They don't really mistreat the humans, at least no more than humans mistreat each other.
You *really* need to watch "The Second Rennaisance", parts 1 and 2. They're two episodes from the Animatrix that explain the history of how machines were first oppressed by man then they turned. At first, the machines tried very hard to cooperate with humans, but humans were too close minded to deal with them. Typical bigotry. Eventually war broke out. When the humans poisoned the sky, the machines sought other energey sources. This is when they began harvesting the humans for experimentation (very explicit in the Animatrix). The torments suffered on humanity are arguably justified for man's treatment of the machines at first, but nonetheless... it's very clear why cooporation isn't going to happen.
I highly recommend everyone really watch the Animatrix episodes, particular, "The Second Renaissance" (2 parts). The insight it sheds on the relationship between humans and the machines is incredible and frightening. When you watch the second half, you will understand exactly what the humans are fighting for. Prepare to be disturbed.
"I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." -Albert Einstein
DVD technology is years behind what it should be because of stupid industry bickering over certain issues.
If any of you will recall, there was this minor issue with a copy protection scheme that took years to hammer our and a week to crack.
Anyone wanna bet this situation will be shown to contain equal stupidity?
"If you can see a way through those things and really pick out the good stuff ... any Christian could apply those things to life and grow from it."
Comments like these really make me wonder how a lot of these people think. To observe in this fashion is like looking at reality through a polarized lense polarized to your own personal tastes. Reality consists of many things and to interpret it without recognizing the whole is futile.
Furthermore, it's interesting to note that one of the central messages in The Matrix is that you're living a lie if you refuse to see what's right in front of you just because it doesn't fall within the perceived framework of your reality. "Picking out the good" and only growing from "the good" is what people still jacked in do.
i would also be interesting to see AI researchers reply to this comment.
:)
One thing that I've always wondered about AI is how do you get away from the man-made principle. Granted, we're going to trigger the catalyst in some way, but no matter what, humans write code. Even if that code wrotes code itself, you're only really adding layers of indirection.
Someone else made a post about "artificial consciousness" and how that ought to be the goal since intelligence may be far more complicated. The begs the question: is an organism conscious before it's intelligent? (Or are those two really the same thing?)
Another question is of course whether or not we are intelligent or even conscious. This delves into the whole free-will question I think. We're trying to create things that mimick intelligence, but perhaps that goes nowhere because all animals simply follow a set of instructions.
The placement of atoms in the universe is a direct result of their placement and movement in the instantaneous moment before, all the way back to the Big Bang. With that in mind, can it not be said that the thoughts in our minds are the result of events before our existence and the way our thinking plays out is the only way it could have played out? In that case, free-will and intelligence and consciousness are all illusions and AI as we think it ought to be is impossible.
Leave it to computer researchers to form a circular link back to centuries old philosophy.
Have you ever handed a cashier a note and had them examine it with an expert eye to determine if it was real or not? Obviously if you hand someone a piece of monopoly money, they're going to know right off the bat that it's "not real". But if I hand a clerk at Subway a counterfeited 20$USD, nobody is going to know it until the bill falls into the hands of someone who's paying attention. By then, it's covered with finger prints. Now this will make it more difficult to make similar-looking currency, but I don't see how it solves the problem.
People who do perform illusions and escape tricks have been doing things mostly the same way for decades. Magic tricks may change slightly, but all the basic principles and tricks are the same. There's no real evolution, just adaptation to please the crowd.
Now, with that in mind, let's look at artificial intelligence. AI has always been about trying to convince an audience that a machine is thinking. This is demonstrated by the very existence of the Turring test and many products (such as the Aibo, Furby, etc) that try to mimick emotions. If the audence is entertained, amused, or convinced, the AI is considered good. Bad AI is when the audience can see right through it.
Artificial intelligence is magic. It's a trick. It's an illusion.
It is no surprise then that AI hasn't really advanced. The trades of showmen are practically unchanged for hundreds of years. Razzle-dazzling an audience involves technological advances, but it remains unchanged. Even in the cases where "artificial intelligence" is used to aid in medical diagnosis ("expert systems") or manufacturing are really only following man-made logical structures. The computers aren't thinking, they're only doing what they're told to do, even if indirectly. The end result is impressed people who think the machine is smart.
Of course, you don't have to take my word for it. If you want to see how badly AI is going nowhere, I hightly recommend reading The Cult of Information by Theodore Roszak. While his focus is not on the fallicy of AI, it covers it in context with the much broader disillusionment of computers by society.
Now, what does AI need in order to progress? Probably AI creating other AI. Something with a deeper embodiment of evolution. As long as it's man-made, it will never be intelligent, just following a routine. Of course, I am going to stop right here... I am not qualified to offer a solution these obstacles.
This is a bad idea. I don't think I need to explain why here -- that's preaching to the choir. The question is what to do about it and I think it's simple:
If you go to an online vendor, and you notice they're located in Califorinia, go someplace else.
There's countless online retailers and even if plenty of them are located in CA, you've got plenty of options left over. From time to time, it may be inconvenient, but it shouldn't be that bad.
Remember that if you demonstrate that new taxation like this increases revenue for the state, others will follow. Slashdot has got to represent a significant portion the online market: let's make sure other states don't do the same.
420
And you get really high.
Does anyone else think this wasn't a coincidence?
I'm staying in a cabin (Lighthouse Point) this weekend at Cedar Point. Does anyone know of any unguarded wireless access points around the island? I'll need to get my fix while I'm there.
Sure, make the Linux/open source community look like a bunch of hackers (ergo terrorists) in the face of the mainstream. When other businesses consider using Linux, they'll consider the risk of being DDoS'ed by a bunch of pissed off lamers. Way to go -- this really helps.
I have recently become the owner of a 15" TiPB 867. This machine is a fantastic machine -- I've loved it since the day I took it out of the box. This machine has a very special property: the design is mature, having been around several years, and has undergone many revisions. As a result, most of these little annoyances have been worked out already. The moral of the story? Avoid pilot or first revision/generation hardware.
...reasons for why really old software/hardware is still in use today. Many people complain that businesses are using heavily outdated software and hardware. These complaints claim that using outdated tools indicates lethargy on the part of the business or organization. However, that is not always so.
Idealy, when programmers write code or engineers design systems, they do it with the ages in mind. While plenty of software developers think that code is throw-away, there are some like myself who like to write enduring code. Perhaps a lot of these ancient systems were just designed so well that their obsolescence is still a long ways off. In that case, the oldest software and hardware is probably to be the most coveted. You usually don't find systems or software today that lasts for decades (and if you're on Microsoft's leash, you're lucky if your software lasts for a year).
It'd be really interesting to see the results. Are these systems really good or are the owners just really lazy?
What SCO clearly do not understand and what the judge hopefully will, is that there are many common algorithms that when implemented, may have identical code. For example, if you were to have 100 coders, all with similar education, and told them to impliment Bubble Sort, I'd bet you'd venture afterwards that 70-80 of them plagerized somebody's code. While I cannot begin to speculate what kind of algorithms were implimented in code SCO claims was stolen, there's a very strong chance the similarities are coinincidence.
A situation like this arose in a couple assignments in computer science courses I've taken. This one professor I had, who was super anal and also did not understand this principle, accused myself and some of my peers of copying each others' code. His evidence for our "cheating" was that our programs all had some almost identical code save for variable names and some functions. Now, the kids I was accused of helping to cheat or cheating off of were people I had never before interacted with until we found ourselves in the prof's office. However, the professor had done the usual thing of teaching basics, here's some algorithms, here's how you do this, here's how you do that... and because some algorithms are so intuitively implimented, the product can look the same. I mean cripes, how do you expect every student to do mutexes or handle deadlock in completely unique ways? Some things have one correct way or being done!
We explained this to him numerous times, but it seemed with every assignment, different segments of the class were being accused of cheating. Unfortunately for some, they were not able to properly explain this phenomenon.
Either SCO is really dumb or they fully expect the judge to not understand it either.
What would also be really neat is if iPods could record. I could definitely see how having a 10-20Gb minirecorder could be really useful for classes. I've always wanted to be able to record lectures and play them back later with a high degree of ease. Laptops OTOH are not too well suited for this and you need a lot of space for a full course load.
Over all, this is a really cool idea.
I find it really amusing when a troll trolls a troll.
I agree that RH is moving things in a good direction; can't say I agree that they're getting it right.
They are most certainly "getting it right". When I can plug in a printer and have it working in 4 mouse clicks, or my Palm, or whatever else, I'd say things are in pretty good shape. While Windows isn't largely usable, it's better than most OSS default desktop environments. RedHat's modifications and clean-up certainly clears Windows right out of the picture -- it'd say is more in league with OS X as far as usability goes.
Sorry to hear that you've discovered how terrible GNOME really is.
"Out of the box", it's unusable. I don't know what they were thinking with the default Sawfish configuration or the arrangement of the Mac-like menu bar across the top and the tasks list on the bottom. The UI is a travesty and doesn't work in an intelligent way. The technology on the otherhand is good. See, I am not saying KDE sucks or GNOME sucks... they simply do not have good default configurations.
RH users, who don't seem to realize that what GNOME and KDE are on RH doesn't necessarily represent reality.
You're missing the whole point. It is a good thing that a distro tweaks or renovates a UI to make it better. Like I said, KDE and GNOME's defaults are REFERENCES. They are a possibility, but they are meant to be refined for end-users.
MIT's Project Oxygen is a very similar concept. It's meant to create intelligent environments that respond to your routines and commands as well. Naturally, Oxygen seems to be far more complete, but less likely to fall into the hands of just about anyone. Check out their site, it's a great read.