Re:Hah, he even got his depiction of neurons wrong
on
The Neuron Drive
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· Score: 1
Uh, yeah, art is always about depicting things photorealistically. That's why the paintings of Picasso, Van Gogh, Mondriaan, Escher, Dali etc. were always wonderfully accurate renditions of their subjects.
RTFA - it is the Wikipedia guys who are holding up Google's donation, not Google:
"Wikimedia's planned facilities in Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Belgium, and Asia are not online yet, so it would be premature at this juncture to ask Google for something specific when we don't yet have good technical knowledge of what we will need in the coming months following the introduction of these new facilities. Google are eager to help us, and Wikimedia are eager to accept their help, but the Board want to be good stewards of donor money, and this requires them to move carefully"
Isn't there an obvious difference between fixing a problem you helped to create by treating the underlying causes, vs. creating a proprietary 'solution' that treats the symptoms rather than the causes?
A big company like Apple makes enough money to just "license" this "patent", or buy it. And with an exclusive license, Apple could lock out its own competitors. Sounds like a better proposition to me than trying to get rid of patents, and letting every Joe and their dog make a competing music player.
I'm not saying Apple would do this, but certain other even bigger software companies would do that in a blink.
Unfortunately, you seem to live in an different reality
WTF? I did not make any statements either for or against the war, yet you seem to have magically deduced, and totally assumed, what you believe is my opinion on that matter? I merely stated the fact that the US government (also) deliberately controls and filters what is displayed in the media in order to control public opinion, and that that censorship does have an effect on the degree to which the public supports their leaders and policies. This is just a fact. Both sides do it, of course, but that is tangential to the discussion. Unless you are actually making the claim that the US doesn't, and only "the enemy" does? I'd like to hear if that is what you honestly believe.
WTF? Firstly, I'm not American, have never been there, and don't like US culture either. Secondly, I wasn't advocating the evolution of our species towards being better "killing machines" - merely stating the UNFORTUNATE fact this is almost always the case in real life in nature. Brush up on your reading skills.
Evolution favours the individuals that reproduce before they die.
Exactly my point - how many Hiroshima/Nagasaki victims successfully reproduced?
No, the reason is that publishing photos of hundreds of coffins containing dead American soldiers will make the reality of what is happening 'hit home' to the America public --- death of thousands of Americans will no longer be just some abstract number, it will suddenly seem much more real, and it won't seem so much like the US is "kicking ass" over there, as is currently the perception. So there is absolutely no doubt that publishing pictures of hundreds of coffins would cause support for the war to plummet quickly (and almost certainly would have cost Bush his re-election).
Mature as a species? This isn't Star Trek. We're not going to magically evolve into "better human beings" one day. We've been this way for thousands of years and we're not going to change any time soon.
Actually, it might well get worse, not better, because genetically, it's usually the most passive people who become victims of wars/conflicts, while those who are doing the killing, and those who do things like drop A-bombs on others, are the ones whose genetic material is more likely to survive. On average over any long period of time, evolution favours the sharpest/best killing machines.
One hope might be that such behaviour is 100% cultural/environmental, rather than genetic. This is highly unlikely though, it's actually a combination of both.
On the other hand, our ability to cooperate peacefully and build civilisations with industrialised economies is what allows us to produce better "murder/defence technology". This means evolution might in some ways favour slightly less aggressive but smarter & cooperative genes, than highly aggressive but "dumber" genes.
One gets the impression reading that paragraph that this wasn't what he really thought, but rather, that he already suspected he was going to get censored, and was trying to write as US-friendly an article as possible in order to try avoid being censored, so that his article could get to the US public.
The problem with most of these security applications is that ultimately, all they're really doing is trying to address the symptoms of an underlying problem / "disease". It's just yet another layer of workarounds stacked upon still more workarounds, none of which ever seem to fix the core problems. There is only so much that symptomatic treatment can do for you, at some point it becomes better to just throw out the entire foundation and build something from the ground up again, 'properly', with security in mind from the beginning. It seems to me the Windows codebase is such a tangled mess that at this point it's probably become extremely costly for MS to maintain, slow to enhance and extend, and changes break things too easily so one fears changing things --- it seems to bear all the hallmarks of 'spaghetti code'.
Hmm.. OK, thanks, I see more where you're coming from now, and indeed, much interesting stuff to think about.
BTW I'm also a white male with larger than average head who also scores very high on standardised tests.
It's true, "intelligence" is not something specific enough to be defined. To one person in one situation it might be solving a complex math problem, to another elsewhere it might be designing a fighter jet control system, to another elsewhere it might be figuring out how to uplift a poor community and solve social inequities, to another it might mean composing a masterful symphony. All of the people in those hypothetical situations may be highly intelligent, but not be so great at doing each other's jobs. Generally speaking though, in most cases, the types of people who achieve such things do usually score high on standardised tests.
Maybe, as you suggest, there is an opposite causal relation at work. People who score poorly on standardised tests are put in 'boxes' from young and told not to try do great things but rather to flip burgers or whatever. They are not given opportunities in their jobs, because HR don't give them a chance, etc.
We don't think twice about wiping out thousands of existing species on Earth. Seems to me it would be quite ironic if we suddenly cared so much about a few obscure single-celled creatures on Mars that we decided not to try terraform it.
I am not buying this bird brained theory at all, without proof. How do we know small brained people aren't mistreated or not encouraged to learn in society?
We don't, and that might very well be the case. (Yes, kids are placed into "boxes"... I was never encouraged to do any sport at school, for example, because everyone assumed that I was just a "brainy type", and pushed me to do "brainy" activities.) But it would still fit in with the results of this research, not disprove the research. See, this research shows a correlation - that's all. They don't claim that they've proved causality. You've just come up with a possible hypothesis as to the cause for the correlation.
Nothing wrong with this, this is how science works. If you pursued science, you might want to go on to try (a) disprove the results, or (b) duplicate the results, or (c) try to hypothesise and test for possible causal relationships. Or you could do related work, like the "shaky" basis of this research that assumes the currently not really proven claim that standardised intelligence tests really test intelligence, and try to either prove that they do or that they don't. Etc.
and that races like Australian aborigines are inferior because they are smaller still? My guess is about... fifteen seconds.
^^^ Woah - hold it right there, this type of political correctness is the antithesis of science. While there will always be groups who abuse "science" to prove some racist point, that doesn't mean that all research that makes such claims are cases of abuse, and if you believe in science at all then you cannot just offhandedly dismiss the possibility that, until proven otherwise, it might actually be true that physically smaller races have slightly lower average intelligence. Has it been proven otherwise? No. Never. Yet somehow, you seem to already have arrived at the conclusion that it cannot be true. How can you know this? What is your reproducible research that proves it? Truth is the ultimate goal - science should never be censored or impeded for the sake of political correctness, as you are suggesting. If someone wants to study the intelligence of aboriginal races in a scientifically sound manner, and produced proveable results that you didn't like, should those results be censored?
I don't know why this study seems to offend you so much. It only talks about averages - it does not mean that someone with a small head cannot be intelligent, it's still possible, just less likely on average, if the results are true. (Is your head smaller than average?) This doesn't show that people will smaller brains are going to be less intelligent - just that there is a general correlation on average. The correlation be so slight as to even have no practically useful predictive power - doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Einstein's single case doesn't "prove the rule is garbage", that's the most scientifically and statistically unsound claim I've seen on slashdot in a long time. A sample size of one doesn't tell you anything - a first year stats student can tell you that.
I agree that the idea that this might be used to e.g. put small children into 'boxes' that pre-determine their supposed potential and destiny based on head size is highly noxious, and that this could very well happen. Schools already put children into such boxes all the time based on various factors. But none of that is a problem with the science. If there is a correlation, and science can show the correlation, then it doesn't matter how much you dislike it.
I don't see any of the circular reasoning you mention, since they don't claim that brain size causes "intelligence" (as measured by their "intelligence tests").. merely that if the standardised tests they measure do actually measure intelligence, that there is a correlation between those test results and brain size. So what they've really measured, is a correlation between brain size and the results of 'standardised intelligence tests'. They haven't proven, nor have they claimed to prove, that 'standardised intelligence tests' do measure "intelligence". "Intelligence" might be a term that is too fuzzy to measure scientifically, but the fact remains that standardised intelligence tests are still one of the best predictors of future job performance. They have practical utility, even if the science is not sound.
Wonder how on earth you're going to search through such a huge data storage
WTF? This is not rocket science, with smart indexing and FSNs you can easily search through massive datasets. How do you think Google manages to search the content of over 8 billion web pages in a fraction of a second?
Microsoft always catch up after being behind everyone else after roughly ten years, in everything they do. The same is true for their current drive towards security, where they are starting to catch up to, say, the seriousness with which 1980's UNIX vendors approached security.
The underlying problem though is that Microsoft only ever develop anything reactively, never proactively. Every move they've ever made has been kind of like: "hey look, company XYZ has produced this excellent product ABC, and everyone loves it, let's also start working on something like that and release a semi-decent version five years from now". This will never change.
So it's all fine and well that Longhorn 2006/7 will be the first MS OS ever actually built with a serious company-wide intention of being secure, but the question is, do you want to always be at least "ten years behind" like that? Do you think it's good to keep putting your money into the company that only knows how to "catch up", in an industry that really runs much better when there is leadership and innovation?
Funny, I don't remember anyone seriously bitching that trademarking the word "Windows" is evil. This is just another silly baseless troll desparately trying to paint the MS critics as being hypocrits.
Heh - interesting, I've had similar experiences. I've written a few (very) small OpenSource games - nothing major, nothing well-known. I've distributed them very clearly under either GPL, BSD or even 'public domain' licenses.
Yet people seem to have always asked my permission before using the source for anything, however tiny and insignificant the use. Some guys also asked my permission once to do a fork.
In the beginning it seemed quite weird to me, now I'm kinda used to it.
So yes, people seem to generally respect copyrights.
How, pray tell, did you wander to this level? This is really nothing but troll.
No, he/she 'wandered to this level' because the author of the posted article, which this entire thread is about, made that link and wandered to "this level". RTFA.
Imagine killing someone for stealing virtual property - simply some bytes of code
You could make the same argument for art. Imagine you owned the Mona Lisa, and someone stole it from you. You'd probably be extremely angry, quite possibly angry enough to consider killing the guilty person. But, "simply some bytes of code" = "simply a few strokes of paint on a piece of canvas", right?
No, the painting has a very high $ value, and this is true regardless of the validity of the reasons why it has such a high $ value.
Still, I don't think we need any new laws here, unless it's to give consumers and not producers more freedom. The fact that a virtual sword can have such a high value, and the fact that so many producers of "virtual" goods are so incredibly rich (including MPAA/RIAA), tells me that the system is working just fine already thank you, at least from the producers' point of view.
To answer your question though, I don't know what that means:) Because as you suggest, an economy that produces primarily candy is going to be just as susceptible in the next global recession, as candy is also one of the first things to go when things get 'tight'. And this has nothing to do with whether the products are virtual or tangible.
I guess the ideal theoretical economy is one that magically shifts it's production resources instantaneously to automatically adjust to shifting global demands to maximise their income and wealth generation. In a hypothetical diamond-age style world where everyone's basic needs are already taken care of and, say, electronic virual entertainment is in the biggest demand, then that's what the economy should produce. I guess that's the value of diversified economies - their higher versatility/adaptability.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, yeah, art is always about depicting things photorealistically. That's why the paintings of Picasso, Van Gogh, Mondriaan, Escher, Dali etc. were always wonderfully accurate renditions of their subjects.
Oh wait, they weren't. At all.
Numbnuts. Who's the douche again?
RTFA - it is the Wikipedia guys who are holding up Google's donation, not Google:
"Wikimedia's planned facilities in Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Belgium, and Asia are not online yet, so it would be premature at this juncture to ask Google for something specific when we don't yet have good technical knowledge of what we will need in the coming months following the introduction of these new facilities. Google are eager to help us, and Wikimedia are eager to accept their help, but the Board want to be good stewards of donor money, and this requires them to move carefully"
For anyone who works at repairing or developing just about anything: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Isn't there an obvious difference between fixing a problem you helped to create by treating the underlying causes, vs. creating a proprietary 'solution' that treats the symptoms rather than the causes?
A big company like Apple makes enough money to just "license" this "patent", or buy it. And with an exclusive license, Apple could lock out its own competitors. Sounds like a better proposition to me than trying to get rid of patents, and letting every Joe and their dog make a competing music player.
I'm not saying Apple would do this, but certain other even bigger software companies would do that in a blink.
a straw-man argument. Try again.
Unfortunately, you seem to live in an different reality
WTF? I did not make any statements either for or against the war, yet you seem to have magically deduced, and totally assumed, what you believe is my opinion on that matter? I merely stated the fact that the US government (also) deliberately controls and filters what is displayed in the media in order to control public opinion, and that that censorship does have an effect on the degree to which the public supports their leaders and policies. This is just a fact. Both sides do it, of course, but that is tangential to the discussion. Unless you are actually making the claim that the US doesn't, and only "the enemy" does? I'd like to hear if that is what you honestly believe.
WTF? Firstly, I'm not American, have never been there, and don't like US culture either. Secondly, I wasn't advocating the evolution of our species towards being better "killing machines" - merely stating the UNFORTUNATE fact this is almost always the case in real life in nature. Brush up on your reading skills.
Evolution favours the individuals that reproduce before they die.
Exactly my point - how many Hiroshima/Nagasaki victims successfully reproduced?
No, the reason is that publishing photos of hundreds of coffins containing dead American soldiers will make the reality of what is happening 'hit home' to the America public --- death of thousands of Americans will no longer be just some abstract number, it will suddenly seem much more real, and it won't seem so much like the US is "kicking ass" over there, as is currently the perception. So there is absolutely no doubt that publishing pictures of hundreds of coffins would cause support for the war to plummet quickly (and almost certainly would have cost Bush his re-election).
Mature as a species? This isn't Star Trek. We're not going to magically evolve into "better human beings" one day. We've been this way for thousands of years and we're not going to change any time soon.
Actually, it might well get worse, not better, because genetically, it's usually the most passive people who become victims of wars/conflicts, while those who are doing the killing, and those who do things like drop A-bombs on others, are the ones whose genetic material is more likely to survive. On average over any long period of time, evolution favours the sharpest/best killing machines.
One hope might be that such behaviour is 100% cultural/environmental, rather than genetic. This is highly unlikely though, it's actually a combination of both.
On the other hand, our ability to cooperate peacefully and build civilisations with industrialised economies is what allows us to produce better "murder/defence technology". This means evolution might in some ways favour slightly less aggressive but smarter & cooperative genes, than highly aggressive but "dumber" genes.
One gets the impression reading that paragraph that this wasn't what he really thought, but rather, that he already suspected he was going to get censored, and was trying to write as US-friendly an article as possible in order to try avoid being censored, so that his article could get to the US public.
The problem with most of these security applications is that ultimately, all they're really doing is trying to address the symptoms of an underlying problem / "disease". It's just yet another layer of workarounds stacked upon still more workarounds, none of which ever seem to fix the core problems. There is only so much that symptomatic treatment can do for you, at some point it becomes better to just throw out the entire foundation and build something from the ground up again, 'properly', with security in mind from the beginning. It seems to me the Windows codebase is such a tangled mess that at this point it's probably become extremely costly for MS to maintain, slow to enhance and extend, and changes break things too easily so one fears changing things --- it seems to bear all the hallmarks of 'spaghetti code'.
Ha ha, you're so funny.
Word to the wise- in the future let us decide who's smart.
I only mentioned it because he did, numbnuts.
But I'll take your advice, I've already made up my mind about your intelligence level - your mindset is "anyone who agrees with me is intelligent".
Hmm .. OK, thanks, I see more where you're coming from now, and indeed, much interesting stuff to think about.
BTW I'm also a white male with larger than average head who also scores very high on standardised tests.
It's true, "intelligence" is not something specific enough to be defined. To one person in one situation it might be solving a complex math problem, to another elsewhere it might be designing a fighter jet control system, to another elsewhere it might be figuring out how to uplift a poor community and solve social inequities, to another it might mean composing a masterful symphony. All of the people in those hypothetical situations may be highly intelligent, but not be so great at doing each other's jobs. Generally speaking though, in most cases, the types of people who achieve such things do usually score high on standardised tests.
Maybe, as you suggest, there is an opposite causal relation at work. People who score poorly on standardised tests are put in 'boxes' from young and told not to try do great things but rather to flip burgers or whatever. They are not given opportunities in their jobs, because HR don't give them a chance, etc.
We don't think twice about wiping out thousands of existing species on Earth. Seems to me it would be quite ironic if we suddenly cared so much about a few obscure single-celled creatures on Mars that we decided not to try terraform it.
I am not buying this bird brained theory at all, without proof. How do we know small brained people aren't mistreated or not encouraged to learn in society?
We don't, and that might very well be the case. (Yes, kids are placed into "boxes" ... I was never encouraged to do any sport at school, for example, because everyone assumed that I was just a "brainy type", and pushed me to do "brainy" activities.) But it would still fit in with the results of this research, not disprove the research. See, this research shows a correlation - that's all. They don't claim that they've proved causality. You've just come up with a possible hypothesis as to the cause for the correlation.
Nothing wrong with this, this is how science works. If you pursued science, you might want to go on to try (a) disprove the results, or (b) duplicate the results, or (c) try to hypothesise and test for possible causal relationships. Or you could do related work, like the "shaky" basis of this research that assumes the currently not really proven claim that standardised intelligence tests really test intelligence, and try to either prove that they do or that they don't. Etc.
and that races like Australian aborigines are inferior because they are smaller still? My guess is about... fifteen seconds.
^^^ Woah - hold it right there, this type of political correctness is the antithesis of science. While there will always be groups who abuse "science" to prove some racist point, that doesn't mean that all research that makes such claims are cases of abuse, and if you believe in science at all then you cannot just offhandedly dismiss the possibility that, until proven otherwise, it might actually be true that physically smaller races have slightly lower average intelligence. Has it been proven otherwise? No. Never. Yet somehow, you seem to already have arrived at the conclusion that it cannot be true. How can you know this? What is your reproducible research that proves it? Truth is the ultimate goal - science should never be censored or impeded for the sake of political correctness, as you are suggesting. If someone wants to study the intelligence of aboriginal races in a scientifically sound manner, and produced proveable results that you didn't like, should those results be censored?
I don't know why this study seems to offend you so much. It only talks about averages - it does not mean that someone with a small head cannot be intelligent, it's still possible, just less likely on average, if the results are true. (Is your head smaller than average?) This doesn't show that people will smaller brains are going to be less intelligent - just that there is a general correlation on average. The correlation be so slight as to even have no practically useful predictive power - doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Einstein's single case doesn't "prove the rule is garbage", that's the most scientifically and statistically unsound claim I've seen on slashdot in a long time. A sample size of one doesn't tell you anything - a first year stats student can tell you that.
I agree that the idea that this might be used to e.g. put small children into 'boxes' that pre-determine their supposed potential and destiny based on head size is highly noxious, and that this could very well happen. Schools already put children into such boxes all the time based on various factors. But none of that is a problem with the science. If there is a correlation, and science can show the correlation, then it doesn't matter how much you dislike it.
I don't see any of the circular reasoning you mention, since they don't claim that brain size causes "intelligence" (as measured by their "intelligence tests") .. merely that if the standardised tests they measure do actually measure intelligence, that there is a correlation between those test results and brain size. So what they've really measured, is a correlation between brain size and the results of 'standardised intelligence tests'. They haven't proven, nor have they claimed to prove, that 'standardised intelligence tests' do measure "intelligence". "Intelligence" might be a term that is too fuzzy to measure scientifically, but the fact remains that standardised intelligence tests are still one of the best predictors of future job performance. They have practical utility, even if the science is not sound.
Einstein had bad grades .. what's your point?
Wonder how on earth you're going to search through such a huge data storage
WTF? This is not rocket science, with smart indexing and FSNs you can easily search through massive datasets. How do you think Google manages to search the content of over 8 billion web pages in a fraction of a second?
Microsoft always catch up after being behind everyone else after roughly ten years, in everything they do. The same is true for their current drive towards security, where they are starting to catch up to, say, the seriousness with which 1980's UNIX vendors approached security.
The underlying problem though is that Microsoft only ever develop anything reactively, never proactively. Every move they've ever made has been kind of like: "hey look, company XYZ has produced this excellent product ABC, and everyone loves it, let's also start working on something like that and release a semi-decent version five years from now". This will never change.
So it's all fine and well that Longhorn 2006/7 will be the first MS OS ever actually built with a serious company-wide intention of being secure, but the question is, do you want to always be at least "ten years behind" like that? Do you think it's good to keep putting your money into the company that only knows how to "catch up", in an industry that really runs much better when there is leadership and innovation?
Funny, I don't remember anyone seriously bitching that trademarking the word "Windows" is evil. This is just another silly baseless troll desparately trying to paint the MS critics as being hypocrits.
Heh - interesting, I've had similar experiences. I've written a few (very) small OpenSource games - nothing major, nothing well-known. I've distributed them very clearly under either GPL, BSD or even 'public domain' licenses.
Yet people seem to have always asked my permission before using the source for anything, however tiny and insignificant the use. Some guys also asked my permission once to do a fork.
In the beginning it seemed quite weird to me, now I'm kinda used to it.
So yes, people seem to generally respect copyrights.
How, pray tell, did you wander to this level? This is really nothing but troll.
No, he/she 'wandered to this level' because the author of the posted article, which this entire thread is about, made that link and wandered to "this level". RTFA.
Imagine killing someone for stealing virtual property - simply some bytes of code
You could make the same argument for art. Imagine you owned the Mona Lisa, and someone stole it from you. You'd probably be extremely angry, quite possibly angry enough to consider killing the guilty person. But, "simply some bytes of code" = "simply a few strokes of paint on a piece of canvas", right?
No, the painting has a very high $ value, and this is true regardless of the validity of the reasons why it has such a high $ value.
Still, I don't think we need any new laws here, unless it's to give consumers and not producers more freedom. The fact that a virtual sword can have such a high value, and the fact that so many producers of "virtual" goods are so incredibly rich (including MPAA/RIAA), tells me that the system is working just fine already thank you, at least from the producers' point of view.
To answer your question though, I don't know what that means :) Because as you suggest, an economy that produces primarily candy is going to be just as susceptible in the next global recession, as candy is also one of the first things to go when things get 'tight'. And this has nothing to do with whether the products are virtual or tangible.
I guess the ideal theoretical economy is one that magically shifts it's production resources instantaneously to automatically adjust to shifting global demands to maximise their income and wealth generation. In a hypothetical diamond-age style world where everyone's basic needs are already taken care of and, say, electronic virual entertainment is in the biggest demand, then that's what the economy should produce. I guess that's the value of diversified economies - their higher versatility/adaptability.