It will only seem "real" when our notion of reality is so degraded or derailed that what some machine farts out convinces us. As someone earlier noted, this discussion goes back to Hegel and earlier, but in point of fact, the discussions of Hegel and Locke and Hume and Plato etc. are light years more sophisticated than the bumbling nonsense of "The Matrix" and the techno-weenies who revel in their helplessness.
They need to go out and get some fresh air. It's spring time. Spring is sprung, the grass is riz...
Hi!
first: Plato's allegory of the cave was an allegory.
Platoâ(TM)s point: the general terms of our language are not 'names' of the physical objects that we can see. They are actually names of things that we cannot see, things that we can only grasp with the mind.
In my view, Plato has it backwards. The "reality" is not the people behind the prisoners holding up objects in front of the fire. The reality is there are no puppet masters, nor are there shadows. There is only this reality which is immediate and constantly changing. With science we learn some things about it, and these are human activities that invent products of the human mind.
I would recommend the works of the neuroscientists Ramachandran and Dehaene, as well as the physicist Barbour. Barbour is especially interesting as he advocates that the universe we see is a product of what he calls "Platonia", which is a hyperdimensional static space/time/matter construct which the universe sits in. Because we don't have access to Platonia, we don't have access to all time / space / matter.
but, back to moy point - I don't think machines will be judge intelligent because they are intelligent. I think we're going to re-define intelligence as something that machines can have. There's a very big difference.
Sure. when I am CONVINCED some girl is sucking me off, I am supposed to beleive it? And pray tell, how will I know that it's "me" getting "sucked off"? And what about Goedel?
The whole Matrix simulacrum spiel is such a load of shite I find it utterly bizarre that people are still entertaining it.
I'm *sure* that the computer will fool some people into thinking what it makes is real, because THOSE PEOPLE ARE STUPID. It's not that the machines will become intelligent, it's that we're bending the curve on what we think is intelligence to something really stupid - we'll just lower the bar, or collectively enter our idiocracy and think "Hey - fooled me!"
"Gee Johnny, why don't you stop drooling on yourself for a minute and tell me: is the machine intelligent?"
"Id da macheen telligent? Duhh YEAH Boss! Id be willy telligent! Can I have cookie now?"
Sure - while ignoring the reasons for their attack in the first place. Japan was hellbent on becoming a major industrial power. To do that you need oil. Tojo learned THAT little fact touring the state of Texas in the 1920s. The closest/best oil to Japan was in Indonesia, which was under the bootheel of British Imperialism, and to get there you need to go through the Phillipines which was under the bootheel of American Imperialism. So, the only way to fuel their industrial empire was to get the political impediments out of the way, and that meant either appeasing, lulling, or attacking the USA and UK.
They settled for something very similar to George Bush's strategy of "Pre-emptive Attack" and attacked a naval base on an island in an illegally stolen territory within the American Regional Empire. Their strike was an obvious contingency, so the valuable ships (spanky new aircraft carriers) were all sent out to sea, leaving behind (mostly) relatively older battleships and cruisers.
For more facts on this, I would recommend Daniel Yergin's "The Prize".
You are not insightful. You are more of an ignorant troll.
It seems to be slashdotted - I couldn't get the page to load. I look forward to reading it. But the name - Anathem? Sounds like someone lisping a headache remedy...
I agree, it has its uses in that limited regard, but overall the 5 pin DIN is slowly disappearing.
I have had BUCKETS of gear in my day, while the old synths have their fetishistic value, they are, for the most part, not that great. The NI soft synth of a Moog 55 may not have the "warmth" and "immediacy" of a real Moog 55, but who cares? IT sounds "good enough", much like CDs vs. vinyl. CDs sound Good Enough. Also, the gear is unidirectional, eg: you can control a Yamaha Motif XS6 with a DX7, but WHY? You can control the DX7 with the Motif, but it's not going to give you more voices in the DX7, nor will it reduce the noise floor of the DX7, or make the DX7 sound any "better". MIDI eliminated the need for great barns filled with keybaord, and encouraged rack mounting of boxen. But with the advent of things like Reason, and the vast armada of softsynths, from M-tron to NI's catalogue, there's precious little reason to have multitudes of boxen for anything other than the fetishistic reasons of the Collector.
For that reason, I don't think the 5 pin DIN will disappear, it will simply stop being used... Kind of like how computers had PS2 ports for years after USB swept them into the trash bin.
By the way - I just bought the Motif XS6. Freakin' AWESOME. Stunning. Weird. And wonderful!
We use Blackboard (BB) where I teach, and I can attest, it is truly a roiling piece of shite. Everything you said is true, and my fellow professors spend more time developing workarounds to avoid using BB than they do developing the work they need to work with BB. Why? Because working WITH BB sucks in horrible horrible ways, and while the work arounds are "more work" at least they're convenient and maleable.
Gradebook is a NIGHTMARE. I mistyped one of the calcs (23 instead 32 percent) and didn't catch it until after midterm, and when I went to reset it, it blew the grades to pieces. It was for a HUGE class (150 students) and so I had to re-grade and personally re-calc 150 grades (midterm, paper, final exam). I used Excel to help, but I HATE EXCEL and it wasn't fun having to deal with something that should not have been hard to re-finagle easily. Total nightmare.
I am hoping this ruling will lead to better software for me. As it is, avoid BB like the plague...
For YEARS Apple refused to get on with the VGA thing, and Apple users had to pay a premium for a monitor that sported a DB15 port. Nasty. I still don't understand why they did that... there were Adaptor plugs for DB15 > VGA all over the place, and eventually Apple dumped DB15, about 10 years too late.
It used to be that about the only way you could move MIDI data was through the clunky old 5 pin DIN cables. Now, while keyboards still sport 5 pin DIN ports, the real action for MIDI is in USB.
So, like, Scoob, lemme get this straight, I put a naked Windows box on the net, and it's pwned in seconds. But, I've like left naked macintosh machines on the web for like months on end, and no one can get in, no one messes with it, and somehow, this article says that like Microsoft is better at patching vulnerabilities.
Scooby! Tell me what's going on here! Like, I don't get it!
Rit's ralled FUD Raggie! FUD yeah!!! Rrrreeeeeeheeehehehee!!!
Dumping that much crap in the atmosphere won't Fuck The Planet Up (tm) but if it leads to what is implied in the description, that China will look to other weather mods, and given they have well over a billion people to do it, I would be Deeply Apprehensive that it would be any kind of a "good Thing".
A completely modularised OS would be insane. All you owuld need is for some particular combo of missing components and present components to not play together well, and BLAM! BSoD. And throw in some special video card and its drivers and maybe a special hi end audio card etc. and if they require components be there, or NOT be there, because they conflict, etc and so on. I don't see how this is testable. It might be, but it has all the earmarks of a real trainwreck.
Hydrogen is more of a battery than a fuel and it is ALWAYS by DEFINITION going to have negative ER/EI. Why? Because the energy required to pull hydrogen out of water or methane or petroleum is going to be greater than the energy you get from burning the hydrogen. What the "hydrogen economy" seeks to do is to protect the sunken cost of the suburbs, and the sunken costs of the automotive infrastructure, both of which are joined at the hip and are completely unsustainable. It's a fools errand and will fail. There is also the not inconsiderable energy that goes into making the bucky balls, etc.
Face it: gigs up. Game over. Prepare to slowly powerdown.
Certainly every minister and professor of theology I know would be appalled at such a suggestion. It most certainly goes against the training ministers receive here in Northern Ireland.
Ummm, world created in 6 days, loaves into fish, the existence of a "God" in the first place? Hello??? To BE a minister of any variety requires you to believe a load of errant nonsense.
Science AND Religion are both social activities. As much as the Platonists like to bark that there are Great Truths that Really Exist in the universe, NONE of it is knowable outside the activities of human beings. Organised religion operates from precisely that position, and is therefore more deeply imbricated in the sociality of its practice, i.e., it's a social activity, it's a part of the social (and hence political) fabric, and everything it does comes from that. With a very few exceptions, Religion has certain requirements of its adherents, which usually centre around a canonical text of some variety.
Belief in the veracity of this text is considered required, and disagreement is often punished. With contemporary western christian religions, you might lose some friends or get kicked out of a social group. Other religions aren't as gentle about apostates (viz. Islam, where it is a capital offence).
What Religion provides in exchange for the fealty of the adherent is not to be underestimated:
1. A universal belief system that doesn't change, and thusly requiring no critical thinking skills.
2. Said system provides meaning in a life where one is thrown at birth into a universe that seems to have none at all.
3. Most Importantly: it provides a social network for the care and upbringing of children.
4. Almost as importantly: it provides ancillary networks for the functioning of social services that fall outside the reach of government systems.
Science does nothing of the sort. Science gives us a mysterious universe where truth is only true until proven otherwise. Science separates the form of collective human existence (DNA, proteins, etc.) from the content of personal human existence (why am I here?). Science doesn't run daycare systems open to the public. Science doesn't run soup kitchens for the hungry, or set up bunks in the basement for the homeless, etc. From every direction, Science, as a social object, is distinctly different and uncompetitive with Religion.
This just touches on the complexity involved. "Selling" science to the "Masses" assumes the masses are predisposed to accept the Science "World". Clearly, in many nations, they are not, and one can't really blame them. In the USA when I needed daycare for my daughter, the public schools were a: filled and b: of very low quality. So we sent her to a daycare run by a Lebanese Christian church. We weren't Christian, and they were very "light" in their religious angles, and the schooling was very good. When my Brother in Law's roof blew off, people from "Church" helped him. I've been told that Hamas runs health clinics in Gaza. There's a "Catholic Relief Fund" but I've never heard of a "Physicist's Poverty Program" or a "Biology Homeless Solution".
As a consequence, it's not much of a stretch for the average human being to blow off the whole "critical thinking" deal and step in line with some mythology. It's not going to matter how you tart Science up. It's not lipstick on a pig, it's more like lipstick on "the empty void of provisional truth and the relentless churn of Testability, Repeatability and Occam's Razor - and falsifiability if you can afford it."
As a former science worker, I deplore the scientific illiteracy of the public, but especially the American Public who are so often willfully ignorant of science and critical thinking. Other countries vary - some are in the thrall of theocratic regimes others not. But making Science "more appealing" or "more interesting" is going to take a shift in social preferences and mores from the public, and a much deeper commitment to issues of compassion, social justice, and sociality as a whole on the part of Science. This could mean things like NOT WORKING FOR PEOPLE WHO BUILT ATOMIC WEAPONS AND OTHER INSTRUMENTS OF DEATH, just as much as it is incumbent for Religion to stop with the "smiting" and "vanquishing" of heathens and apostates. Combine all THAT with Science in a short tight skirt, and you might actually get somewhere. Otherwise, you're fucked and wasting your time.
Argh. I wasn't trolling. I was asking an honest question. I don't DL from iTunes music store, and I don't have an iPod. I just looked at the statements at face value. If the iTunes Music store allowed me to pay (x) dolars for infinite DLs, I might consider it.
The UK was perfectly happy dismantling it's military with the soviet threat on it's doorstep in turn for socialized medicine and other programs. Meanwhile it forced the US to beef it's army up to provide the same amounts of protections in Europe which illustrates yet again, how stupid they are.
BWAHAHAAAA!!!!
you're an idiot. What you just described is how the British were BRILLIANT. Whether they faced the Nazis down fro mthe git go or not, the Wehrmacht had the tactical advantage: Blitzkrieg. The British had to get kicked out of France - there was no way they could have beaten the Germans at that point. Then the Germans bombed the crap out of them, and, at first, the Germans had the better planes and more experienced troops. So, the British got hammered. After the war, the place was a mess, so the British got the Americans to lay out all this money to fight the Soviets, while they rebuilt their country. That wasn't STUPID, that was SMART. and if you can't see how smart that is, then you're one of the knuckledragging retards I'm talking about....
1. When do you want to see all USA troops removed from Iraq. If window > 12 months, WHY?
2. Will you introduce or back a bill to immediately restore habeus corpus? If not, WHY?
3. Will you seek to imprison or support the imprisonment of the Bush Junta for their obvious war crimes? If not, WHY NOT?
4. Will you introduce or back a national adoption of the International Depletion Protocol, as developed by Prof. Heinberg of California? If not, WHY NOT?
5. Will you introduce a bill or support a bill that bans practices such as extreme rendition and waterboarding? If not, WHY NOT?
6. Will you support the prosecution of those responsible for the practice of extreme rendition and waterboarding? If not, WHY NOT?
7. Will you introduce or support a bill that will close American military bases outside the USA? If not, WHY NOT?
8. Do you repudiate american imperialism? If not, why not?
9. Will you introduce or support a bill that reinstitutes a graduated income tax that will actually force the rich to pay a larger percentage of their wealth than the working middle class? If not, WHY NOT?
10. Will you introduce or support a bill that reduces military expenditure by at least 50% over the next 4 years? If not, WHY NOT?
A lot of people replied saying concrete instead of asphalt.
Nope. nuh uh. Not gonna happen. Why?
The second largest source of CO2 after automobile manufacture is cement. you use it to make concrete. We need to curtail cement manufacture.
So, no asphalt, no cement, so no concrete. what's left?
What some posters described: slave labour making roads of stone. You're not goign to run a high intensity trucking based infrastructure on cobblestone roads. The asphalt will get pot holes. They won't get fixed. The road will get torn up. The remaining asphalt will be ground up and mixed with dirt to make a hardened (but not hard) surface suitable for lightweight low speed vehicles and bicycles. Eventually, those will give way to dirt roads, just like we've had for the past unpteen thousand years.
Industrial society was an anomaly. It's fun being alive now, but it's anomalous.
Slashdot Mirror
It will only seem "real" when our notion of reality is so degraded or derailed that what some machine farts out convinces us. As someone earlier noted, this discussion goes back to Hegel and earlier, but in point of fact, the discussions of Hegel and Locke and Hume and Plato etc. are light years more sophisticated than the bumbling nonsense of "The Matrix" and the techno-weenies who revel in their helplessness.
They need to go out and get some fresh air. It's spring time. Spring is sprung, the grass is riz...
best,
RS
Platoâ(TM)s point: the general terms of our language are not 'names' of the physical objects that we can see. They are actually names of things that we cannot see, things that we can only grasp with the mind.
In my view, Plato has it backwards. The "reality" is not the people behind the prisoners holding up objects in front of the fire. The reality is there are no puppet masters, nor are there shadows. There is only this reality which is immediate and constantly changing. With science we learn some things about it, and these are human activities that invent products of the human mind.
I would recommend the works of the neuroscientists Ramachandran and Dehaene, as well as the physicist Barbour. Barbour is especially interesting as he advocates that the universe we see is a product of what he calls "Platonia", which is a hyperdimensional static space/time/matter construct which the universe sits in. Because we don't have access to Platonia, we don't have access to all time / space / matter.
but, back to moy point - I don't think machines will be judge intelligent because they are intelligent. I think we're going to re-define intelligence as something that machines can have. There's a very big difference.
cheers!
RS
The whole Matrix simulacrum spiel is such a load of shite I find it utterly bizarre that people are still entertaining it.
I'm *sure* that the computer will fool some people into thinking what it makes is real, because THOSE PEOPLE ARE STUPID. It's not that the machines will become intelligent, it's that we're bending the curve on what we think is intelligence to something really stupid - we'll just lower the bar, or collectively enter our idiocracy and think "Hey - fooled me!"
"Gee Johnny, why don't you stop drooling on yourself for a minute and tell me: is the machine intelligent?"
"Id da macheen telligent? Duhh YEAH Boss! Id be willy telligent! Can I have cookie now?"
RS
RS
Thank you, thank you - I'm here all week. The lasagna's great - tip your waitress...
RS
They settled for something very similar to George Bush's strategy of "Pre-emptive Attack" and attacked a naval base on an island in an illegally stolen territory within the American Regional Empire. Their strike was an obvious contingency, so the valuable ships (spanky new aircraft carriers) were all sent out to sea, leaving behind (mostly) relatively older battleships and cruisers.
For more facts on this, I would recommend Daniel Yergin's "The Prize".
You are not insightful. You are more of an ignorant troll.
RS
RS
HW
I have had BUCKETS of gear in my day, while the old synths have their fetishistic value, they are, for the most part, not that great. The NI soft synth of a Moog 55 may not have the "warmth" and "immediacy" of a real Moog 55, but who cares? IT sounds "good enough", much like CDs vs. vinyl. CDs sound Good Enough. Also, the gear is unidirectional, eg: you can control a Yamaha Motif XS6 with a DX7, but WHY? You can control the DX7 with the Motif, but it's not going to give you more voices in the DX7, nor will it reduce the noise floor of the DX7, or make the DX7 sound any "better". MIDI eliminated the need for great barns filled with keybaord, and encouraged rack mounting of boxen. But with the advent of things like Reason, and the vast armada of softsynths, from M-tron to NI's catalogue, there's precious little reason to have multitudes of boxen for anything other than the fetishistic reasons of the Collector.
For that reason, I don't think the 5 pin DIN will disappear, it will simply stop being used... Kind of like how computers had PS2 ports for years after USB swept them into the trash bin.
By the way - I just bought the Motif XS6. Freakin' AWESOME. Stunning. Weird. And wonderful!
cheers,
RS
Gradebook is a NIGHTMARE. I mistyped one of the calcs (23 instead 32 percent) and didn't catch it until after midterm, and when I went to reset it, it blew the grades to pieces. It was for a HUGE class (150 students) and so I had to re-grade and personally re-calc 150 grades (midterm, paper, final exam). I used Excel to help, but I HATE EXCEL and it wasn't fun having to deal with something that should not have been hard to re-finagle easily. Total nightmare.
I am hoping this ruling will lead to better software for me. As it is, avoid BB like the plague...
RS
RS
RS
RS
RS
Scooby! Tell me what's going on here! Like, I don't get it!
Rit's ralled FUD Raggie! FUD yeah!!! Rrrreeeeeeheeehehehee!!!
RS
RS
RS
Hydrogen is more of a battery than a fuel and it is ALWAYS by DEFINITION going to have negative ER/EI. Why? Because the energy required to pull hydrogen out of water or methane or petroleum is going to be greater than the energy you get from burning the hydrogen. What the "hydrogen economy" seeks to do is to protect the sunken cost of the suburbs, and the sunken costs of the automotive infrastructure, both of which are joined at the hip and are completely unsustainable. It's a fools errand and will fail. There is also the not inconsiderable energy that goes into making the bucky balls, etc.
Face it: gigs up. Game over. Prepare to slowly powerdown.
RS
Ummm, world created in 6 days, loaves into fish, the existence of a "God" in the first place? Hello??? To BE a minister of any variety requires you to believe a load of errant nonsense.
RS
Belief in the veracity of this text is considered required, and disagreement is often punished. With contemporary western christian religions, you might lose some friends or get kicked out of a social group. Other religions aren't as gentle about apostates (viz. Islam, where it is a capital offence).
What Religion provides in exchange for the fealty of the adherent is not to be underestimated:
1. A universal belief system that doesn't change, and thusly requiring no critical thinking skills.
2. Said system provides meaning in a life where one is thrown at birth into a universe that seems to have none at all.
3. Most Importantly: it provides a social network for the care and upbringing of children.
4. Almost as importantly: it provides ancillary networks for the functioning of social services that fall outside the reach of government systems.
Science does nothing of the sort. Science gives us a mysterious universe where truth is only true until proven otherwise. Science separates the form of collective human existence (DNA, proteins, etc.) from the content of personal human existence (why am I here?). Science doesn't run daycare systems open to the public. Science doesn't run soup kitchens for the hungry, or set up bunks in the basement for the homeless, etc. From every direction, Science, as a social object, is distinctly different and uncompetitive with Religion.
This just touches on the complexity involved. "Selling" science to the "Masses" assumes the masses are predisposed to accept the Science "World". Clearly, in many nations, they are not, and one can't really blame them. In the USA when I needed daycare for my daughter, the public schools were a: filled and b: of very low quality. So we sent her to a daycare run by a Lebanese Christian church. We weren't Christian, and they were very "light" in their religious angles, and the schooling was very good. When my Brother in Law's roof blew off, people from "Church" helped him. I've been told that Hamas runs health clinics in Gaza. There's a "Catholic Relief Fund" but I've never heard of a "Physicist's Poverty Program" or a "Biology Homeless Solution".
As a consequence, it's not much of a stretch for the average human being to blow off the whole "critical thinking" deal and step in line with some mythology. It's not going to matter how you tart Science up. It's not lipstick on a pig, it's more like lipstick on "the empty void of provisional truth and the relentless churn of Testability, Repeatability and Occam's Razor - and falsifiability if you can afford it."
As a former science worker, I deplore the scientific illiteracy of the public, but especially the American Public who are so often willfully ignorant of science and critical thinking. Other countries vary - some are in the thrall of theocratic regimes others not. But making Science "more appealing" or "more interesting" is going to take a shift in social preferences and mores from the public, and a much deeper commitment to issues of compassion, social justice, and sociality as a whole on the part of Science. This could mean things like NOT WORKING FOR PEOPLE WHO BUILT ATOMIC WEAPONS AND OTHER INSTRUMENTS OF DEATH, just as much as it is incumbent for Religion to stop with the "smiting" and "vanquishing" of heathens and apostates. Combine all THAT with Science in a short tight skirt, and you might actually get somewhere. Otherwise, you're fucked and wasting your time.
nuff said.
RS
RS
RS
BWAHAHAAAA!!!!
you're an idiot. What you just described is how the British were BRILLIANT. Whether they faced the Nazis down fro mthe git go or not, the Wehrmacht had the tactical advantage: Blitzkrieg. The British had to get kicked out of France - there was no way they could have beaten the Germans at that point. Then the Germans bombed the crap out of them, and, at first, the Germans had the better planes and more experienced troops. So, the British got hammered. After the war, the place was a mess, so the British got the Americans to lay out all this money to fight the Soviets, while they rebuilt their country. That wasn't STUPID, that was SMART. and if you can't see how smart that is, then you're one of the knuckledragging retards I'm talking about....
RS
2. Will you introduce or back a bill to immediately restore habeus corpus? If not, WHY?
3. Will you seek to imprison or support the imprisonment of the Bush Junta for their obvious war crimes? If not, WHY NOT?
4. Will you introduce or back a national adoption of the International Depletion Protocol, as developed by Prof. Heinberg of California? If not, WHY NOT?
5. Will you introduce a bill or support a bill that bans practices such as extreme rendition and waterboarding? If not, WHY NOT?
6. Will you support the prosecution of those responsible for the practice of extreme rendition and waterboarding? If not, WHY NOT?
7. Will you introduce or support a bill that will close American military bases outside the USA? If not, WHY NOT?
8. Do you repudiate american imperialism? If not, why not?
9. Will you introduce or support a bill that reinstitutes a graduated income tax that will actually force the rich to pay a larger percentage of their wealth than the working middle class? If not, WHY NOT?
10. Will you introduce or support a bill that reduces military expenditure by at least 50% over the next 4 years? If not, WHY NOT?
RS
Nope. nuh uh. Not gonna happen. Why?
The second largest source of CO2 after automobile manufacture is cement. you use it to make concrete. We need to curtail cement manufacture.
So, no asphalt, no cement, so no concrete. what's left?
What some posters described: slave labour making roads of stone. You're not goign to run a high intensity trucking based infrastructure on cobblestone roads. The asphalt will get pot holes. They won't get fixed. The road will get torn up. The remaining asphalt will be ground up and mixed with dirt to make a hardened (but not hard) surface suitable for lightweight low speed vehicles and bicycles. Eventually, those will give way to dirt roads, just like we've had for the past unpteen thousand years.
Industrial society was an anomaly. It's fun being alive now, but it's anomalous.
RS