> 1a. Nobody has a choice where they work- they work where they can because labor is in surplus.
I had plenty of choices of where to work. Granted, not as many as I would have in the dot-com days, but I was by no means beholden to any particular place.
> 1b. No employer is moral- their only god is money and their only rule of morality is profit.
Wow, you must have had some pretty crappy jobs to make such a generalization. It certainly hasn't been the case for me.
> 2. According to the Department of Labor- the average CEO now makes 417 times minimum wage.
People who are harder to replace tend to get higher salaries. What's your point?
> 3. Not even the Japanese have noticed yet that the guy earning the most money is the most efficient person to cut- but I hope the stockholders here do soon.
The salary a typical CEO makes it only a small fraction of the total amount a company makes. It's generally well worth it, considering how much a good CEO affects a company's performance.
Precisely. Some sort of market based on CPU processing is a must-have for this sort of technology to take off. If there's something I need to compute and my cellphone/PDA/computer can't do it on its own (or it would consume too much electricity), it'd be great if I could expend some "credits" to get the CPU power I need to get it done. Similarly, if my desktop has a wireless connection and isn't doing anything else, I could put it to work to earn credits.
Regardless of what chair I'm using, I've noticed that I tend to subconsciously curl up into a fetal position whenever my mind is focused on something. This probably can't be good for my back. Does anyone else have this problem, or know of an effective way to stop it?
I remember I'd sometimes end up doing a "apt-get remove mozilla" in order to get more work done. Then I'd find myself using lynx to procrastinate, so I'd have to "apt-get remove lynx". Then I started ssh'ing into the University servers and running mozilla off those machines...
Sigh.
Incidentally, I also gave up Slashdot for Lent last year. I actually managed to hold out for a few weeks, but eventually my will collapsed.
> It is like the "Free Speech Zones" that Bush erects whenever he speaks somewhere. The reasoning? Protesters can cause problems, and we want to avoid those security and safety concerns.
Not to nit-pick, but Kerry also uses those Free Speech Zones. It's funny how many people objected to these things when Bush had them, but then turn around to defend these abominations when they find out Kerry has them as well.
This reminds me of a psych seminar I attended earlier this year, which I think also concerned the Piraha tribe. The working hypothesis, if I recall correctly, is that there are actually two different systems of innate counting. The first system is discrete/digital, but can only count up to very small numbers. The second system is fuzzier/analogue, but can distinguish between bigger numbers like 200 and 300, controlling for potential confounding factors by doing things like varying the size of objects. Neither of these systems are by themselves able to distinguish between numbers like 8 and 9, which is generally not too harmful in the context of evolution.
The idea is that language (or perhaps modification of brain structures related to language) is needed to tie these two systems together. You and I learned these sorts of mechanisms growing up, but members of the Piraha tribe didn't.
I remember this girl who was doing her English senior thesis on comparing writing styles of programmers to those of non-programmers. I'm not sure what sort of results she got, though.
Does anybody remember the Ecco the Dolphin TV advertisement, from the early 90s? I think it featured a sea captain (sort of like Jacques Cousteau) reminiscing about Ecco. For whatever reason, it was one of the most memorable TV ads I'd ever seen.
Anyone remember details about it? I was trying to write it up for the wikipedia node on Ecco, but couldn't recall anything solid.
I was under the impression that the image data being transferred was compressed losslessly; TIFFs are available on the NASA site. I've skimmed through a number of the images, and I have to say that they look nothing like images compression artifacts I've ever seen.
AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky mentions a number of different ways to reach a singularity:
* Computer software endowed with heuristic algorithms * Artificial entities generated by evolution within computer systems * Integration of the human nervous system and computer hardware * Blending of humans and computers with user interfaces * Dynamically organizing computer networks
Most of the comments so far have concerned the first method, which basically consists of programming a super-smart AI. However, I think that the third and fourth items listed, dealing with the way humans augment their information-processing capabilities, will have the biggest near-term results.
> I appreciate what you're saying, but I can't get past the fact that we haven't had any real breakthroughs since the birth of the Atomic and Computer ages 40-50 years ago. Great stuff like the Internet is just the deployment of stuff that was invented more than 30 years ago.
Breakthroughs?
We have monkeys which can use a neural interface to control a robotic arm. Some of us (myself included) have PDAs in our pockets which can quickly access data from a world-wide information network. We have a complete transcript of the human genome, and scientists all over the world are working on turning that data into useful knowledge and applications. Private companies are on the verge of offerring paid rides into space for thousands of dollars, which will undoubtedly soon be followed by airline-like suborbital flights between continents. As we speak, we have robots crawling around on an alien world.
In the Chequers, Doctorow mentions the original title for one of the novels he's working on, a story about a spam filter that becomes artificially intelligent and tries to eat the universe. "I was thinking of calling it/usr/bin/god."
"That's great!" Stross remarks.
Well, great for those who know that "/usr/bin" is the repository for Unix programs and that "god" in this case would be the name of the program, but a tad abstract for the rest of us. This tendency can make for difficult reading--one early reader of a Stross story complained that to understand it, people would have to overdose for a month on Slashdot (a blog that calls itself "News for Nerds").
If I recall correctly, Armadillo Aerospace has only spent about $1.5 million on their X-Prize craft. The only group which has spent more than $10 million is Scaled Composites.
Slashdot Mirror
> 1a. Nobody has a choice where they work- they work where they can because labor is in surplus.
I had plenty of choices of where to work. Granted, not as many as I would have in the dot-com days, but I was by no means beholden to any particular place.
> 1b. No employer is moral- their only god is money and their only rule of morality is profit.
Wow, you must have had some pretty crappy jobs to make such a generalization. It certainly hasn't been the case for me.
> 2. According to the Department of Labor- the average CEO now makes 417 times minimum wage.
People who are harder to replace tend to get higher salaries. What's your point?
> 3. Not even the Japanese have noticed yet that the guy earning the most money is the most efficient person to cut- but I hope the stockholders here do soon.
The salary a typical CEO makes it only a small fraction of the total amount a company makes. It's generally well worth it, considering how much a good CEO affects a company's performance.
Precisely. Some sort of market based on CPU processing is a must-have for this sort of technology to take off. If there's something I need to compute and my cellphone/PDA/computer can't do it on its own (or it would consume too much electricity), it'd be great if I could expend some "credits" to get the CPU power I need to get it done. Similarly, if my desktop has a wireless connection and isn't doing anything else, I could put it to work to earn credits.
Regardless of what chair I'm using, I've noticed that I tend to subconsciously curl up into a fetal position whenever my mind is focused on something. This probably can't be good for my back. Does anyone else have this problem, or know of an effective way to stop it?
I remember I'd sometimes end up doing a "apt-get remove mozilla" in order to get more work done. Then I'd find myself using lynx to procrastinate, so I'd have to "apt-get remove lynx". Then I started ssh'ing into the University servers and running mozilla off those machines...
Sigh.
Incidentally, I also gave up Slashdot for Lent last year. I actually managed to hold out for a few weeks, but eventually my will collapsed.
> It is like the "Free Speech Zones" that Bush erects whenever he speaks somewhere. The reasoning? Protesters can cause problems, and we want to avoid those security and safety concerns.
Not to nit-pick, but Kerry also uses those Free Speech Zones. It's funny how many people objected to these things when Bush had them, but then turn around to defend these abominations when they find out Kerry has them as well.
As some of you already know, recently an online casino, GoldenPalace.com, put up money to fund the da Vinci project's X-Prize attempt. The project is now known as "The Golden Palace.Com Space Program". It seems that a couple days ago, GoldenPalace.com had some more publicity, with a man in a tutu, with "Golden Palace.com" written across his chest, jumping into the pool during an Olympic diving final.
BBC article link.
It would be nice if instead of artists hosting the actual mp3s on their sites, they had BitTorrent seeds, and the iRate client supported it.
According to the feature requests on SourceForge, it looks like I'm not the only one to think this.
This reminds me of a psych seminar I attended earlier this year, which I think also concerned the Piraha tribe. The working hypothesis, if I recall correctly, is that there are actually two different systems of innate counting. The first system is discrete/digital, but can only count up to very small numbers. The second system is fuzzier/analogue, but can distinguish between bigger numbers like 200 and 300, controlling for potential confounding factors by doing things like varying the size of objects. Neither of these systems are by themselves able to distinguish between numbers like 8 and 9, which is generally not too harmful in the context of evolution.
The idea is that language (or perhaps modification of brain structures related to language) is needed to tie these two systems together. You and I learned these sorts of mechanisms growing up, but members of the Piraha tribe didn't.
I remember this girl who was doing her English senior thesis on comparing writing styles of programmers to those of non-programmers. I'm not sure what sort of results she got, though.
Hmm... excuse to track her down...
Dungeons and Dragons... SATAN'S GAME!!
Did he get 1000 XP?
Does anybody remember the Ecco the Dolphin TV advertisement, from the early 90s? I think it featured a sea captain (sort of like Jacques Cousteau) reminiscing about Ecco. For whatever reason, it was one of the most memorable TV ads I'd ever seen.
Anyone remember details about it? I was trying to write it up for the wikipedia node on Ecco, but couldn't recall anything solid.
The Wikipedia node has some decent info.
Freaky. After Super Mario Bros., that was probably the first video game my parents ever bought for me.
I was under the impression that the image data being transferred was compressed losslessly; TIFFs are available on the NASA site. I've skimmed through a number of the images, and I have to say that they look nothing like images compression artifacts I've ever seen.
It should be noted though, that the Falcon V is going to be man-rated, though they haven't announced any actual capsule plans.
> the interesting question to me is whether that psychology is innate, or manufactured; and whether it's obsolete, and if so, if it can be changed.
IMHO, it's probably innate, just like in all the other animals.
Wikipedia sez: A weblog, or simply a blog, is a website which contains periodic, reverse chronologically ordered posts on a common webpage.
I'd say slashdot fits that definition.
Very useful, if only for the hunter-seeker algorithm.
short term solution: nuclear power (when the oil runs out, people will get rid of their irrational fear of anything with the word "nuclear")
medium term: solar power satellites
long term: Dyson spheres
Like Go?
AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky mentions a number of different ways to reach a singularity:
* Computer software endowed with heuristic algorithms
* Artificial entities generated by evolution within computer systems
* Integration of the human nervous system and computer hardware
* Blending of humans and computers with user interfaces
* Dynamically organizing computer networks
Most of the comments so far have concerned the first method, which basically consists of programming a super-smart AI. However, I think that the third and fourth items listed, dealing with the way humans augment their information-processing capabilities, will have the biggest near-term results.
> I appreciate what you're saying, but I can't get past the fact that we haven't had any real breakthroughs since the birth of the Atomic and
Computer ages 40-50 years ago. Great stuff like the Internet is just the deployment of stuff that was invented more than 30 years ago.
Breakthroughs?
We have monkeys which can use a neural interface to control a robotic arm. Some of us (myself included) have PDAs in our pockets which can quickly access data from a world-wide information network. We have a complete transcript of the human genome, and scientists all over the world are working on turning that data into useful knowledge and applications. Private companies are on the verge of offerring paid rides into space for thousands of dollars, which will undoubtedly soon be followed by airline-like suborbital flights between continents. As we speak, we have robots crawling around on an alien world.
I'd go on, but I'm sure you get the idea.
From the Popular Science article:
/usr/bin/god."
In the Chequers, Doctorow mentions the original title for one of the novels he's working on, a story about a spam filter that becomes artificially intelligent and tries to eat the universe. "I was thinking of calling it
"That's great!" Stross remarks.
Well, great for those who know that "/usr/bin" is the repository for Unix programs and that "god" in this case would be the name of the program, but a tad abstract for the rest of us. This tendency can make for difficult reading--one early reader of a Stross story complained that to understand it, people would have to overdose for a month on Slashdot (a blog that calls itself "News for Nerds").
If I recall correctly, Armadillo Aerospace has only spent about $1.5 million on their X-Prize craft. The only group which has spent more than $10 million is Scaled Composites.