Have you ever met a schizophrenic? Ever visited a mental institution?
Your ignorance is resoundingly displayed by your invocation of agoraphobia. Bringing up phobias in a discussion about schizophrenia is like sharing your thoughts on bandaids with a guy who's just had an arm ripped off.
The mind is a complex thing. The treatment of it continues to evolve. Modern treatment is not perfect, but to imply that it is unnecessary, as you have just done, is callous and irresponsible.
You're absolutely right. A program can be beautiful, and its creators can take pride in it. This is the same pride a bricklayer might take in a well-built wall. That doesn't mean it's a creative endeavor.
I think it's hilarious that the article includes an edited version of Stephenson's comments comparing programming the writing. He was led into that question by the interviewer and he heavily qualified his answer, to the point where it basically boiled down to "both involve typing". Yet we Slashdotters are ready to jump all over it -- "OMG Neal and I are exactly the same we'll be best friends 4EVER!!!"
Stephenson's awesome: an entertaining writer and a geek to boot. Let's not forget which one comes first.
Practically every engineer I knew coming out of college thought they'd be making six figures. Hah. The CS majors had the worst luck.
I've been working as a programmer for two years now, have become the lead developer at an admittedly small company, and am the consensus most proficient and best-paid programmer among my immediate peers. I make 40k.
Programming is now a commodity. Sorry to say it, but if you chose your major based on the money you might make rather than interest in the topic, you chose poorly. With that said, if you demonstrate skill and amass some appreciative contacts you can make a great hourly rate doing consulting in the evenings.
but don't discount the possibility of in utero animal studies. Odds are the chemical factors responsible for cell differentiation are similar across mammals.
I should also point out that adding more cells may or may not help. We don't understand how thoughts translate to neuronal activity beyond extremely crude 1-1 mapping of sense-space to nuclei. Adding cells may increase visual STM capacity, or it may not -- just as brain size seems to correlate roughly with intelligence*, but is far from the only deciding factor.
There are a lot of studies out there implying that the brain is hardwired to have seven or so short term memory registers, as defined in various ways. This study seems to measure what I'd call the semantic richness that these registers are capable of; not their number. Increasing their quantity would likely take something more involved than even stem cell therapy -- just like how stem cells may someday enable you to regrow an arm, versus adding a third one.
* this was considered a myth for a while, but more recent studies that measure actual brain weight instead of using skull circumference seem to bear out the generalization
Just go out on the town and keep an eye out for drunk, oily-looking guys wearing thinkgeek gear trying to use techspeak to pick up girls. The last one I ran into tried to pick up my girlfriend with the line "this may shock you, but I.... am a hacker" -- no joking. I introduced myself and eventually he explained to me at great length (and in greatly slurred speech) how he could take down the internet if he wanted. You just have to send fragmented packets to "the root server", apparently. Wonder why no one thought of that before, huh?
Pay these guys no mind. They don't understand the failsafes involved that take care of their kind quite handily. They see an exploit that works on desktops and assume it can be applied to spy satellites. My guess is he's got a few dozen zombie machines and thinks he can SYN flood some telecom satellite with an IP from a chinese block.
I love the Simpsons as much as anybody, but it's time to put the show to rest. Lame writing has been the main culprit -- their current crop of writers seems to have no sense of history of the show, reusing gags from the early seasons and stealing cheap gags that have been previously parodied on the Simpsons precisely for their lameness.
I blame the writers primarily, but the voice actors have been phoning it in, too. I can't say I blame them -- it must be hard to infuse wit into insipid material. But the fact is their best work is behind them. Put the rest of the golden age seasons out on DVD, wrap up the show and get these people working on something fresh and creative.
let's not overreact here. Obviously there will always be a need for low-level coding. But we're already almost at a point where you can program without "programming" -- ever use visual studio.net? You can accomplish a lot of tasks without writing any code.
Is this a good thing? From your and my perspective, maybe not. We know it's better to have the flexibility to control exactly how things will run. But for less technical people, a lot of work could be accomplished using purely visual programming tools.
Demonizing anything Bill says is fun and all, but frankly I think he has a point on this one.
the original atari 2600 was constructed using off-the-shelf parts. I imagine they put one on a chip, is all.
processing power to emulate is quickly becoming negligible. obviously newer systems will require more power, but you can comfortably run everything through PS1 on an XBox using emulators that are out there. Visit xbox-scene.com for more information.
In fact, I can play the Gameboy Advance version of Super Mario Brothers 3 on my xbox -- that's two layers of emulation!
(Ok, 2 I think -- I don't know exactly how nintendo implemented their gba cartridge)
TiVo is in serious trouble. Cheaper alternatives are becoming widely available. Allegiance to TiVo comes from the user experience -- it's hard to convince someone who hasn't used the product that it's worth the money, versus a $5/month extra on their cable bill for a lousy scientific atlanta PVR.
Implementing more industry friendly features like stopping commercial skipping and inserting these on-demand commercials may help them form some more strategic partnerships with business -- important, given the likely replacement of DirecTiVo with a cheaper vendor's tech. But it won't do anything to improve the user experience -- which at this point, is basically all that TiVo's got going for it.
How many of those things are currently capped by your bandwidth? Yes, there is a difference in how much evil some types of malware can do between broadband (as it exists now) and dialup. However, are you aware of anyone getting more spam, installing worse trojans, or suffering from more "information overload" in the wake of, say, comcast's recent doubling of their downstream residential bandwidth?
No.
People already have more bandwidth than they can fully utilize on an individual basis. Faster downloads aren't going to just jam more into our sensory pipes -- they're already full.
Disposable pop genres can be elevated to art forms -- having just finished reading Alan Moore's Watchmen, I feel particularly convinced of this at the moment. But I would suggest that videogames are not particularly close to becoming meaningful art. In time, I think they will -- but we're not there yet.
Wires that bend! Great job on the breakthrough, guys.
Seriously though, this sounds fine for integrating electronics into fabrics, but the "artificial nerve" idea conjures images on Christopher Reeve leaping up and tap dancing. This invention doesn't sound like it has any therapeutic uses that a normal wire doesn't. Perhaps users of vagus nerve stimulators or other devices requiring in vivo wiring could be a little more physically vigorous without worrying about things pulling or breaking... but I have my doubts about even that.
Can you imagine what would happen when the first space advertisement is launched?
I can't, but whatever it is, it would immediately need to be put next to the entry for "backlash" in the dictionary. You can bet the thing would be torn down asap. But I suspect that such an event couldn't help but spur a conversation on the extent to which advertising saturates our society -- it might even lead to the tide of logos receding, just a bit (and for just a little while).
I'm currently suffering through maintaining a 2000 install for my mom. All she uses is MS Word and the web (primarily for a web-based email client). I wonder whether knoppix configured to automount the HD for storage would be sufficient?
as others have said: the answer is a long, long way away.
simplest case scenario -- you need to trace every axon, find every dendrite it interfaces with, and measure the strength of the synapse, and take down the type of neurotransmitter(s) and receptor(s) used -- there are generally several configurations of receptor for each neurotransmitter, and there are at least a dozen identified neurotransmitters.
As you mentioned, measuring synaptic strength will modify the synapse. And of course there's currently no way to do this in vivo with much precision for even one synapse -- you certainly can't do it for very many synapses. Passive sensing technologies can detect relative activity down to a precision of several hundred (thousand? I'm not up to date) neurons, but that's about it.
Given that there are 100 billion neurons in the brain, it might take a while for this to become feasible. Maybe someday we'll be able to strip off the skull and use ultra-precise PET to start recording whole brains, but I doubt it'll be in your or my lifetime.
Theobromine occurs in cocoa products, primarily. It's chemically similar to caffeine but is generally considered to produce a "mellower" feeling. It does occur in tea, but in miniscule amounts. Theophylline does occur in tea at larger amounts -- it's also related to caffeine, but again, produces fewer jitters. Its main claim to fame is being used for treatment of asthma. While it does show up in tea, it does so in tiny amounts -- 1 mg vs 50 mg of caffeine (source).
The "tea is different!" confusion generally comes up because caffeine can also be called theine -- it's the same chemical, though. Tea's got a lot of healthy stuff in it, but its stimulant properties work exactly the same way as coffee's -- via caffeine. The only significant difference is the average dosage.
uh, NO. having spent half a year there, the little monsters were swarming the bus system by 1pm every day. Not to mention the ludicrous amounts of vacation time they get. They do have to get up pretty early, though.
how about less inflammatory story text?
on
Gates on Spam
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· Score: 1
While saying this requires users to "pay to send emails" may be technically accurate, the practical cost to most users will be zero since they're not using those cycles anyway (and the consumed wattage will be virtually nonexistent). Adding a computational burden to email may not be a good idea under MS's implementation -- fine -- but don't lead people to think it's going to take money out of their pockets to send email.
not a problem
on
Gates on Spam
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· Score: 2, Insightful
presumably postage-free mail could still be sent, to allow for backward compatibility. You'd just have to put that sender on your "allowed" list.
I do agree that this could be potentially troublesome for companies like amazon that send out large quantities of confirmation emails. But I imagine those would still be received and stored somewhere -- the user would just have to go poke around for emails they were expecting but hadn't specifically authorized.
I've used an SA8000 at a friend's house a fair amount. I was not impressed. The delay in changing channels is significant. This is a pet peeve for me in general -- I won't be getting direcTV anytime soon for the same reason.
I haven't used a tivo so I can't compare, but at home I've got a mythtv box, and I think it does a considerably better job than the SA.
This is very unlikely. The extreme thermal cycles that the rovers are subject to on a daily basis are the largest source of stress. The repairs necessary to renovate a rover would be very involved indeed.
Also, keep in mind that robotic interfaces are much harder to design than in the movies. The current rovers' Rock Abrasion Tool is a fantastic piece of equipment that likely cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop. A human arm equipped with a hammer, chisel and file could do the same thing faster and for less than $10.
Designing a robotic tool to repair another rover? It practically boggles the mind...
Although IT jobs are currently undergoing what manufacturing went through in the 1990s, many more jobs will be created in the US as a result of the lower costs associated with outsourcing IT work. The jobs created at home will be higher paid too.
They really use the American manufacturing industry to support their claims? Last I checked steel was reeling, textiles were dead, auto manufacturing had been reduced to a self-supporting welfare state and chip fab was happening in Asia.
You're right, some things get cheaper with truly open markets. So far those things seem to mostly be plastic trinkets at WalMart. The cost of education continues to outpace inflation, healthcare costs are spiralling out of control and the housing and real estate markets are heavily overvalued, at least in my part of the country. Bargain-basement cars may be marginally cheaper, and of course electronics always get less expensive, but those are the only two durable goods I can think of that have become significantly less expensive.
...but only because I can play emulated nintendo games on it. NES and SNES games run flawlessly -- N64 is mostly ok, too. Plus there's MAME, NeoGeo, ports of Doom and Quake1&2, etc etc...
Seriously, the XBox is not a great platform for games. KOTOR was fun, but I'm not a huge RPG fanatic. Halo -- well, it's nice to see FPS's catching on, and I dug the soundtrack, but its deathmatch sucks pretty hard if you've played Q3A... or hell, even doom2. The other titles are mostly non-exclusive -- or just bad. Nintendo games are lighthearted, frequently innovative (admittedly, not in theme -- in gameplay) and ALWAYS fun.
But stick a chip in that XBox, open up the world of emulation, and you have perhaps the best console *ever*. I'm considering buying a spare just so that I can count on having a solid emulation-capable console for the foreseeable future (since I imagine they'll lock the console down with XB2).
Slashdot Mirror
Your ignorance is resoundingly displayed by your invocation of agoraphobia. Bringing up phobias in a discussion about schizophrenia is like sharing your thoughts on bandaids with a guy who's just had an arm ripped off.
The mind is a complex thing. The treatment of it continues to evolve. Modern treatment is not perfect, but to imply that it is unnecessary, as you have just done, is callous and irresponsible.
I think it's hilarious that the article includes an edited version of Stephenson's comments comparing programming the writing. He was led into that question by the interviewer and he heavily qualified his answer, to the point where it basically boiled down to "both involve typing". Yet we Slashdotters are ready to jump all over it -- "OMG Neal and I are exactly the same we'll be best friends 4EVER!!!"
Stephenson's awesome: an entertaining writer and a geek to boot. Let's not forget which one comes first.
I've been working as a programmer for two years now, have become the lead developer at an admittedly small company, and am the consensus most proficient and best-paid programmer among my immediate peers. I make 40k.
Programming is now a commodity. Sorry to say it, but if you chose your major based on the money you might make rather than interest in the topic, you chose poorly. With that said, if you demonstrate skill and amass some appreciative contacts you can make a great hourly rate doing consulting in the evenings.
I should also point out that adding more cells may or may not help. We don't understand how thoughts translate to neuronal activity beyond extremely crude 1-1 mapping of sense-space to nuclei. Adding cells may increase visual STM capacity, or it may not -- just as brain size seems to correlate roughly with intelligence*, but is far from the only deciding factor.
There are a lot of studies out there implying that the brain is hardwired to have seven or so short term memory registers, as defined in various ways. This study seems to measure what I'd call the semantic richness that these registers are capable of; not their number. Increasing their quantity would likely take something more involved than even stem cell therapy -- just like how stem cells may someday enable you to regrow an arm, versus adding a third one.
* this was considered a myth for a while, but more recent studies that measure actual brain weight instead of using skull circumference seem to bear out the generalization
Pay these guys no mind. They don't understand the failsafes involved that take care of their kind quite handily. They see an exploit that works on desktops and assume it can be applied to spy satellites. My guess is he's got a few dozen zombie machines and thinks he can SYN flood some telecom satellite with an IP from a chinese block.
These people are idiots. Don't encourage them.
I blame the writers primarily, but the voice actors have been phoning it in, too. I can't say I blame them -- it must be hard to infuse wit into insipid material. But the fact is their best work is behind them. Put the rest of the golden age seasons out on DVD, wrap up the show and get these people working on something fresh and creative.
Is this a good thing? From your and my perspective, maybe not. We know it's better to have the flexibility to control exactly how things will run. But for less technical people, a lot of work could be accomplished using purely visual programming tools.
Demonizing anything Bill says is fun and all, but frankly I think he has a point on this one.
the original atari 2600 was constructed using off-the-shelf parts. I imagine they put one on a chip, is all.
processing power to emulate is quickly becoming negligible. obviously newer systems will require more power, but you can comfortably run everything through PS1 on an XBox using emulators that are out there. Visit xbox-scene.com for more information.
In fact, I can play the Gameboy Advance version of Super Mario Brothers 3 on my xbox -- that's two layers of emulation!
(Ok, 2 I think -- I don't know exactly how nintendo implemented their gba cartridge)
Implementing more industry friendly features like stopping commercial skipping and inserting these on-demand commercials may help them form some more strategic partnerships with business -- important, given the likely replacement of DirecTiVo with a cheaper vendor's tech. But it won't do anything to improve the user experience -- which at this point, is basically all that TiVo's got going for it.
No.
People already have more bandwidth than they can fully utilize on an individual basis. Faster downloads aren't going to just jam more into our sensory pipes -- they're already full.
Disposable pop genres can be elevated to art forms -- having just finished reading Alan Moore's Watchmen, I feel particularly convinced of this at the moment. But I would suggest that videogames are not particularly close to becoming meaningful art. In time, I think they will -- but we're not there yet.
Seriously though, this sounds fine for integrating electronics into fabrics, but the "artificial nerve" idea conjures images on Christopher Reeve leaping up and tap dancing. This invention doesn't sound like it has any therapeutic uses that a normal wire doesn't. Perhaps users of vagus nerve stimulators or other devices requiring in vivo wiring could be a little more physically vigorous without worrying about things pulling or breaking... but I have my doubts about even that.
I can't, but whatever it is, it would immediately need to be put next to the entry for "backlash" in the dictionary. You can bet the thing would be torn down asap. But I suspect that such an event couldn't help but spur a conversation on the extent to which advertising saturates our society -- it might even lead to the tide of logos receding, just a bit (and for just a little while).
I'm currently suffering through maintaining a 2000 install for my mom. All she uses is MS Word and the web (primarily for a web-based email client). I wonder whether knoppix configured to automount the HD for storage would be sufficient?
simplest case scenario -- you need to trace every axon, find every dendrite it interfaces with, and measure the strength of the synapse, and take down the type of neurotransmitter(s) and receptor(s) used -- there are generally several configurations of receptor for each neurotransmitter, and there are at least a dozen identified neurotransmitters.
As you mentioned, measuring synaptic strength will modify the synapse. And of course there's currently no way to do this in vivo with much precision for even one synapse -- you certainly can't do it for very many synapses. Passive sensing technologies can detect relative activity down to a precision of several hundred (thousand? I'm not up to date) neurons, but that's about it.
Given that there are 100 billion neurons in the brain, it might take a while for this to become feasible. Maybe someday we'll be able to strip off the skull and use ultra-precise PET to start recording whole brains, but I doubt it'll be in your or my lifetime.
The "tea is different!" confusion generally comes up because caffeine can also be called theine -- it's the same chemical, though. Tea's got a lot of healthy stuff in it, but its stimulant properties work exactly the same way as coffee's -- via caffeine. The only significant difference is the average dosage.
uh, NO. having spent half a year there, the little monsters were swarming the bus system by 1pm every day. Not to mention the ludicrous amounts of vacation time they get. They do have to get up pretty early, though.
While saying this requires users to "pay to send emails" may be technically accurate, the practical cost to most users will be zero since they're not using those cycles anyway (and the consumed wattage will be virtually nonexistent). Adding a computational burden to email may not be a good idea under MS's implementation -- fine -- but don't lead people to think it's going to take money out of their pockets to send email.
I do agree that this could be potentially troublesome for companies like amazon that send out large quantities of confirmation emails. But I imagine those would still be received and stored somewhere -- the user would just have to go poke around for emails they were expecting but hadn't specifically authorized.
I haven't used a tivo so I can't compare, but at home I've got a mythtv box, and I think it does a considerably better job than the SA.
Also, keep in mind that robotic interfaces are much harder to design than in the movies. The current rovers' Rock Abrasion Tool is a fantastic piece of equipment that likely cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop. A human arm equipped with a hammer, chisel and file could do the same thing faster and for less than $10.
Designing a robotic tool to repair another rover? It practically boggles the mind...
get a grip, guys
They really use the American manufacturing industry to support their claims? Last I checked steel was reeling, textiles were dead, auto manufacturing had been reduced to a self-supporting welfare state and chip fab was happening in Asia.
You're right, some things get cheaper with truly open markets. So far those things seem to mostly be plastic trinkets at WalMart. The cost of education continues to outpace inflation, healthcare costs are spiralling out of control and the housing and real estate markets are heavily overvalued, at least in my part of the country. Bargain-basement cars may be marginally cheaper, and of course electronics always get less expensive, but those are the only two durable goods I can think of that have become significantly less expensive.
are you really claiming a definitive cause for the Great Depression? If so, I know a few economists who'd like to talk to you...
Seriously, the XBox is not a great platform for games. KOTOR was fun, but I'm not a huge RPG fanatic. Halo -- well, it's nice to see FPS's catching on, and I dug the soundtrack, but its deathmatch sucks pretty hard if you've played Q3A... or hell, even doom2. The other titles are mostly non-exclusive -- or just bad. Nintendo games are lighthearted, frequently innovative (admittedly, not in theme -- in gameplay) and ALWAYS fun.
But stick a chip in that XBox, open up the world of emulation, and you have perhaps the best console *ever*. I'm considering buying a spare just so that I can count on having a solid emulation-capable console for the foreseeable future (since I imagine they'll lock the console down with XB2).