Wouldn't it be nice if Nine Inch Nails released their webpages in an open format? I am all for creative freedom and letting the artist express his vision in any way he sees fit, but making the blog using a bunch of gifs with intentionally garbled text looks pretty over the top.
The blind fans of NIN will certainly not appreciate empty ALT tags...
I don't know why MR is getting the "credit" for this.
It's simple PR. They had a site running before the film was released where they explained how they had such a cool team of futurists. And they issued a press release. Of course, the gadget-whores at Wired and other places could not pass the opportunity to drool. Since the journalists rarely do enough research, (and don't care) they never mentioned earlier prototypes/ideas.
and no one ever seems to have an offline backup, one copy is all there is. Well, you'd be surprised at how realistic this actually is.:)
Sucks to be you, but freedom of speech (while not the absolute) is more important than your personal peace of mind.
We can't allow people like yourself to control what their ex-girlfriends post, because then we would have to allow people who abuse their spouses to control what information said spouses can release to the public.
If you think that your x-gf damaged your reputation (and if you can't solve it with her peacefully), sue her. But please don't try to argue that we should all give up our freedom of speech so that you can silence your x-gf.
I think we need to look further. If most people do not particularly care about the topic, don't have their own opinion and will answer differently depending on how the question is phrased, why do we care about their opinions at all?
Why do we care what 72% of people say if 71% of them are incompetent morons? Public opinion is worthless on issues where the majority doesn't actually have one.
I can speak from experience - this is how submissions are accepted. I twisted the story a bit in Jakob Nielsen Defends "1-Click" Patents. In fact, the quote is real, but the title contained my own interpretation. As robolemon pointed out, "Nielsen never mentions one-click patents" (real quote, not made up or distorted).
But nevertheless, that was how I wrote the submission and, of course, it was accepted. Kids, it's journalism. You can twist the truth in any way you want, you just need some excuse later. If you don't flat-out lie, you will be fine. And since it's Slashdot, you can probably flat-out lie, it's not like editors care.
P.S. I think this is unethical and won't do it again. There is a million other Slashdot users though.
There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read--something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn't make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn't read any of the books on that list. I had this uneasy feeling of "I'm not adequate," until finally I said to myself, "I'm gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it means."
So I stopped--at random--and read the next sentence very carefully. I can't remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: "The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels." I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? "People read."
Then I went over the next sentence, and I realized that I could translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty business: "Sometimes people read; sometimes people listen to the radio," and so on, but written in such a fancy way that I couldn't understand it at first, and when I finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it.
There was only one thing that happened at that meeting that was pleasant or amusing. At this conference, every word that every guy said at the plenary session was so important that they had a stenotypist there, typing every goddamn thing. Somewhere on the second day the stenotypist came up to me and said, "What profession are you? Surely not a professor."
"I am a professor," I said.
"Of what?"
"Of physics--science."
"Oh! That must be the reason," he said.
"Reason for what?"
He said, "You see, I'm a stenotypist, and I type everything that is said here. Now, when the other fellas talk, I type what they say, but I don't understand what they're saying. But every time you get up to ask a question or to say something, I understand exactly what you mean--what the question is, and what you're saying--so I thought you can't be a professor!"
I was bored, so here are the Slashdot stories that discuss the Moore's Law starting from 1998. I included only hand-picked stories that have moore's in their writeups. Selection was somewhat subjective.
Here is the number of stories per year
1999: 4 lameness filter is lame
2000: 4 lameness filter is lame
2001: 4 lameness filter is lame
2002: 6 lameness filter is lame
2003: 11 lameness filter is lame
2004: 6 lameness filter is lame
2005: 3 lameness filter is lame
As you can see, there is no significant growth and certainly no trend for the number of stories to increase.
Also interesting are the months when the stories appeared. It's usually April, because, guess what, the original article was published on April 19, 1965. So the stories are usually just filler. When you don't have anything worthwhile to print, you can always claim that Moore's Law is dead or counterclaim that it will be extended by the latest invention in semiconductor industry.
January: 2 lameness filter is lame
February: 4 lameness filter is lame
March: 1 lameness filter is lame
April: 9 lameness filter is lame
May: 1 lameness filter is lame
June: 3 lameness filter is lame
July: 0 lameness filter is lame
August: 2 lameness filter is lame
September: 5 lameness filter is lame
October: 2 lameness filter is lame
November: 3 lameness filter is lame
December: 6 lameness filter is lame
If you ignore the April stories (and one late story on May, 2nd), you get an even stranger picture:
1999: 3 lameness filter is lame
2000: 4 lameness filter is lame
2001: 3 lameness filter is lame
2002: 6 lameness filter is lame
2003: 8 lameness filter is lame
2004: 2 lameness filter is lame
2005: 0 lameness filter is lame
That can be claimed to be the number of relevant stories about Moore's Law. On the other hand, the "obligatory" April stories didn't appear until 2004, when Slashdot carried 4 of them. Now in 2005 we are only 13 days into April and we already have 3 such stories. Make your own conclusions.
You don't need to upload files to get trust. Everyone can provide information on all the files that he knows about (a table of hash values and ratings). When downloading a file, your P2P client would grab the ratings from every user (recording the user IDs/user hashes), then after the download is finished, you rate it yourself and the client compares your rating with those of all the other users.
This way distribution of files and distribution of information about files is separated. But since hash values are used to identify the files, you can download the file from a random user, as long as you know that the file (hash value) is valid.
Re:On Consciousness....
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Chinese room is an old fallacious argument. The person there doesn't speak Chinese, but the system comprised of the person, the book and the room, does speak it. Similarly, parts of the computer will not be conscious (just like parts of your brain aren't), but the whole system will be.
Step 1: Build 10000000000 nanobots Step 2: Send them into the brain and command them to attach to neurons Step 3: Ask them to record what they see and send that data back to the mothership... err, computer. Step 4: Simulate the huge neural net using the data from the nanobots Step 5: Realise that you are running under MS Windows. Step 6: Try to commit suicide, realise that you can't Step 7: ???? Step 8: You know the drill.
Re:Next round in: free will vs. biological machine
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Actually the book touches on this problem as well. For example "A brain scanning study of forty-one convicted murderers (thirty-nine men and two women) found that the majority showed reduced frontal lobe activity, which, as we shall see in Chapter Eight, may severely compromise a person's ability to control their impulses." Another example is the case of Julie (covered in more details in The Mind Machine by Colin Blakemore), a woman who has developed regular panic attacks and one day in such a state knifed another woman through the heart. She was studied by a neurosurgeon, who located the part of the brain that was causing the panic attacks. He then burnt it out and Julie's rages disappeared.
A wonderful book, it really has it all.:)
Re:Next round in: free will vs. biological machine
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 1
Rita Carter gave one pink page in the book (page 329) to Penrouse to push his pseudoscientific agenda. Actually Roger himself admits that a lot of his theory is just speculation. He says:
"The arguments that underlie my proposal are complicated and some are admittedly speculative. Beneath the technicality I have a strong feeling that it is obvious that the conscious mind cannot work like a computer. That feeling, which comes more easily to children than adults, is surely something that a computer could never have."
If I am parsing his logic correctly, he basically says "My infantile beliefs in non-computational nature of human mind are irrational, unsupported by evidence and I am sure that no computer would ever agree with me." I think we can already dismiss Penrose's theories as quackery.
Re:If you REALLY want to know yourself,...
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 1
Hi, Lion Kimbro.:)
I understand your discontent, but that's precisely why it would be worthwhile for you to read the book. Your problem with it seems to be how you feel about who you are, not what you know about it. And the detailed exploration of the brain together with all the helpful examples and schemes really help you get a feeling of what it is to have a mind. There is nothing confusing about how we have the experiences, once you look at it from the right angle. Read the book, you will be glad you did.
Danila Medvedev
Re:Is Mapping the Mind obsolete?
on
Mapping the Mind
·
· Score: 1
There is little overlap, as "Exploring Consciousness" concentrates on one particular area, while "Mapping the Mind" explains the general structure of the brain and its functioning. "Mapping the Mind" lays the foundation - and you would deny yourself a lot of enjoyment by ignoring the overall structure of the brain, its evolution, the older regions, the emotions and perceptions, to jump to the conclusion of consciousness.
I may be mistaken, but at several places online I read that NYC subway trains run every 2-5 minutes during the rush hour and every 10-20 minutes the rest of the time.
BTW, I don't feel sorry for the victims either. And I think this really is a perfect situation: the greedy suckers lose their money and the spammer goes to jail.
Of course, there is some spam, about which you can be quite confident that it's spam, but in some cases there is no clear distinction between spam and legitimate e-mail (on the recipient's side).
Consider an advert for a seminar on logistics. If I receive it from the spammer, it's spam, if I get the same message forwarded to me by a colleague, it's less so. If we change the topic of the seminar to be more/less interesting to me, the message will become less/more spammy.
You can't have a filter be 100% reliable in telling spam, because I can't be 100% reliable myself. Sometimes I am not sure whether I should flag the message as spam in my e-mail client, because I actually wouldn't mind getting more unsolicited messages like it.
Of course, the filters can do a passable job (they can even be better than humans), but you really can't program it perfectly.
May be you are just a tool for your genes to make more genes. I personally don't buy that idiotic philosophy. I am myself, an intelligent sentient being and I don't intend to waste my resources on procreating. For me the destiny of the humanity is very important, but secondary to my personal long-term well-being.
People can believe in whatever crap they can imagine. Some believe their purpose is to make kids, for some it's to make money, some think they need to protect the institution of marriage, but for the superior minority of intelligent people, who are the only ones really worthy of living, the purpose is self-improvement, learning about the world and bettering it in creative ways.
If you do not concern yourself with such superficial things as probabilities, may be you should also start worrying about half of the atoms in your body jumping 1 meter to the right, as they are prone to do from time to time thanks to the quantum indeterminancy.
I don't know about the article, but the blog post was totally unprofessional and lame in a misguided attempt to please some weird target audience. Why all that talk about hypothetical unethical scientists, the cocain?
I am always glad about computerization, but it surprises me that you can't ensure uninterrupted traffic on a dedicated subway line.
In Russia subway trains are controlled by humans, but they still manage to ensure safe and reliable operation. The trains go with the interval as small as 90 seconds and still they manage to avoid congestion. Of course, the subways here are not 100-years old - more like 50-years old, but still.
And you must learn that not everything is black and white. But if Austria was a backwards country with most of the people involved in subsistence agriculture, if Hitler wasn't a genocidal maniac and if he wasn't planning on escalating the conflict into a World War, I would probably be able to justify the Anschluss to some extent.
And I don't understand what "people" you are talking about. The aggressive minority in exile? Or the Llama and his cronies? The attitude of the majority of Tibetians was nicely described as being "between ignorance and indifference". For the vast majority of the people the problem is not "brutal oppression" of Chinese authorities, but simple and boring poverty. They do not want independence, they want economic development.
As for that pseudo-enlightened bastard Dalai Llama, I say "Fuck the Llama!".
You're funny too.;) My position is that there are two types of separatists - 1) those whose separatism is justified and 2) those whose separatism is not.
Of course, there will always be a debate on which class a particular separatism movement belongs to. But the point is - in principle it is possible to make this distinction.
There are cases when independence is clearly justified (because of national, economic, cultural or other reasons). There are cases when it's not clear and then there are cases when independence is clearly a pipe dream.
Palestina is probably one of the closest to the first category. Kurds in Turkey are another. But Basques in Spain and Tibetians in China are closer to the second category.
There is simply no justification for Tibet being independent, except for some backwards Llamas that are theocratic feodals anyway (meaning they are not deserving of our sympathy).
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't it be nice if Nine Inch Nails released their webpages in an open format? I am all for creative freedom and letting the artist express his vision in any way he sees fit, but making the blog using a bunch of gifs with intentionally garbled text looks pretty over the top.
The blind fans of NIN will certainly not appreciate empty ALT tags...
I don't know why MR is getting the "credit" for this.
:)
It's simple PR. They had a site running before the film was released where they explained how they had such a cool team of futurists. And they issued a press release. Of course, the gadget-whores at Wired and other places could not pass the opportunity to drool. Since the journalists rarely do enough research, (and don't care) they never mentioned earlier prototypes/ideas.
and no one ever seems to have an offline backup, one copy is all there is.
Well, you'd be surprised at how realistic this actually is.
Sucks to be you, but freedom of speech (while not the absolute) is more important than your personal peace of mind.
We can't allow people like yourself to control what their ex-girlfriends post, because then we would have to allow people who abuse their spouses to control what information said spouses can release to the public.
If you think that your x-gf damaged your reputation (and if you can't solve it with her peacefully), sue her. But please don't try to argue that we should all give up our freedom of speech so that you can silence your x-gf.
I think we need to look further. If most people do not particularly care about the topic, don't have their own opinion and will answer differently depending on how the question is phrased, why do we care about their opinions at all?
Why do we care what 72% of people say if 71% of them are incompetent morons? Public opinion is worthless on issues where the majority doesn't actually have one.
I can speak from experience - this is how submissions are accepted. I twisted the story a bit in Jakob Nielsen Defends "1-Click" Patents. In fact, the quote is real, but the title contained my own interpretation. As robolemon pointed out, "Nielsen never mentions one-click patents" (real quote, not made up or distorted).
But nevertheless, that was how I wrote the submission and, of course, it was accepted. Kids, it's journalism. You can twist the truth in any way you want, you just need some excuse later. If you don't flat-out lie, you will be fine. And since it's Slashdot, you can probably flat-out lie, it's not like editors care.
P.S. I think this is unethical and won't do it again. There is a million other Slashdot users though.
from Richard Feynman's immortal book:
There was a sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read--something he had written ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn't make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn't read any of the books on that list. I had this uneasy feeling of "I'm not adequate," until finally I said to myself, "I'm gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly, so I can figure out what the hell it means."
So I stopped--at random--and read the next sentence very carefully. I can't remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: "The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels." I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? "People read."
Then I went over the next sentence, and I realized that I could translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty business: "Sometimes people read; sometimes people listen to the radio," and so on, but written in such a fancy way that I couldn't understand it at first, and when I finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it.
There was only one thing that happened at that meeting that was pleasant or amusing. At this conference, every word that every guy said at the plenary session was so important that they had a stenotypist there, typing every goddamn thing. Somewhere on the second day the stenotypist came up to me and said, "What profession are you? Surely not a professor."
"I am a professor," I said.
"Of what?"
"Of physics--science."
"Oh! That must be the reason," he said.
"Reason for what?"
He said, "You see, I'm a stenotypist, and I type everything that is said here. Now, when the other fellas talk, I type what they say, but I don't understand what they're saying. But every time you get up to ask a question or to say something, I understand exactly what you mean--what the question is, and what you're saying--so I thought you can't be a professor!"
I was bored, so here are the Slashdot stories that discuss the Moore's Law starting from 1998. I included only hand-picked stories that have moore's in their writeups. Selection was somewhat subjective.
Here is the number of stories per year
1999: 4 lameness filter is lame
2000: 4 lameness filter is lame
2001: 4 lameness filter is lame
2002: 6 lameness filter is lame
2003: 11 lameness filter is lame
2004: 6 lameness filter is lame
2005: 3 lameness filter is lame
As you can see, there is no significant growth and certainly no trend for the number of stories to increase.
Also interesting are the months when the stories appeared. It's usually April, because, guess what, the original article was published on April 19, 1965. So the stories are usually just filler. When you don't have anything worthwhile to print, you can always claim that Moore's Law is dead or counterclaim that it will be extended by the latest invention in semiconductor industry.
January: 2 lameness filter is lame
February: 4 lameness filter is lame
March: 1 lameness filter is lame
April: 9 lameness filter is lame
May: 1 lameness filter is lame
June: 3 lameness filter is lame
July: 0 lameness filter is lame
August: 2 lameness filter is lame
September: 5 lameness filter is lame
October: 2 lameness filter is lame
November: 3 lameness filter is lame
December: 6 lameness filter is lame
If you ignore the April stories (and one late story on May, 2nd), you get an even stranger picture:
1999: 3 lameness filter is lame
2000: 4 lameness filter is lame
2001: 3 lameness filter is lame
2002: 6 lameness filter is lame
2003: 8 lameness filter is lame
2004: 2 lameness filter is lame
2005: 0 lameness filter is lame
That can be claimed to be the number of relevant stories about Moore's Law. On the other hand, the "obligatory" April stories didn't appear until 2004, when Slashdot carried 4 of them. Now in 2005 we are only 13 days into April and we already have 3 such stories. Make your own conclusions.
And here is the list:
You don't need to upload files to get trust. Everyone can provide information on all the files that he knows about (a table of hash values and ratings). When downloading a file, your P2P client would grab the ratings from every user (recording the user IDs/user hashes), then after the download is finished, you rate it yourself and the client compares your rating with those of all the other users.
This way distribution of files and distribution of information about files is separated. But since hash values are used to identify the files, you can download the file from a random user, as long as you know that the file (hash value) is valid.
Chinese room is an old fallacious argument. The person there doesn't speak Chinese, but the system comprised of the person, the book and the room, does speak it. Similarly, parts of the computer will not be conscious (just like parts of your brain aren't), but the whole system will be.
Step 1: Build 10000000000 nanobots
Step 2: Send them into the brain and command them to attach to neurons
Step 3: Ask them to record what they see and send that data back to the mothership... err, computer.
Step 4: Simulate the huge neural net using the data from the nanobots
Step 5: Realise that you are running under MS Windows.
Step 6: Try to commit suicide, realise that you can't
Step 7: ????
Step 8: You know the drill.
Actually the book touches on this problem as well. For example "A brain scanning study of forty-one convicted murderers (thirty-nine men and two women) found that the majority showed reduced frontal lobe activity, which, as we shall see in Chapter Eight, may severely compromise a person's ability to control their impulses." Another example is the case of Julie (covered in more details in The Mind Machine by Colin Blakemore), a woman who has developed regular panic attacks and one day in such a state knifed another woman through the heart. She was studied by a neurosurgeon, who located the part of the brain that was causing the panic attacks. He then burnt it out and Julie's rages disappeared.
:)
A wonderful book, it really has it all.
If I am parsing his logic correctly, he basically says "My infantile beliefs in non-computational nature of human mind are irrational, unsupported by evidence and I am sure that no computer would ever agree with me." I think we can already dismiss Penrose's theories as quackery.
Hi, Lion Kimbro. :)
I understand your discontent, but that's precisely why it would be worthwhile for you to read the book. Your problem with it seems to be how you feel about who you are, not what you know about it. And the detailed exploration of the brain together with all the helpful examples and schemes really help you get a feeling of what it is to have a mind. There is nothing confusing about how we have the experiences, once you look at it from the right angle. Read the book, you will be glad you did.
Danila Medvedev
There is little overlap, as "Exploring Consciousness" concentrates on one particular area, while "Mapping the Mind" explains the general structure of the brain and its functioning. "Mapping the Mind" lays the foundation - and you would deny yourself a lot of enjoyment by ignoring the overall structure of the brain, its evolution, the older regions, the emotions and perceptions, to jump to the conclusion of consciousness.
I may be mistaken, but at several places online I read that NYC subway trains run every 2-5 minutes during the rush hour and every 10-20 minutes the rest of the time.
BTW, I don't feel sorry for the victims either. And I think this really is a perfect situation: the greedy suckers lose their money and the spammer goes to jail.
Of course, there is some spam, about which you can be quite confident that it's spam, but in some cases there is no clear distinction between spam and legitimate e-mail (on the recipient's side).
Consider an advert for a seminar on logistics. If I receive it from the spammer, it's spam, if I get the same message forwarded to me by a colleague, it's less so. If we change the topic of the seminar to be more/less interesting to me, the message will become less/more spammy.
You can't have a filter be 100% reliable in telling spam, because I can't be 100% reliable myself. Sometimes I am not sure whether I should flag the message as spam in my e-mail client, because I actually wouldn't mind getting more unsolicited messages like it.
Of course, the filters can do a passable job (they can even be better than humans), but you really can't program it perfectly.
May be you are just a tool for your genes to make more genes. I personally don't buy that idiotic philosophy. I am myself, an intelligent sentient being and I don't intend to waste my resources on procreating. For me the destiny of the humanity is very important, but secondary to my personal long-term well-being.
People can believe in whatever crap they can imagine. Some believe their purpose is to make kids, for some it's to make money, some think they need to protect the institution of marriage, but for the superior minority of intelligent people, who are the only ones really worthy of living, the purpose is self-improvement, learning about the world and bettering it in creative ways.
If you do not concern yourself with such superficial things as probabilities, may be you should also start worrying about half of the atoms in your body jumping 1 meter to the right, as they are prone to do from time to time thanks to the quantum indeterminancy.
I don't know about the article, but the blog post was totally unprofessional and lame in a misguided attempt to please some weird target audience. Why all that talk about hypothetical unethical scientists, the cocain?
Obscure scientist? Heck, the whole thing was named after him (galvanism). How is that obscure?
I am always glad about computerization, but it surprises me that you can't ensure uninterrupted traffic on a dedicated subway line.
In Russia subway trains are controlled by humans, but they still manage to ensure safe and reliable operation. The trains go with the interval as small as 90 seconds and still they manage to avoid congestion. Of course, the subways here are not 100-years old - more like 50-years old, but still.
Actually it was because they could not fit the whole contraption in the room.
I am not trolling.
And you must learn that not everything is black and white. But if Austria was a backwards country with most of the people involved in subsistence agriculture, if Hitler wasn't a genocidal maniac and if he wasn't planning on escalating the conflict into a World War, I would probably be able to justify the Anschluss to some extent.
And I don't understand what "people" you are talking about. The aggressive minority in exile? Or the Llama and his cronies? The attitude of the majority of Tibetians was nicely described as being "between ignorance and indifference". For the vast majority of the people the problem is not "brutal oppression" of Chinese authorities, but simple and boring poverty. They do not want independence, they want economic development.
As for that pseudo-enlightened bastard Dalai Llama, I say "Fuck the Llama!".
You're funny too. ;) My position is that there are two types of separatists - 1) those whose separatism is justified and 2) those whose separatism is not.
Of course, there will always be a debate on which class a particular separatism movement belongs to. But the point is - in principle it is possible to make this distinction.
There are cases when independence is clearly justified (because of national, economic, cultural or other reasons). There are cases when it's not clear and then there are cases when independence is clearly a pipe dream.
Palestina is probably one of the closest to the first category. Kurds in Turkey are another. But Basques in Spain and Tibetians in China are closer to the second category.
There is simply no justification for Tibet being independent, except for some backwards Llamas that are theocratic feodals anyway (meaning they are not deserving of our sympathy).