Apple has been successfully shutting down clone makers for 25 years. Some immediately, some after several months, but always successfully. Psystar will choke on the stack of precedents.
These 2D videos show 2D diagrams of what a 4D projection into 3D would look like if it were flat. Entirely unsatisfying.
Want a 4D-in-3D demo? Take a small balloon, blow it up then let it go flat. That's what a 4D sphere projecting into 3D would look like.
You can imagine in 4D fairly easily if you decide to ignore your senses and decide that the smaller faces on the internal cube in a tesseract are indeed the same size (an in fact coincide with) the larger, outer faces, and so the outer pseudo-cubes are in fact cubes with all 90 degree corners. You see perpective with fake apparent angles, you can use the same trick your mind uses to see more.
By the way, we do not see in 3 dimensions. We see in 2.5. We can't see the backs of things. We can feel in 3 dimensions if we can get our hands all the way around it.
We do NOT see in 2 dimensions (as a previous comment stated) unless we have no depth perception. Stereoscopic vision gives us much more than flat projection, and stereointegration in the visual cortex gives us even more. In fact, a one-eyed being with stereointegration need only moves its head around and collect visual images from different angles in order to create a successfully adequate 3D concept.
And ask the previous commenter asked, yes we do have examples of reverse perspective where things behind get bigger. Gravitational lensing of galaxies passing behind smaller, intense gravity fields (theoretically black holes or neutron stars). Can't point to any I've seen on the web offhand, but I've seen them there as well as on some astronomy shows on TV.
On behalf of my fellow elderlies (I'm only honorary, at 53, but I'm in training), you do not want a 24/7 link. It needs to have a call siggnal and an on/off switch. You, and we, do not need to deal with your trauma of seeing grandpa bending grandma over the sink for a sneak-up quickie.
Don't think we don't. You don't want to think about it at all, so consider the reasons why you don't want to.
If you want a global on switch, fine. Let us have an override off switch. Put an hour delay cut-off on it if you like. We're old, it takes us more than the 10 minutes you kids take. (Just wait until you get to enjoy that aspect). And we're gladly admit that an hour is plenty, and we should be looked in on after that. Especially if we spend the whole hour.
On the other hand, I've heard said "We wouldn't even bother to do it anymore, but the kids like to watch." If your elders have that mindset, go ahead and give them the means to offer you instruction 24/7. You don't think they haven't learned a few novel tricks in 40 or so years?
Got a problem with this? Get over yourself. You're halfway to this age yourself, and I'm betting when you get there you'll have no plans on stopping.
Go ahead and mod this funny, since you don't have a "+1 elders' wisdom" mod.
Ask the pertinent questions of the person who will be supervising you. Some of the definitions will be theirs. Some will be mandated from higher up, but it's still the supervisor who interprets and reports to the highers up. Find out how mucvh leeway your supervisor will have (and will take).
My wife has doubled her salary to nearly 6 figures in 5 years, strictly telecommuting (up to 1000 miles from the office). She learned how to handle the virtual chain of cammand, and the real cvrossways communication where comes the real needs and techniques. It helps that from the outset she has helped devise the requirements.
"And from reader JagsLive comes news that Comcast has a different plan in place to deal with heavy bandwidth users: slow traffic for up to 20 minutes at a time to users who are grabbing the most bits."
But they'll continue to sell it as though this weren't so. They intend to continue perpetrating the fraud they've come to enjoy. While some aspects of this fall under FCC jurisdiction, the fraudulent action of refusing -- not merely failing -- to provide the service they've sold falls under FTC jurisdiction. The FCC is doing better than it has, but still lags. The FTC has been kicking ass for a decade now and shows no sign of letting up.
It just takes one good class action suit against Comcast that gets picked up by a state's Attorney General, and having that AT and the lead counsel for the suit take it to the FTC, and Comcast will end up begging for the used bits from every mom & pop dial-up in the US.
Both presidential candidates are known to keep themselves as outsiders when it comes to the currently unprecedented level of govermental-corporate incest. When the present administration falls, an entire network of croneyism will fall too. There will be sacrificial corporate heads and nads. The astutue sufferer of Comcast's opticalfibersclerosis will take heed, and find or build a suitable bandwagon. Should be a downhill ride.
There should be a "Bandwidth Industry vs. The People" site, much like "The Recording Industry vs. The People". Only this time with a decidedly offensive bent, and tips on forming class actions and enlisting states' AGs as well as filing complaints with the FTC.
Stop spam, a major waste of bandwidth, to solve the supposed problem? Oh no, too hard. Besides, some spammers are downstream customers and the recipients are private and business customers. If that wasted bandwidth shows up buried in the lossage numbers they use to justify their next pseudo-legal FUBAR, well that just gets more people closer to their arbitrary cut-off earning them the 20 minute Time Out. I certainly someone tracks who gets the 20 minute notice and who doesn't, and which of those run P2P and which use as much or more bandwidth but not P2P. They can't shoot the sitting ducks like a bad hunter, they'll try to snatch those ducks underwater from where they sit like a fat alligator. A few decoys on "problem" and "non-problem" lines, with DPI detection and data recording for compariops, and Comcast could be forced to sell off enough shares that customers become the major shareholders.
In medicine, it's called "allopathic", treating the symptoms. Doctors frequently do this because they're working from complaints and tests, not from a theoretical understanding of the systems. You can take aspirin for a headache. It'll probably work. You can't know without extensive testing whether that headache is due to a brain tumor (obSchwartzenneger: "It's NOT a tumah! It's NOT!").
A 4G vibration that's not felt by the astronauts but still occur in the vehicle could still rip the booster apart.
The DIRECT 2.0 alternative http://www.launchcomplexmodels.com/Direct/index.htm wouldn't have this problem. It uses mostly existing systems that have already been tested. (THIS is the real reuse of shuttle parts, not Ares). Yes, these have had their problems, but it was the engineers' idea, not something administratively mandated for them to design. I trust the engineers. When they ran things we had "failure is not an option" (Apollo 13). When management types took over we got "My God, Thiokol, what do you want me to do, wait until April to launch?" (SS Challenger). I'd sooner ride a non-man-rated SpaceX Falcon than anything devised by NASA management committee, much less something so devised then revised to eliminate the experience of the problem but not the problem. I'd at least like enough warning that something was going horribly wrong so I could scream.
If they recognise the dot and try to remove it from the mirror reflection then they don't understand that they are an object in a world full of objects.
On the other hand, if their first reaction is to act on their own body to remove the dot, then they do understand that they exist as an individual object.
They might not be able to talk about it or have deep thoughts on the subject but they are aware of their own existence.
You didn't bother to follow the link I suggested. I'll give you a fairly unsatisfying response and suggest you follow the link.
I can't prove the response I quoted above wasn't written by a bot. Had I been there when you (if there is a "you" there) supposedly wrote it, I would have a recollection of the incident, and that's all. Things happen that we forget about, and we remember things that didn't happen, and far more often remember things adequately accurately, but not entirely accurately.
Had I been there to see "you" write it, I'd still have no way at all the prove that "you" actually had (and continue to have) conscious awareness of that, or any other act of yours. You may operate entirely on stimulus/response reactions and preprogrammed behavior. (This is what the wiki article covers, "zombies", unaware but apparently completely operational humans).
In order to know otherwise, I'd have to be able to experience your subjective awareness from within your own head, inside my own. But then I'd be experiencing something from within my own head, and couldn't be sure what was my own subjective experience, and what was yours. You might see an object that we agree is red. When you experience it and I experience it, we come to the same conclusion. When I experience your stream of consciousness, I might still interpret it as what I call red. But what you experience as red I might experience as green if seen through my eyes, yet because we agree on what to call it, we'd never know we see completely different colors. This extrapolates to the entirety of experience, including the null set, in which one or the other of us experiences nothing at all, yet behaves perfectly normally.
You don't see why this should be the case. You might not 'see' anything. I can't know. And we can't know what's going on in a magpie's mind. If it's impossible to tap into another human's consciousness, it's doubly hard to prove what you experienced when tapping a mapgpie's mind was what the magpie was experiencing, because you'd be 'seeing' it in a mind belonging to an entirely different species. You can't even ask the magpie whether they experienced anything, much less what that was. I can't even believe your response to that question because you might be programmed to respond with something that looks very much like a normal human response.
Turn the Turing Test around and point it back at yourself and everybody you know, and consider what it would take to entirely eliminate any false positive results. It can't be done. Any conclusion otherwise will contain a logical flaw based on a presumption of the conclusion.
If you want a more general coverage of the topic, read up on phenomenology. If that's too difficult, watch the movie "Dark Star" and watch what happens to the bomb.
You are correct that mirror neurons react to images of the subject. However, their reactivity is not shown to be either necessary or sufficient for self-recognition. Just because they act this way does not imply other neural systems are not required. They pretty obviously are -- try to recognize something when you have no brain stem and so no reticular activating system to make you wake up. The other systems involved in self-recognition may be necessary and sufficient.
And self-recognition is not self-awareness. The study showed self-recognition. The New Scientist seems to be the source of the flawed logical jump, from the first to second sentences of TFA.
Recognition (including self-) is easy to demostrate. Awareness (ie. conscious experience) of any sort is impossible to show. It would require being able to tap into the presumed consciousness of the subject in order to detect that the subject knows they've recognized the target object. This is as true of humans as of magpies. For a taste of, and links to, arguments regarding inability to prove awareness, start at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
"I look forward to it being profiled on Top Gear."
I look forward to the new specialty magazine, "Chair & Driver". There can be a professional circuit section, with souped up motorized wheel chairs, and a 'dirt track' stock chair section for vehicles like this. And just wait until Ky "Rocketman" Michaelson http://www.the-rocketman.com/ gets into it.
Seriously, this thing should fall under an unregulatable category, much like ultralight aircraft in the US that couldn't possibly meet FAA licensing requirements without growing into an entirely different vehicle.
Photoshop is only a recent tool for image manipulation, done digitally. Photos have been doctored in order to alter memories in ways that are even stated in TFA. They worked just as well.
Fact is, we don't "remember" anything. We construct what we view as memory from stored pieces of data. Whatever fits the stored associations with all relevant previous data well enough to be considered our fastest best match gets chosen. It is always wrong to some degree, and is surprisingly easy to alter to a surprising degree of inaccuracy.
False memories, implanted memories, suppressed memories, eye witness reliability, all are topics within the memory studies in cognitive psychology. The #1 top expert in the field is Elizabeth Loftus. She's listed in the references in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory_syndrome which is as good a start as any. Altered photography is just one of the many ways of playing around with long term storage, retrieval and reconstruction.
Come on kids, this is Psych 101 stuff. Just because software gets used doesn't make it newsworthy. Try to get over the hype.
Obviously they asked a panel of, at least primarily, neuroscientists. TFA doesn't mention that the report wasn't an all-around technology assessment, but rather is from the outset a futurism projection of neuroscience: http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12177&page=R1 They didn't come to the conclusion, as implied by the tone of TFA, rather it was their starting point and working boundary.
Had they asked a panel of archeologists, the battlefield of the future would probably be inside the Great Pyramid, but The Guardian would fail to note the profession of the report writers, instead simply calling them "leading scientists".
KARI flew the 100% indigenous KSR-3 (Korean Sounding Rocket) five times from 1993 to 2002 with a 100% success rate. The original KSLV-1 was to be a KSR-3 core with two KSR-3s strapped on in parallel, a KSR-3 second stage, and an apogee kick motor based on the earlier KSR-1 and -2 solid motors.
Suddenly in 2005 KARI announced a switch to the Russian Angara booster, unbuilt much less unproven, using entirely contracted ground equipment, and 10 times bigger than what should have flown to orbit by 2007, instead of (now, so far) 2009. And they're locked into the new design through the KSLV-3, due in 2015. Supposedly.
In 2006, Korea had 2 candidates selected as cosmonauts, one of which flew a 10 day mission to ISS in 2007. I'll bet you can't name either of them, but I'll bet you can guess who's going to be making money for years, who paid for prestige now empty, and which is sorry.
To be fair, this 9 month delay is due far more to components lost in the Chinese earthquake than the 30 day late shipment of Russian ground equipment.
Cooking is forced decomposition. The "easier" calories are, as TFA says, from pre-processing otherwise difficult to digest material. Scavengers have been around for a long time. Where's the smart vultures?
The pre-processing most relevant to cognition is making making the nucleotides adenylate, inosinate and guanylate easier to extract, from which the neurotransmitter glutamate is made. Glutamate availability is well documented as necessary to effective cognition. We are tuned to detect those nucleotides via the "5th taste", umami. Monosodium glutamate is to tongue receptors what benzodiazapines and narcotics are to the brain's GABA and endorphin receptors -- fake keys that fit the locks. Food treated with MSG seems "heartier" when tasted, and one might feel full sooner because the brain is easily fooled, but hungry again sooner because the stomach is slow, but not stupid. Chinese and similar cuisines are rich in glutamate containing foods, and frequently MSG is added (as "meat tenderizer" or "flavor enhancer") to the food.
It remains to be seen whether the "intelligence" (more undefinable as you know more about it) is a beneficial evolutionary trait. We haven't been around in the "smart" version long enough to serve as proof. "Intelligence" may be nothing more than one mutation that provided a species one means to become the ecological equivalent of a cancer, and providing us with the ability to live in denial of our nature by deluding ourselves about "superiority".
The superior design may well prove to be a scavenger (make no mistake, we are) with low water content and requirement, and cognitive abilities may prove irrelevant or even counter-productive. What species is expected to survive a nuclear war, and what species can conduct one?
Evidence of scavenger nature in humans and cockroaches (and the delusional nature of the former) can be found in "social facilitation". Performance in enhanced by the presence of others. Cockroaches run mazes faster when they "know other cockroaches are watching". Bugger*. How can they have what in us we consider to be a highly complex (ie. "social") behavior with no cognitive ability to speak of? They don't "abstract" being watched. Social psychology needs to check in with evolutionary biology. The scavenger that detects competition will do what it can to get to the calories fastest -- run faster -- and thus be more successful. Or it might just use its mutant powers to conduct rapid decomposition on demand as well as pretend it's not just rotten**.
*,** Both double meanings unintended, but I'll take them.
What kind of tinfoil mickey are you trying slip in my drink?
Grenada, blanks, ham operator, WTF? citation or door.
CBS news broadcast footage, 25 October 1983, compare early and late night versions. The early version included a voice over of the radio operator. But both showed the same insanely ridiculous staged "rescue" tactic of having the St. George's students running crouched beneath a line of M-16s being fired by members of the 22nd Marine Amphibs. You can corroborate by looking for the reports of the SEAL team that secured "Radio Free Grenada", and compare when that was supposed to have occurred compared to when that station went off the air, also compared with other hams' CQ logs showing LOS from an operator on Grenada.
If you'd like to do your own homework to get the aluminum taste out of your mouth, try to come up with a logical reason why the US Marine unit mobilized to replace those killed in the Beirut barracks bombing were diverted en route to "save" students at an off-shore medical school instead of reinforcing the part of the US presence lost in the bombing. To give you a head start, conceive of a form of presentation between fiction and documentary and then watch "Wag The Dog".
I'd also suggest you read Paul Linebarger's "Psychological Warfare", but I know you'll no more do that than you will attempt to follow up on the other stuff.
Anyone who is surprised at this is probably unaware that disruption, denial and subversion of communications is a common factor in all modern (as in more modern than two groups of grunting and growling rock throwers) warfare. Telegraph and phone lines got cut. Radio got jammed. Alexander had fires built upwind of enemy columns to make it hard for them to see each other easily. The US Army confiscated the radio of the British ham operator on Grenada that was broadcasting a running commentary of infantry firing over the heads of the medical students being "rescued". The US news broadcast footage clearly showed them being forced to run under a line of firing (most likely blanks) M-16s; the early news shows broadcast the ham operator's reports along with the footage, but his reports were absent from the late news broadcasts.
Command and control (C2) refers to the ability of military commanders to carry out strategy and tactics. The addition of Communications (C3) refers to inclusion of the ability to carry out C2 without being present on the battlefield and the ability of units to coordinate over distance. That's the US version, the NATO version of C3 being "Consultation, Command and Control", just a different label for the same process. It's now frequently referred to as C4 because it includes computers. Since they are used for more than communication, the fourth C is not redundant. The other thing they're used for is data analysis for intelligence generation, so the "I" in "C4I" *is* redundant. And all the other extensions out to C4ISTAR is just showing off.
Being "cyber", it's pertinent to/. but it's not news unless one assumes that one particular form of communication should be immune to this "time honored tradition".
of people with ideas who want other people to do the work but still get paid for the idea.
The only ones who make any money selling their ideas are the ones whose ideas are about how to make money. Some of them manage to sell their ideas, usually on infomercials. Almost nobody except the person selling the idea makes any money. And you're not trying to sell an idea about how to make money.
Get to work, give it away, or give it up. Ideas are easy, and free.
I ran and supported my own Linux box for Matlab for a while. It took a fraction of my time to keep things running.
I also ran one for a lab that paid for migration, OS and Java Desktop support, because I was supposed to be a researcher, not an admin. It took about the same fraction of time to keep things running. A quarter of that fraction was waiting for answers. A quarter was spent getting non-answers from clueless drones reading problem-solution flow charts and having to find a cluefull support person. A quarter was trying to understand support people who knew what they meant but weren't good at communicating it. And a quarter was divided between figuring out what the poor communicators meant (luckily I already spoke *nix) and fixing things myself anyway. I spent the same amount of time not doing science both ways, and the latter lab was out a relatively small support payment. On the other hand since I was sometimes just following instructions rather than problem solving, I understood the system less. I'd rather they just let me do it, and since I couldn't pass along as much knowledge to my successor, they probably ended up wishing I'd done it myself also.
Luckily it was only Linux. Now Matlab, you can pay a bundle for support, and another bundle for a rotating plate full of grad students, or you can pay through the nose and still need a hybrid engineer/coder to make your flops flip. In the first case, I supported the Linux and the lab supported a doctoral student by paying him to code Matlab. In the second, we had ample grad students, each with ample knowledge, but so much turn around that things went only half as fast as at the first lab.
I should also mention that just before I got there the first lab was running Matlab on Irix and was hemoraging support money. Those huge SGI boxes ended up as great end tables.
Turn them on. Time the time-to-desktop or other end end point in the boot process. Look at how long it took. The try to justify why you have to have them up and running faster than the minute or two it takes. What is it for, the NORAD anti-missile defense system? Flip the switch and go take a leak, they'll be ready when you get back.
> I wholeheartedly agree with you, and I wonder if perhaps the influence of > appealing to the media may have colored this article.
There's no doubt in my mind that's the case. See Alan Boyle's "Cosmic Log" of 7/12 on MSNBC.com for an extensive rant I wrote on just that subject.
> Honestly, I think the best method we'll have for determining when language > came about will be an expansive study of ancient artwork and tools, trying > to find out if the information necessary to make them could have been > transmitted without language.
Examine your definition of language. Language generates spontaneously, even in the absence of auditory and vocal systems (children born deaf to hearing parents in isolated areas develop a sign language with the parents, even though the parents had no previous experience with sign). The first language was almost certainly sign language. The language needed for making and using tools was probably tool making and use, with gestural emphasis added. The brain's capability for "generative grammar", the major developmental milestone in language, probably evolved well before speech, which itself was at first likely just some more emphatic additions to the sign language. A grunt is just a grunt, but a grunt and gesture is communication. Even now 2/3 of our spoken language is nonvocal -- signs, signals, gestures, kinesics, proxemics and chronemics.
It's unlikely humans are the only species with generative grammar capability. I don't know of any brain imaging to support it (of Wernicke's area in this case, as opposed to Broca's which I referred to previously), but Penny Patterson's dissertation contains at least two instances of Koko compounding signs into a new sign phrase -- that's generative. And she used them repeatedly in sentences with a set order -- that's grammar. One of those phrases was essentially cussing (Mike + dirty + toilet + stink: "Mike is shit.") -- and that's language at its finest.
"What I tell you three times is true." I'm saying it once but two others already have.
Feynman's "Lectures" + "Tips"
If you want an expert's opinion, ask the chancellor of John Moore's University in Liverpool. He's an astrophysicist, as well as a member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club For Scientists, which counts for naught save as an indicator of a sense of humor and thus probably approachability. And he's a bit of a musician so I hear. He has a web site with a contact link: http://brianmay.com/main.html#
The fact that the human auditory system is "sensitive" in the 2K to 4K range is no indication of language in us or any hominid, present or past. The average human voice covers 2 octaves, not just this one, and the range of those two varies considerably, from around 350 Hz to 4.5K. It is far more likely that homonid hearing evolved to perceive the most salient sounds, those requiring fight-or-flight response or else used for hunting, thus increasing surivability. The vocal cords most likely evolved to produce sounds at the range the auditory system was already primed for.
Telephones reproduce speech between 400 Hz and 3.4K, because that's where the most information content in speech is. This is at odds with the 2K-to-4K claim in TFA. The portion of the auditory system examined in TFA is the resonant cavity responsible for filling in 'missing' information. Language as normally practiced does not require this. Survival oriented hearing, predating spoken language by several species, does.
I'll be somewhat impressed if they can show that chimps do not have the same auditory system tuning. Chimps do, after all, have greater left than right frontal cortex, in the same area as human language perception and production, and that wouldn't have evolved without a reason either.
"a bigger threat to user-generated sites emerges: The law is increasingly siding with rights owners."
The law *exists* to protect the rights of the owners. Intellectual property is still property. Got a problem with that? Then if I take your car, don't call the cops.
Slashdot Mirror
are doomed to repeat it.
Apple has been successfully shutting down clone makers for 25 years. Some immediately, some after several months, but always successfully. Psystar will choke on the stack of precedents.
To be fair, we also don't have a "-1 elders" creepy mod either.
Hang on to that thought, son. For about 40 years. The decide whether the piece you're getting is worth +1 or -1.
"We are only immortal for a limited time." And yours is coming soon enough.
These 2D videos show 2D diagrams of what a 4D projection into 3D would look like if it were flat. Entirely unsatisfying.
Want a 4D-in-3D demo? Take a small balloon, blow it up then let it go flat. That's what a 4D sphere projecting into 3D would look like.
You can imagine in 4D fairly easily if you decide to ignore your senses and decide that the smaller faces on the internal cube in a tesseract are indeed the same size (an in fact coincide with) the larger, outer faces, and so the outer pseudo-cubes are in fact cubes with all 90 degree corners. You see perpective with fake apparent angles, you can use the same trick your mind uses to see more.
By the way, we do not see in 3 dimensions. We see in 2.5. We can't see the backs of things. We can feel in 3 dimensions if we can get our hands all the way around it.
We do NOT see in 2 dimensions (as a previous comment stated) unless we have no depth perception. Stereoscopic vision gives us much more than flat projection, and stereointegration in the visual cortex gives us even more. In fact, a one-eyed being with stereointegration need only moves its head around and collect visual images from different angles in order to create a successfully adequate 3D concept.
And ask the previous commenter asked, yes we do have examples of reverse perspective where things behind get bigger. Gravitational lensing of galaxies passing behind smaller, intense gravity fields (theoretically black holes or neutron stars). Can't point to any I've seen on the web offhand, but I've seen them there as well as on some astronomy shows on TV.
On behalf of my fellow elderlies (I'm only honorary, at 53, but I'm in training), you do not want a 24/7 link. It needs to have a call siggnal and an on/off switch. You, and we, do not need to deal with your trauma of seeing grandpa bending grandma over the sink for a sneak-up quickie.
Don't think we don't. You don't want to think about it at all, so consider the reasons why you don't want to.
If you want a global on switch, fine. Let us have an override off switch. Put an hour delay cut-off on it if you like. We're old, it takes us more than the 10 minutes you kids take. (Just wait until you get to enjoy that aspect). And we're gladly admit that an hour is plenty, and we should be looked in on after that. Especially if we spend the whole hour.
On the other hand, I've heard said "We wouldn't even bother to do it anymore, but the kids like to watch." If your elders have that mindset, go ahead and give them the means to offer you instruction 24/7. You don't think they haven't learned a few novel tricks in 40 or so years?
Got a problem with this? Get over yourself. You're halfway to this age yourself, and I'm betting when you get there you'll have no plans on stopping.
Go ahead and mod this funny, since you don't have a "+1 elders' wisdom" mod.
Ask the pertinent questions of the person who will be supervising you. Some of the definitions will be theirs. Some will be mandated from higher up, but it's still the supervisor who interprets and reports to the highers up. Find out how mucvh leeway your supervisor will have (and will take).
My wife has doubled her salary to nearly 6 figures in 5 years, strictly telecommuting (up to 1000 miles from the office). She learned how to handle the virtual chain of cammand, and the real cvrossways communication where comes the real needs and techniques. It helps that from the outset she has helped devise the requirements.
"And from reader JagsLive comes news that Comcast has a different plan in place to deal with heavy bandwidth users: slow traffic for up to 20 minutes at a time to users who are grabbing the most bits."
But they'll continue to sell it as though this weren't so. They intend to continue perpetrating the fraud they've come to enjoy. While some aspects of this fall under FCC jurisdiction, the fraudulent action of refusing -- not merely failing -- to provide the service they've sold falls under FTC jurisdiction. The FCC is doing better than it has, but still lags. The FTC has been kicking ass for a decade now and shows no sign of letting up.
It just takes one good class action suit against Comcast that gets picked up by a state's Attorney General, and having that AT and the lead counsel for the suit take it to the FTC, and Comcast will end up begging for the used bits from every mom & pop dial-up in the US.
Both presidential candidates are known to keep themselves as outsiders when it comes to the currently unprecedented level of govermental-corporate incest. When the present administration falls, an entire network of croneyism will fall too. There will be sacrificial corporate heads and nads. The astutue sufferer of Comcast's opticalfibersclerosis will take heed, and find or build a suitable bandwagon. Should be a downhill ride.
There should be a "Bandwidth Industry vs. The People" site, much like "The Recording Industry vs. The People". Only this time with a decidedly offensive bent, and tips on forming class actions and enlisting states' AGs as well as filing complaints with the FTC.
Stop spam, a major waste of bandwidth, to solve the supposed problem? Oh no, too hard. Besides, some spammers are downstream customers and the recipients are private and business customers. If that wasted bandwidth shows up buried in the lossage numbers they use to justify their next pseudo-legal FUBAR, well that just gets more people closer to their arbitrary cut-off earning them the 20 minute Time Out. I certainly someone tracks who gets the 20 minute notice and who doesn't, and which of those run P2P and which use as much or more bandwidth but not P2P. They can't shoot the sitting ducks like a bad hunter, they'll try to snatch those ducks underwater from where they sit like a fat alligator. A few decoys on "problem" and "non-problem" lines, with DPI detection and data recording for compariops, and Comcast could be forced to sell off enough shares that customers become the major shareholders.
In medicine, it's called "allopathic", treating the symptoms. Doctors frequently do this because they're working from complaints and tests, not from a theoretical understanding of the systems. You can take aspirin for a headache. It'll probably work. You can't know without extensive testing whether that headache is due to a brain tumor (obSchwartzenneger: "It's NOT a tumah! It's NOT!").
A 4G vibration that's not felt by the astronauts but still occur in the vehicle could still rip the booster apart.
The DIRECT 2.0 alternative http://www.launchcomplexmodels.com/Direct/index.htm wouldn't have this problem. It uses mostly existing systems that have already been tested. (THIS is the real reuse of shuttle parts, not Ares). Yes, these have had their problems, but it was the engineers' idea, not something administratively mandated for them to design. I trust the engineers. When they ran things we had "failure is not an option" (Apollo 13). When management types took over we got "My God, Thiokol, what do you want me to do, wait until April to launch?" (SS Challenger). I'd sooner ride a non-man-rated SpaceX Falcon than anything devised by NASA management committee, much less something so devised then revised to eliminate the experience of the problem but not the problem. I'd at least like enough warning that something was going horribly wrong so I could scream.
I don't see why it would be the case.
If they recognise the dot and try to remove it from the mirror reflection then they don't understand that they are an object in a world full of objects.
On the other hand, if their first reaction is to act on their own body to remove the dot, then they do understand that they exist as an individual object.
They might not be able to talk about it or have deep thoughts on the subject but they are aware of their own existence.
You didn't bother to follow the link I suggested. I'll give you a fairly unsatisfying response and suggest you follow the link.
I can't prove the response I quoted above wasn't written by a bot. Had I been there when you (if there is a "you" there) supposedly wrote it, I would have a recollection of the incident, and that's all. Things happen that we forget about, and we remember things that didn't happen, and far more often remember things adequately accurately, but not entirely accurately.
Had I been there to see "you" write it, I'd still have no way at all the prove that "you" actually had (and continue to have) conscious awareness of that, or any other act of yours. You may operate entirely on stimulus/response reactions and preprogrammed behavior. (This is what the wiki article covers, "zombies", unaware but apparently completely operational humans).
In order to know otherwise, I'd have to be able to experience your subjective awareness from within your own head, inside my own. But then I'd be experiencing something from within my own head, and couldn't be sure what was my own subjective experience, and what was yours. You might see an object that we agree is red. When you experience it and I experience it, we come to the same conclusion. When I experience your stream of consciousness, I might still interpret it as what I call red. But what you experience as red I might experience as green if seen through my eyes, yet because we agree on what to call it, we'd never know we see completely different colors. This extrapolates to the entirety of experience, including the null set, in which one or the other of us experiences nothing at all, yet behaves perfectly normally.
You don't see why this should be the case. You might not 'see' anything. I can't know. And we can't know what's going on in a magpie's mind. If it's impossible to tap into another human's consciousness, it's doubly hard to prove what you experienced when tapping a mapgpie's mind was what the magpie was experiencing, because you'd be 'seeing' it in a mind belonging to an entirely different species. You can't even ask the magpie whether they experienced anything, much less what that was. I can't even believe your response to that question because you might be programmed to respond with something that looks very much like a normal human response.
Turn the Turing Test around and point it back at yourself and everybody you know, and consider what it would take to entirely eliminate any false positive results. It can't be done. Any conclusion otherwise will contain a logical flaw based on a presumption of the conclusion.
If you want a more general coverage of the topic, read up on phenomenology. If that's too difficult, watch the movie "Dark Star" and watch what happens to the bomb.
You are correct that mirror neurons react to images of the subject. However, their reactivity is not shown to be either necessary or sufficient for self-recognition. Just because they act this way does not imply other neural systems are not required. They pretty obviously are -- try to recognize something when you have no brain stem and so no reticular activating system to make you wake up. The other systems involved in self-recognition may be necessary and sufficient.
And self-recognition is not self-awareness. The study showed self-recognition. The New Scientist seems to be the source of the flawed logical jump, from the first to second sentences of TFA.
Recognition (including self-) is easy to demostrate. Awareness (ie. conscious experience) of any sort is impossible to show. It would require being able to tap into the presumed consciousness of the subject in order to detect that the subject knows they've recognized the target object. This is as true of humans as of magpies. For a taste of, and links to, arguments regarding inability to prove awareness, start at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
"I look forward to it being profiled on Top Gear."
I look forward to the new specialty magazine, "Chair & Driver". There can be a professional circuit section, with souped up motorized wheel chairs, and a 'dirt track' stock chair section for vehicles like this. And just wait until Ky "Rocketman" Michaelson http://www.the-rocketman.com/ gets into it.
Oh wait, he has: http://www.the-rocketman.com/full-throttle.html
Seriously, this thing should fall under an unregulatable category, much like ultralight aircraft in the US that couldn't possibly meet FAA licensing requirements without growing into an entirely different vehicle.
Photoshop is only a recent tool for image manipulation, done digitally. Photos have been doctored in order to alter memories in ways that are even stated in TFA. They worked just as well.
Fact is, we don't "remember" anything. We construct what we view as memory from stored pieces of data. Whatever fits the stored associations with all relevant previous data well enough to be considered our fastest best match gets chosen. It is always wrong to some degree, and is surprisingly easy to alter to a surprising degree of inaccuracy.
False memories, implanted memories, suppressed memories, eye witness reliability, all are topics within the memory studies in cognitive psychology. The #1 top expert in the field is Elizabeth Loftus. She's listed in the references in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory_syndrome which is as good a start as any. Altered photography is just one of the many ways of playing around with long term storage, retrieval and reconstruction.
Come on kids, this is Psych 101 stuff. Just because software gets used doesn't make it newsworthy. Try to get over the hype.
Obviously they asked a panel of, at least primarily, neuroscientists. TFA doesn't mention that the report wasn't an all-around technology assessment, but rather is from the outset a futurism projection of neuroscience: http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12177&page=R1
They didn't come to the conclusion, as implied by the tone of TFA, rather it was their starting point and working boundary.
Had they asked a panel of archeologists, the battlefield of the future would probably be inside the Great Pyramid, but The Guardian would fail to note the profession of the report writers, instead simply calling them "leading scientists".
KARI flew the 100% indigenous KSR-3 (Korean Sounding Rocket) five times from 1993 to 2002 with a 100% success rate. The original KSLV-1 was to be a KSR-3 core with two KSR-3s strapped on in parallel, a KSR-3 second stage, and an apogee kick motor based on the earlier KSR-1 and -2 solid motors.
Suddenly in 2005 KARI announced a switch to the Russian Angara booster, unbuilt much less unproven, using entirely contracted ground equipment, and 10 times bigger than what should have flown to orbit by 2007, instead of (now, so far) 2009. And they're locked into the new design through the KSLV-3, due in 2015. Supposedly.
In 2006, Korea had 2 candidates selected as cosmonauts, one of which flew a 10 day mission to ISS in 2007. I'll bet you can't name either of them, but I'll bet you can guess who's going to be making money for years, who paid for prestige now empty, and which is sorry.
To be fair, this 9 month delay is due far more to components lost in the Chinese earthquake than the 30 day late shipment of Russian ground equipment.
Cooking is forced decomposition. The "easier" calories are, as TFA says, from pre-processing otherwise difficult to digest material. Scavengers have been around for a long time. Where's the smart vultures?
The pre-processing most relevant to cognition is making making the nucleotides adenylate, inosinate and guanylate easier to extract, from which the neurotransmitter glutamate is made. Glutamate availability is well documented as necessary to effective cognition. We are tuned to detect those nucleotides via the "5th taste", umami. Monosodium glutamate is to tongue receptors what benzodiazapines and narcotics are to the brain's GABA and endorphin receptors -- fake keys that fit the locks. Food treated with MSG seems "heartier" when tasted, and one might feel full sooner because the brain is easily fooled, but hungry again sooner because the stomach is slow, but not stupid. Chinese and similar cuisines are rich in glutamate containing foods, and frequently MSG is added (as "meat tenderizer" or "flavor enhancer") to the food.
It remains to be seen whether the "intelligence" (more undefinable as you know more about it) is a beneficial evolutionary trait. We haven't been around in the "smart" version long enough to serve as proof. "Intelligence" may be nothing more than one mutation that provided a species one means to become the ecological equivalent of a cancer, and providing us with the ability to live in denial of our nature by deluding ourselves about "superiority".
The superior design may well prove to be a scavenger (make no mistake, we are) with low water content and requirement, and cognitive abilities may prove irrelevant or even counter-productive. What species is expected to survive a nuclear war, and what species can conduct one?
Evidence of scavenger nature in humans and cockroaches (and the delusional nature of the former) can be found in "social facilitation". Performance in enhanced by the presence of others. Cockroaches run mazes faster when they "know other cockroaches are watching". Bugger*. How can they have what in us we consider to be a highly complex (ie. "social") behavior with no cognitive ability to speak of? They don't "abstract" being watched. Social psychology needs to check in with evolutionary biology. The scavenger that detects competition will do what it can to get to the calories fastest -- run faster -- and thus be more successful. Or it might just use its mutant powers to conduct rapid decomposition on demand as well as pretend it's not just rotten**.
*,** Both double meanings unintended, but I'll take them.
What kind of tinfoil mickey are you trying slip in my drink?
Grenada, blanks, ham operator, WTF? citation or door.
CBS news broadcast footage, 25 October 1983, compare early and late night versions. The early version included a voice over of the radio operator. But both showed the same insanely ridiculous staged "rescue" tactic of having the St. George's students running crouched beneath a line of M-16s being fired by members of the 22nd Marine Amphibs. You can corroborate by looking for the reports of the SEAL team that secured "Radio Free Grenada", and compare when that was supposed to have occurred compared to when that station went off the air, also compared with other hams' CQ logs showing LOS from an operator on Grenada.
If you'd like to do your own homework to get the aluminum taste out of your mouth, try to come up with a logical reason why the US Marine unit mobilized to replace those killed in the Beirut barracks bombing were diverted en route to "save" students at an off-shore medical school instead of reinforcing the part of the US presence lost in the bombing. To give you a head start, conceive of a form of presentation between fiction and documentary and then watch "Wag The Dog".
I'd also suggest you read Paul Linebarger's "Psychological Warfare", but I know you'll no more do that than you will attempt to follow up on the other stuff.
Indiana Jones and the New Version of Dukem Nukem.
Anyone who is surprised at this is probably unaware that disruption, denial and subversion of communications is a common factor in all modern (as in more modern than two groups of grunting and growling rock throwers) warfare. Telegraph and phone lines got cut. Radio got jammed. Alexander had fires built upwind of enemy columns to make it hard for them to see each other easily. The US Army confiscated the radio of the British ham operator on Grenada that was broadcasting a running commentary of infantry firing over the heads of the medical students being "rescued". The US news broadcast footage clearly showed them being forced to run under a line of firing (most likely blanks) M-16s; the early news shows broadcast the ham operator's reports along with the footage, but his reports were absent from the late news broadcasts.
Command and control (C2) refers to the ability of military commanders to carry out strategy and tactics. The addition of Communications (C3) refers to inclusion of the ability to carry out C2 without being present on the battlefield and the ability of units to coordinate over distance. That's the US version, the NATO version of C3 being "Consultation, Command and Control", just a different label for the same process. It's now frequently referred to as C4 because it includes computers. Since they are used for more than communication, the fourth C is not redundant. The other thing they're used for is data analysis for intelligence generation, so the "I" in "C4I" *is* redundant. And all the other extensions out to C4ISTAR is just showing off.
Being "cyber", it's pertinent to /. but it's not news unless one assumes that one particular form of communication should be immune to this "time honored tradition".
of people with ideas who want other people to do the work but still get paid for the idea.
The only ones who make any money selling their ideas are the ones whose ideas are about how to make money. Some of them manage to sell their ideas, usually on infomercials. Almost nobody except the person selling the idea makes any money. And you're not trying to sell an idea about how to make money.
Get to work, give it away, or give it up. Ideas are easy, and free.
I ran and supported my own Linux box for Matlab for a while. It took a fraction of my time to keep things running.
I also ran one for a lab that paid for migration, OS and Java Desktop support, because I was supposed to be a researcher, not an admin. It took about the same fraction of time to keep things running. A quarter of that fraction was waiting for answers. A quarter was spent getting non-answers from clueless drones reading problem-solution flow charts and having to find a cluefull support person. A quarter was trying to understand support people who knew what they meant but weren't good at communicating it. And a quarter was divided between figuring out what the poor communicators meant (luckily I already spoke *nix) and fixing things myself anyway. I spent the same amount of time not doing science both ways, and the latter lab was out a relatively small support payment. On the other hand since I was sometimes just following instructions rather than problem solving, I understood the system less. I'd rather they just let me do it, and since I couldn't pass along as much knowledge to my successor, they probably ended up wishing I'd done it myself also.
Luckily it was only Linux. Now Matlab, you can pay a bundle for support, and another bundle for a rotating plate full of grad students, or you can pay through the nose and still need a hybrid engineer/coder to make your flops flip. In the first case, I supported the Linux and the lab supported a doctoral student by paying him to code Matlab. In the second, we had ample grad students, each with ample knowledge, but so much turn around that things went only half as fast as at the first lab.
I should also mention that just before I got there the first lab was running Matlab on Irix and was hemoraging support money. Those huge SGI boxes ended up as great end tables.
Turn them on. Time the time-to-desktop or other end end point in the boot process. Look at how long it took. The try to justify why you have to have them up and running faster than the minute or two it takes. What is it for, the NORAD anti-missile defense system? Flip the switch and go take a leak, they'll be ready when you get back.
> I wholeheartedly agree with you, and I wonder if perhaps the influence of
> appealing to the media may have colored this article.
There's no doubt in my mind that's the case. See Alan Boyle's "Cosmic Log" of 7/12 on MSNBC.com for an extensive rant I wrote on just that subject.
> Honestly, I think the best method we'll have for determining when language
> came about will be an expansive study of ancient artwork and tools, trying
> to find out if the information necessary to make them could have been
> transmitted without language.
Examine your definition of language. Language generates spontaneously, even in the absence of auditory and vocal systems (children born deaf to hearing parents in isolated areas develop a sign language with the parents, even though the parents had no previous experience with sign). The first language was almost certainly sign language. The language needed for making and using tools was probably tool making and use, with gestural emphasis added. The brain's capability for "generative grammar", the major developmental milestone in language, probably evolved well before speech, which itself was at first likely just some more emphatic additions to the sign language. A grunt is just a grunt, but a grunt and gesture is communication. Even now 2/3 of our spoken language is nonvocal -- signs, signals, gestures, kinesics, proxemics and chronemics.
It's unlikely humans are the only species with generative grammar capability. I don't know of any brain imaging to support it (of Wernicke's area in this case, as opposed to Broca's which I referred to previously), but Penny Patterson's dissertation contains at least two instances of Koko compounding signs into a new sign phrase -- that's generative. And she used them repeatedly in sentences with a set order -- that's grammar. One of those phrases was essentially cussing (Mike + dirty + toilet + stink: "Mike is shit.") -- and that's language at its finest.
"What I tell you three times is true." I'm saying it once but two others already have.
Feynman's "Lectures" + "Tips"
If you want an expert's opinion, ask the chancellor of John Moore's University in Liverpool. He's an astrophysicist, as well as a member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club For Scientists, which counts for naught save as an indicator of a sense of humor and thus probably approachability. And he's a bit of a musician so I hear. He has a web site with a contact link: http://brianmay.com/main.html#
The fact that the human auditory system is "sensitive" in the 2K to 4K range is no indication of language in us or any hominid, present or past. The average human voice covers 2 octaves, not just this one, and the range of those two varies considerably, from around 350 Hz to 4.5K. It is far more likely that homonid hearing evolved to perceive the most salient sounds, those requiring fight-or-flight response or else used for hunting, thus increasing surivability. The vocal cords most likely evolved to produce sounds at the range the auditory system was already primed for.
Telephones reproduce speech between 400 Hz and 3.4K, because that's where the most information content in speech is. This is at odds with the 2K-to-4K claim in TFA. The portion of the auditory system examined in TFA is the resonant cavity responsible for filling in 'missing' information. Language as normally practiced does not require this. Survival oriented hearing, predating spoken language by several species, does.
I'll be somewhat impressed if they can show that chimps do not have the same auditory system tuning. Chimps do, after all, have greater left than right frontal cortex, in the same area as human language perception and production, and that wouldn't have evolved without a reason either.
"a bigger threat to user-generated sites emerges: The law is increasingly siding with rights owners."
The law *exists* to protect the rights of the owners. Intellectual property is still property. Got a problem with that? Then if I take your car, don't call the cops.