It's not just "a few" order of magnitude off, it's 14 orders of magnitude. That's a lot, by any standard in science.
Not by cosmology's standard, not really. Most estimates about cosmology - from Universe's age to the distance to nearest stars - were off by far greater amount until the last century or so, and some of them - such as the size of the Universe - still could be.
And by the way, could we let the "fixed that for you" meme die?
Do not want.
It's awesome, and it's getting old, as in invincible old master.
The complaints are coming from the people buying this tripe--and rightfully so.
If this spam really starts turning up in every Amazon search, I'd imagine a lot more people will be complaining, and eventually looking for alternatives. Someone at Amazon has let greed got to their heads, and is chasing their golden egg laying goose with an axe on hand and a mad glint in the eye.
You used to be able to acquire a book and know that since it was a book the author(s) had done their homework. It was hard for idiots to get publishing deals because the publishers would actually read their work.
Um, no. People who have no idea what they're talking about - or know but lie intentionally - have never have any problem getting heard. Publishers select books based on how much they'll sell, not on whether or not they're factually correct. If you want the latter, you need to subscribe to a peer-reviewed journal, and even those are ultimately untrustworthy.
If you trust a book just because it's a book then, to put it bluntly, you are an idiot.
Wrong! Read the case document. He did not attempt to have sex with a 13 year old girl. He attempted to have sex with an adult who he thought was a 13 year old girl.
In other words, he intended to have sex with a 13 year old girl, but accidentally ended up trying to pick up an adult instead. It's exactly the same as attempted murder, attempted robbery, or attempted scam: not a thought crime, but trying to commit a crime.
You trying to stretch the concept of "thoughtcrime" to cover a case where a criminal fails in his attempt to commit a crime due to incompetence is the same as calling someone attracted to a 17-year old a pedophile: it makes the concept meaningless.
Now arguments contending that his punishment may be ineffective at preventing future crime (ex: other vectors of attack) have some weight behind them. That he has "paid his dues" is just weak.
No, it isn't. One of the ideas behind the legal system is that punishment should be proportional to the crime. That means that for each crime, there comes a time where no further punishment is acceptable, even if that means you might offend again. In other words, once you've paid your dues, you've paid your dues, and should be treated the exact same way as every other citizen.
This is analogous to how it's not acceptable to arrest angry people just because they're more prone to violent crime than calm ones.
Yes, but he didn't make and act on plans to have sex with a 13 year old girl. He made and acted on plans to have sex with an adult who he thought was a 13 year old girl. That's the difference between a conspiracy crime and a thought crime.
Um... No. Thought crime would be thinking of having sex with a 13 year old girl - you know, fantasizing. This guy went beyond that and attempted to have sex with a 13 year old girl. His attempt simply failed.
It's a bit like the difference between fantasizing about killing your boss, and taking a shoot at your boss but missing. The first would be at most a thought crime, the second is attempted murder: you thought about doing a crime vs. you tried to do a crime but were sufficiently incompetent to fail.
So yes, he went and made plans to have sex with a 13 year old girl. It's the exact same as someone planning to find the treasure at the end of the rainbow: sure, there is no treasure, but he planned finding that nonexistent treasure anyway.
That is an unethical stance, and one easily adopted by sociopaths. To put it bluntly, I don't want to live in that kind of world, so why should I act that way? (meaning in this case: the act of accepting sociopathy as inevitable and acceptable, particularly when given authority.)
Sociopathy is inevitable. It's a state of being where you have no empathy. Just look at the number of posts in this very discussion who are in favour of castrating, killing, imprisoning for life, or inflicting any other kind of pointless suffering on pedophiles or criminals. That's sociopathy right there: the very act of vengeance requires you to suppress any empathy you might feel towards the target first; in other words, making you sociopathic against him.
In fact, advertising your sociopathy - "I will be though on crime" - is going to help your political career and standing in society. All talk about "bleeding hearts" is also essentially mocking feeling pity or compassion, thus advocating sociopathy. "Why should I pay for my neighbour's medical bills?" Well, a sociopath sure can't think of any reason, now can he?
Sociopaths will always be amongst us, because there will always be people who hail them as their heroes, as long as they direct their evil against acceptable targets.
Criminals don't have the right to vote, yet must pay taxes, and are generally used as a dog to kick by anyone who wants to demonstrate how "though" they are. I think I see a connection... Who was it again who said something about taxes without representation being tyranny?
I couldn't operate my thermostat to control the temperature in my home, use any form of entertainment other than a book (no CDs, DVDs, TVs, etc.), and driving a new car would be banned as well.
How are you going to get that book? You can't get cash from ATMs, and you can't use a credit card, since the card handling systems are computerized nowadays. Not that it matters, since pretty much every job requires interacting with computers at some point.
That sounds something like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or any other iron-fisted dictator throughout the history would had said.
We all make choices, and choices have consequences. This guy did his, and was judged; but so have the "though on crime" crowd done, and should be judged by that.
Yes, but how can pedophilia, as an orientation, not end in child abuse?
Jacking off to child porn or finding a mate with suitable hormonal imbalances comes to mind.
Are you saying that there are celibate pedophiles?
Given that there are celibate heterosexuals, and that pedophiles outnumber - at least judging by the amount of hysteria - heterosexuals at least 100 to 1, I find it very likely.
Javascript is, as the name implies, a scripting language.
At the time, that distinction was relevant. It isn't anymore.
It describes the intended use cases the language is optimized for, and specifically the size of the applications it's meant to produce.
You can write COBOL in any language, and you can write good code in any language.
You can, but that doesn't mean it's quite as easy. C++ can't do anything C couldn't, yet it's preferred nowadays, precisely because things like data hiding enforce a certain amount of discipline, which in turn makes large multi-person projects feasible.
If you don't have the discipline for Javascript, you could always write a preprocessor that forces it on you, but I think you'll find that knowledgeable programmers using it on real projects don't tend to have these problems.
Good enough programmers can write anything in anythin Turing complete. That says nothing about how good the language is for that particular task, however.
Another fact is that this same handholding slows down good programmers until you only have mediocrity everywhere. I don't think it even succeeds in making bad programmers mediocre, as TheDailyWTF will confirm.
You have a rather interesting definition of a good programmer: "he who produces code the fastest." Traditionally, it's been "he who's code executes fastest or fails least", but I guess that's Javascript generation for you:p.
A good programmer in a good language can easily outperform ten bad-to-mediocre programmers in a crippled language.
You think that forcing the programmer to decide what kind of data he'll store in a variable to be crippling?
It doesn't hurt as much as you might imagine when you have full test coverage. In fact, given full test coverage, runtime errors are compile-time errors, meaning fewer runtime errors slipping by than you'd have with a program written in a stricter language but with fewer tests.
And what if you write in a strict language and run as many tests as you would with the sloppy language? How many errors do you get then?
mostly because they like to pretend that variables are untyped
That's not pretending. In languages like Javascript, the variables are. It's the objects that are typed.
Perhaps you might explain the significance of this to me? Because either way, the end result is the good old "cast everything to (void *)" pattern of C/C++.
Duh. What did you expect?
That the language either allows any operation on any object, or acknowledges that objects have types and so should the variables that refer to them.
Here's a hint: Even in Java, there are many cases where something will fail at runtime when you try to do something the object doesn't support, faster than you can say NullPointerException.
Yes, there is, altought ClassCastException would be more relevant to the topic. However, Javascript has all the same cases and a host of others on top of that. That is the problem with pretending objects are typeless: it moves error checking from compile time to runtime.
You seem to be assuming that we all write crazy code where no one knows what type of object we're dealing with.
No, I'm saying that Javascript makes it really really easy to make just that kind of code, and once you have more than one programmer involved, it's far harder to keep track of what's going on than in, say, Java.
In practice, it's not that far off from anonymous subclasses in Java, and it's significantly faster t
For now, you may have a point...but eventually, full games will be natively coded to be browser-based without any extra plugins.
I sincerely doubt it. Javascript is, as the name implies, a scripting language. It has the same problem as with other scripting languages: it's easy to hack something together, but as the size of the project grows, that same feature makes it harder and harder to keep the whole thing from collapsing into a rats nest lined with spaghetti.
The awful fact is that most programmers are mediocre and need handholding from the language to produce good or even okay code. Languages like Javascript or Python allow - even encourage - sloppiness, since that facilitates writing quick and dirty scripts, but a huge application with multiple developers requires damage control which they lack.
It doesn't exactly help that scripting languages tend to catch most errors at runtime rather than compile time, mostly because they like to pretend that variables are untyped yet fail if you try to do something the object doesn't support. Javascript is even worse, since Python at least checks that the basic block structure is sane before starting to execute.
In short, only a masochist would try to code a non-trivial game on Javascript.
I think Mono is a good thing but it's not even close to supporting the type of WORA support that Java enjoys today.
Unfortunately, now that Oracle has acquired Sun, I'm pretty sure Java will be perverted and tied into Oracle's database products. Oh well, it's about time to learn LISP anyway...
Write Once, Debug Everywhere used to be the joke about Java but today WORA has really come true there.
Well, it would if developers stopped using look and feel changer to emulate the host system. At least the GTK version is hopelessly buggy, and more often than not crashes.
Bombing civilians is a heinous crime, but the ideology behind it is different.
"My cause is just, therefore I may do anything, for ends justify the means."
Sounds about the same to me. Al-Qaida, McVeigh, and torture supporters in the government and military are all the same, and the proper name for what they are is "scum".
You can not base something on a placebo effect. You will not I said A placebo effect. There are different kinds, all are well known, and none heal anything.
Placebo effect cures psychosomatic illness just fine. Indirect effects of improved mood - such as getting off your butt and exercising instead of drowning your sorrows on beer - can also have quite a large effect on your health.
Of course homeopathy won't help with serious illness, but most illnesses are not serious, and will pass by on their own. In such case, a placebo to alleviate the symptoms - or, rather, how the patient experiences the symptoms - can be the best possible help.
MS seems to be steadily evolving into a patent troll.
It's simply another example of the tragedy of the commons: it's more profitable to let someone else pay for R&D and then hijack the profits through a patent, than pay for it yourself and run the risk of getting hit by this tactic.
A software company led by a rational CEO who's trying to maximize shareholder value should pursue patent troll status.
old people using the two foot method and then using the wrong foot to brake, panicking and pressing the "brake" foot down even harder
Why would that affect Toyota more than other cars?
People that heard about the problems and are trying to get on the bandwagon in the hopes of a free new car
If you can't disprove an accusation, cast doubts to the reliability of the accuser. Do it in a vague enough way that nothing concrete can possible ever be proved one way or another.
Nice, but a bit transparent.
Come up with a way to sift those and other incidences of driver error out of the numbers and then you got something to talk about.
Driver errors should affect all cars equally. If they affect Toyota more than others, then there's something wrong with Toyota.
Astroturf moar, you still have lots to learn young shill.
That's a good question. Someone should be asking the people who put Javascript in Netscape the same thing! I mean, there's absolutely no use cases for having dynamic documents!
True, there isn't. A "dynamic document" is an unbelievably annoying gimmick. Recently they've graduated to full-blown Web Applications, which is fine; but prior to XMLHttpRequest and its ilk I usually surfed with Javascript disabled to avoid all the "dynamic" crap.
You notice patterns in your sensory inputs, and learn these as abstractions. Then you notice patterns in these abstractions, and build higher abstractions on top of them. Then you just repeat forever.
What is it possible to learn at all?
Anything that has a connection to the physical world, where "physical world" is defined as your sensory input.
Please note that this is a huge - likely infinite - set.
How *might* the brain go about doing what it does?
It does exactly what I just said, and is aided by some special features such as mirror neurons. It's just data mining, which neural networks happen to be very well suited for. All organisms with a neural system exhibit this behaviour to the degree their brains allow, with more complex brains reaching higher levels of abstraction.
I wonder what kind of concepts an AI or "uploaded" human would come up with? With no more physical limits to the size of the neural net, you could simply add new neurons to the network and see what happens. The blind often get far more use out of their ears because their visual cortex gets repurposed; here we would be adding more computing power to the cognitive areas.
How could we duplicate it in a computer to see if the theory is correct?
Well, simulating a neuron is actually pretty straightforward. They're not all that complex. If there's 100 billion neurons in human brains, and each has the maximum of 10,000 connections to other neurons, as well as its own excitation level to track, it would take around 4.1 petabytes to store the whole thing. A neuron can switch its state the maximum of around 1000 times per second, so you would need to process about 4E18 operations per second, half of them pointer dereferences. Also, it's an embarassingly parallel program.
In other words, a human-level AI should be doable with a large enough datacenter right now. If you drop the requirement for real-time, 4000 100-dollar hard disks would be sufficient to hold the database of state.
However, a neural network is not really necessary, any pattern recognition system will exhibit some level of intelligence. As long as an agent can learn connections between different sensory inputs, and react to these patterns when one is started, it is going to appear to have at least a bit of intelligence. And once it starts deriving patterns from already-learned patterns, rather than raw sensory stimuli, it has begun its journey towards abstract thought.
The trouble with your complacence is, we're most likely overextended already. There is little evidence that we can provide nine or ten billion people with the sort of comfortable life that counteracts population growth on this planet's resource base.
What counteracts population growth is not comfort, but small infant mortality and cheap contraceptives. Comfort is nice but not strictly necessary.
The "population explosion" we saw recently was simply medicines becoming available combined with people not having yet adjusted to the fact that they can get one or two kids and be almost certain they'll survive to adulthood. It's already leveling off.
Anyway, what makes you think we're limited to this planet's resource base? Space flight is slowly but surely getting cheaper (and will get really cheap if we ever get over our fear of nuclear rockets). It's just a matter of time before we can tap to asteroid field for raw materials and orbital solar arrays for power.
In the mean time, we could do a lot to help things by switching to nuclear for our electric grids. Pity the Greenpeace wants Earth to choke on smoke instead.
What we're going to end up with is one hellacious engineering problem after another until some form of equilibrium is reached.
Since our engineering skills keep growing, I doubt very much we'll ever reach a real equilibrium. We haven't been at one since we moved from being hunter-gatherers to agriculture, and there's evidence that even that was actually an engineering solution to a resource crisis. Yet here we still are, better off than ever.
Extinction or societal collapse is one option, as is a great big beautiful tomorrow.
Extinction of human life at this point is all but impossible. We've spread everywhere, can adapt to pretty much everything, and can actively think of new solutions to problems. Anything short of total extinction of multi-cellular landlife would be unlikely to get the job done.
But any population curbs that are compatible with a free and just society would help improve the odds of the latter.
As I already told you, the free societies have already experienced a natural population curbs, and the rest are getting there.
Yeah, like the way that respect for other people's cultures should completely dominate cultural imperialism. When I say respect, of course, I don't mean you have to agree with them, but at the same time, you don't have to shove alternatives down their throats.
I haven't suggested shoveling anything down anyone's throat. I have merely suggested letting the Chinese people decide for themselves, rather than Chinese Communist Party deciding for everyone and hiding alternatives to prevent any of their subjects from disagreeing.
You wait. If China becomes big enough, you're going to get a huge taste of your own medicine.
Actually, wouldn't that be incentive for me to not wait, but try to convert China to my way of thinking?
Stupid, narrow-minded little American.
I'm not an American. Perhaps it's you who should widen your mental image of the world a bit?
Thinking that his opinions are shared throughout the world, or that these opinions can be logically derived for everyone, when we don't even share the same axioms.
The axiom I started with is that "nobody likes someone else forcing their will on them". If someone doesn't agree with that axiom, why would they disagree with that someone else being me? And if they do agree with it, it follows that democracy would be a better form of government to them, since it conforms to that axiom more closely.
Also, all your arguments seem to take that axiom as a given, so you clearly do share it.
You say that a dislike for censorship can be derived from considering being censored by someone not in line with your goals. What about, for example, working? I don't like working under a boss who's goals are contrary to my own. Does that mean I should have a dislike of work? Does it mean I should shove a dislike of work down everybody else's throats?
Nice rant. Dislike for censorship can be derived from the fact that censorship makes it impossible for you to decide for yourself, since you have no reliable way of getting information about your choices. That's the very reason censorship has been and continues to be such a valuable tool for various dictatorships.
As a side note, Chinese dictatorship certainly seems to consider Western culture superior to theirs, since they feel the need to hide it from their subjects. Why do that, if they believed said subjects would choose said dictatorship over democracy?
Of course censorship sucks for you if the censurer's goals aren't in line with your own. The same applies to anything situation with more than one decision-maker. By considering only the absolute worse case, you haven't at all proven that censorship is evil.
Indeed, the case of many decision makers requires negotiation of a fair and acceptable compromise between them and their goals. A censor attempts to sort-circuit that, by hiding information from other decision makers, and thus wielding power over them.
Are you an idiot? I never said all cultures were equal, and I never thought that. However, if it makes it comforts you that much that everyone that doesn't love the good ol' US of A is lying to themselves, then, well, you are an idiot!
Perhaps. Of course, I never said anything the like, so the lack of cognitive ability seems to better characterize the other party to this exchange. All I have said is that freedom is better than lack of it.
Also, if all cultures are not equal, then it follows that "cultural imperialism" is actually a good thing, as it spreads the superior culture and lets more people enjoy its fruits. You seem to fail to understand what you're saying, and it's logical consequences.
And certainly I never claimed that your culture wasn't superior to some other cultures
Both groups are ignorant fucks who don't deserve the right to vote.
Exactly. Only the people I agree with should have that right. That is the true definition of freedom - the freedom to act and think in ways approved by me!
Slashdot Mirror
Not by cosmology's standard, not really. Most estimates about cosmology - from Universe's age to the distance to nearest stars - were off by far greater amount until the last century or so, and some of them - such as the size of the Universe - still could be.
Do not want.
Fixed that for you.
If this spam really starts turning up in every Amazon search, I'd imagine a lot more people will be complaining, and eventually looking for alternatives. Someone at Amazon has let greed got to their heads, and is chasing their golden egg laying goose with an axe on hand and a mad glint in the eye.
Um, no. People who have no idea what they're talking about - or know but lie intentionally - have never have any problem getting heard. Publishers select books based on how much they'll sell, not on whether or not they're factually correct. If you want the latter, you need to subscribe to a peer-reviewed journal, and even those are ultimately untrustworthy.
If you trust a book just because it's a book then, to put it bluntly, you are an idiot.
In other words, he intended to have sex with a 13 year old girl, but accidentally ended up trying to pick up an adult instead. It's exactly the same as attempted murder, attempted robbery, or attempted scam: not a thought crime, but trying to commit a crime.
You trying to stretch the concept of "thoughtcrime" to cover a case where a criminal fails in his attempt to commit a crime due to incompetence is the same as calling someone attracted to a 17-year old a pedophile: it makes the concept meaningless.
Fixed that for you.
No, it isn't. One of the ideas behind the legal system is that punishment should be proportional to the crime. That means that for each crime, there comes a time where no further punishment is acceptable, even if that means you might offend again. In other words, once you've paid your dues, you've paid your dues, and should be treated the exact same way as every other citizen.
This is analogous to how it's not acceptable to arrest angry people just because they're more prone to violent crime than calm ones.
Um... No. Thought crime would be thinking of having sex with a 13 year old girl - you know, fantasizing. This guy went beyond that and attempted to have sex with a 13 year old girl. His attempt simply failed.
It's a bit like the difference between fantasizing about killing your boss, and taking a shoot at your boss but missing. The first would be at most a thought crime, the second is attempted murder: you thought about doing a crime vs. you tried to do a crime but were sufficiently incompetent to fail.
So yes, he went and made plans to have sex with a 13 year old girl. It's the exact same as someone planning to find the treasure at the end of the rainbow: sure, there is no treasure, but he planned finding that nonexistent treasure anyway.
Sociopathy is inevitable. It's a state of being where you have no empathy. Just look at the number of posts in this very discussion who are in favour of castrating, killing, imprisoning for life, or inflicting any other kind of pointless suffering on pedophiles or criminals. That's sociopathy right there: the very act of vengeance requires you to suppress any empathy you might feel towards the target first; in other words, making you sociopathic against him.
In fact, advertising your sociopathy - "I will be though on crime" - is going to help your political career and standing in society. All talk about "bleeding hearts" is also essentially mocking feeling pity or compassion, thus advocating sociopathy. "Why should I pay for my neighbour's medical bills?" Well, a sociopath sure can't think of any reason, now can he?
Sociopaths will always be amongst us, because there will always be people who hail them as their heroes, as long as they direct their evil against acceptable targets.
Criminals don't have the right to vote, yet must pay taxes, and are generally used as a dog to kick by anyone who wants to demonstrate how "though" they are. I think I see a connection... Who was it again who said something about taxes without representation being tyranny?
How are you going to get that book? You can't get cash from ATMs, and you can't use a credit card, since the card handling systems are computerized nowadays. Not that it matters, since pretty much every job requires interacting with computers at some point.
That sounds something like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot or any other iron-fisted dictator throughout the history would had said.
We all make choices, and choices have consequences. This guy did his, and was judged; but so have the "though on crime" crowd done, and should be judged by that.
Jacking off to child porn or finding a mate with suitable hormonal imbalances comes to mind.
Given that there are celibate heterosexuals, and that pedophiles outnumber - at least judging by the amount of hysteria - heterosexuals at least 100 to 1, I find it very likely.
Because we don't have Sharia law here, and consequently won't mutilate people as a punishment.
Crawl back to Dark Ages or Middle-East, whichever you came from.
It describes the intended use cases the language is optimized for, and specifically the size of the applications it's meant to produce.
You can, but that doesn't mean it's quite as easy. C++ can't do anything C couldn't, yet it's preferred nowadays, precisely because things like data hiding enforce a certain amount of discipline, which in turn makes large multi-person projects feasible.
Good enough programmers can write anything in anythin Turing complete. That says nothing about how good the language is for that particular task, however.
You have a rather interesting definition of a good programmer: "he who produces code the fastest." Traditionally, it's been "he who's code executes fastest or fails least", but I guess that's Javascript generation for you :p.
You think that forcing the programmer to decide what kind of data he'll store in a variable to be crippling?
And what if you write in a strict language and run as many tests as you would with the sloppy language? How many errors do you get then?
Perhaps you might explain the significance of this to me? Because either way, the end result is the good old "cast everything to (void *)" pattern of C/C++.
That the language either allows any operation on any object, or acknowledges that objects have types and so should the variables that refer to them.
Yes, there is, altought ClassCastException would be more relevant to the topic. However, Javascript has all the same cases and a host of others on top of that. That is the problem with pretending objects are typeless: it moves error checking from compile time to runtime.
No, I'm saying that Javascript makes it really really easy to make just that kind of code, and once you have more than one programmer involved, it's far harder to keep track of what's going on than in, say, Java.
I sincerely doubt it. Javascript is, as the name implies, a scripting language. It has the same problem as with other scripting languages: it's easy to hack something together, but as the size of the project grows, that same feature makes it harder and harder to keep the whole thing from collapsing into a rats nest lined with spaghetti.
The awful fact is that most programmers are mediocre and need handholding from the language to produce good or even okay code. Languages like Javascript or Python allow - even encourage - sloppiness, since that facilitates writing quick and dirty scripts, but a huge application with multiple developers requires damage control which they lack.
It doesn't exactly help that scripting languages tend to catch most errors at runtime rather than compile time, mostly because they like to pretend that variables are untyped yet fail if you try to do something the object doesn't support. Javascript is even worse, since Python at least checks that the basic block structure is sane before starting to execute.
In short, only a masochist would try to code a non-trivial game on Javascript.
Unfortunately, now that Oracle has acquired Sun, I'm pretty sure Java will be perverted and tied into Oracle's database products. Oh well, it's about time to learn LISP anyway...
Well, it would if developers stopped using look and feel changer to emulate the host system. At least the GTK version is hopelessly buggy, and more often than not crashes.
"My cause is just, therefore I may do anything, for ends justify the means."
Sounds about the same to me. Al-Qaida, McVeigh, and torture supporters in the government and military are all the same, and the proper name for what they are is "scum".
Placebo effect cures psychosomatic illness just fine. Indirect effects of improved mood - such as getting off your butt and exercising instead of drowning your sorrows on beer - can also have quite a large effect on your health.
Of course homeopathy won't help with serious illness, but most illnesses are not serious, and will pass by on their own. In such case, a placebo to alleviate the symptoms - or, rather, how the patient experiences the symptoms - can be the best possible help.
So how is that different from any other day?
It's simply another example of the tragedy of the commons: it's more profitable to let someone else pay for R&D and then hijack the profits through a patent, than pay for it yourself and run the risk of getting hit by this tactic.
A software company led by a rational CEO who's trying to maximize shareholder value should pursue patent troll status.
old people using the two foot method and then using the wrong foot to brake, panicking and pressing the "brake" foot down even harder
Why would that affect Toyota more than other cars?
If you can't disprove an accusation, cast doubts to the reliability of the accuser. Do it in a vague enough way that nothing concrete can possible ever be proved one way or another.
Nice, but a bit transparent.
Driver errors should affect all cars equally. If they affect Toyota more than others, then there's something wrong with Toyota.
Astroturf moar, you still have lots to learn young shill.
True, there isn't. A "dynamic document" is an unbelievably annoying gimmick. Recently they've graduated to full-blown Web Applications, which is fine; but prior to XMLHttpRequest and its ilk I usually surfed with Javascript disabled to avoid all the "dynamic" crap.
You notice patterns in your sensory inputs, and learn these as abstractions. Then you notice patterns in these abstractions, and build higher abstractions on top of them. Then you just repeat forever.
Anything that has a connection to the physical world, where "physical world" is defined as your sensory input.
Please note that this is a huge - likely infinite - set.
It does exactly what I just said, and is aided by some special features such as mirror neurons. It's just data mining, which neural networks happen to be very well suited for. All organisms with a neural system exhibit this behaviour to the degree their brains allow, with more complex brains reaching higher levels of abstraction.
I wonder what kind of concepts an AI or "uploaded" human would come up with? With no more physical limits to the size of the neural net, you could simply add new neurons to the network and see what happens. The blind often get far more use out of their ears because their visual cortex gets repurposed; here we would be adding more computing power to the cognitive areas.
Well, simulating a neuron is actually pretty straightforward. They're not all that complex. If there's 100 billion neurons in human brains, and each has the maximum of 10,000 connections to other neurons, as well as its own excitation level to track, it would take around 4.1 petabytes to store the whole thing. A neuron can switch its state the maximum of around 1000 times per second, so you would need to process about 4E18 operations per second, half of them pointer dereferences. Also, it's an embarassingly parallel program.
In other words, a human-level AI should be doable with a large enough datacenter right now. If you drop the requirement for real-time, 4000 100-dollar hard disks would be sufficient to hold the database of state.
However, a neural network is not really necessary, any pattern recognition system will exhibit some level of intelligence. As long as an agent can learn connections between different sensory inputs, and react to these patterns when one is started, it is going to appear to have at least a bit of intelligence. And once it starts deriving patterns from already-learned patterns, rather than raw sensory stimuli, it has begun its journey towards abstract thought.
What counteracts population growth is not comfort, but small infant mortality and cheap contraceptives. Comfort is nice but not strictly necessary.
The "population explosion" we saw recently was simply medicines becoming available combined with people not having yet adjusted to the fact that they can get one or two kids and be almost certain they'll survive to adulthood. It's already leveling off.
Anyway, what makes you think we're limited to this planet's resource base? Space flight is slowly but surely getting cheaper (and will get really cheap if we ever get over our fear of nuclear rockets). It's just a matter of time before we can tap to asteroid field for raw materials and orbital solar arrays for power.
In the mean time, we could do a lot to help things by switching to nuclear for our electric grids. Pity the Greenpeace wants Earth to choke on smoke instead.
Since our engineering skills keep growing, I doubt very much we'll ever reach a real equilibrium. We haven't been at one since we moved from being hunter-gatherers to agriculture, and there's evidence that even that was actually an engineering solution to a resource crisis. Yet here we still are, better off than ever.
Extinction of human life at this point is all but impossible. We've spread everywhere, can adapt to pretty much everything, and can actively think of new solutions to problems. Anything short of total extinction of multi-cellular landlife would be unlikely to get the job done.
As I already told you, the free societies have already experienced a natural population curbs, and the rest are getting there.
I haven't suggested shoveling anything down anyone's throat. I have merely suggested letting the Chinese people decide for themselves, rather than Chinese Communist Party deciding for everyone and hiding alternatives to prevent any of their subjects from disagreeing.
Actually, wouldn't that be incentive for me to not wait, but try to convert China to my way of thinking?
I'm not an American. Perhaps it's you who should widen your mental image of the world a bit?
The axiom I started with is that "nobody likes someone else forcing their will on them". If someone doesn't agree with that axiom, why would they disagree with that someone else being me? And if they do agree with it, it follows that democracy would be a better form of government to them, since it conforms to that axiom more closely.
Also, all your arguments seem to take that axiom as a given, so you clearly do share it.
Nice rant. Dislike for censorship can be derived from the fact that censorship makes it impossible for you to decide for yourself, since you have no reliable way of getting information about your choices. That's the very reason censorship has been and continues to be such a valuable tool for various dictatorships.
As a side note, Chinese dictatorship certainly seems to consider Western culture superior to theirs, since they feel the need to hide it from their subjects. Why do that, if they believed said subjects would choose said dictatorship over democracy?
Indeed, the case of many decision makers requires negotiation of a fair and acceptable compromise between them and their goals. A censor attempts to sort-circuit that, by hiding information from other decision makers, and thus wielding power over them.
Perhaps. Of course, I never said anything the like, so the lack of cognitive ability seems to better characterize the other party to this exchange. All I have said is that freedom is better than lack of it.
Also, if all cultures are not equal, then it follows that "cultural imperialism" is actually a good thing, as it spreads the superior culture and lets more people enjoy its fruits. You seem to fail to understand what you're saying, and it's logical consequences.
Exactly. Only the people I agree with should have that right. That is the true definition of freedom - the freedom to act and think in ways approved by me!