Then you're in science fiction land...woo hoo! I like scifi as much as the next/.er but your imaginations of the possible existence of a civilization that can fully digitize continuous data is worthless to a **scientific discussion**
To put it bluntly, this entire study is worthless as science. We don't know how human mind works. Should we ever know, we'd then have the oh so fun task of disentangling accidents of biology from fundamental underlaying limits. And because we don't know how the human mind works, we have no way of knowing whether a particular model presents it accurately or at all (however, any theory that claims human memory is in any way perfect is certainly off to a bad start), thus any conclusions based on it are firmly in the land of wild mass guessing.
To be science it must be able to be tested. It must be a premise that is capable of being proven or disproven. "hard AI" proponents like Kurzweil and the "singularity" believers ignore this part of science.
Well, the complexity of behaviour of the Universe has been increasing since at least the Big Bang in a virtuous circle. Is there some reason why the trend would stop, either now or at some future point? If not, then it seems like singularity would be the inevitable result.
Anti-AI isn't science, it's just the ancient belief about the supernatural specialness of human soul, typically dressed in arguments from lack of imagination and often seasoned with a helping of ego. Nature has no way of telling between "artificial" and "natural", after all, so it's incapable of allowing natural intelligent creatures (us) yet disallowing artificial ones.
Close to infinite is as good a way as any as saying 'fucking big'.
"Fucking big" compared to what? Supply? Obviously not, if the price is close to zero.
There is no 'free', there is no 'infinite demand'. Duh.
Then perhaps you shouldn't use these terms and should instead talk about the actual supply, demand and cost. Because as is, your statement is implying that merely providing free parking would mean everyone suddenly wanted to visit San Fransisco, which is absurd.
That's a standard abuse pattern, and it's built on the belief that "x person has changed' and "they can change them, so they go back."
No, those are simply rationalizations. The truth is that change is scary at the best of times, and much more so when you're tired, traumatized and afraid. And since those circumstances also make you less likely to think rationally and just go with your habits...
It's the same mechanism that keeps people in all kinds of bad circumstances, even if the way out seems both easy and obvious to an outsider: they simply can't see leaving (literally or metaphorically) as a realistic option, even if it's pointed out to them, until after they've left and have spent enough time outside to recover. And it's not just individuals, but organizations and even entire nations that get imprisoned into self-destructive behaviours by what's ultimately their own delusions.
I would not like to meet the person who can digest fibre reinforced plastic... I have a hard enough time with burritos with jalapeno peppers and hot sauce!
But aren't peppers and wheat basically fibre reinforced plastics? Proteins are polymers, after all.
The market cap of the company is 12X annual revenue. A reasonable revenue multiple is between 1X and 3X annual revenue. Tesla might be a great company but that doesn't make it a great investment at the current price.
Maybe, maybe not. The best case scenario is that the market for electric vehicles contunues to grow at increasing rate as gasoline-powered ones get replaced, and Tesla can leverage their current position and experience to take a significant portion of it. While that's certainly risky, such extraordinary circumstances might justify extraordinary estimates for expected utility.
Why hello Mr. Chamberlain, I wondered when you'd show up.
Someone Godwins a discussion about the merits of Linux bootup mechanisms. Someone else mods that Insightful. All that's missing is for someone to compare tmpfs to a death camp... Oops, too late.
Eyewitness accounts have been proven to be wrong over and over again. The assumption of a non-lossy memory is just false.
Let's play a little game. Go to, say, DeviantArt, and pick a random picture. With that picture right in front of you, can you describe it in such detail that I can find it? Or will the game end with me picking a random image that might, with some luck, bear some resemblance to the scene you described?
Eyewitness accounts are difficult because making a useful description is hard, even with memory entirely eliminated as a factor. And it becomes even harder when describing a sequence of events, because human beings don't actually differentiate between their sensory input and imagination - you don't remember hearing a loud noise, you remember hearing a shot. The latter is a conclusion, a scenario your imagination came up with to assign meaning to the former, which is just random noise without it.
This, BTW, explains a lot about human behaviour...
If human consciousness is a phenomenon of a massively complex system of symbolic representation in the brain, then it's only developed gradually over years of absorbing input and forming connections, and developing an AI with true consciousness basically requires simulating a brain down to a low physical level and having it "grow up" over time.
Even if human consciousnes is based on method X, that doesn't mean that consciousness has to be based on method X. Remember, the original Turing machine thought experiment involved paper reels, while modern computers use electronics.
Furthermore, even a copy of the brain doesn't necessarily need to simulate it down to the "physical level". You can probably abstract away a lot of the molecular machinery of the cells; you can likely abstract away less flexible subsystems (like body function regulation); you could perhaps even use techniques of JIT to "compile" more abstract representations from "source code" of a neural network, and update the original network and recompile when learning.
Demand for free resources is whatever non-free resources constrain it at. I don't have infinite amount of cars, and thus can't occupy infinite amounts of parking spaces at once.
And "close to infinite" is meaningless. Either demand is finite, in which case it's infinitely far from infinite, or it's infinite. The only reason to use such a nonsensical expression is rhetorical, which makes me wonder what agenda you're pushing - resource constraints are good because forcing ascetism on others lets you pretend you're a disciplined, spiritual person without engaging in any actual self-discipline or soul-searching?
People don't get violent over ticket scalpers, so why would they do so over parking scalpers either? Store owners, on the other hand, might.
Anyway, this really shouldn't come as surprise - monpolizing a public resource and then extracting rent is, after all, a more efficient way of making profits than actually doing something useful. As technology enables them, the parasites will spread to new niches. This, then, leads to two questions: can the local economy defend itself? And what area of life will be the next victim?
This poor, virginal loser didn't try to create the internet's most purposefully asinine userbase.
"Virgin" is to Internet Tough Guys what "whore" is to fundamentalists: a supposedly devastating insult shaming its victim forever. What neither of you seem to comprehend is that whether one has never had sex or is being paid for it, it's the people who insist on bringing the matter up at otherwise non-sexual contexts who come across as creepy perverts.
Sidereal rotation of Earth in Cartesian space while in orbit about a medium-sized star - itself orbiting lazily within a larger galaxy, with no reference for "up" and "down"?
"Up" means the direction of where the potential energy of an object due to gravity is greater, and "down" the opposite direction. Earth, as a massive body, defines "up" and "down" for all observers within its gravitational sphere of influence. For that matter, so do the Sun and the Milky Way.
What is this "rise" you refer to?
"Sunrise" is the point in spacetime where observer's world line crosses the edge of Earth's shadow from within said shadow.
"Most people" being not crazy didn't help on S11. When there are 6-7 billion of us even a tiny minority of idiots is hundreds of millions of people.
There are not 6-7 billion domestic terrorist in any country on Earth. I'll leave it as an excersize to the reader why that might be.
Moreover since the military are some of the people who say anti-money-laundering initiatives help prevent terrorism, you're implying the military actually gets paid based on the volume of transactions in the international finance system. It doesn't.
I'm asking who's making the claim. "The military" is still too vague, especially with zero evidence provided.
As how many have been stopped, that's a really dumb way for you to bring up the point.
Really? Asking for numbers to assess effectiveness is a dumb way of doing so? Then how do you propose it's assessed?
The answer is 100% of the attacks that involve spending more a grand.
And that's how many? Exactly speaking, or even as an order of magnitude figure?
Legally available firearms only cost more then $500 if you get a really nice one, which terrorists tend not to do, and pressure-cooker bombs are under $100. Congrats dummy, you just walked into that one. If you didn't suck at this you would have anticipated that argument, and claimed that no major attacks had been tried, and therefore my argument was ridiculous.
So what, exactly speaking, are you claiming here? That terrorist attacks don't actually require a lot of money, so money transfers aren't really that important to terrorists, so watching money transfers is pointless from anti-terrorism point of view?
Frankly you're so bad at this I'm already half-convinced you're an anti-BTC agent provocateur.
I'm entirely convinced that you're an idiot. The only question remains whether you genuinely lack intelligence, or just can't bear to be shown wrong on the Internet.
You do realize there are entire staffs of people in the military whose entire job is to figure out "what happens if potential opponent x does this thing that nobody thinks he'll ever do?"
It's called contingency planning, and since the real world is fucking weird it's really useful. For example who would have predicted that Ukraine would break up in February?
So yes, I'd say the odds that Al Qaeda actually use BTC mining to get rich are fairly low. But that doesn't mean I don't want a couple $80k analysts to look into the question for a few months. And that's all this report is saying will happen.
Moreover it doesn't imply that a) future terrorist opponents won't be mining the latest altcoin, or b) AQ won't simply buy some BTC on a shady exchange, put it on a wallet, and mail the thumb-drive to DC.
That's all nice and good. But it still doesn't address my point: Al-Qaeda can't compete against miners who put their money on their mining equipment, because Al-Qaeda put their money into explosives.
Also, you stated above that Al-Qaeda doesn't need money to stake attacks, or at least not money above what you can make in a minimum-wage job, so why would they bother? I'll let your weird scenario of mailing a couble hundred kilobytes - or, more likely, a single adress of 34 characters - slide. It's still stupid, though.
Nonsense. Well, in the long term, nonsense. The industrial revolution made the modern world, with its factory towers and pollution - but also with its hospitals, schools and longer lifespan. Moon-rockets, television, cars, jets... thank the industrial revolution for those.
"It was not until the unions and fear of another Red October restored some balance that the good began to outshine the bad."
In economics, this is called 'Creative destruction', which is what short-term destruction is (of manual looms or ignition keys) to get to a better location (automatic looms or press-button starts). And we're all in the business of IT, so change for us is second nature.
The problem with "creative destruction" is that I need to eat every day, so if my livelyhood is destroyed in the short term it doesn't matter to me what it might result in in the long term, since I'm dead from starvation by then.
Mind you, this problem could be dealt with, for example with "citizen pay" schemes where you're quaranteed a minimum unconditional income sufficient to live with, and anything you earn through your own efforts comes on top of that. It's just that our current society isn't doing that, so it has to upkeep dying industries to keep its economy from collapsing. It's stupid, but it's the price you pay for being more focused on keeping anyone from being a freeloader than on the overall result.
Our success at preventing domestic terror attacks is usually credited partly to our ability to stop the terrorists from sending each-other money.
"Usually credited" by whom? People who have a vested interest in stopping people from sending each other money without going through them?
For that matter, how many "domestic terror attacks" have been stopped lately? Or is it simply that most people aren't crazy enough to want to blow up their own home?
BTC is specifically designed so that government's can't trace it, or interdict the cash-flow. This means the anti-terror cops damn well better have a plan for if AQ starts a major BTC mining operation.
Starting a BTC mining operation requires capital. Al-Qaeda is unlikely to outcompete miners who are in it for money, not if it keeps blowing its nest egg away.
But what's often forgotten is that Ludd was right. The Industrial Revolution really did cause horrible misery to many, to the point of making violent communistic revolution seem like a good idea. It was not until the unions and fear of another Red October restored some balance that the good began to outshine the bad.
And yes, all machines - including cars - should have a kill switch that mechanically cuts off the power. Industrial machines are required to have those, so why should land missiles mostly operated by amateurs be exempt?
Once you've filled the raft with several tons of fresh water, will it still be buoyant enough to hold the several tons of engine needed to push that mass?
Rafts are usually towed. However, it's highly questionable whether a raft would be ideal for this thing - just erect pylons on shallow coastal water and erect it on those. You'll use the water on land, so why produce it far from there?
However, a raft could be a nice anchor point for airborne wind turbine.
So you rather see someone's quality of life go down whenever possible? I never get why people want everyone else to live their lives in groaning, miserable slavery with "resource pressure" on every single usable thing, be it Internet bandwidth, power, water, usable land, or food.
Power. If you have everything you want or need, the only way to enslave you is through outright force. But that's hard to give the appearance of righteousness. So, instead those who would be your masters seek to control the resources you need and graciously let you have their table scraps if you obey them. Of course, that system also stays up through force of arms, but this time the violence inherent in it can be disguised as defending the masters's property.
Not that this strategy has any chance of working in the long term - the inherent chaos of the universe grinds any control scheme to dust - but in the short term various artificial shortages can and do pervert the economy into acting against human interests, be their cause intentional behaviour-shaping or unthinking greed.
With modern tools you can build it faster, but the modern factory worker who uses a staple gun does not create a nicer product than the carpenter who uses a hand saw to create dovetail joints, and screws every screw in by hand to ensure the wood doesn't get weakened.
Yes. And you know what? It doesn't matter. The factory-made table is good enough, while hand-made one may be better or may be worse, but is far more expensive in either case.
There's a reason why factories replaced artisans in the real world.
Maybe deep inside some kernel routine we cannot afford the 0.5nanosecond it takes to check the buffer size,
Speaking of weird remnants of the past, I've seen claims about the kernel needing to be uber-efficient before, but does that really make any sense? How much time does the average machine spend executing kernel code, besides the idle loop? If kernel was 10 times as slow, would it still be a significant amount?
and we can always have a pragma that disables the checking for that piece of code.
No we can't, because every programmer is better than average, thus they clearly can disable the checks safely, and as the Heartbleed fiasco showed, they will do stupid shit to gain a (real or imagined) speed advantage.
No, if checks are to do any good, they need to be mandatory. But we already have a language that does that, and Java is bitterly hated precisely because it keeps programmers from living dangerously. Not that that stops them from inventing new and innovative ways of screwing up, as evidenced by the software that requires a particular JVM version...
Also, I'm not at all certain that a truly secure programming language wouldn't face opposition or outright sabotage from various intelligence agencies. Whether the excuse is spying on your own consumers or the foreign dogs, everyone and their dog wants access to every system they come across.
But somewhere, somehow, you have to transport or convert that amount of energy in a non-light way, which is going to involve some humungously gigantic amount of heat on a physical component, or some monstrously huge device to attempt to dissipate the heat.
Why? If raw power is all you're concerned with, just use gamma rays and/or neutrons from an exploding nuclear bomb to pump your lasing media. Sure, you'll only get a single pulse, but that's all you'll need.
Heck, you could surround the bomb with primary converters to capture as much energy as possible, and focus them on a secondary converter to get a single beam, Death Star style.
Fundamentally, why are swap and hibernation in separate files? Hibernation is just swapping everything out, as if the computer temporarily had 0 RAM.
Because that way you can get back to having a responding computer in a reasonable time, since it can just do a sequential read to put the working set back into memory. Also, because kernel needs to write its normally non-swappable state somewhere - what processes are running, what files are open, what virtual memory space and address do the pages in the swap file belong to, what interrupt handles are installed, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
To put it bluntly, this entire study is worthless as science. We don't know how human mind works. Should we ever know, we'd then have the oh so fun task of disentangling accidents of biology from fundamental underlaying limits. And because we don't know how the human mind works, we have no way of knowing whether a particular model presents it accurately or at all (however, any theory that claims human memory is in any way perfect is certainly off to a bad start), thus any conclusions based on it are firmly in the land of wild mass guessing.
Well, the complexity of behaviour of the Universe has been increasing since at least the Big Bang in a virtuous circle. Is there some reason why the trend would stop, either now or at some future point? If not, then it seems like singularity would be the inevitable result.
Anti-AI isn't science, it's just the ancient belief about the supernatural specialness of human soul, typically dressed in arguments from lack of imagination and often seasoned with a helping of ego. Nature has no way of telling between "artificial" and "natural", after all, so it's incapable of allowing natural intelligent creatures (us) yet disallowing artificial ones.
"Fucking big" compared to what? Supply? Obviously not, if the price is close to zero.
Then perhaps you shouldn't use these terms and should instead talk about the actual supply, demand and cost. Because as is, your statement is implying that merely providing free parking would mean everyone suddenly wanted to visit San Fransisco, which is absurd.
No, those are simply rationalizations. The truth is that change is scary at the best of times, and much more so when you're tired, traumatized and afraid. And since those circumstances also make you less likely to think rationally and just go with your habits...
It's the same mechanism that keeps people in all kinds of bad circumstances, even if the way out seems both easy and obvious to an outsider: they simply can't see leaving (literally or metaphorically) as a realistic option, even if it's pointed out to them, until after they've left and have spent enough time outside to recover. And it's not just individuals, but organizations and even entire nations that get imprisoned into self-destructive behaviours by what's ultimately their own delusions.
But aren't peppers and wheat basically fibre reinforced plastics? Proteins are polymers, after all.
Maybe, maybe not. The best case scenario is that the market for electric vehicles contunues to grow at increasing rate as gasoline-powered ones get replaced, and Tesla can leverage their current position and experience to take a significant portion of it. While that's certainly risky, such extraordinary circumstances might justify extraordinary estimates for expected utility.
Someone Godwins a discussion about the merits of Linux bootup mechanisms. Someone else mods that Insightful. All that's missing is for someone to compare tmpfs to a death camp... Oops, too late.
And 4chan gets called the Goatse of the Internet.
Let's play a little game. Go to, say, DeviantArt, and pick a random picture. With that picture right in front of you, can you describe it in such detail that I can find it? Or will the game end with me picking a random image that might, with some luck, bear some resemblance to the scene you described?
Eyewitness accounts are difficult because making a useful description is hard, even with memory entirely eliminated as a factor. And it becomes even harder when describing a sequence of events, because human beings don't actually differentiate between their sensory input and imagination - you don't remember hearing a loud noise, you remember hearing a shot. The latter is a conclusion, a scenario your imagination came up with to assign meaning to the former, which is just random noise without it.
This, BTW, explains a lot about human behaviour...
Even if human consciousnes is based on method X, that doesn't mean that consciousness has to be based on method X. Remember, the original Turing machine thought experiment involved paper reels, while modern computers use electronics.
Furthermore, even a copy of the brain doesn't necessarily need to simulate it down to the "physical level". You can probably abstract away a lot of the molecular machinery of the cells; you can likely abstract away less flexible subsystems (like body function regulation); you could perhaps even use techniques of JIT to "compile" more abstract representations from "source code" of a neural network, and update the original network and recompile when learning.
Demand for free resources is whatever non-free resources constrain it at. I don't have infinite amount of cars, and thus can't occupy infinite amounts of parking spaces at once.
And "close to infinite" is meaningless. Either demand is finite, in which case it's infinitely far from infinite, or it's infinite. The only reason to use such a nonsensical expression is rhetorical, which makes me wonder what agenda you're pushing - resource constraints are good because forcing ascetism on others lets you pretend you're a disciplined, spiritual person without engaging in any actual self-discipline or soul-searching?
People don't get violent over ticket scalpers, so why would they do so over parking scalpers either? Store owners, on the other hand, might.
Anyway, this really shouldn't come as surprise - monpolizing a public resource and then extracting rent is, after all, a more efficient way of making profits than actually doing something useful. As technology enables them, the parasites will spread to new niches. This, then, leads to two questions: can the local economy defend itself? And what area of life will be the next victim?
"Virgin" is to Internet Tough Guys what "whore" is to fundamentalists: a supposedly devastating insult shaming its victim forever. What neither of you seem to comprehend is that whether one has never had sex or is being paid for it, it's the people who insist on bringing the matter up at otherwise non-sexual contexts who come across as creepy perverts.
That, or someone got banned.
"Up" means the direction of where the potential energy of an object due to gravity is greater, and "down" the opposite direction. Earth, as a massive body, defines "up" and "down" for all observers within its gravitational sphere of influence. For that matter, so do the Sun and the Milky Way.
"Sunrise" is the point in spacetime where observer's world line crosses the edge of Earth's shadow from within said shadow.
So... does that mean that the Religious Right is going to start rooting for Russia?
There are not 6-7 billion domestic terrorist in any country on Earth. I'll leave it as an excersize to the reader why that might be.
I'm asking who's making the claim. "The military" is still too vague, especially with zero evidence provided.
Really? Asking for numbers to assess effectiveness is a dumb way of doing so? Then how do you propose it's assessed?
And that's how many? Exactly speaking, or even as an order of magnitude figure?
So what, exactly speaking, are you claiming here? That terrorist attacks don't actually require a lot of money, so money transfers aren't really that important to terrorists, so watching money transfers is pointless from anti-terrorism point of view?
I'm entirely convinced that you're an idiot. The only question remains whether you genuinely lack intelligence, or just can't bear to be shown wrong on the Internet.
That's all nice and good. But it still doesn't address my point: Al-Qaeda can't compete against miners who put their money on their mining equipment, because Al-Qaeda put their money into explosives.
Also, you stated above that Al-Qaeda doesn't need money to stake attacks, or at least not money above what you can make in a minimum-wage job, so why would they bother? I'll let your weird scenario of mailing a couble hundred kilobytes - or, more likely, a single adress of 34 characters - slide. It's still stupid, though.
"It was not until the unions and fear of another Red October restored some balance that the good began to outshine the bad."
The problem with "creative destruction" is that I need to eat every day, so if my livelyhood is destroyed in the short term it doesn't matter to me what it might result in in the long term, since I'm dead from starvation by then.
Mind you, this problem could be dealt with, for example with "citizen pay" schemes where you're quaranteed a minimum unconditional income sufficient to live with, and anything you earn through your own efforts comes on top of that. It's just that our current society isn't doing that, so it has to upkeep dying industries to keep its economy from collapsing. It's stupid, but it's the price you pay for being more focused on keeping anyone from being a freeloader than on the overall result.
"Usually credited" by whom? People who have a vested interest in stopping people from sending each other money without going through them?
For that matter, how many "domestic terror attacks" have been stopped lately? Or is it simply that most people aren't crazy enough to want to blow up their own home?
Starting a BTC mining operation requires capital. Al-Qaeda is unlikely to outcompete miners who are in it for money, not if it keeps blowing its nest egg away.
But what's often forgotten is that Ludd was right. The Industrial Revolution really did cause horrible misery to many, to the point of making violent communistic revolution seem like a good idea. It was not until the unions and fear of another Red October restored some balance that the good began to outshine the bad.
And yes, all machines - including cars - should have a kill switch that mechanically cuts off the power. Industrial machines are required to have those, so why should land missiles mostly operated by amateurs be exempt?
Rafts are usually towed. However, it's highly questionable whether a raft would be ideal for this thing - just erect pylons on shallow coastal water and erect it on those. You'll use the water on land, so why produce it far from there?
However, a raft could be a nice anchor point for airborne wind turbine.
Power. If you have everything you want or need, the only way to enslave you is through outright force. But that's hard to give the appearance of righteousness. So, instead those who would be your masters seek to control the resources you need and graciously let you have their table scraps if you obey them. Of course, that system also stays up through force of arms, but this time the violence inherent in it can be disguised as defending the masters's property.
Not that this strategy has any chance of working in the long term - the inherent chaos of the universe grinds any control scheme to dust - but in the short term various artificial shortages can and do pervert the economy into acting against human interests, be their cause intentional behaviour-shaping or unthinking greed.
Given what we now know about corruption and lawlessness in the US three-letter agencies, I'd have to say that it just might.
Yes. And you know what? It doesn't matter. The factory-made table is good enough, while hand-made one may be better or may be worse, but is far more expensive in either case.
There's a reason why factories replaced artisans in the real world.
How so? How expensive is a syscall that just returns a pseudorandom number?
Speaking of weird remnants of the past, I've seen claims about the kernel needing to be uber-efficient before, but does that really make any sense? How much time does the average machine spend executing kernel code, besides the idle loop? If kernel was 10 times as slow, would it still be a significant amount?
No we can't, because every programmer is better than average, thus they clearly can disable the checks safely, and as the Heartbleed fiasco showed, they will do stupid shit to gain a (real or imagined) speed advantage.
No, if checks are to do any good, they need to be mandatory. But we already have a language that does that, and Java is bitterly hated precisely because it keeps programmers from living dangerously. Not that that stops them from inventing new and innovative ways of screwing up, as evidenced by the software that requires a particular JVM version...
Also, I'm not at all certain that a truly secure programming language wouldn't face opposition or outright sabotage from various intelligence agencies. Whether the excuse is spying on your own consumers or the foreign dogs, everyone and their dog wants access to every system they come across.
Why? If raw power is all you're concerned with, just use gamma rays and/or neutrons from an exploding nuclear bomb to pump your lasing media. Sure, you'll only get a single pulse, but that's all you'll need.
Heck, you could surround the bomb with primary converters to capture as much energy as possible, and focus them on a secondary converter to get a single beam, Death Star style.
Because that way you can get back to having a responding computer in a reasonable time, since it can just do a sequential read to put the working set back into memory. Also, because kernel needs to write its normally non-swappable state somewhere - what processes are running, what files are open, what virtual memory space and address do the pages in the swap file belong to, what interrupt handles are installed, etc.