You are illustrating my point. OK, personally I would choose an example of octopuses, because their intelligence more easily impresses us, but I've gone with the example from parent poster - and Squids definitely are intelligent too - some of them, for example, communicate, cooperate during hunts.
But it is so different, so "primitive" kind of intelligence you dismiss it completely.
Even taking into account your criteria:
In this context, "intelligence" means being intelligent enough to develop language, communicate with other beings, create technology, perform abstract reasoning, learn about and use mathematics, etc.
there are animals that fit. Yes, on "lesser" level, but they fit. You even mention them later...
But this assumption, that intelligence should be enough, relies on another - that those will be similar kinds of intelligence. Which might not be true.
Look at the example with squid. Is it intelligent? Definitely. Does it help us humans in communicating with it? Not really.
Notice that I've said "us humans". The burden of finding a viable channel for communication will almost certainly lie on the more intelligent species - simply because its modes of reasoning are totally out of grasp for "lesser" one. In case of squidshumans we, as a "higher" species, didn't really manage to figure out ways of communication. And it works for vast majority of species on Earth, except those which are very simple or those which are very similar to us (and it's still far from great in this case). And no, domesticated animals don't count - we bred proper responses into them.
The intelligence we might get into contact with will be almost certainly quite different from ours - not necessarilly because of different modes of operation (hive mind for example), but also because it, most probably, had a different timescale to evolve, refine itself.
Overall, it is likely it will be more intelligent than us. And somehow I doubt it will be very close to us, diminishing even further the chance of "close enough to find common ground". At the same time we're already quite advanced, so not exactly falling into "primitive enough".
PS. As a personal sidenote: I think that, eventually, intelligence of our type, one that is well on its way to harness power over genes, is quite short, quite transitory stage towards intelligence that is fully aware, harnesses and embraces...memes. How it would think then? Here's the point - I am unable to comprehend. But we would look to it similarly like animals look to us - totally under influence of genes, not even realising next step.
Well, I was thinking about using helicopter - after all:
a) this is Slashdot, we prefer technical solutions
b) totally unmodified Eurocopter landed on Mount Everest few years back, so with some modifications/stripping of weight it could be feasible to carry a car like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant (also stripped down) to the lowest mountain from those 14 in "over 8000 m" category... (which would still be over 5 miles, but giving you extra 800m of air density in comparison to Mount Everest)
Answering to your sideline question: no, I think it's not the same, in case of a bus, as it is in case of airplanes. Certainly I don't feel any anxiety or excitement when using buses/trams/trains (while I still slightly do in case of airplanes, even though I know the stats and the underlying cause of my perception)
Why is that? Not sure...perhaps buses/trams/trains are conceptually similar enough to a car so we can put it in the same category (especially since we're used to driving as a passenger in ground based transport from an early age). Following the original point, most people would say to themselves "yeah, I could drive those" (even though that's not true in most cases)
Plane otoh is totally alien for them.
BTW, another thought: perhaps beeing fully aware of not knowing how to fly a plane causes lack of trust in those who do fly airplanes?
Feeling of helplessness greatly influences perceptions of safety of an airplane.
In case of a car, you can actively increase your safety, by...driving safely. Granted, sometimes you are at a mercy of some moron, but even then - you can often recognise such situation soon enough, or at least point at the other guy. Furthermore, in relation to "you can always blame the other guy", most morons on the road think they are great drivers. And this is all about perception, of safety in this case.
But the planes are different. You're just a cargo. When things unfold you have no idea who/what is responsible and can activelly increase you chances (proper position and evacuation) only in part of the cases.
And people hate beeing reminded how small and fragile pieces in the grand scheme of things they are.
There are valid reasons to prefer other browsers, of course. Actually, I believe they even...don't have to be rational! (if they are presented that way)
Also, there are things at which I think Opera should be better...implementation of tabs, while very good, is still lacking IMHO. Bookmarks mechanisms are useless (FF in this case is just two small steps from what I want). While they use heavily great UI concept of dialog "subwindows" in the form of bars, in many places there are still classic ones. Google apps dont work the way I would like. There are problems with performance in "background image heavy" CSS pages. That's just from the top of my head.
And there are things Opera definatelly can't do...there is, for example, sweet bibtex/bibliography extension for Firefox. Chrome has much better tabs presentation concept (different thing than I was talking about above) . And so on...
However in majority of cases claims of "why I can't use Opera" are simply not true! That's propaganda! That's fanboyism. This is what I was showing to other posters.
I believe there are Greasemonkey (so also probably UserJS for Opera) scripts that require you to manualy initiate playback (when opened in background tab, video simply pauses at the beginning and buffers the content)
Or perhaps remembering that hold down RMB and move scrollwheel tab list shows recently visited tabs at the beginning and last/never visited at the end would be enough?...
BTW...30? That's nothing, try 300 sometimes;p (yeah, it does slow down eventually...but it seems that RAM, which Opera uses wisely anyway, is almost the only limit)
That might as well be because Slashdot sees you as beeing from another country/region?
I doubt Opera would do that - they don't tend to do things which would provoke sites into introducing incompatibilities with them; for example, while Opera does have Adblock, the visible part of its funcionality is quite manual.
It's not like Russia isn't the country with highest number of non-military launches in history. Heck, they had even exclusively resupplied the ISS when Shuttles were grounded...
Hey, with vast majority of EU fines being levied on European companies, can you really blame them for thinking that ALL companies operating in EU, not only local ones, should follow rules?
If you're referring to EU fines...they are absolutely insignificant pocket change for EU budget; they wouldn't even make a difference to most of its individual memberstates.
In this case the amount of money would be similarly insignificant when it comes to contribution to Russian budget. OTOH...there are certianly few individuals who could forget the whole deal for some favours. That's how things work in post-soviet countries.
In anycase, the claims are bogus, almost everybody runs pirated software in Russia.
Sorry, I seem to have cognitively interpreted the quote of mine that you included together with your post, it seemed to flow that way / talk about DownThemAll.
That, plus I'm at the moment slightly fed up with all the threads that go something like this:
"well, too bad Opera doesn't have this, this and this" Yes it has... "oh yeah? does it has this and that?" [shakes head]uhmmm...yeah[/shakes head]
Your knowledge of Firefox seems to be based on announcements that they're entertaining the thought of multithread/multiprocess model, tinkering with it a bit and may eventually implement it sometime in the future. (srsly, there was even quite recent/. thread about it...)
Slashdot Mirror
Then most humans don't qualify also.
You are illustrating my point. OK, personally I would choose an example of octopuses, because their intelligence more easily impresses us, but I've gone with the example from parent poster - and Squids definitely are intelligent too - some of them, for example, communicate, cooperate during hunts.
But it is so different, so "primitive" kind of intelligence you dismiss it completely.
Even taking into account your criteria:
In this context, "intelligence" means being intelligent enough to develop language, communicate with other beings, create technology, perform abstract reasoning, learn about and use mathematics, etc.
there are animals that fit. Yes, on "lesser" level, but they fit. You even mention them later...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincos_(language)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CosmicOS
CosmicOS is even a project on sourceforge, so if anybody have skills and will to contribute...
But this assumption, that intelligence should be enough, relies on another - that those will be similar kinds of intelligence. Which might not be true.
Look at the example with squid. Is it intelligent? Definitely. Does it help us humans in communicating with it? Not really.
Notice that I've said "us humans". The burden of finding a viable channel for communication will almost certainly lie on the more intelligent species - simply because its modes of reasoning are totally out of grasp for "lesser" one. In case of squidshumans we, as a "higher" species, didn't really manage to figure out ways of communication. And it works for vast majority of species on Earth, except those which are very simple or those which are very similar to us (and it's still far from great in this case). And no, domesticated animals don't count - we bred proper responses into them.
The intelligence we might get into contact with will be almost certainly quite different from ours - not necessarilly because of different modes of operation (hive mind for example), but also because it, most probably, had a different timescale to evolve, refine itself.
Overall, it is likely it will be more intelligent than us. And somehow I doubt it will be very close to us, diminishing even further the chance of "close enough to find common ground". At the same time we're already quite advanced, so not exactly falling into "primitive enough".
PS. As a personal sidenote: I think that, eventually, intelligence of our type, one that is well on its way to harness power over genes, is quite short, quite transitory stage towards intelligence that is fully aware, harnesses and embraces...memes. How it would think then? Here's the point - I am unable to comprehend. But we would look to it similarly like animals look to us - totally under influence of genes, not even realising next step.
Well, I was thinking about using helicopter - after all:
a) this is Slashdot, we prefer technical solutions
b) totally unmodified Eurocopter landed on Mount Everest few years back, so with some modifications/stripping of weight it could be feasible to carry a car like this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant (also stripped down) to the lowest mountain from those 14 in "over 8000 m" category... (which would still be over 5 miles, but giving you extra 800m of air density in comparison to Mount Everest)
Answering to your sideline question: no, I think it's not the same, in case of a bus, as it is in case of airplanes. Certainly I don't feel any anxiety or excitement when using buses/trams/trains (while I still slightly do in case of airplanes, even though I know the stats and the underlying cause of my perception)
Why is that? Not sure...perhaps buses/trams/trains are conceptually similar enough to a car so we can put it in the same category (especially since we're used to driving as a passenger in ground based transport from an early age). Following the original point, most people would say to themselves "yeah, I could drive those" (even though that's not true in most cases)
Plane otoh is totally alien for them.
BTW, another thought: perhaps beeing fully aware of not knowing how to fly a plane causes lack of trust in those who do fly airplanes?
...
because we as a species have a difficult time trusting in a 'higher power' to save us.
(Incidentally, you probably don't want me to get into my ideas on what the implications this has on our 'need' for religion.)
I would gladly hear it. I'm quite curious how you reconciled the two...
I think you've just inspired me to put some kind of a car on top of one of 14 highest mountain peaks (above 8000 meters)
It might take a while though... ;/
Feeling of helplessness greatly influences perceptions of safety of an airplane.
In case of a car, you can actively increase your safety, by...driving safely. Granted, sometimes you are at a mercy of some moron, but even then - you can often recognise such situation soon enough, or at least point at the other guy. Furthermore, in relation to "you can always blame the other guy", most morons on the road think they are great drivers. And this is all about perception, of safety in this case.
But the planes are different. You're just a cargo. When things unfold you have no idea who/what is responsible and can activelly increase you chances (proper position and evacuation) only in part of the cases.
And people hate beeing reminded how small and fragile pieces in the grand scheme of things they are.
Sorta, though manually invoked (mouse buttons gesture (yeah, involving only buttons) or key shortcut)
There are valid reasons to prefer other browsers, of course. Actually, I believe they even...don't have to be rational! (if they are presented that way)
Also, there are things at which I think Opera should be better...implementation of tabs, while very good, is still lacking IMHO. Bookmarks mechanisms are useless (FF in this case is just two small steps from what I want). While they use heavily great UI concept of dialog "subwindows" in the form of bars, in many places there are still classic ones. Google apps dont work the way I would like. There are problems with performance in "background image heavy" CSS pages. That's just from the top of my head.
And there are things Opera definatelly can't do...there is, for example, sweet bibtex/bibliography extension for Firefox. Chrome has much better tabs presentation concept (different thing than I was talking about above) . And so on...
However in majority of cases claims of "why I can't use Opera" are simply not true! That's propaganda! That's fanboyism. This is what I was showing to other posters.
Could it be:
oh, look, we can't develop our own software for those features so we sneak in into something that works for people
?
I believe there are Greasemonkey (so also probably UserJS for Opera) scripts that require you to manualy initiate playback (when opened in background tab, video simply pauses at the beginning and buffers the content)
Or perhaps remembering that hold down RMB and move scrollwheel tab list shows recently visited tabs at the beginning and last/never visited at the end would be enough?...
BTW...30? That's nothing, try 300 sometimes ;p (yeah, it does slow down eventually...but it seems that RAM, which Opera uses wisely anyway, is almost the only limit)
I think they have a plan of financing them from OEM/telecom deals (for including Opera Turbo feature in their portable products)
That might as well be because Slashdot sees you as beeing from another country/region?
I doubt Opera would do that - they don't tend to do things which would provoke sites into introducing incompatibilities with them; for example, while Opera does have Adblock, the visible part of its funcionality is quite manual.
It appears you have no idea what you're talking about.
So...again:
a) those money are pocket change to EU budget
b) EU primarily fines...European companies! Do you suggest "multinationals" should be given some slack?
It's not like Russia isn't the country with highest number of non-military launches in history. Heck, they had even exclusively resupplied the ISS when Shuttles were grounded...
Hey, with vast majority of EU fines being levied on European companies, can you really blame them for thinking that ALL companies operating in EU, not only local ones, should follow rules?
Ich verstehe nicht, warum brauchen wir einen Bikini?
They do in many european countries.
Like in those two:
http://www.en.ranking.pl/
http://www.en.ranking.com.ua/
(as you see you can check few more from the area)
If you're referring to EU fines...they are absolutely insignificant pocket change for EU budget; they wouldn't even make a difference to most of its individual memberstates.
In this case the amount of money would be similarly insignificant when it comes to contribution to Russian budget. OTOH...there are certianly few individuals who could forget the whole deal for some favours. That's how things work in post-soviet countries.
In anycase, the claims are bogus, almost everybody runs pirated software in Russia.
Sorry, I seem to have cognitively interpreted the quote of mine that you included together with your post, it seemed to flow that way / talk about DownThemAll.
That, plus I'm at the moment slightly fed up with all the threads that go something like this:
"well, too bad Opera doesn't have this, this and this"
Yes it has...
"oh yeah? does it has this and that?"
[shakes head]uhmmm...yeah[/shakes head]
Your knowledge of Firefox seems to be based on announcements that they're entertaining the thought of multithread/multiprocess model, tinkering with it a bit and may eventually implement it sometime in the future. (srsly, there was even quite recent /. thread about it...)
Chrome and IE8 are multiprocess, don't know about IE7.
Firefox OTOH...does practically everything in one thread.
"Bikini"? Now I'm confused.