Well, the comments might be as insightful as the average comments from Gartner, so maybe the PHB's should pay as much attention as they currently do...
It doesn't matter. The issue is whether all there is is physics, not whether chaos theory and emergent behavior are properly considered as part of that.
See, if there is no God, no soul, no spirit, just matter, than all we are is just matter. You can say that intelligence comes via emergent behavior, but it still comes from a complicated pile of neurons, and only that - not from a metaphysical "mind" or "spirit" or "soul". Emergent behavior and complexity theory just become part of the scientific understanding of how piles of neurons behave.
And so "you" are just an artifact of this neurological machinery. Piling on additional scientific laws doesn't change that, because the conclusion doesn't come from the specifics of which laws you consider to be important to understand the machinery. The conclusion only depends on the original premise: that the laws of science are what is most fundamental, and they run everything else. In particular, they run our minds.
Not necessarily...
on
Blink
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· Score: 3, Insightful
You don't have to react by saying, "OK, well, I guess we're screwed. No point really trying, then" and watching as your marriage does, in fact, fall apart.
Instead, you could react by saying, "Well, these guys see some problem signs. Let's figure out what they are, and start fixing things." If you follow through (consistently), you may well save the marriage.
I haven't looked at the study, but it wouldn't shock me if what they look for is whether the couple expects to have to continually work to make the marriage work, or if they just assume that it'll all work out fine on it's own.
I've been married almost 15 years, and we've had to kind of rebuild our relationship about ten or twelve times in those years. You can't just sit around and let entropy do a number on you...
Modern mankind's problem is this: We are convinced that we are machines.
This is not a casual statement. If you believe that the laws of physics are the most fundamental things there are, then the logic is inescapable. You are determined by the laws of physics, chemistry, and neurology. You have no free will. What you think of as thinking is just neurological machinery over which you have no control - it controls you. There is no such thing as love; all there is is chemical machinery. All we are is machines. (The only escape from this logic is if you don't accept the premise - that all there really is is the laws of physics.)
The horror of the modern position is that we cannot accept that we are just machines. We feel that we are more, that humans are not just machines. And so we feel that we are more, but rationally we are driven to view ourselves as just machines.
If this is the modern human's horror, why do we want to take machines, and give them feelings? If it's horrifying to have human feelings, but rationally be forced to accept that you are only a machine, how horrifying is it to have human feelings, but be trapped in the body of a machine?
Note: The above analysis closely follows the thoughts of Francis Schaeffer. I can't claim much credit for it.
I'm not sure this is right. I think it does have to be buried swiftly and anaerobically, though. The lack of oxygen kills most of the rotting processes (the same is true in landfills, by the way, if they process a reasonably high volume of trash daily).
By the way, this means that most or all of petrified wood comes from a catastrophe, not from the "normal" course of events.
kill one person out of hatred and you are no different than someone that has killed millions out of hatred.
Well, in absolute moral terms, no, I suppose not. You're still guilty of the same heinous crime. But...
There is a large difference in how much they affect other people. You're (probably) all right living in the next town from the person who kills one person out of hatred. You're in much more danger living in the next country from the person who kills millions out of hatred.
Wow. I had no idea. I'm kind of an old guy, but I'm used to CPUs having address and data pins, and some power and ground pins, and a very few bus control signals, and that's basically it. Well, clearly that's not the case here, even if they used a 512-bit-wide data bus, which I kind of doubt that they did (though it would be a great way to increase bandwidth).
In fact, about 10 years ago I decided that the hot future CPUs would have bandwidth issues (right on the money), and that the way to solve this was with a high pin count and an enormously wide (512- or 1024-bit), non-byte-addressable data bus. (Non-byte addressible cuts down on the bus-control craziness, which can help on the speed front.)
Is Intel actually doing this? If not, what in the world are they doing with all those pins?
Here's a challenge: A patient comes into a doctor's office with a bacterial infection. Worse, it's one of those antibiotic resistant bugs. What we need to be able to do is: - sequence the bacteria's DNA right there in the doctor's office (this part isn't really an IT challenge) - from the bacteria's genetics, determine which antibiotics (out of all known ones) can effectively kill it - if none can effectively kill it, ship the DNA sequence information off to the CDC's supercomputers, and have them automatically develop a new antibiotic that will kill the bug.
I figure that this is a challenge for the next forty years, not just for the next twenty.
Here's a clue for some moderator: Using big words does not make a post "Insightful". Throwing wild accusations at somebody without any specifics does not make a post "Insightful". Even combining the two does not make a post "Insightful".
Anything this long on venom and short on substance should be moderated "Troll" or "Flamebait", even if you happen to not like the guy getting ripped.
Two words: transaction costs. The less expensive it is to do things, the more things become economically feasible.
So, if the OS is free, more computer-type things become economically possible. I think that will help a tech boom, but not necessarily in "computers". It may be in gadgets.
See, nobody cares about the OS. (Well, many of us do, because we're tired of the disgustingly filthy Microsoft environment. But users - plain old everyday users - don't care.) People care about what the system can do. The OS is just an enabler. But a free OS - both no-cost and free of chains that the vendor would put on you - is a better enabler than an encumbered OS, and makes more things possible.
Xanadu is dead. In fact, Xanadu was never alive. It could have been. But...
They were so sure that it was going to be hot stuff that they kept the data structures secret that were needed to implement it. So... nobody implemented it.
Then came the web, and it was good enough. The need has been filled, and nobody cares about Xanadu. Even if there was a free, publicly available implementation, nobody would care.
Ego and greed killed Xanadu - or rather, kept it from ever being born.
I agree with what you say. But what I want to say is that the only legitimate power the government has is what we the people have explicitly given it through the Constitution.
What I don't want to say is the depressing implication of what you are saying: That we the people, by not putting a stop to this nonsense (by force, if necessary), have de facto delegated to the government all the overly vast power that it currently has.
I know that this isn't what you said. But it seems to me to be the logical, non-statist conclusion of what you said.
The good news (?) is that it means that the government's huge power is illegitimate, and we therefore have reasonable, Constitutional grounds for demanding that they stop.
And, once you quit thinking of "promote the general welfare" as a blank check that lets the federal government do practically anything, once you realize that the Constitution puts some specific limits on what the federal government can do, then the current federal government looks extremely out of line compared to what the Constitution says it is allowed to do...
"Just another bow shot"? To me, a bow shot is a shot to inform your (naval) opponent that you can hit them, and to imply that you will hit them if they don't stop.
This article, however, is nothing of the sort. It's more like "just another shot at a random set of coordinates, hoping that it comes close enough to someone to scare them".
First, even in this respect, open source is unlike what has historically or politically been called "communism", because if you don't like it, you don't have to do it. Contrast with "communist" countries, where if you don't want to work on what they tell you, you die or go to Siberia.
Second, in a project that has people paid to work on it and volunteers also working on it, the paid people do more work per person than most of the volunteers. So your argument falls apart about the poor exploited peasants who are doing all the work. They're not. The paid "bosses" are doing huge amounts of work.
The third thing wrong with what you're saying here is that you assume that the only way to get paid is in money. That's false. For example, let's suppose that I really want some new feature in an operating system. With open source, I can add the feature to the operating system. Sure I'm working for free, but I'm being paid by getting what I want. (On the bottom line, what other kind of payment is there?)
How much is that worth? Well, lets suppose that I wanted Microsoft to add a feature to Windows. How much money would I have to throw at them before they would even listen to me?
First, 38 cm high? That's... um... a bit of a hardship to the humans that are used to playing players that are 180 cm tall, isn't it?
Second, 360 degree vision. Again, that's quite an advantage to the robots - literally "eyes in the back of their head".
A bit fairer competition would be 180 cm tall robots with 180 degree vision. Let's throw in a restriction that the robots be bipedal, too - no hiding the ball among 8 legs or some such...
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just a US thing...
Well, the comments might be as insightful as the average comments from Gartner, so maybe the PHB's should pay as much attention as they currently do...
See, if there is no God, no soul, no spirit, just matter, than all we are is just matter. You can say that intelligence comes via emergent behavior, but it still comes from a complicated pile of neurons, and only that - not from a metaphysical "mind" or "spirit" or "soul". Emergent behavior and complexity theory just become part of the scientific understanding of how piles of neurons behave.
And so "you" are just an artifact of this neurological machinery. Piling on additional scientific laws doesn't change that, because the conclusion doesn't come from the specifics of which laws you consider to be important to understand the machinery. The conclusion only depends on the original premise: that the laws of science are what is most fundamental, and they run everything else. In particular, they run our minds.
Instead, you could react by saying, "Well, these guys see some problem signs. Let's figure out what they are, and start fixing things." If you follow through (consistently), you may well save the marriage.
I haven't looked at the study, but it wouldn't shock me if what they look for is whether the couple expects to have to continually work to make the marriage work, or if they just assume that it'll all work out fine on it's own.
I've been married almost 15 years, and we've had to kind of rebuild our relationship about ten or twelve times in those years. You can't just sit around and let entropy do a number on you...
This is not a casual statement. If you believe that the laws of physics are the most fundamental things there are, then the logic is inescapable. You are determined by the laws of physics, chemistry, and neurology. You have no free will. What you think of as thinking is just neurological machinery over which you have no control - it controls you. There is no such thing as love; all there is is chemical machinery. All we are is machines. (The only escape from this logic is if you don't accept the premise - that all there really is is the laws of physics.)
The horror of the modern position is that we cannot accept that we are just machines. We feel that we are more, that humans are not just machines. And so we feel that we are more, but rationally we are driven to view ourselves as just machines.
If this is the modern human's horror, why do we want to take machines, and give them feelings? If it's horrifying to have human feelings, but rationally be forced to accept that you are only a machine, how horrifying is it to have human feelings, but be trapped in the body of a machine?
Note: The above analysis closely follows the thoughts of Francis Schaeffer. I can't claim much credit for it.
Believe it. The only thing it influenced was the name.
And then Slashdot will complain about intrusive new legislation, and whine that "we're losing our freedom!"
Well, we mocked them when they picked the name "Pentium", too...
By the way, this means that most or all of petrified wood comes from a catastrophe, not from the "normal" course of events.
Mod parent up, please.
Well, in absolute moral terms, no, I suppose not. You're still guilty of the same heinous crime. But...
There is a large difference in how much they affect other people. You're (probably) all right living in the next town from the person who kills one person out of hatred. You're in much more danger living in the next country from the person who kills millions out of hatred.
Wow. I had no idea. I'm kind of an old guy, but I'm used to CPUs having address and data pins, and some power and ground pins, and a very few bus control signals, and that's basically it. Well, clearly that's not the case here, even if they used a 512-bit-wide data bus, which I kind of doubt that they did (though it would be a great way to increase bandwidth).
In fact, about 10 years ago I decided that the hot future CPUs would have bandwidth issues (right on the money), and that the way to solve this was with a high pin count and an enormously wide (512- or 1024-bit), non-byte-addressable data bus. (Non-byte addressible cuts down on the bus-control craziness, which can help on the speed front.)
Is Intel actually doing this? If not, what in the world are they doing with all those pins?
Here's a challenge: A patient comes into a doctor's office with a bacterial infection. Worse, it's one of those antibiotic resistant bugs. What we need to be able to do is:
- sequence the bacteria's DNA right there in the doctor's office (this part isn't really an IT challenge)
- from the bacteria's genetics, determine which antibiotics (out of all known ones) can effectively kill it
- if none can effectively kill it, ship the DNA sequence information off to the CDC's supercomputers, and have them automatically develop a new antibiotic that will kill the bug.
I figure that this is a challenge for the next forty years, not just for the next twenty.
Let's start with:
- the UN
- SCO (and their parent, the Canopy Group)
- Microsoft
- Congress
Anything this long on venom and short on substance should be moderated "Troll" or "Flamebait", even if you happen to not like the guy getting ripped.
Two words: transaction costs. The less expensive it is to do things, the more things become economically feasible.
So, if the OS is free, more computer-type things become economically possible. I think that will help a tech boom, but not necessarily in "computers". It may be in gadgets.
See, nobody cares about the OS. (Well, many of us do, because we're tired of the disgustingly filthy Microsoft environment. But users - plain old everyday users - don't care.) People care about what the system can do. The OS is just an enabler. But a free OS - both no-cost and free of chains that the vendor would put on you - is a better enabler than an encumbered OS, and makes more things possible.
Xanadu is dead. In fact, Xanadu was never alive. It could have been. But...
They were so sure that it was going to be hot stuff that they kept the data structures secret that were needed to implement it. So... nobody implemented it.
Then came the web, and it was good enough. The need has been filled, and nobody cares about Xanadu. Even if there was a free, publicly available implementation, nobody would care.
Ego and greed killed Xanadu - or rather, kept it from ever being born.
You were warned.
Water is heavy. Seriously.
What I don't want to say is the depressing implication of what you are saying: That we the people, by not putting a stop to this nonsense (by force, if necessary), have de facto delegated to the government all the overly vast power that it currently has.
I know that this isn't what you said. But it seems to me to be the logical, non-statist conclusion of what you said.
The good news (?) is that it means that the government's huge power is illegitimate, and we therefore have reasonable, Constitutional grounds for demanding that they stop.
And, once you quit thinking of "promote the general welfare" as a blank check that lets the federal government do practically anything, once you realize that the Constitution puts some specific limits on what the federal government can do, then the current federal government looks extremely out of line compared to what the Constitution says it is allowed to do...
"Just another bow shot"? To me, a bow shot is a shot to inform your (naval) opponent that you can hit them, and to imply that you will hit them if they don't stop.
This article, however, is nothing of the sort. It's more like "just another shot at a random set of coordinates, hoping that it comes close enough to someone to scare them".
Second, in a project that has people paid to work on it and volunteers also working on it, the paid people do more work per person than most of the volunteers. So your argument falls apart about the poor exploited peasants who are doing all the work. They're not. The paid "bosses" are doing huge amounts of work.
The third thing wrong with what you're saying here is that you assume that the only way to get paid is in money. That's false. For example, let's suppose that I really want some new feature in an operating system. With open source, I can add the feature to the operating system. Sure I'm working for free, but I'm being paid by getting what I want. (On the bottom line, what other kind of payment is there?)
How much is that worth? Well, lets suppose that I wanted Microsoft to add a feature to Windows. How much money would I have to throw at them before they would even listen to me?
Increased temperature causes increased evaporation from the soil. So the soil is, on average, drier.
First, 38 cm high? That's... um... a bit of a hardship to the humans that are used to playing players that are 180 cm tall, isn't it?
Second, 360 degree vision. Again, that's quite an advantage to the robots - literally "eyes in the back of their head".
A bit fairer competition would be 180 cm tall robots with 180 degree vision. Let's throw in a restriction that the robots be bipedal, too - no hiding the ball among 8 legs or some such...