Don't waste your breath, you are talking to people who believe, mind is a magical gift given to people by an immortal old guy who lives in the sky.
I don't believe in god, I just think that the casual handwaving aside of the problems of consciousness is breathtakingly simplistic.
Anyway, if it is possible to create artificial intelligence/life, then the one thing we should be doing is stopping people from creating artificial intelligence/life. I do not enjoy the thought of some Matrix/Skynet future when our robotic overlords decide we're history like the Neanderthals.
I agree that these kind of pop-psychology hacks don't really have anything meaningful to add to this discussion. In fact, if they are registered psychologists, issuing a diagnosis without actually interviewing the person is essentially a form of medical malpractice.
Don't be ridiculous. It is human nature to want to understand why people act as they do and say what they do. Kurzweil's ideas are so nutty that an analysis of his personality is worth more effort than arguing with his stupid ideas.
I know a lot of the Aspie types on slashdot would love it, but personally I can't see a future as part of the cyber-Borg being some great vision for humanity.
Why? It has a clear definition to those in the industry who actually depend upon it. It's not the same as a the mainframes of yore - it's a distinct technical shift people haven't seen before. I would say anyone who thinks the term "The Cloud" can't be said with a straight face simply doesn't know what they're talking about.
"The Cloud" is just another way of saying you have massively distributed data you can access. There is no philosophicaldifference between having one giant database on a single mainframe somewhere that you access remotely, and having the data distributed amongst thousands of separate servers which you access as though it were one machine.
The technical differences are obvious, but I just don't see that's there's anything fundamentally different about "The Cloud" in terms of how humans beings access information.
If we can just build an exact replica of a blank functioning brain then we can download a human mind directly into it and live forever in a silicon paradise.
And if we can just make the trivial medical breakthrough necessary to reverse ageing, we can have physical immortality too.
And once we discover the way to navigate through hyperspace, travel to other galaxies will become a matter of routine like catching a bus.
Mr Kurzweil's been talking nonsense for a very long time. What he sees as the inevitable jump from adequate dictation software to the now legendary Singularity has the logic of cats becoming snipers because they're good at hunting.
I had to forget from Kindergarten to Second grade to learn enough to pass Calculus. I can do integrals, but my basic arithmetic has gone straight to hell.
That's the best excuse I've ever heard for being crap at basic maths.
In a similar vein, after I did a degree in English Literature, I could recite The Waste Land but forgot how to do basic grammar and spelling. Oh, wait, no I didn't.
You can't really be a bit bilingual, any more than you can be quite pregnant, or fairly dead. Bilingual means you speak/write/read a language as well as your native one.
Countries or governments do not monitor. These are people who monitor other people.
No these are people acting as representatives of the government, which is in itself a representative of the people of that country.
I've seen this ultra-individualistic lpseudo-libertarian crap before on slashdot before. So, for example, that's not a US soldier shootinga member of al Qaeda, they're just two guys having a mano a mano fight with no need for The Government to be involved or even exist. It's stupid.
> I had an old Nokia 6160 more then a decade ago, and the thing was virtually indestructible.
Meh. I'm from the UK - their phones lasted forever because they did fuck all. I never understood why people went on about the menu system and how it was untuitive blah blah blah. It was the same as all the others. Shitty non smartphone which lasted forever because no-one fiddles with/drops phones which don't do anything which just take/make phone calls.
Bollocks, people used dumbphones all the time, both for talking and texting. You know, for the things a phone is good for. The idea of having a pocket sized computer is a nice idea, but most people don't actually do anything computery while they're walking around or sitting in a pub anyway.
Do you honestly know any substantial number of smartphone users who run caseless? I did with the older iPhones, and people teased me all the time. Maybe it's a generational thing - I don't interact with many teenagers (yet).
Good point. I have a teenage daughter, and neither she nor any of her friends use cases for phones, iPods or anything else. They don't even wear jumpers when it's cold or coats when it's raining, so if they can't be bothered to look after themselves (or rather, place looking cool over practicality) they're not going to do it for a gadget.
And, yes, they do break the fucking things all the time. I was going to get her one of those LandRover ruggedized phones. But of course she just wouldn't use it, so what's the point?
You have got to be kidding. I was in a meeting yesterday and 6 of us had iPhones on the table, only 1 had a case on it. Most tech people I know don't use cases because they know how to handle their phones and not drop them.
Wait, what? This is pure crazy.
Having tech-related knowledge doesn't make you immune to dropping things.
I manage to get through life without continually dropping calculators, netbooks, bottles of ink, phials of acid, tablets, laptops, tumblers of expensive scotch, watches, walkie-talkies, cut glass decanters, bone china cups and many other things. What's so special about a mobile phone?
I think the material debate is kind of absurd anyway, since hardly anyone goes caseless.
Your peer group is obviously composed of sensible people who value looking after their possessions over showing them off. Almost everyone else wants the world to know they have an iPhone. An iPhone in a plain black case is indistinguishable at first glance from a cheap Android phone in a plain black case.
It's like with clothes, there's no point in buying £200 trainers if you can't differentiate them from a £10 pair from Asdas.
"The fact that there are no disc-shaped aircraft in the skies today, though, suggests that the USAF's flying saucer efforts probably never got past the prototype stage."
or they work so good that only blurry and shaky videos exist of them flying around and terrorizing cows
OK smartypants, how do you explain the anal probing then? It can't all be drunk farmers being buggered by their livestock, surely?
I am confused, did the merry pranksters who designed it in their spare time just happen to work for British Rail during the day, or was there really some bizarre space exploration department in BR?
Not always true. Most sightings dont have blinking lights. I saw something once, looked like a satellite zipping by, then stopped and started doing zig zags, figure 8s, circles, box shapes and moved in other unsatelliteish ways for about 20-30 minutes before it took off. The person i was with also saw whatever it was and watched it with me for the same amount of time. Was definately not a plane, as i have seen many many planes and am familiar with. We looked on her phone as she had a app that told us the names of all the stars and satellites, something which we used to track satellites in the past. Was not on there either. The best i could come up with was a weather balloon, but that doesnt fit with the movements of w.e this was.
The plural of "unsubstantiated anecdote without even a shaky cameraphone video" is not "data."
I know we are all like Fox Mulder and want to believe, but we need a bit more than stories like this.
It's funny that people will blindly believe in religions and deities, but laugh at the possibility of other life in our universe.
If there is other life in the universe that uses spaceships easily discernible to the naked eye, they are not very advanced are they? And if they're not very advanced how are they able to build spaceships that must have travelled many light years to get here (discounting the shall we say slim chance of their coming from Mars)?
I'm sure there is other life in the universe, I just don't think it's very likely we'll be meeting up with any of it any time soon. The universe is a big place.
To be honest, there is probably as much evidence of the existence of god as of intelligent life not from Earth, which is to say none either way.
Before the Lindisfarne monastery was attacked by Vikings in 793, the monks reported having seen a multitude of omens, among others, swarms of fiery dragons were seen in the sky
If you're scared and drunk, clouds (especially at sunset) can look like anything you want them to.
Sometimes people do see something, but they just didn't understand the technology at the time. There was some preacher missionary on a Pacific island who reported hearing a buzzing noise and seeing a craft that looked a glass dome on legs hovering above the tree-line, being controlled by a pilot who seemed to be sitting at a chair pushing and pulling levers. They achieved some basic communication where the preacher bowed, and the craft's pilot reciprocated. I hate to say this, but it does sound a bit like a navy helicopter.
Yeah, or maybe it was an alien craft pretending to be a navy helicopter.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't waste your breath, you are talking to people who believe, mind is a magical gift given to people by an immortal old guy who lives in the sky.
I don't believe in god, I just think that the casual handwaving aside of the problems of consciousness is breathtakingly simplistic.
Anyway, if it is possible to create artificial intelligence/life, then the one thing we should be doing is stopping people from creating artificial intelligence/life. I do not enjoy the thought of some Matrix/Skynet future when our robotic overlords decide we're history like the Neanderthals.
I agree that these kind of pop-psychology hacks don't really have anything meaningful to add to this discussion. In fact, if they are registered psychologists, issuing a diagnosis without actually interviewing the person is essentially a form of medical malpractice.
Don't be ridiculous. It is human nature to want to understand why people act as they do and say what they do. Kurzweil's ideas are so nutty that an analysis of his personality is worth more effort than arguing with his stupid ideas.
I know a lot of the Aspie types on slashdot would love it, but personally I can't see a future as part of the cyber-Borg being some great vision for humanity.
Why? It has a clear definition to those in the industry who actually depend upon it. It's not the same as a the mainframes of yore - it's a distinct technical shift people haven't seen before. I would say anyone who thinks the term "The Cloud" can't be said with a straight face simply doesn't know what they're talking about.
"The Cloud" is just another way of saying you have massively distributed data you can access. There is no philosophicaldifference between having one giant database on a single mainframe somewhere that you access remotely, and having the data distributed amongst thousands of separate servers which you access as though it were one machine.
The technical differences are obvious, but I just don't see that's there's anything fundamentally different about "The Cloud" in terms of how humans beings access information.
If, indeed.
If we can just build an exact replica of a blank functioning brain then we can download a human mind directly into it and live forever in a silicon paradise.
And if we can just make the trivial medical breakthrough necessary to reverse ageing, we can have physical immortality too.
And once we discover the way to navigate through hyperspace, travel to other galaxies will become a matter of routine like catching a bus.
Mr Kurzweil's been talking nonsense for a very long time. What he sees as the inevitable jump from adequate dictation software to the now legendary Singularity has the logic of cats becoming snipers because they're good at hunting.
I had to forget from Kindergarten to Second grade to learn enough to pass Calculus. I can do integrals, but my basic arithmetic has gone straight to hell.
That's the best excuse I've ever heard for being crap at basic maths.
In a similar vein, after I did a degree in English Literature, I could recite The Waste Land but forgot how to do basic grammar and spelling. Oh, wait, no I didn't.
I am bilingual to an extent
You can't really be a bit bilingual, any more than you can be quite pregnant, or fairly dead. Bilingual means you speak/write/read a language as well as your native one.
And so a pedantic twit get's to put another notch on his belt...
Try being pedantic yourself -- it's "gets". Apostrophes aren't just random little pre-s symbols you know.
There's a difference between making a small grammatical mistake like the GP and talking utter bollocks like the GGP.
Countries or governments do not monitor. These are people who monitor other people.
No these are people acting as representatives of the government, which is in itself a representative of the people of that country.
I've seen this ultra-individualistic lpseudo-libertarian crap before on slashdot before. So, for example, that's not a US soldier shootinga member of al Qaeda, they're just two guys having a mano a mano fight with no need for The Government to be involved or even exist. It's stupid.
I'm not. Any modern government (law enforcement or intelligence agencies) would or at least should have this capability.
Really? Because saying they should have this capability is equivalent to saying we shouldn't be using strong, effective encryption.
National security trumps your ability to keep your Skype conversations absolutely private. Sorry, but what else do you expect?
> I had an old Nokia 6160 more then a decade ago, and the thing was virtually indestructible.
Meh. I'm from the UK - their phones lasted forever because they did fuck all. I never understood why people went on about the menu system and how it was untuitive blah blah blah. It was the same as all the others. Shitty non smartphone which lasted forever because no-one fiddles with/drops phones which don't do anything which just take/make phone calls.
Bollocks, people used dumbphones all the time, both for talking and texting. You know, for the things a phone is good for. The idea of having a pocket sized computer is a nice idea, but most people don't actually do anything computery while they're walking around or sitting in a pub anyway.
The back of their phones is made out of glass, I repeat, the back of their phones is made out of glass.
And what is glass made of?
Wood.
It's a witch!
Do you honestly know any substantial number of smartphone users who run caseless? I did with the older iPhones, and people teased me all the time. Maybe it's a generational thing - I don't interact with many teenagers (yet).
Good point. I have a teenage daughter, and neither she nor any of her friends use cases for phones, iPods or anything else. They don't even wear jumpers when it's cold or coats when it's raining, so if they can't be bothered to look after themselves (or rather, place looking cool over practicality) they're not going to do it for a gadget.
And, yes, they do break the fucking things all the time. I was going to get her one of those LandRover ruggedized phones. But of course she just wouldn't use it, so what's the point?
You have got to be kidding. I was in a meeting yesterday and 6 of us had iPhones on the table, only 1 had a case on it. Most tech people I know don't use cases because they know how to handle their phones and not drop them.
Wait, what? This is pure crazy.
Having tech-related knowledge doesn't make you immune to dropping things.
I manage to get through life without continually dropping calculators, netbooks, bottles of ink, phials of acid, tablets, laptops, tumblers of expensive scotch, watches, walkie-talkies, cut glass decanters, bone china cups and many other things. What's so special about a mobile phone?
I think the material debate is kind of absurd anyway, since hardly anyone goes caseless.
Your peer group is obviously composed of sensible people who value looking after their possessions over showing them off. Almost everyone else wants the world to know they have an iPhone. An iPhone in a plain black case is indistinguishable at first glance from a cheap Android phone in a plain black case.
It's like with clothes, there's no point in buying £200 trainers if you can't differentiate them from a £10 pair from Asdas.
Good luck trying to find a new iPhone 4 or iPad 2 in normal stores now.
One phone & one tablet?
iPad2, iPad3, iPad Mini (Soon), iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPhone5
I count that as 5, soon to be 6.
Why has this been modded insightful? As AC below says, iPad3 and iPhone 5 are the current models, Mini doesn't exist and the others are old models.
You might as well have included iPhones 1-3 and the original iPad and said they have 10 different models.
"The fact that there are no disc-shaped aircraft in the skies today, though, suggests that the USAF's flying saucer efforts probably never got past the prototype stage."
or they work so good that only blurry and shaky videos exist of them flying around and terrorizing cows
OK smartypants, how do you explain the anal probing then? It can't all be drunk farmers being buggered by their livestock, surely?
Ah...
I am confused, did the merry pranksters who designed it in their spare time just happen to work for British Rail during the day, or was there really some bizarre space exploration department in BR?
why would aliens put flashing lights on an interstellar space craft?
The lights are just a byproduct of their faster-than-light communication system.
Yeah, they need the lights so they can see what they're travelling faster than.
Not always true. Most sightings dont have blinking lights. I saw something once, looked like a satellite zipping by, then stopped and started doing zig zags, figure 8s, circles, box shapes and moved in other unsatelliteish ways for about 20-30 minutes before it took off. The person i was with also saw whatever it was and watched it with me for the same amount of time. Was definately not a plane, as i have seen many many planes and am familiar with. We looked on her phone as she had a app that told us the names of all the stars and satellites, something which we used to track satellites in the past. Was not on there either. The best i could come up with was a weather balloon, but that doesnt fit with the movements of w.e this was.
The plural of "unsubstantiated anecdote without even a shaky cameraphone video" is not "data."
I know we are all like Fox Mulder and want to believe, but we need a bit more than stories like this.
It's funny that people will blindly believe in religions and deities, but laugh at the possibility of other life in our universe.
If there is other life in the universe that uses spaceships easily discernible to the naked eye, they are not very advanced are they? And if they're not very advanced how are they able to build spaceships that must have travelled many light years to get here (discounting the shall we say slim chance of their coming from Mars)?
I'm sure there is other life in the universe, I just don't think it's very likely we'll be meeting up with any of it any time soon. The universe is a big place.
To be honest, there is probably as much evidence of the existence of god as of intelligent life not from Earth, which is to say none either way.
Before the Lindisfarne monastery was attacked by Vikings in 793, the monks reported having seen a multitude of omens, among others, swarms of fiery dragons were seen in the sky
If you're scared and drunk, clouds (especially at sunset) can look like anything you want them to.
Sometimes people do see something, but they just didn't understand the technology at the time. There was some preacher missionary on a Pacific island who reported hearing a buzzing noise and seeing a craft that looked a glass dome on legs hovering above the tree-line, being controlled by a pilot who seemed to be sitting at a chair pushing and pulling levers. They achieved some basic communication where the preacher bowed, and the craft's pilot reciprocated. I hate to say this, but it does sound a bit like a navy helicopter.
Yeah, or maybe it was an alien craft pretending to be a navy helicopter.
Finally, the voice of reason.