" This provides a natural economic incentive both to find alternatives, and to recycle, at the point where it is economically feasible."
This is not always the case, many multi-national corporations still dump garbage into the commons without paying a red cent. The idea that incentives alone will change their behaviou just shows you are naive. There are plenty of companies downloading their risks and passing the buck, there needs to be a way to enforce the law against such companies which is difficult to say the least.
... can't write or teach worth a damn, I've got tonnes of books written by experts that are not worthy of being called "textbook" or even for teaching much of anything.
If there's anything I've learned in my life is that ALL areas of knowledge overlap to many degrees, and you can begin learning something from many points along the line but, there needs to be a MAP, many people who 'don't learn properly' or looked down upon by others and university professors aren't simply 'stupid', many of them start off at the wrong entry point into a sphere of knowledge or discipline.
I've wondered about taking thebrain -- http://www.thebrain.com/ and it's SDK and wiki-fying it so that people around the industry can share what kinds of subjects and math they use for what the do, so students aren't totally blind, then off that map, you can hire the best text/teaching book writers to go at it and do their thing.
Most people tend to personalize their language or are not verbose enough for the beginner in explaining with depth all the many things that need to be learned. Often professors and experts do teach from the bottom up, they think perspectivistly from the top down, which ends up bastardizing and distorting the quality of education for many young and upcoming students.
I disagree. I need BOTH folders AND "labels", and by labels I really mean tags, since labels are a piss poor implentation of tagging that's been going on a while at places like delicious. I've asked the gmail team many times to implement delicious style tagging with a half-decent interface. I love delicious's integration with firefox, if I had something like that for gmail I'd wet my pants. Many of us use email to save quick notes as drafts to come back to later, I know I've got a tonne of drafts sitting in my draft folder marked with labels that I wish I could interface with better using tags instead.
Another one of Gmails real problem is that it's interface is verging on crap, it's usable for certain, but many aspects of it are cumbersome for serious users. There's too much noise you can't controland the interface needs dockable/undockable, hidable UI and custom 'toolbars'. There's so much I'd change if I was in charge of gmails development, GMail has been stuck in molasses for god knows how long now.
... even if their first attempt isn't great, I've often wondered if one couldn't make a puzzle game out of teaching basic electricity and electronics. I was playing bioshock with the little 'hacking' tubes game and thought "wouldn't it be cool if this was about electronics, in 3D, and you could make stuff!"
I have to wonder if the complexity of modern software is part of the big reason driving OSS, it would seem to me as our systems get faster, we can increase the complexity of our programs ad infintum, and at some point it 'breaks the camels back' and no business can hope to maintain something so large and unwieldy.
"I'm continually stunned on how bullshit laws like this keep popping up in a society that spells out a specific separation of church and state."
It's about population size and the culture of that historical population, religious people outbreed secular people at a much higher rate, therefore they 'win' by cultural imperialism through breeding.
Yes I am replying to my own post, hit reply there before finishing. I mean that what one might consider 'smaller defects', are they really 'defects', how does one determine defect from being different? If one looks at how life evolves, we might consider many species today as a result of 'defects'.
So when considering smaller defects, just what is the evidence for it's implications, and what kind of data do we have on them? That's the question I'd ask before discarding them.
That's the real issue, in my opinion where it is GROSSLY obvious that a defect will harm the child severely then we should. I really doubt our science (and scientists) are capable at present at deciding what is a 'defect' when no studies have been done and data is not available, since what one might consider a defect, may not be, or maybe tied to a whole host of other issues once development starts, after all if you're going to discard emybryos with percieved small 'defects', the error in judgement of what constitutes a defect is rather large.
If we coul we would monitor and control the growth and eliminate 'defects' during the whole term of a pregnancy or even as we grow throughout are life but this is just not feasable realistically, at some point an embryo is 'good enough', and I really don't think we have the knowledge at present to judge very accurately what constitutes a 'defect' at smaller levels without studies and long term data to back it up.
"Just because we don't age doesn't mean we can't die. "
I didn't mean it in the literal sense of "not dying", I meant it in the sense of 'ageless' going to war with each other and killing one another, or to be at 'war' (i.e. at odds) for however long they live.
I wonder if this means at some point politics and religion will have to go obsolete, I can't see immortals who are idealogically charged getting along with each other, will this lead to immortal wars, or will age and maturity see idealogy as nonsense?
It was so obvious, we know ISP's are the worst kinds of businesses, they oversell the bandwidth massively on the customer end and yet their backbones are pretty hardly ever used so they just end up cheating the consumer. It's basically extortion.
"So despite investing heavily in technologies to reduce our travel budget, and despite the effectiveness of these tools, our travel budget remains hefty. Showing up in person is like wearing nice clothes to work - it shows that you are serious, and that your intention is to make things work. And so we show up, and our company continues to grow profitably."
What the real problem is cheap travel creates business opportunities which create international dependencies which drive even more consumption. What happens is businesses constnatly want GROWTH, in order to do that you exploit the geometry of population sizes and markets you never had access to before, so everyone is going after a LARGER population then ever before, as businesses connect with even MORE of the earths 6.5 billion people it creates even more trade networks and stress on limited fuel resources.
No, this is bullshit, you're just not doing enough cardio exercise per week.
I know because I'm a big stalky guy, you have to eat more protein, less carbs, and do more cardio and FREEWEIGHTS (free weights + cardo = key here), and I gaurantee you, you WILL see your muscles.
It's a matter of dedication of your time, you need to burn at least 1000 cals a day, 7 days a week and not eat over roughly ~1800 cals a day. You will lose the weight and bodyfat, I know because I've done it.
You need to see a personal trainer who knows what they are doing.
"Punctuation aids communication. Its misuse aids obfuscation."
No doubt about it, but my errors were so minor, and considering this IS slashdot, you'd have to be a moron to think that the meaning was lost or was 'obfuscated'.
It went over your head = you felt the need to READ something into it that was not there. So yes it went over your head because you didn't get the gist of what was actually implied by what was said.
You're being pedantic. Go read old english (specifically old new testament bibles) there is a reason we don't speak like that anymore, since language evolves over time.
"Don't they have grade school any more? Is it all selfish steam and no English or math?"
No it has nothing to do with that, why do you think published books have editors and proof readers? The way different human minds operate are radically different from one another. I have insight into my own memory systems, the way my memory processes words for instance is by grouping them by similar sound, so I might type he's a roll model instead of he's a ROLE model and not even know I made the error until afterwords. It's unconscious memory errors like having an address that is off by one.
BTW. I've never had any courses in grammar when I was going through school and I still seemed to do mostly fine. If you want to blame anyone, blame the schools.
"But as TFA mentions, its also entirely possible that we do not need to replicate the human mind to accomplish the tasks we set out to accomplish with AI."
I think you misunderstood my post, I'm not saying we have to BUILD a human brain, I'm saying there's things we will discover in different sciences that have enormous consequences for other discplines. It's the complex mix of conceptual tools, analytical methods, and other DISCOVERIES that have applications in many discplines beyond their own, I can't draw a 'mind map' (concept network here) but you can get an idea with these arrows (i.e. physics --> AI --> biology --> AI --> ETC)
I think what I posted went over your head. Your post only amplifies exactly why I said what I said - our consciousness GROWS for a reason within an environment. But you have to realize that once the brain is developed the consciousness doesn't simply 'go away' if you chop off other parts of your body, you could theoretically destroy most of your body and replace most of your body with artificial substitutes (i.e. brain in a vat kind of thing) and still be as conscious as you are now.
We've already experimented with restoring peoples vision so that they can detect light, soon we will be able to restore (some people) from paralysis, etc, and regrow/re-attach real live limbs. It's only a matter of time before we could by-pass or jury rigg an intelligence (bootstrap) one instead of having to go through the organic growth process.
... 'intelligence' need to be made first. I have a feeling that the reason AI has 'underdelivered' is merely due to not understanding our own intelligence first. I think the whole idea that AI's we imagine (like in the movies) could be constructed purely de-novo, was naive. I think it's a matter of cross-polination that has to take place from biology and many other sciences, some genius's and teams of scientists have to come along and take all the elements and put them together into a cohesive framework.
Also I think the previous parent to which you were responding doesn't understand that as things become MORE complicated, we tend to remix and combine our past inventions with new ones, but the newer ones tend to be even more complex, which takes more time, this is offset somewhat by computers but right now we are OVERLOADED with information. There is so much potential for invention with the internet it's unreal, we're just too slow to realize it all.
I'm sure in the future inventions and much of science will be automated by computer AI, and scientists will have even less of a roll to play, if ray kurzweil is even moderately right.
"What's next? "Graphic" cards with hardware accelerated AI support?"
Actually this isn't a bad idea, this is a good idea since pathfinding in games like Supreme commander is just a nightmare as you add more units, I've wondered about using the GPU for pathfinding acceleration.
... seriously, there are many sites you can use as permanent stores, such as GMAIL (Gmail drive - http://www.allscoop.com/tools/gmail/) and other tools, just look around!
"As I said in the quote you supplied, it's easy to blame the corporations and call them evil, even as you, on a daily basis, benefit from the technological and medical advances of corporate culture. A man of average income today lives better than the pharaohs of ancient Egypt"
You must be nuts to think that the average person lives better then the pharoahs, especially when you're making non-sequitor comparisons, the pharoahs had slaves and concubines and had enormous influence and power over the average person. The average person today does not have any of that stuff, but the rich sure do (paying for prostitutes, mistresses, etc) or simply having greater access due to money.
China made many technological advances before modern times under different economic systems. Saying "It's all because of X" cover for someones pet idealogy. Time + effort = progress, many old civilizations made many technical marvels without modern economic systems. We're not as progressive as we think either, it was only a mere ~100 years ago that slavery abolished.
Lastly, who cares about 1000's of year ago? You're comparing apples to oranges, the technology and society is radically different from 2000 years ago. The "pharoahs" that live today live way better then the average man, so you argument is irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
" This provides a natural economic incentive both to find alternatives, and to recycle, at the point where it is economically feasible."
This is not always the case, many multi-national corporations still dump garbage into the commons without paying a red cent. The idea that incentives alone will change their behaviou just shows you are naive. There are plenty of companies downloading their risks and passing the buck, there needs to be a way to enforce the law against such companies which is difficult to say the least.
... can't write or teach worth a damn, I've got tonnes of books written by experts that are not worthy of being called "textbook" or even for teaching much of anything.
If there's anything I've learned in my life is that ALL areas of knowledge overlap to many degrees, and you can begin learning something from many points along the line but, there needs to be a MAP, many people who 'don't learn properly' or looked down upon by others and university professors aren't simply 'stupid', many of them start off at the wrong entry point into a sphere of knowledge or discipline.
I've wondered about taking thebrain -- http://www.thebrain.com/ and it's SDK and wiki-fying it so that people around the industry can share what kinds of subjects and math they use for what the do, so students aren't totally blind, then off that map, you can hire the best text/teaching book writers to go at it and do their thing.
Most people tend to personalize their language or are not verbose enough for the beginner in explaining with depth all the many things that need to be learned. Often professors and experts do teach from the bottom up, they think perspectivistly from the top down, which ends up bastardizing and distorting the quality of education for many young and upcoming students.
"Labels aren't better than folders?"
I disagree. I need BOTH folders AND "labels", and by labels I really mean tags, since labels are a piss poor implentation of tagging that's been going on a while at places like delicious. I've asked the gmail team many times to implement delicious style tagging with a half-decent interface. I love delicious's integration with firefox, if I had something like that for gmail I'd wet my pants. Many of us use email to save quick notes as drafts to come back to later, I know I've got a tonne of drafts sitting in my draft folder marked with labels that I wish I could interface with better using tags instead.
Another one of Gmails real problem is that it's interface is verging on crap, it's usable for certain, but many aspects of it are cumbersome for serious users. There's too much noise you can't controland the interface needs dockable/undockable, hidable UI and custom 'toolbars'. There's so much I'd change if I was in charge of gmails development, GMail has been stuck in molasses for god knows how long now.
... even if their first attempt isn't great, I've often wondered if one couldn't make a puzzle game out of teaching basic electricity and electronics. I was playing bioshock with the little 'hacking' tubes game and thought "wouldn't it be cool if this was about electronics, in 3D, and you could make stuff!"
I have to wonder if the complexity of modern software is part of the big reason driving OSS, it would seem to me as our systems get faster, we can increase the complexity of our programs ad infintum, and at some point it 'breaks the camels back' and no business can hope to maintain something so large and unwieldy.
"I'm continually stunned on how bullshit laws like this keep popping up in a society that spells out a specific separation of church and state."
It's about population size and the culture of that historical population, religious people outbreed secular people at a much higher rate, therefore they 'win' by cultural imperialism through breeding.
Yes I am replying to my own post, hit reply there before finishing. I mean that what one might consider 'smaller defects', are they really 'defects', how does one determine defect from being different? If one looks at how life evolves, we might consider many species today as a result of 'defects'.
So when considering smaller defects, just what is the evidence for it's implications, and what kind of data do we have on them? That's the question I'd ask before discarding them.
That's the real issue, in my opinion where it is GROSSLY obvious that a defect will harm the child severely then we should. I really doubt our science (and scientists) are capable at present at deciding what is a 'defect' when no studies have been done and data is not available, since what one might consider a defect, may not be, or maybe tied to a whole host of other issues once development starts, after all if you're going to discard emybryos with percieved small 'defects', the error in judgement of what constitutes a defect is rather large.
If we coul we would monitor and control the growth and eliminate 'defects' during the whole term of a pregnancy or even as we grow throughout are life but this is just not feasable realistically, at some point an embryo is 'good enough', and I really don't think we have the knowledge at present to judge very accurately what constitutes a 'defect' at smaller levels without studies and long term data to back it up.
"Just because we don't age doesn't mean we can't die. "
I didn't mean it in the literal sense of "not dying", I meant it in the sense of 'ageless' going to war with each other and killing one another, or to be at 'war' (i.e. at odds) for however long they live.
"Yes...I DO want to live for ever."
I wonder if this means at some point politics and religion will have to go obsolete, I can't see immortals who are idealogically charged getting along with each other, will this lead to immortal wars, or will age and maturity see idealogy as nonsense?
It was so obvious, we know ISP's are the worst kinds of businesses, they oversell the bandwidth massively on the customer end and yet their backbones are pretty hardly ever used so they just end up cheating the consumer. It's basically extortion.
... this is what you get in a competitive society where anyone will do their damndest to avoid poverty.
"So despite investing heavily in technologies to reduce our travel budget, and despite the effectiveness of these tools, our travel budget remains hefty. Showing up in person is like wearing nice clothes to work - it shows that you are serious, and that your intention is to make things work. And so we show up, and our company continues to grow profitably."
What the real problem is cheap travel creates business opportunities which create international dependencies which drive even more consumption. What happens is businesses constnatly want GROWTH, in order to do that you exploit the geometry of population sizes and markets you never had access to before, so everyone is going after a LARGER population then ever before, as businesses connect with even MORE of the earths 6.5 billion people it creates even more trade networks and stress on limited fuel resources.
No, this is bullshit, you're just not doing enough cardio exercise per week.
I know because I'm a big stalky guy, you have to eat more protein, less carbs, and do more cardio and FREEWEIGHTS (free weights + cardo = key here), and I gaurantee you, you WILL see your muscles.
It's a matter of dedication of your time, you need to burn at least 1000 cals a day, 7 days a week and not eat over roughly ~1800 cals a day. You will lose the weight and bodyfat, I know because I've done it.
You need to see a personal trainer who knows what they are doing.
What's really interesting is how much more popular incest is then orgy!
http://www.google.com/trends?q=orgy%2C+incest&ctab=0&geo=US&geor=all&date=all&sort=0
"Punctuation aids communication. Its misuse aids obfuscation."
No doubt about it, but my errors were so minor, and considering this IS slashdot, you'd have to be a moron to think that the meaning was lost or was 'obfuscated'.
It went over your head = you felt the need to READ something into it that was not there. So yes it went over your head because you didn't get the gist of what was actually implied by what was said.
You're being pedantic. Go read old english (specifically old new testament bibles) there is a reason we don't speak like that anymore, since language evolves over time.
"Don't they have grade school any more? Is it all selfish steam and no English or math?"
No it has nothing to do with that, why do you think published books have editors and proof readers? The way different human minds operate are radically different from one another. I have insight into my own memory systems, the way my memory processes words for instance is by grouping them by similar sound, so I might type he's a roll model instead of he's a ROLE model and not even know I made the error until afterwords. It's unconscious memory errors like having an address that is off by one.
BTW. I've never had any courses in grammar when I was going through school and I still seemed to do mostly fine. If you want to blame anyone, blame the schools.
"But as TFA mentions, its also entirely possible that we do not need to replicate the human mind to accomplish the tasks we set out to accomplish with AI."
I think you misunderstood my post, I'm not saying we have to BUILD a human brain, I'm saying there's things we will discover in different sciences that have enormous consequences for other discplines. It's the complex mix of conceptual tools, analytical methods, and other DISCOVERIES that have applications in many discplines beyond their own, I can't draw a 'mind map' (concept network here) but you can get an idea with these arrows (i.e. physics --> AI --> biology --> AI --> ETC)
I think what I posted went over your head. Your post only amplifies exactly why I said what I said - our consciousness GROWS for a reason within an environment. But you have to realize that once the brain is developed the consciousness doesn't simply 'go away' if you chop off other parts of your body, you could theoretically destroy most of your body and replace most of your body with artificial substitutes (i.e. brain in a vat kind of thing) and still be as conscious as you are now.
We've already experimented with restoring peoples vision so that they can detect light, soon we will be able to restore (some people) from paralysis, etc, and regrow/re-attach real live limbs. It's only a matter of time before we could by-pass or jury rigg an intelligence (bootstrap) one instead of having to go through the organic growth process.
... 'intelligence' need to be made first. I have a feeling that the reason AI has 'underdelivered' is merely due to not understanding our own intelligence first. I think the whole idea that AI's we imagine (like in the movies) could be constructed purely de-novo, was naive. I think it's a matter of cross-polination that has to take place from biology and many other sciences, some genius's and teams of scientists have to come along and take all the elements and put them together into a cohesive framework.
Also I think the previous parent to which you were responding doesn't understand that as things become MORE complicated, we tend to remix and combine our past inventions with new ones, but the newer ones tend to be even more complex, which takes more time, this is offset somewhat by computers but right now we are OVERLOADED with information. There is so much potential for invention with the internet it's unreal, we're just too slow to realize it all.
I'm sure in the future inventions and much of science will be automated by computer AI, and scientists will have even less of a roll to play, if ray kurzweil is even moderately right.
"What's next? "Graphic" cards with hardware accelerated AI support?"
Actually this isn't a bad idea, this is a good idea since pathfinding in games like Supreme commander is just a nightmare as you add more units, I've wondered about using the GPU for pathfinding acceleration.
... seriously, there are many sites you can use as permanent stores, such as GMAIL (Gmail drive - http://www.allscoop.com/tools/gmail/) and other tools, just look around!
Why not take advantage of it?
"As I said in the quote you supplied, it's easy to blame the corporations and call them evil, even as you, on a daily basis, benefit from the technological and medical advances of corporate culture. A man of average income today lives better than the pharaohs of ancient Egypt"
You must be nuts to think that the average person lives better then the pharoahs, especially when you're making non-sequitor comparisons, the pharoahs had slaves and concubines and had enormous influence and power over the average person. The average person today does not have any of that stuff, but the rich sure do (paying for prostitutes, mistresses, etc) or simply having greater access due to money.
China made many technological advances before modern times under different economic systems. Saying "It's all because of X" cover for someones pet idealogy. Time + effort = progress, many old civilizations made many technical marvels without modern economic systems. We're not as progressive as we think either, it was only a mere ~100 years ago that slavery abolished.
Lastly, who cares about 1000's of year ago? You're comparing apples to oranges, the technology and society is radically different from 2000 years ago. The "pharoahs" that live today live way better then the average man, so you argument is irrelevant.