If there is one cause without cause why can't there be many (i.e. fresh ideas). Sure, the universe provides the potential for everything yet it isn't certain the theory of relativity would exist if Einstein had never lived. So ideas are connected to those that think them up and they are also qualitatively different from the shape of a leaf. The difference is the involvement of the human brain which unarguably belongs to the human. Therefor it's not a stretch to assert that any output of it's processes can be treated as also belonging to that human.
It's really a conudrum. If you create something that people love they feel like they have an emotional investment and therefor the right to demand changes (like you would demand that your spouse stopped getting drunk in the middle of the day). "Stopping WoW" really doesn't enter your mind just as "I'll break up with XYZ" won't if you still love XYZ.
That's why the WoW forum is such a mess. WoW is amongst the thing that those players hold dearest to their heart. Of course they will be pasionate and irrational about it.
Regarding the warden: I'm a programmer and how anyone can trust any program up from a certain complexity is beyond me. Ultimatively you have to trust that the publisher has their best interesst at heart which in blizzards case is not about messing with you PC or stealing your personal data. BTW, I really wonder how many of those that are complaining about this have entered their credit card number on blizzards site..
Strangely WoW doesn't feel like the client is doing much of anything. There is dead reckoning (play wow, pull the lan plug and observe as people are going in circles). In high latency situations you are not able to queue up actions and you get lot's of "out of range" or "not behind the target" messages. It seems like everything is actually authenticated on the server so I wonder how cheating is possible at all.
That's like saying a program isn't novel because a bit sequence happens to appear in an other program. Obviously that is not true. There are orginal ideas (there must be otherwise there can't be any ideas) and there are novel recombination of ideas. Content creators do work, sometimes a great deal i.e. in movie production. Following your logic everything would be free for the taking because physical property is also mostly a recombination of things that have existed before. I actually agree with your sentiment but attacking copyright in proxy of attacking property rights will not get you anywhere.
I don't want to defend copyright and patents (especially patents!) as they are but your logic is flawed. Copyright is an extention of property rights which is based on the believe that a person should reap the reward of their labor.
The problem at the moment is that the law treats copyrighted IP as if there is always a license attached regardless of whether you can know about it. In my opinion it's morally completely acceptable if a company bases it's sale of instances of an IP on a contract that forbids the seller from sharing it. Please note that this is different then an EULA or (c) notice on the back. For one the buyer can't deny that he is aware of the limitation and the seller must keep the contract in their archive. This means that the burden of prove lies with the IP holder again.
In this scenario, the only one who could be charged in a civil suit would be who breached the contract in this specific instance.
Of course, in practice this would never work. It would cost to much to track down who actually breached the contract and IP owners would soon realize that the only value of IP is to draw visitors to your website. And then we would be back at a purely advertisment supported content as it has been with TV and radio for the last 50 years (at least!). What a nice day that'll be. The way it is know I fear we'll have to wait till the generation that won't let go of the idea that people will pay actually money for stuff they can get for free has died.
Being from germany my perspective is different: Your government does something which is clearly illegal. Mine does the same thing legally. This means evidence from it will be court admissible and there is almost no way to stop this except for appealing to the consitutional court. Since the the german consitution was drawn up at the high point of stateism it doesn't restrict law makers a whole lot though. Once you get over the fact that governments are basically evil it becomes preferable if they break their own rules instead of having to power to make most all rules they want.
The mistake of course is to assume that "We are alone!" is actually an explanation. It creates more (and more difficult) questions then it answers. It also lends credence to religion and I think when we introducing God into a scientific debate Occam shouts from the grave "dammit, this is *exactly* what I was talking about".
I think your destruction potiential doesn't include population growth. I'd say that if you take into consideration what technology is necessary to support 6 billion people on earth the ratio gets a lot better.
Re:I'd say it depends on who you ask...
on
Is SETI Worth It?
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· Score: 1
Maybe they already have. Per definition, as a non-time-traveler, you wouldn't be able to judge whether your timeline is untempered. Maybe in an alternate timeline the cold war became a hot war destroying almost all humans. 3000 years later the descendants of the survivers built a time machine, went back and prevented that war. How would you tell?
Maybe it's just not cost efficient to do so. Maybe even advanced technology will not make the problem posed by gigantic interstellar distances go away. I hope with all my heart that this is not true but it is a possibilty. Anyhow, I prefer to think that we are what others will in a million years call the "precursors". The first species to travel amongst the stars...
I do agree it's a long shot. I disagree that we can't judge SETIs efficiency with some reasonable assumptions (like intelligence = technology = EM radition). Still, a couple of years ago I'd problably conceded the argument at this point but seeing the advances in finding exosolar planets I still think that there is a chance to trim the haystack to a manageable size. Regarding the lottery: Some do win you know. Still it's not the same: Stars that have been scanned before needn't be rescanned. If the lottery worked like that you'd actually increase your chances from week to week;)
Also, I just thought of something practical which came out of SETI: distributed computing really took of with the SETI client.
I do appreciate your support for all money burning activities!;)
Actually there is life in the universe. Just thought I'd mention it since you seem to be unaware.
SETI isn't a scientific theory for christ sake so stop treating it like one. It's a bet on that the chances of finding alien life are pretty good by looking for EM that can't be of natural cause. It probably doesn't have very good odds but that's not the point here.
Regarding AI: You sure have a lot of answers. I wonder where the result is though? Show me a program that can carry on a coherent conversation in a human language. Show me a computer that is self aware (which is not the same as introspective). But most of all show me a computer that is intelligent on a general purpose level. Who cares about statistical analysis (which humans never do in their head btw...) and brute forcing through a million combinations of how a chess game might end. I want a chess program that says 'You know what, I feel like checkers today' and KNOWS what this means.
Thruth is that currently no one has formalized how the human brain works. No one even has a workable idea how one might go about this!
I can tell that you are a diciple of the mechanical school which has very simple answers that tend to make of mumbling "should, might, maybe" and a 100k research grant. Like this "hm hm, self awareness equals introspection of mental states equals debugging ah ha! should be easy!" Or this "Halting problems only affect theoretical system with infinite memory, since computers don't have infinite memory this won't be a problem! 100K please! PS: hope you don't mind that your AstroBot2000 can be DoSed by any and all infinite recursions!"
Yep, chances can not be estimated because our knowledge of evolution, planet formation and a whole lot of other things are not up to it. So while we figure them out, does it really hurt to keep looking? If the chances turn out to be pretty good (say you'd need a hundred years on average to discover an alien civ) we will be glad we had a head start.
I'm not going to go into chances that SETI has to succeed. We just don't know yet.
But thinking that we are the only intelligent life in the whole universe? There is no reason at all to believe *that*. SETI might be a hit/miss type of thing. I don't know. Let's assume it is. Are all hit or miss type problems not worth trying to solve?
You are right in the sense that it's impossible to prove the absence of aliens with SETI. The rest of your argument is wrong though. SETIs foundation is the testable theory that life exists in this universe. If you look around you'll be able to confirm that. The real question is not whether "SETI is testable" but if it is a feasible method for looking for *other* life or even if it is feasible to search for it at all.
This in turn is a statistical function where not all parameters are well understood. Once astronomy and biology have all the answers for how life gets started, if intelligence is a likely outcome of evolution, how many M-Class planets there really are etc etc this function might give us a probability that most people would find to be way too low. That's when you can shutdown the SETI program.
Speaking of true AI: No one has found the secret sauce of human intelligence yet. No one is able to create a set of formal rules that have as outcome human-like intelligence. Wether a search for these rules will ever yield results is just as unkown as if SETI will find aliens. What you are refering to is weak-AI that utilizes the fact that computers are better at doing calculations.
The wow forum is leaking big time.. could you keep your whining there please?
Adressing your post:
1) WoW subscription numbers are rising so no, not *everyone* is quiting and WoW is not failing (which 'prophets' like you predicted for since well before the game was officially released!)
2) Instancing: Spamcamping and getting jacked while doing a hard boss are not fun. The world is still plenty massive. So is the real world yet I don't want 2000 people over every night.
3) Arenas: IT'S RATED. Got it this time? The rating ensures that you are up against opponents that match you in strength. Wether this is skill or gear doesn't matter.
4) PvP: I lol'd at this "it used to be better". It wasn't. It was more gear dependant since you could easily one-two shot people. It wasn't about organization but about getting 15 well equiped people to cap the farm (or stables) in 20 seconds. The old preformed PvP Groups left the battleground if the other side even put up a fight. It was the worst grind any game ever had because it got harder the more other players grinded!
5) Bugs & Xploits: You gotta be kidding me. I'm glad WoW has so few bugs...
... before you pay people to argue against you maybe you should be familiar with the actual topic. The smoking ban for minors is not in place because smoking is more or less harmful to that age group (though it is). The concensus in many societies is that children are not abled to make decisions that affect them in the long run because their horizon tends to be rather small. This is important especially for anything that causes some kind of addiction precisely because an addiction has consequences 20 years down the line. Kids can't plan for the next week, let alone the state of their health in their forties.
he is right you know. You wouldn't post in such length if you didn't care anymore. People who don't care wouldn't bother. It's similar to the WoW forums where every minute action by Blizzards causes a torrent of "WoW will die [has already died/will die even more quickly] because of this". WoW and slashdot's death will have one thing in common: it's going to be silent.
It's a database! It's not like anyone will have to shlepp around thousand volumns of the wikipedia. Have a non-notable tag like you have a POV tag and the issue is solved. Why you would delete *anything* without substitution from Wiki is beyond me!
Reading this triade against Veropedia demonstrated to me why companies are right in being cautios in embracing open source and open standards. Freedom only seems to mean "freedom to do something non-profit". What the hell guys? If one has the slightes clue about Wikipedia it should be quite clear that Veropedia adds value to Wikipedia and to the users of both. The OP rants about impartiality. That's rich seeing as companies are free to add advertisement (slant) to the articles in Wikipedia themselves!
That's bullshit. You know how I know? I created a new class in eclipse and mashed buttons on the keyboard as fast as I could. No Lag at all. P4 2.6GHZ, 2GB of Ram. Stop posing.
exactly. But societies operate on see no evil hear no evil. Same with child porn. While I dispise it, naturally, there is really no good reason to forbid someone from showing of their criminal activities. Instead of going after the original crimes far to many law enforcement recourses are being diverted to fighting secondary consequences. One could say the same for anti drug laws which where originally designed to curb crimes related to drug aquisition. Now there is a whole new class of criminals, prisons are full with drug addicts and police departments have drug specialists, k9 squads and so forth. Yet theft, burglary and robbings haven't gone down. I wonder what kind of world we could life in if it weren't for the laws that periodically expand the number of criminals (sometimes by millions at a time) without producing any messurable effects on public safety.
It's been such a long time but finally, after an exhausting 72 years wait facism is back! Meanwhile millions of italian bloggers go by on scouters yelling "ciao!".
Slashdot Mirror
If there is one cause without cause why can't there be many (i.e. fresh ideas). Sure, the universe provides the potential for everything yet it isn't certain the theory of relativity would exist if Einstein had never lived. So ideas are connected to those that think them up and they are also qualitatively different from the shape of a leaf. The difference is the involvement of the human brain which unarguably belongs to the human. Therefor it's not a stretch to assert that any output of it's processes can be treated as also belonging to that human.
It's really a conudrum. If you create something that people love they feel like they have an emotional investment and therefor the right to demand changes (like you would demand that your spouse stopped getting drunk in the middle of the day). "Stopping WoW" really doesn't enter your mind just as "I'll break up with XYZ" won't if you still love XYZ.
..
That's why the WoW forum is such a mess. WoW is amongst the thing that those players hold dearest to their heart. Of course they will be pasionate and irrational about it.
Regarding the warden: I'm a programmer and how anyone can trust any program up from a certain complexity is beyond me. Ultimatively you have to trust that the publisher has their best interesst at heart which in blizzards case is not about messing with you PC or stealing your personal data.
BTW, I really wonder how many of those that are complaining about this have entered their credit card number on blizzards site
Strangely WoW doesn't feel like the client is doing much of anything. There is dead reckoning (play wow, pull the lan plug and observe as people are going in circles). In high latency situations you are not able to queue up actions and you get lot's of "out of range" or "not behind the target" messages. It seems like everything is actually authenticated on the server so I wonder how cheating is possible at all.
That's like saying a program isn't novel because a bit sequence happens to appear in an other program. Obviously that is not true. There are orginal ideas (there must be otherwise there can't be any ideas) and there are novel recombination of ideas. Content creators do work, sometimes a great deal i.e. in movie production. Following your logic everything would be free for the taking because physical property is also mostly a recombination of things that have existed before. I actually agree with your sentiment but attacking copyright in proxy of attacking property rights will not get you anywhere.
I don't want to defend copyright and patents (especially patents!) as they are but your logic is flawed. Copyright is an extention of property rights which is based on the believe that a person should reap the reward of their labor.
The problem at the moment is that the law treats copyrighted IP as if there is always a license attached regardless of whether you can know about it. In my opinion it's morally completely acceptable if a company bases it's sale of instances of an IP on a contract that forbids the seller from sharing it. Please note that this is different then an EULA or (c) notice on the back. For one the buyer can't deny that he is aware of the limitation and the seller must keep the contract in their archive. This means that the burden of prove lies with the IP holder again.
In this scenario, the only one who could be charged in a civil suit would be who breached the contract in this specific instance.
Of course, in practice this would never work. It would cost to much to track down who actually breached the contract and IP owners would soon realize that the only value of IP is to draw visitors to your website. And then we would be back at a purely advertisment supported content as it has been with TV and radio for the last 50 years (at least!). What a nice day that'll be. The way it is know I fear we'll have to wait till the generation that won't let go of the idea that people will pay actually money for stuff they can get for free has died.
Being from germany my perspective is different: Your government does something which is clearly illegal. Mine does the same thing legally. This means evidence from it will be court admissible and there is almost no way to stop this except for appealing to the consitutional court. Since the the german consitution was drawn up at the high point of stateism it doesn't restrict law makers a whole lot though. Once you get over the fact that governments are basically evil it becomes preferable if they break their own rules instead of having to power to make most all rules they want.
The mistake of course is to assume that "We are alone!" is actually an explanation. It creates more (and more difficult) questions then it answers. It also lends credence to religion and I think when we introducing God into a scientific debate Occam shouts from the grave "dammit, this is *exactly* what I was talking about".
I think your destruction potiential doesn't include population growth. I'd say that if you take into consideration what technology is necessary to support 6 billion people on earth the ratio gets a lot better.
Maybe they already have. Per definition, as a non-time-traveler, you wouldn't be able to judge whether your timeline is untempered. Maybe in an alternate timeline the cold war became a hot war destroying almost all humans. 3000 years later the descendants of the survivers built a time machine, went back and prevented that war. How would you tell?
Maybe it's just not cost efficient to do so. Maybe even advanced technology will not make the problem posed by gigantic interstellar distances go away. I hope with all my heart that this is not true but it is a possibilty. Anyhow, I prefer to think that we are what others will in a million years call the "precursors". The first species to travel amongst the stars ...
I do agree it's a long shot. I disagree that we can't judge SETIs efficiency with some reasonable assumptions (like intelligence = technology = EM radition). Still, a couple of years ago I'd problably conceded the argument at this point but seeing the advances in finding exosolar planets I still think that there is a chance to trim the haystack to a manageable size. ;)
;)
Regarding the lottery: Some do win you know. Still it's not the same: Stars that have been scanned before needn't be rescanned. If the lottery worked like that you'd actually increase your chances from week to week
Also, I just thought of something practical which came out of SETI: distributed computing really took of with the SETI client.
I do appreciate your support for all money burning activities!
Actually there is life in the universe. Just thought I'd mention it since you seem to be unaware. SETI isn't a scientific theory for christ sake so stop treating it like one. It's a bet on that the chances of finding alien life are pretty good by looking for EM that can't be of natural cause. It probably doesn't have very good odds but that's not the point here.
...) and brute forcing through a million combinations of how a chess game might end. I want a chess program that says 'You know what, I feel like checkers today' and KNOWS what this means.
Regarding AI: You sure have a lot of answers. I wonder where the result is though? Show me a program that can carry on a coherent conversation in a human language. Show me a computer that is self aware (which is not the same as introspective). But most of all show me a computer that is intelligent on a general purpose level. Who cares about statistical analysis (which humans never do in their head btw
Thruth is that currently no one has formalized how the human brain works. No one even has a workable idea how one might go about this!
I can tell that you are a diciple of the mechanical school which has very simple answers that tend to make of mumbling "should, might, maybe" and a 100k research grant. Like this "hm hm, self awareness equals introspection of mental states equals debugging ah ha! should be easy!"
Or this "Halting problems only affect theoretical system with infinite memory, since computers don't have infinite memory this won't be a problem! 100K please! PS: hope you don't mind that your AstroBot2000 can be DoSed by any and all infinite recursions!"
Yep, chances can not be estimated because our knowledge of evolution, planet formation and a whole lot of other things are not up to it. So while we figure them out, does it really hurt to keep looking? If the chances turn out to be pretty good (say you'd need a hundred years on average to discover an alien civ) we will be glad we had a head start.
I'm not going to go into chances that SETI has to succeed. We just don't know yet.
But thinking that we are the only intelligent life in the whole universe? There is no reason at all to believe *that*. SETI might be a hit/miss type of thing. I don't know. Let's assume it is. Are all hit or miss type problems not worth trying to solve?
You are right in the sense that it's impossible to prove the absence of aliens with SETI. The rest of your argument is wrong though. SETIs foundation is the testable theory that life exists in this universe. If you look around you'll be able to confirm that. The real question is not whether "SETI is testable" but if it is a feasible method for looking for *other* life or even if it is feasible to search for it at all.
This in turn is a statistical function where not all parameters are well understood. Once astronomy and biology have all the answers for how life gets started, if intelligence is a likely outcome of evolution, how many M-Class planets there really are etc etc this function might give us a probability that most people would find to be way too low. That's when you can shutdown the SETI program.
Speaking of true AI: No one has found the secret sauce of human intelligence yet. No one is able to create a set of formal rules that have as outcome human-like intelligence. Wether a search for these rules will ever yield results is just as unkown as if SETI will find aliens. What you are refering to is weak-AI that utilizes the fact that computers are better at doing calculations.
The wow forum is leaking big time .. could you keep your whining there please?
...
Adressing your post:
1) WoW subscription numbers are rising so no, not *everyone* is quiting and WoW is not failing (which 'prophets' like you predicted for since well before the game was officially released!)
2) Instancing: Spamcamping and getting jacked while doing a hard boss are not fun. The world is still plenty massive. So is the real world yet I don't want 2000 people over every night. 3) Arenas: IT'S RATED. Got it this time? The rating ensures that you are up against opponents that match you in strength. Wether this is skill or gear doesn't matter.
4) PvP: I lol'd at this "it used to be better". It wasn't. It was more gear dependant since you could easily one-two shot people. It wasn't about organization but about getting 15 well equiped people to cap the farm (or stables) in 20 seconds. The old preformed PvP Groups left the battleground if the other side even put up a fight. It was the worst grind any game ever had because it got harder the more other players grinded!
5) Bugs & Xploits: You gotta be kidding me. I'm glad WoW has so few bugs
... before you pay people to argue against you maybe you should be familiar with the actual topic. The smoking ban for minors is not in place because smoking is more or less harmful to that age group (though it is). The concensus in many societies is that children are not abled to make decisions that affect them in the long run because their horizon tends to be rather small. This is important especially for anything that causes some kind of addiction precisely because an addiction has consequences 20 years down the line. Kids can't plan for the next week, let alone the state of their health in their forties.
A slashdot gem, your post. Thanks a lot :-D
I mean it.
This is relevant how?
he is right you know. You wouldn't post in such length if you didn't care anymore. People who don't care wouldn't bother. It's similar to the WoW forums where every minute action by Blizzards causes a torrent of "WoW will die [has already died/will die even more quickly] because of this". WoW and slashdot's death will have one thing in common: it's going to be silent.
there is some hilarious joke about dupes in their ...
It's a database! It's not like anyone will have to shlepp around thousand volumns of the wikipedia. Have a non-notable tag like you have a POV tag and the issue is solved. Why you would delete *anything* without substitution from Wiki is beyond me!
Reading this triade against Veropedia demonstrated to me why companies are right in being cautios in embracing open source and open standards. Freedom only seems to mean "freedom to do something non-profit". What the hell guys? If one has the slightes clue about Wikipedia it should be quite clear that Veropedia adds value to Wikipedia and to the users of both. The OP rants about impartiality. That's rich seeing as companies are free to add advertisement (slant) to the articles in Wikipedia themselves!
That's bullshit. You know how I know? I created a new class in eclipse and mashed buttons on the keyboard as fast as I could. No Lag at all. P4 2.6GHZ, 2GB of Ram. Stop posing.
exactly. But societies operate on see no evil hear no evil. Same with child porn. While I dispise it, naturally, there is really no good reason to forbid someone from showing of their criminal activities. Instead of going after the original crimes far to many law enforcement recourses are being diverted to fighting secondary consequences. One could say the same for anti drug laws which where originally designed to curb crimes related to drug aquisition. Now there is a whole new class of criminals, prisons are full with drug addicts and police departments have drug specialists, k9 squads and so forth. Yet theft, burglary and robbings haven't gone down. I wonder what kind of world we could life in if it weren't for the laws that periodically expand the number of criminals (sometimes by millions at a time) without producing any messurable effects on public safety.
It's been such a long time but finally, after an exhausting 72 years wait facism is back! Meanwhile millions of italian bloggers go by on scouters yelling "ciao!".