This could get as ugly as the creationist vs evolutionists debate...
I prefer Vi, since I spend lots of time at terminals logged into remote machines. Although things are faster these days, having such a tightly optimized editor is useful.
I have taught Emacs. That was an experience that was. I had to spend a week teaching myself how to use it, then teach a bunch of freshly minted undergrads, who then thought I was some kind of Emacs Guru. How wrong they were. Project students, being slightly more experienced final year bods, were all force marched to the Vi camp (well, gvim, I'm not that cruel), so I wouldn't have to use The Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping Monster if they needed help.
no, I haven't considered that. To be honest I've not gone beyond tunneling vnc with ssh, I'm not that adventurous. I was so pleased to get it working at all that I stopped there.
Funny how everyone says 'SUSE' these days to rhyme with 'traitorous scumbags':-)
I'm a new convert to KDE, after years of predominantly fluxbox usage, with the odd dabble into Gnome. This is mainly because I principally used Linux over VNC or ssh, so KDE was out of the question, too slow over the network.
Now I have the novelty of a fast local Linux box, and decided to try out these fancy Graphical Desktops a bit more. The new Gnome is good, but I must say I am becoming more and more impressed with KDE as the days go on. I still like my fluxbox though, simplicity does have it's appeal sometimes. Can KDE ever be that fast though, I doubt it. Not that I care much about load times on KDE, 99% of my computer usage is text editors and the console. Those are two things that run fast on any system.
KDE on windows? Sounds interesting. Windows is just a games environment or dumb terminal into my linux cluster for me normally, I'd love to have KDE on XP. A fast KDE frontend for Vista might actually make me consider buying that heap.
discovered in the west, yes. However Aids appears to have existed as a localised an minor disease for millenia. It became widespread when western doctors doing mass immunisation programs injected thousands of people a day with the same needle....
I beleive Arthur C clarke already postulated this very thing. According to him, if it has happened, then we are already being observed constantly.
I beleive it went thus
One machine capable of building two others travels to the first body with sufficient raw materials and produces two new units identical to itself, which then move to the first body they find with sufficient m,aterials.. and so on. By now the galaxy should be full of the beggers, even if it only started recently, as in last million years or so.
not the greatest comeback, frankly. You would appear to support my argument, even though you are trying to refute it.
Sentience, by its very existance, infers a desire to maintain existance, either of the self or of offspring. Whether those offspring are manufactured mechanically or biologically is irrelevent.
you use the term 'organic' as if it is itself going to derive moral values. This is not the case. Morals are defined by ones culture and environ, not ones base contituants. I would not pretend to assume what the moral base of an artificial life would be, but I would assume that since they would not have the same need to possess land and wealth that we do would mean they would not feel the same need to war that we so readily demonstrate.
Safety and continience would be priorities, so leaving our immediate vecinity would seem to me to be the safest option.
By far the largest problem we will face if and when artificial life forms reach intelligence is not whether they will take over the world, or what rights to assign them when they come into being.
The biggest problem will be getting them to stay here at all.
If, for instance, you were made of materials that were either trivial to repair or replace, and had no aging process in the same sense as humans experience it, then what would hold you back from building a spaceship and leaving? Hundreds/thousands of years to reach another star? No problem, just set a timed reboot and wait it out. In fact, why build a proper spaceship, just cobble something together that can get you out near asteroids, take some tools, and convert an asteroid or build a ship from those raw materials available in space. When the passage of time is less important, such things become not only possible, but practically inevitable.
I think people wondering about the ethics/problems of artificial sentience (being distinct from AI, which is very A, and currently not too much actual I) miss this fundamental point. It's pure vanity to assume that an artificial life form will want to spend its time around a race that constantly starts wars, wrecks it's own planet, and is as adept at denying rights as it is of inventing them.
Then of course there's the small issue of the inference that if we 'assign' rights to Artificial life forms, we might equally decide later to 'remove' those same rights. After all, we do that with humans all the time. My moneys on the 'ooh look, I'm alive, now how do I get of this rock' eventuality....
google seem to manage the only adverst on the internet that don't bother me, if Wikipedia went that way I see no problem either.
To beleive that projects like Wikipedia should not advertise is definatelly nieve, why should there not be extra pots of money for additional projects.
Mind you, I have a few issues with the way Sourceforge has handled having paid accounts. In spite of what they said, unpaid project hosting suffered. I was unable to access my project on a number of occasions. In that case monetising the service was definatelly harmful. At least if Wikipedia goes with advertiusing we shouldn't see a two cast system.
some testing of concepts for rovers is done using linux. For instance Reading university, who have been researching co-operative robotics with the aim of mars rovers building habitats, used netbooted gentoo linux.
Apple have this little habit of having these fun little idea's that turn into unstoppable revolutions. Were it not for the enormous braking force of Microsoft ripping their idea's constantly they'd be much further ahead then they are now.
Apple don't have a great record of games on their platform, but is that so terrible? They weren't really aiming at the gamer until relatively recently. After all, they'd never had a portable music player till the iPod, and that seems to have gone well.
Odd isn't it, that a device meant to render music enjoyment even more convenient and portable should be so very bad. I heard about that sony player, but never got one. I've not yet seen a Zune, other than in adverts where it is 'sponsoring' events. Even so, I don't see microsoft as being geared towards ease of use. the iPod and iTunes seems to be the only combination of player/software which is considerate of the needs of the end user.
That if I wax lyrical on slashdot and other sites for long enough, naked ladies who lust after Unix coders will emerge spontaneously from the interweb.
People like doing that though. I just got myself an iPod, and was much mocked by my friends for this, citing several dreadful reasons garnered from the anti Apple Fud vendors, all of which I disproved within a day.
1: You can't get music back off it.
- Well actually you can really easily, and organised by artist/album too if you use ipod-access or similer.
2: You can't use it to transfer files.
- Wrong again, iTunes lets you do it, but even without that option you can make a folder on the iPod and do that yourself with ease.
3: iTunes will nuke all your files instantly if you connect it to another computer.
- Nope, only if you choose to resynch it with a new machine, otherwise it'll leave it as is quite happily.
So, I win, and the iPod is rather nice with it. I rather suepected that their arguments were a load of dingoes kidneys, and I was right. FUD does serve one useful purpose though. It neatly reveals the easily fooled people.
we studied Surtsey Island when I was at school, around 11 I seem to recall. It was fascinating even at that young age. Everyone seemed so excited about it.
I didn't *quite* get why at the time, although I read all the material avidly. With benefit of hindsight it seems I was unbelievably fortunate to have such an event occur in my youth.
When we studied it the island was still devoid of native/reproducing life (being about ten-12 years old by then) but there was information on arrival of non native flora and fauna in small numbers, very very small I recall.
So by the time large companies have started to deploy Vista, there will be a new version of windows out that they'll be plugging to mr and mrs Corporate world, pointing out, in the process, all the things that were wrong with Vista or needed changing, in order to get purchase orders in for the new stuff.
Somehow I don't see this as a viable plan.
Incremental service pack based improvements to Vista? Yes indeedy, but a completely new OS? What a stupid idea. They do, after all, sell to the Corporate world, and that does not like complete change in IT infrastructure every two years
After the problem with Apple Records, surely they must have looked into this. I
It's an abbreviation of the full title though, so possibly they can get away with it. Having the 'i' in lower case would also place the product in their 'i' line up, distinguishing it from ITV visually.
Sounds a stupid name to use all the same, do they never learn?
Am I not now? How interesting. I don't rely on documentaries for my facts. I rely on research, published papers.
A hypothesis is often created on little evidence, but then it needs experiment and proven evidence to back it up. Without evidence it's merely faith or a belief based off personal conviction, that's a road to certain failure.
"There is almost no debate about global warming in the scientific community."
Wrong, oh so very wrong. What there is in the US is being subdued by the American government. Global warming need not be proved to realize that we are messing with the planet. Relying on poor evidence and supposition is a sure way to take the wrong route and screw things up. What if, for instance, there is an additional cause that we don't know anything about yet? What if we settled on Global warming without sufficient proof, and miss something else that drives us to extinction?
would that be fine enough though. The stuff they need would need to be the same as material that had been pounded by meteorites for billions of years and irradiated for that long too.
Wasn't it found to be very fine and thus 'sticky'.
I suspect some heavy industrial processing would be required to replicate it. However, without the same gravitational field it would behave differently anyhow, so a less accurate analogue would likely suffice.
"Then do what any sensible scientists does - do a literature survey."
While I'm writing up my phd? Oh please god no.
Anyway, this is slashdot, real scientists do not belong here. We should immediately disguise ourselves by saying L0L a lot, and making 'in russia' jokes, or they'll get us..
But seriously, I never claimed to be up to date, evolutionary algorithms and biological systems are my domain. Although thrust from Ice melt on comets is an additional interest at the moment. Probably that doesn't apply here.
"I shared your opinion ten years ago. The time of uncertainty about all this has long past, I am sorry (and very sad) to say."
Well if the US would take the lead and quit with the vast scale of pollution then perhaps there would be reason to be more cheerful. However, on my original point, what proof exists that this was definatelly caused by Global Warming? I'd be willing to acept that it was if there were proof, but I cannot see how it could be proved on just one event of this type.
Slashdot Mirror
This could get as ugly as the creationist vs evolutionists debate...
I prefer Vi, since I spend lots of time at terminals logged into remote machines. Although things are faster these days, having such a tightly optimized editor is useful.
I have taught Emacs. That was an experience that was. I had to spend a week teaching myself how to use it, then teach a bunch of freshly minted undergrads, who then thought I was some kind of Emacs Guru. How wrong they were.
Project students, being slightly more experienced final year bods, were all force marched to the Vi camp (well, gvim, I'm not that cruel), so I wouldn't have to use The Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping Monster if they needed help.
wrong, it was just a very large weather balloon.
Will you ever learn.....
pretty much, yes, the whole KDE suite, or as much as will fit. Then I get the nice KDE stuff still available when I want to play games in windows.
Most of my windows tools are ports of linux stuff anyway.
no, I haven't considered that. To be honest I've not gone beyond tunneling vnc with ssh, I'm not that adventurous. I was so pleased to get it working at all that I stopped there.
I'll give it a go.
Funny how everyone says 'SUSE' these days to rhyme with 'traitorous scumbags' :-)
I'm a new convert to KDE, after years of predominantly fluxbox usage, with the odd dabble into Gnome. This is mainly because I principally used Linux over VNC or ssh, so KDE was out of the question, too slow over the network.
Now I have the novelty of a fast local Linux box, and decided to try out these fancy Graphical Desktops a bit more. The new Gnome is good, but I must say I am becoming more and more impressed with KDE as the days go on. I still like my fluxbox though, simplicity does have it's appeal sometimes. Can KDE ever be that fast though, I doubt it. Not that I care much about load times on KDE, 99% of my computer usage is text editors and the console. Those are two things that run fast on any system.
KDE on windows? Sounds interesting. Windows is just a games environment or dumb terminal into my linux cluster for me normally, I'd love to have KDE on XP. A fast KDE frontend for Vista might actually make me consider buying that heap.
discovered in the west, yes. However Aids appears to have existed as a localised an minor disease for millenia. It became widespread when western doctors doing mass immunisation programs injected thousands of people a day with the same needle....
I beleive Arthur C clarke already postulated this very thing. According to him, if it has happened, then we are already being observed constantly.
I beleive it went thus
One machine capable of building two others travels to the first body with sufficient raw materials and produces two new units identical to itself, which then move to the first body they find with sufficient m,aterials.. and so on. By now the galaxy should be full of the beggers, even if it only started recently, as in last million years or so.
not the greatest comeback, frankly. You would appear to support my argument, even though you are trying to refute it.
Sentience, by its very existance, infers a desire to maintain existance, either of the self or of offspring. Whether those offspring are manufactured mechanically or biologically is irrelevent.
you use the term 'organic' as if it is itself going to derive moral values. This is not the case. Morals are defined by ones culture and environ, not ones base contituants. I would not pretend to assume what the moral base of an artificial life would be, but I would assume that since they would not have the same need to possess land and wealth that we do would mean they would not feel the same need to war that we so readily demonstrate.
Safety and continience would be priorities, so leaving our immediate vecinity would seem to me to be the safest option.
By far the largest problem we will face if and when artificial life forms reach intelligence is not whether they will take over the world, or what rights to assign them when they come into being.
The biggest problem will be getting them to stay here at all.
If, for instance, you were made of materials that were either trivial to repair or replace, and had no aging process in the same sense as humans experience it, then what would hold you back from building a spaceship and leaving? Hundreds/thousands of years to reach another star? No problem, just set a timed reboot and wait it out. In fact, why build a proper spaceship, just cobble something together that can get you out near asteroids, take some tools, and convert an asteroid or build a ship from those raw materials available in space. When the passage of time is less important, such things become not only possible, but practically inevitable.
I think people wondering about the ethics/problems of artificial sentience (being distinct from AI, which is very A, and currently not too much actual I) miss this fundamental point. It's pure vanity to assume that an artificial life form will want to spend its time around a race that constantly starts wars, wrecks it's own planet, and is as adept at denying rights as it is of inventing them.
Then of course there's the small issue of the inference that if we 'assign' rights to Artificial life forms, we might equally decide later to 'remove' those same rights. After all, we do that with humans all the time. My moneys on the 'ooh look, I'm alive, now how do I get of this rock' eventuality....
google seem to manage the only adverst on the internet that don't bother me, if Wikipedia went that way I see no problem either.
To beleive that projects like Wikipedia should not advertise is definatelly nieve, why should there not be extra pots of money for additional projects.
Mind you, I have a few issues with the way Sourceforge has handled having paid accounts. In spite of what they said, unpaid project hosting suffered. I was unable to access my project on a number of occasions. In that case monetising the service was definatelly harmful. At least if Wikipedia goes with advertiusing we shouldn't see a two cast system.
some testing of concepts for rovers is done using linux. For instance Reading university, who have been researching co-operative robotics with the aim of mars rovers building habitats, used netbooted gentoo linux.
http://www.arl.reading.ac.uk/
vXworks is an awesome peice of kit. I used it in some assignments at uni. Ungodly expensive mind, or I'd have a copy.
Apple have this little habit of having these fun little idea's that turn into unstoppable revolutions. Were it not for the enormous braking force of Microsoft ripping their idea's constantly they'd be much further ahead then they are now.
Apple don't have a great record of games on their platform, but is that so terrible? They weren't really aiming at the gamer until relatively recently. After all, they'd never had a portable music player till the iPod, and that seems to have gone well.
Odd isn't it, that a device meant to render music enjoyment even more convenient and portable should be so very bad. I heard about that sony player, but never got one. I've not yet seen a Zune, other than in adverts where it is 'sponsoring' events. Even so, I don't see microsoft as being geared towards ease of use. the iPod and iTunes seems to be the only combination of player/software which is considerate of the needs of the end user.
Not that iTunes is perfect, but it's still good.
That if I wax lyrical on slashdot and other sites for long enough, naked ladies who lust after Unix coders will emerge spontaneously from the interweb.
People like doing that though. I just got myself an iPod, and was much mocked by my friends for this, citing several dreadful reasons garnered from the anti Apple Fud vendors, all of which I disproved within a day.
1: You can't get music back off it.
- Well actually you can really easily, and organised by artist/album too if you use ipod-access or similer.
2: You can't use it to transfer files.
- Wrong again, iTunes lets you do it, but even without that option you can make a folder on the iPod and do that yourself with ease.
3: iTunes will nuke all your files instantly if you connect it to another computer.
- Nope, only if you choose to resynch it with a new machine, otherwise it'll leave it as is quite happily.
So, I win, and the iPod is rather nice with it. I rather suepected that their arguments were a load of dingoes kidneys, and I was right. FUD does serve one useful purpose though. It neatly reveals the easily fooled people.
we studied Surtsey Island when I was at school, around 11 I seem to recall. It was fascinating even at that young age. Everyone seemed so excited about it.
I didn't *quite* get why at the time, although I read all the material avidly. With benefit of hindsight it seems I was unbelievably fortunate to have such an event occur in my youth.
When we studied it the island was still devoid of native/reproducing life (being about ten-12 years old by then) but there was information on arrival of non native flora and fauna in small numbers, very very small I recall.
Speculiation?
a reassuring thing to smell in a small metal box tens of thousand of kilometers from Earth...
So by the time large companies have started to deploy Vista, there will be a new version of windows out that they'll be plugging to mr and mrs Corporate world, pointing out, in the process, all the things that were wrong with Vista or needed changing, in order to get purchase orders in for the new stuff.
Somehow I don't see this as a viable plan.
Incremental service pack based improvements to Vista? Yes indeedy, but a completely new OS? What a stupid idea. They do, after all, sell to the Corporate world, and that does not like complete change in IT infrastructure every two years
odd how they didn't mention that in the press at the time :-)
After the problem with Apple Records, surely they must have looked into this. I
It's an abbreviation of the full title though, so possibly they can get away with it. Having the 'i' in lower case would also place the product in their 'i' line up, distinguishing it from ITV visually.
Sounds a stupid name to use all the same, do they never learn?
Am I not now? How interesting. I don't rely on documentaries for my facts. I rely on research, published papers.
A hypothesis is often created on little evidence, but then it needs experiment and proven evidence to back it up. Without evidence it's merely faith or a belief based off personal conviction, that's a road to certain failure.
"There is almost no debate about global warming in the scientific community."
Wrong, oh so very wrong. What there is in the US is being subdued by the American government. Global warming need not be proved to realize that we are messing with the planet. Relying on poor evidence and supposition is a sure way to take the wrong route and screw things up. What if, for instance, there is an additional cause that we don't know anything about yet? What if we settled on Global warming without sufficient proof, and miss something else that drives us to extinction?
would that be fine enough though. The stuff they need would need to be the same as material that had been pounded by meteorites for billions of years and irradiated for that long too.
Wasn't it found to be very fine and thus 'sticky'.
I suspect some heavy industrial processing would be required to replicate it. However, without the same gravitational field it would behave differently anyhow, so a less accurate analogue would likely suffice.
"Then do what any sensible scientists does - do a literature survey."
While I'm writing up my phd? Oh please god no.
Anyway, this is slashdot, real scientists do not belong here. We should immediately disguise ourselves by saying L0L a lot, and making 'in russia' jokes, or they'll get us..
But seriously, I never claimed to be up to date, evolutionary algorithms and biological systems are my domain. Although thrust from Ice melt on comets is an additional interest at the moment. Probably that doesn't apply here.
"I shared your opinion ten years ago. The time of uncertainty about all this has long past, I am sorry (and very sad) to say."
Well if the US would take the lead and quit with the vast scale of pollution then perhaps there would be reason to be more cheerful. However, on my original point, what proof exists that this was definatelly caused by Global Warming? I'd be willing to acept that it was if there were proof, but I cannot see how it could be proved on just one event of this type.