Well put, and I agree. I would add that what we actually want out of artificial systems is some kind of combination of survivability and intelligence, and we don't want to go too far in either direction.
"Too much survivability" would be where we can't shut the system down when it's not doing what we want it to, or being destructive. Too little survivability would be where the resources to keep it going exceed the benefit of the output it gives us.
Now, how can you get too much intelligence? Well, if you take intelligence to mean "extracting the most knowledge from the least data", then an optimally intelligent system would be the one that updates its "probability distribution" over the world exactly as its limited observations suggest. However, this would needlessly discard all of the knowledge we already have embedded in our bodies as a result of our long evolutionary history. Many things that we do to survive rely on such implicit knowledge.
In other words, we make good guesses that can't be justified based on what we consciously know, but "happen" to be right for this planet and this universe -- the very things a merely "intelligent" system would try to avoid. An example of a superintelligent system is Marcus Hutter's AIXI, which makes provably optimal inferences, but which takes way too long to do anything useful, because it has to re-learn everything starting from nothing but Occam's Razor.
I think the concern about the arctic ice is not that it will raise sea levels (by itself it won't), but rather, that losing them will reduce the earth's albino, or reflectivity, which would accelerate the warming.
I'm trying to figure out how to make this into a joke about Sarah Palin claiming to have foreign policy experience based on being governor of Alaska[1], but I'm not coming up with anything... help?
[1] In truth, she probably didn't believe that, but someone in the McCain campaign probably thought it was a line they could sell and so one day she was told she'd have to go with that message.
It's been my observation as a non-trucker that the majority of truckers treat the rest of us like shit. Where I live, they camp the passing lanes WAY more than could be justified by stupidity or desperation -- we're well into "malice" territory now. They also love to take their sweet time on freeway entrance ramps. I know they're accelerating a greater mass, but I know they can clear 35 mph more easily than they're letting on. In my experience, the days of courteous, professional truck drivers ended years ago. Today I look in the cab and see mostly young don't-care types.
The truckers' lobby also fights firmly against any infringement on their inalienable right not to pay the full cost of the damage they do to the roads, or their right to use dirty engines.
Exactly. Is it REALLY too much to expect of truckers these days, that they know their height limitations? I mean, EVERY bridge posts its clearance. In feet and inches, no less!
What do these fucking rednecks think the signs are for, to pad the "sign budget" for next year or something?
Then again, where I live, 18-wheelers like to camp the passing lanes on six-lane freeways... Trucker quality has probably gone down.
It's now what, a year behind the schedule they'd set after the explosion? CERN is looking worse and worse.
Oh, come on, man, it's not CERN's fault that the anthropic principle limits us to observing universes that haven't ended our existence by creating black holes in a hadron collider!
Surprisingly, that's almost exactly how the psychologist Julian Jaynes explained the origin of consciousness: people went from hearing voices, to identifying with that voice enough for it to be their "consciousness". He also believed that modern schizophrenia is a relapse to that earlier, non-conscious, "bicameral" state.
I see an arms race. Assuming Greene (whose papers in the past, like his dissertation, I haven't been impressed with) really was able to ethically create a circumstance where people truly lying and he knows it:
All that means is that he found a correlate of lying. The method used in his lie detector would exploit that correlation. But once this becomes common knowledge, people can figure out what kind of thinking would trip the lie detector, eventually rendering it useless, even assuming everything they claim is right.
Furthermore, the study would tell people how talk in a way that trips the lie detector, making it look like every statement is a lie, even the truthful statement of their own name. With that many false positives, it would no longer be reliable.
Along the same lines, I've wondered why it's even possible for spammers to mount a legal defense at all. That is, how come vigilantes aren't targeting the lawyers who represent spammers? Imagine if you were effectively cut off from fair treatment by the legal system because no lawyer wants to be associated with you...
Not endorsing it, just wondering why this low-hanging fruit hasn't been grabbed by spam haters.
Do believe that went some celebrity appears on TV for a product that they really use it?
Good point. Somehow, we've got to the point where it's illegal to say,
"I'm a celebrity, this product is good" (without mentioning you were paid to say so)
but not,
"I'm an average person, this product is good". (without mentioning you were paid to say so)
WTF, seriously? If the government is really concerned about paid fake endorsements, they have MUCH bigger fish to fry than some small-time cosmetics company. Yet somehow the small-time ones are the only ones that will be prosecuted.
Why is it that we let companies trademark words which are already in the common lexicon?
Not to defend the Rosetta Stone's asinine lawsuit here, but trademark law (in theory) only lets companies control pre-existing words to the extent that they identify its product. Trademark law does not let them restrict all uses of the mark.
So Rosetta Stone company's trademark does not prevent you from saying things like,
"I visited the Rosetta Stone." "Bob is as helpful to us as the Rosetta Stone was for egyptologists!"
or even
"Taking the Berlitz foreign language course was like finding the Rosetta Stone for me!"
Isn't this kind of like asking, "What are the best training wheels to use on the Tour de France?"
Elite programmers should be using an environment where they don't have to use the mouse at all, or use it minimally. They know key commands for everything, except maybe when you want to test out a mouse feature, in which case you can't assume the user has a cool mouse anyway.
Every mathematician knows you can't get a 3D view from a 2D one. Like the old joke says...
Three long-time friends meet up in Scotland. One is a biologist, one's a physicist, and one's a mathematician. As they're driving away from the airport into the Scottish countryside, they see a brown cow off in the distance.
The biologist says, "Wow, that's amazing! All the cows in Scotland are brown!"
The physicist replies, "No, all we really know is that some cows in Scotland are brown."
The mathematician replies, "No, all we really know is: there is at least one cow in Scotland, and this side is brown."
Note that I said "project or class of projects". That means, your explanation is fine for any one specific project. But why isn't there a more general guide to bridge the gap between "I can write individual programs and scripts" to "I can understand real-world programs"?
I don't see how such a guide would be a loss from the perspective of FOSS as a whole, since it would make it easier to tap already-existing programmers and increase the accessibility of projects in general.
I'm in largely the same position as the submitter, and I think the problem is that jumping into existing programs like you suggest is not the simple step you make it out to be. Stuff that may same "duh!" to you, may not be obvious to others. Stupid as it sounds, what I really need is some step-by-step instruction set like:
"If you want to contribute to [OSS project or class of OSS projects], download the source files [here], and compile them using [program], which you can download [here], by [following this compiling procedure] with [these settings]. If you're a beginner, check out the part of the code that [does simple task x] which is in [file], and see how it interacts with the rest of the program. This program depends on [other files], which you can get [here]. [Here] is an example of where it uses them."
But I have yet to find some tutorial like this anywhere.
Gee, it's almost like they don't want people to learn to how to contribute.
It's like The Force, you see. All around us, binding our processes behind the scenes in ways it takes an enlightened eye to perceive.
Wait, so does that mean that in 20 years, you're going to tell us that Linux is actually made by invisible creatures that can only be detected with special equipment?
*sigh* I'm sorry, but it is really, really difficult getting the most basic points through to you. Let's go over this one more time:
1) Yes, the purpose of cap and trade -- like ALL laws -- is to manipulate behavior. No duh. The justification being that people don't feel the full cost of their fossil fuel use in market prices, so it's necessary to make that price higher so as to match the private cost with social cost.
2) So yes, it's going to require individuals paying more for things with more fossil fuel content.
3) The prebate, despite canceling the net affect on the average poor person, is NOT pointless. Let's go over this one more time:
BEFORE cap/trade/prebate, using one additional unit of (fossil) fuel costs P. AFTER cap/trade/prebate, using one additional unit of fuel costs P(1+t) where t is the effective tax rate.
The fact that they got a prebate canceling poverty-level energy spending does not change any of this. Previously, the poor can save $P by cutting out some energy use. Now, they can save $P(1+t) per unit of energy the cut back on. Their incentive to cut back went up.
Anyway, this will probably be my last response to you since you seem more interested in incoherent out-of-context rants against things you don't understand than serious discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
Well put, and I agree. I would add that what we actually want out of artificial systems is some kind of combination of survivability and intelligence, and we don't want to go too far in either direction.
"Too much survivability" would be where we can't shut the system down when it's not doing what we want it to, or being destructive. Too little survivability would be where the resources to keep it going exceed the benefit of the output it gives us.
Now, how can you get too much intelligence? Well, if you take intelligence to mean "extracting the most knowledge from the least data", then an optimally intelligent system would be the one that updates its "probability distribution" over the world exactly as its limited observations suggest. However, this would needlessly discard all of the knowledge we already have embedded in our bodies as a result of our long evolutionary history. Many things that we do to survive rely on such implicit knowledge.
In other words, we make good guesses that can't be justified based on what we consciously know, but "happen" to be right for this planet and this universe -- the very things a merely "intelligent" system would try to avoid. An example of a superintelligent system is Marcus Hutter's AIXI, which makes provably optimal inferences, but which takes way too long to do anything useful, because it has to re-learn everything starting from nothing but Occam's Razor.
I think the concern about the arctic ice is not that it will raise sea levels (by itself it won't), but rather, that losing them will reduce the earth's albino, or reflectivity, which would accelerate the warming.
however he is no where near a level of addiction the could require consoling
Aw, come on, everyone needs consoling! But if you get addicted to something, then you need counseling on top of that.
I'm trying to figure out how to make this into a joke about Sarah Palin claiming to have foreign policy experience based on being governor of Alaska[1], but I'm not coming up with anything ... help?
[1] In truth, she probably didn't believe that, but someone in the McCain campaign probably thought it was a line they could sell and so one day she was told she'd have to go with that message.
It's been my observation as a non-trucker that the majority of truckers treat the rest of us like shit. Where I live, they camp the passing lanes WAY more than could be justified by stupidity or desperation -- we're well into "malice" territory now. They also love to take their sweet time on freeway entrance ramps. I know they're accelerating a greater mass, but I know they can clear 35 mph more easily than they're letting on. In my experience, the days of courteous, professional truck drivers ended years ago. Today I look in the cab and see mostly young don't-care types.
The truckers' lobby also fights firmly against any infringement on their inalienable right not to pay the full cost of the damage they do to the roads, or their right to use dirty engines.
Exactly. Is it REALLY too much to expect of truckers these days, that they know their height limitations? I mean, EVERY bridge posts its clearance. In feet and inches, no less!
What do these fucking rednecks think the signs are for, to pad the "sign budget" for next year or something?
Then again, where I live, 18-wheelers like to camp the passing lanes on six-lane freeways... Trucker quality has probably gone down.
So you're asking, how many lightbulbs does it take to replace a scientist?
It's now what, a year behind the schedule they'd set after the explosion? CERN is looking worse and worse.
Oh, come on, man, it's not CERN's fault that the anthropic principle limits us to observing universes that haven't ended our existence by creating black holes in a hadron collider!
So how long until Congress debates whether they have to give Red Hat lots of free money on the grounds that they're "systemically important" now? :-P
Surprisingly, that's almost exactly how the psychologist Julian Jaynes explained the origin of consciousness: people went from hearing voices, to identifying with that voice enough for it to be their "consciousness". He also believed that modern schizophrenia is a relapse to that earlier, non-conscious, "bicameral" state.
I see an arms race. Assuming Greene (whose papers in the past, like his dissertation, I haven't been impressed with) really was able to ethically create a circumstance where people truly lying and he knows it:
All that means is that he found a correlate of lying. The method used in his lie detector would exploit that correlation. But once this becomes common knowledge, people can figure out what kind of thinking would trip the lie detector, eventually rendering it useless, even assuming everything they claim is right.
Furthermore, the study would tell people how talk in a way that trips the lie detector, making it look like every statement is a lie, even the truthful statement of their own name. With that many false positives, it would no longer be reliable.
Along the same lines, I've wondered why it's even possible for spammers to mount a legal defense at all. That is, how come vigilantes aren't targeting the lawyers who represent spammers? Imagine if you were effectively cut off from fair treatment by the legal system because no lawyer wants to be associated with you...
Not endorsing it, just wondering why this low-hanging fruit hasn't been grabbed by spam haters.
Do believe that went some celebrity appears on TV for a product that they really use it?
Good point. Somehow, we've got to the point where it's illegal to say,
"I'm a celebrity, this product is good" (without mentioning you were paid to say so)
but not,
"I'm an average person, this product is good". (without mentioning you were paid to say so)
WTF, seriously? If the government is really concerned about paid fake endorsements, they have MUCH bigger fish to fry than some small-time cosmetics company. Yet somehow the small-time ones are the only ones that will be prosecuted.
Insightful? He didn't even figure out how to circumvent the ACAP limit.
Rot13 next time, dude.
Why is it that we let companies trademark words which are already in the common lexicon?
Not to defend the Rosetta Stone's asinine lawsuit here, but trademark law (in theory) only lets companies control pre-existing words to the extent that they identify its product. Trademark law does not let them restrict all uses of the mark.
So Rosetta Stone company's trademark does not prevent you from saying things like,
"I visited the Rosetta Stone."
"Bob is as helpful to us as the Rosetta Stone was for egyptologists!"
or even
"Taking the Berlitz foreign language course was like finding the Rosetta Stone for me!"
Isn't this kind of like asking, "What are the best training wheels to use on the Tour de France?"
Elite programmers should be using an environment where they don't have to use the mouse at all, or use it minimally. They know key commands for everything, except maybe when you want to test out a mouse feature, in which case you can't assume the user has a cool mouse anyway.
Every mathematician knows you can't get a 3D view from a 2D one. Like the old joke says ...
Three long-time friends meet up in Scotland. One is a biologist, one's a physicist, and one's a mathematician. As they're driving away from the airport into the Scottish countryside, they see a brown cow off in the distance.
The biologist says, "Wow, that's amazing! All the cows in Scotland are brown!"
The physicist replies, "No, all we really know is that some cows in Scotland are brown."
The mathematician replies, "No, all we really know is: there is at least one cow in Scotland, and this side is brown."
Wind power costs about 0.055 cents/kWh. Coal has been slowly rising and is about 0.03 cents/kWh right now.
Please don't ever get your energy pricing information from Verizon.
In fairness, Slashdot displays things badly in Firefox 3.0. And Safari. And Opera. And Chrome. And probably Mosaic if you gave it a spin.
Please, just give me back the old site.
Um, if it helps you to understand it that way, sure, magnetic field lines are indeed imaginary.
Now, you just need to remember that electric field lines are real, since they make a 90 degree angle with magnetic field lines.
Note that I said "project or class of projects". That means, your explanation is fine for any one specific project. But why isn't there a more general guide to bridge the gap between "I can write individual programs and scripts" to "I can understand real-world programs"?
I don't see how such a guide would be a loss from the perspective of FOSS as a whole, since it would make it easier to tap already-existing programmers and increase the accessibility of projects in general.
I'm in largely the same position as the submitter, and I think the problem is that jumping into existing programs like you suggest is not the simple step you make it out to be. Stuff that may same "duh!" to you, may not be obvious to others. Stupid as it sounds, what I really need is some step-by-step instruction set like:
"If you want to contribute to [OSS project or class of OSS projects], download the source files [here], and compile them using [program], which you can download [here], by [following this compiling procedure] with [these settings]. If you're a beginner, check out the part of the code that [does simple task x] which is in [file], and see how it interacts with the rest of the program. This program depends on [other files], which you can get [here]. [Here] is an example of where it uses them."
But I have yet to find some tutorial like this anywhere.
Gee, it's almost like they don't want people to learn to how to contribute.
TARP recipient, is that you?
It's like The Force, you see. All around us, binding our processes behind the scenes in ways it takes an enlightened eye to perceive.
Wait, so does that mean that in 20 years, you're going to tell us that Linux is actually made by invisible creatures that can only be detected with special equipment?
*sigh* I'm sorry, but it is really, really difficult getting the most basic points through to you. Let's go over this one more time:
1) Yes, the purpose of cap and trade -- like ALL laws -- is to manipulate behavior. No duh. The justification being that people don't feel the full cost of their fossil fuel use in market prices, so it's necessary to make that price higher so as to match the private cost with social cost.
2) So yes, it's going to require individuals paying more for things with more fossil fuel content.
3) The prebate, despite canceling the net affect on the average poor person, is NOT pointless. Let's go over this one more time:
BEFORE cap/trade/prebate, using one additional unit of (fossil) fuel costs P.
AFTER cap/trade/prebate, using one additional unit of fuel costs P(1+t) where t is the effective tax rate.
The fact that they got a prebate canceling poverty-level energy spending does not change any of this. Previously, the poor can save $P by cutting out some energy use. Now, they can save $P(1+t) per unit of energy the cut back on. Their incentive to cut back went up.
Anyway, this will probably be my last response to you since you seem more interested in incoherent out-of-context rants against things you don't understand than serious discussion.