It isn't a victimless crime but you seem to be closing out any other options beyond primitive revengeful punishment.
Just because he is emotionally a defective human being doesn't mean we shouldn't exploit his intellectual abilities. I fully support hooking him up to a laptop and letting him code to his heart's content for the next 15 years.
Why not? Because he might enjoy it? Because he might feel useful? Because it won't satisfy our need to make him hurt for as long as possible? Do we really think 15 years in prison will dissuade people from killing their wives?
Is he even really a threat to society beyond living as an example of someone who murdered their wife? Let's put his jail sentence to use and make him work even if it means his stay is more enjoyable.
Ghost in the Shell is precisely the sort of show that perpetuates bad stereotypes of the future.
It seems pathetically easy to A) implement extremely simple shutoff routines and B) limit the amount of external access to the brain.
I think Spam in my inbox is a more accurate assessment of the future threat to my cybernetic enhancements than marionettes.
If we get to the point where data is streaming in at conscious levels and my consciousness is sitting in the middle of the internet's "stream" then we've already effectively become a hive mind. We've already implemented thought crime and put a portion of each of our attentions to tracking down anybody who has intent to harm within the bounds of our laws and will be able to coordinate the law abiding masses almost instantly to identify and remove any cancerous personalities.
If our technology is so sophisticated that someone can be brainwashed that implies we have an extremely accurate understanding of conscious thought and the complete subversion of free will. A world where we can completely simulate and override free will is a world where everybody's thoughts can be pre-screened for intent.
If it's an arms race... it's one the hive mind is going to dominate.
Furthermore there is still the question as to how microsoft was supposed to make money as a FOSS company.
The argument is often made that Microsoft is simply backwards and stupid for *Not* being a FOSS company and that they themselves would have profited and or would profit by switching to an open source model.
I would ask these people to cite a consumer Open Source company in existence.
"Sell support contracts". Oh really? When was the last time you personally purchased a support contract for a consumer piece of software? Microsoft has set its sights from almost the get go on the home. The home doesn't know what a "Support Contract" is. You give a consumer software which is free except for a "Support contract" and you've just given away the software for nothing.
Before people can make a solid argument against closed source as an unprofitable and backwards sales model they need to prove the viability of open source for consumers not just huge datacenters and fortune 500 companies.
You've tapped the incredibly difficult and accurate snag of capitalism: it's been shown to be one of the most effective methods of managing an impossibly large economy by employing the members to self regulate much like P2P.
The problem is that it inherently finds the most efficient equilibrium at any cost. When we reach peak oil--capitalism will re-stabilize the system. But if that means purging mass sections of the population from the equation... that's what it'll do.
The classical libertarian position is that the government is not responsible for caring for the weak (end welfare etc.) which is really a necessary position for someone who believes in pure capitalism without government intervention. If a government policy results in massive unemployment and starvation and then later has to pay the welfare checks the net human cost has to be weighed. In a purely capitalistic sense the best thing for the economy and the net system is for everybody who is no longer valuable to the economy to be 'terminated'. Since that's largely frowned upon, putting them on the street and ignoring them is evidently the next best solution to regain equilibrium.
What do you do with people whose livelihood is replaced by a more efficient and cost effective system? What if they simply aren't able to learn a new trade even if their life depended on it? Machines have been eating away at the lower IQ jobs pretty steadily. Eventually computer learning will replace all but the most creative and high functioning careers. What do you do with everybody who can't keep up? Can you force someone to accept cyber augmentation? Can you force someone into job training?
Peak oil is just one of the dozen problems that capitalism simply cannot solve they're philosophical problems the likes of which we haven't encountered since the rise of democracy... and far more fundamental to our future. People have been people for all of recorded history. What do you do when you introduce something in addition to people?
The important part of the target demographic isn't the quantity of viewers, it's the quantity of buyers.
Advertisers don't care if they show it to 10,000,000 people and 50,000 follow up with a sale or 500,000 are shown and 50,000 follow up with a sale. A Sale is a Sale. Sales per $ of advertising is one of the most important metrics. If they have to direct marketing past 60% of the audience which isn't interested that's fine--they weren't going to buy anything from them anyway.
Network television reaches an absurdly large number of people. There is no reason to shift the target demographic because a small percentage of a huge group of people aren't interested.
Let's say you're presented with the option to buy ad space on Channel A which is 50% 18-49 or Channel B which is 100% 18-49 which do you pick? No way to choose. Maybe Channel A has 10million viewers and Channel B only has 3 million viewers. You're still going to more high volume buyers on channel A even though the percentage is less.
Percentages mean nothing without comparable volumes.
Shock and Amaze! A politician who has made almost no memorable positions known on any domestic policy beyond truism of cooperation is liked by everybody!
Of course he's a top pick by everybody--he's like Opera-- nobody knows what his actual beliefs and agenda is, therefore nobody disagrees with him. If Colin Powell were so audacious as to actually make his position known on a politically hot subject he would suddenly see his popularity plummet.
This is America. If you agree with me you're a good guy. If you don't, you're a muslim terrorist. The only way to be liked by everybody is to say nothing of consequence.
Truth with a capital T is always dependent upon the assumptions one makes about truth.
If killing someone sends them to heaven and makes everybody they know super happy. If murdering someone improves the world and is a universally (including the person being murdered) beneficial act as best as can be determined... then Murder is Good.
2+2=4 because of empirical observations about the universe which lead us to conclude the universe at least partially contains linear scaling quantities. Addition is not True it's just a good model for our understanding of reality. We very well may have come into being in a universe where there was no such thing as set relative quantities. Addition is based on the Assumption that there are linear quantities. That's an unprovable assumption.
The Truth that religion purports to spread is founded on a million unprovable assumptions. I think you would be very very hard pressed to find a philosopher of reputation is would argue anything other than that God or any form of ethics is anything more than a well reasoned assumption at best.
Why is not an unscientific question. "Why did he kill his wife?" is not some metaphysical extraction of thought it's a scientific/historical question about the emotional and rational state of his wife. "Why do we exist?" only contains a subjective answer if you believe we were created. If the answer were "there is no reason beyond random chance" then you have to support that statement using historical/scientific study. If you say "In order to improve the universe" then you could argue from a humanist perspective "We are capable of improvement therefore we should use our powers to as we understand it better the universe" or from a religious perspective "because we were created by a loving God who instructed us to be Good it's the least we can do in exchange for life."
No question of ethics can be removed from empiricism. If a tree falls on a man in a windstorm we do not hold any ethical questions in mind when understanding what happened. There is a "why" and the answer is "because the tree was weak, the wind was strong and the man was beneath it thereby crushed." If a person placed shaped explosives in the tree and lured a man to underneath the falling point and intentionally crushed the man then ethically we can determine that he was killed by intent. The "Why" is "Because someone wanted to kill him." The further "why" might be because the killer thought it would make him feel good, or it might be because he felt slighted and thought killing the man would better the universe. There is a third way which is often ignored and that is that the universe including ourselves is deterministic in which case we can say that the man who killed the other man with a tree did so without free will and was purely a complex and strangely guided force of nature in which case both wind and humans are amoral forces.
Regardless of which of the three occurs we have really done two things behind the scenes subconscious which are more important to science than to religion:
1) We've determined that the death of the man made the universe worse and is therefore an undesirable action. and 2) That respectively: The wind was at fault but no corrective action is possible. The Man was at fault by free will and he should be killed, restrained or treated in order to prevent further undesirable action. And the third option which beyond the word "Free will" is identical to the second.
In the case of 2-B and C however the question of 'subjective' ethics is really boiled down to the question of whether or not anything can be done to prevent further undesirable activity. Science answers both "whys" of undesirable activity 1) Was the action really undesirable and 2) If it was can it be corrected.
If morality and ethics cannot be studied then our entire court of law and judicial attempt at answering the questions of what is and is not ethical are a sham. We are eternally studying the nature of human activity and attem
Or the Japanese people are more considerate of the "commons" and don't want to be a drag on society. They also might not over react like Americans who view this as a Stalinesque totalitarian move to fine citizens for costing the public money.
If you OCR the text and determine that there is no image data you can disard the raster data and compress more heavily leaving the text as vector data.
That's a form of magically synthesizing vector data from raster scans.
This is Slashdot; you're supposed to mispell at least one thing so we can make fun of the editors... and the grammar nazi's. Ohhhh I see what you're doing there and I'm not going to fall for it.
But I think you're both being too hard on our poor social networking sites. The reason both are going to die is not because of the services they provide (keeping track of all your personal information and photos in one place) it's the UI fades from popularity.
What Facebook needs to do right now is completely rework their entire site so that it's a standardized, open RSS feed which mandates some sort of "adwords" type injection. Then they can continue making money off of advertisements regardless of what site provides the hippest coolest way to present your name, email address and status.
They need to harness the 8086 model. Create a standard (IBM Compatible running on Microsoft Software) and let individual vendors box the components. Then you have competition working for you instead of against you.
I don't think we're going to program the first sentient AI. I think sentience and Sapent-Type intelligence is the product of fiendishly parallel synchronized processes; to the degree that getting them to work in concert would take someone sitting in a room thinking really really hard to even start to scratch the surface.
I absolutely hate to use the word but the human brain is to some degree "Irreducibly Complex"; not in that it can't be reproduced--just that it's possibly too complex for a group of humans to reproduce. Evolution on multi core systems however does offer the perfect sort of process where you don't have to load the entire concept into some one's brain first to create it. You can try lots and lots and lots of dead ends which slowly evolve towards the final goal. Brute force combined with extremely refined "selection" algorithms however will need extremely powerful hardware.
To say for instance as some do that if AI were real we would have extremely slow versions running now is ridiculous. People need feedback to work if they are to know whether or not they're on the right track. Taking a look at computer graphics is a PERFECT example of this. The "Digital Human" has long been thought of as impossible. There were not even 3D models that looked vaguely human 10 years ago-- even though it would have only taken a couple of days to render. The limitation was not even our understanding of the color science. The limitation was that people didn't have the tools and responsiveness to transfer what an artist knows into a computer. It was a feedback/input software problem. Both obstacles were solved by increasing hardware speeds.
I would say we have the exact same limitation with AI we have a feedback/input problem.
1) We need faster computers to tell us if our methods are on the right track. and 2) We need far more sophisticated means of interfacing with software to determine if it's working.
I would say further proof of this would be in the field of neural research. Neuroscientists are learning more and more as computers are able to brute force more and more data from the brain. We aren't programming computers which are hard set in their understanding of brain patterns, we're making computers which can adapt to the neural patterns and adjust in real time which in turn allows the brain to adapt to the computer.
My final analogy for AI research is creating a flight simulator. If you created a flight simulator which only could draw a primitive frame once every minute you wouldn't say it's very useful. IF you pre-render a computer flying a set pattern, it's smooth but still not very useful. Only when you have a system in which the brain (through an input device) and the hardware are able to interact with one another can any meaningful work be created.
From the Feature List:
Easy access for people with limited mobility. But... it's a bicycle that they get. What are people with limited mobility going to do with the bicycle?
If they're simply digitizing someone else's design, they can't copyright it. But they aren't "Simply digitizing it". That would be like using a file converter.
The wireframe of an object is an exceedingly creative task--one in which two people would never create even a relatively simple object identically twice. This would be like saying a very accurate drawing of a car is not copyrightable. 3D models are as much a creative representation as a painting or rendering of a car. It just happens to be 3D.
Hitting "Render" according to the judge all of a sudden makes it a creative work!? Pressing the render button isn't really art. That's when the math kicks in. The scene file has to be setup by a human. Now if you had a lidar scanner which generated a USEABLE mesh automatically then I would say it's simply a digital copy.
Perhaps the modelling company could claim "trade secrets" and argue that their wireframes are proprietary due to the modeling techniques used by their artists.
In fact I would go one step further. A pointcloud is not copyrightable because it simply defines the surface positions of an existing object. However the lines which connect the points are copyrightable as they are (unlike say an alphabetical list) not a utilitarian but creative art form.
Not only does it not work but on my computer (Xp x64) Firefox 3 crashes on MSN.com every single time. Now I'm certain formatting bugs shouldn't crash a browser.
For anyone who actually creates wireframe models they would know that there is creativity and expression within the way in which they are arranged by the artist. I'm going to assume the judge didn't actually open up the copyrights to the degree implied in the article. If the judge did... it needs to be overturned ASAP.
I've used a Samsung Q1 Ultra before through "remote assistance" (just set up an invitation that is valid for like 60 days) and connect to the main machine over wifi. The sweet thing is you are able to browse the net on the primary monitor or put the video controls on the primary screen and not interfere with the video playing on the TV.
If you can't prove your God exists then he's not very useful.
A God whose actions reverberate in this world is a God whom is worthy of interest and investigation. If you can't even demonstrate evidence for a notion then it's as valid of a concept as ANY other. As soon as you reject empiricism as the basis for your assumptions and claims upon any fact then you're almost certainly wrong.
I like to think of all probabilities as infinity and the number of observations as the numerator. If I observe something about the universe and have only that single piece of data then my understanding of it is 1/infinity. If you knew everything about the universe (and could know that you knew everything about the universe) then you would be making an observation of infinity/infinity and have certainty you know what happened. All other assumptions about the universe are scattered along that continuum. A perfect understanding can only ever come from self defined facts of which there are scant few.
If your concept of God is based upon the assumption that there is little to no evidence for it to be true then you're making a fanciful summation of a desire for the way the universe is and you're doing it purely arbitrarily. I would agree with the statement "I like the idea of there being a benevolent God" but I'm an atheist.
I would be curious as to by what means you delineate what you "believe" and what random thoughts just pass through your head if it's not subject to some level of empiricism. (Even if the empiricism is measuring your own emotional and spiritual feelings internally.) Do you believe in rock people who live below your bed? Or do you believe that your desk lamps come to life when you leave the room? At what point does a hope become a 'belief'? Apparently if it's God you skip hope and pass directly to belief. And she's unique in that manner I guess.
I don't know that almost a half a million people can be called a small sect.
I would say it's a pretty notable religious belief. Not to mention I drive past a church every day on the way to work validifies its credibility as a notable group of people.
But let's sweep those under the rug in favour of pointing out what a hypothetical group of people (who you invented) might do their hypothetical children (who you also invented).
I think members of The Church of Christ, Scientist might be offended by being called imaginary.
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't a victimless crime but you seem to be closing out any other options beyond primitive revengeful punishment.
Just because he is emotionally a defective human being doesn't mean we shouldn't exploit his intellectual abilities. I fully support hooking him up to a laptop and letting him code to his heart's content for the next 15 years.
Why not? Because he might enjoy it? Because he might feel useful? Because it won't satisfy our need to make him hurt for as long as possible? Do we really think 15 years in prison will dissuade people from killing their wives?
Is he even really a threat to society beyond living as an example of someone who murdered their wife? Let's put his jail sentence to use and make him work even if it means his stay is more enjoyable.
Exactly.
Ghost in the Shell is precisely the sort of show that perpetuates bad stereotypes of the future.
It seems pathetically easy to A) implement extremely simple shutoff routines and B) limit the amount of external access to the brain.
I think Spam in my inbox is a more accurate assessment of the future threat to my cybernetic enhancements than marionettes.
If we get to the point where data is streaming in at conscious levels and my consciousness is sitting in the middle of the internet's "stream" then we've already effectively become a hive mind. We've already implemented thought crime and put a portion of each of our attentions to tracking down anybody who has intent to harm within the bounds of our laws and will be able to coordinate the law abiding masses almost instantly to identify and remove any cancerous personalities.
If our technology is so sophisticated that someone can be brainwashed that implies we have an extremely accurate understanding of conscious thought and the complete subversion of free will. A world where we can completely simulate and override free will is a world where everybody's thoughts can be pre-screened for intent.
If it's an arms race... it's one the hive mind is going to dominate.
Furthermore there is still the question as to how microsoft was supposed to make money as a FOSS company.
The argument is often made that Microsoft is simply backwards and stupid for *Not* being a FOSS company and that they themselves would have profited and or would profit by switching to an open source model.
I would ask these people to cite a consumer Open Source company in existence.
"Sell support contracts". Oh really? When was the last time you personally purchased a support contract for a consumer piece of software? Microsoft has set its sights from almost the get go on the home. The home doesn't know what a "Support Contract" is. You give a consumer software which is free except for a "Support contract" and you've just given away the software for nothing.
Before people can make a solid argument against closed source as an unprofitable and backwards sales model they need to prove the viability of open source for consumers not just huge datacenters and fortune 500 companies.
You've tapped the incredibly difficult and accurate snag of capitalism: it's been shown to be one of the most effective methods of managing an impossibly large economy by employing the members to self regulate much like P2P.
The problem is that it inherently finds the most efficient equilibrium at any cost. When we reach peak oil--capitalism will re-stabilize the system. But if that means purging mass sections of the population from the equation... that's what it'll do.
The classical libertarian position is that the government is not responsible for caring for the weak (end welfare etc.) which is really a necessary position for someone who believes in pure capitalism without government intervention. If a government policy results in massive unemployment and starvation and then later has to pay the welfare checks the net human cost has to be weighed. In a purely capitalistic sense the best thing for the economy and the net system is for everybody who is no longer valuable to the economy to be 'terminated'. Since that's largely frowned upon, putting them on the street and ignoring them is evidently the next best solution to regain equilibrium.
What do you do with people whose livelihood is replaced by a more efficient and cost effective system? What if they simply aren't able to learn a new trade even if their life depended on it? Machines have been eating away at the lower IQ jobs pretty steadily. Eventually computer learning will replace all but the most creative and high functioning careers. What do you do with everybody who can't keep up? Can you force someone to accept cyber augmentation? Can you force someone into job training?
Peak oil is just one of the dozen problems that capitalism simply cannot solve they're philosophical problems the likes of which we haven't encountered since the rise of democracy... and far more fundamental to our future. People have been people for all of recorded history. What do you do when you introduce something in addition to people?
The important part of the target demographic isn't the quantity of viewers, it's the quantity of buyers.
Advertisers don't care if they show it to 10,000,000 people and 50,000 follow up with a sale or 500,000 are shown and 50,000 follow up with a sale. A Sale is a Sale. Sales per $ of advertising is one of the most important metrics. If they have to direct marketing past 60% of the audience which isn't interested that's fine--they weren't going to buy anything from them anyway.
Network television reaches an absurdly large number of people. There is no reason to shift the target demographic because a small percentage of a huge group of people aren't interested.
Let's say you're presented with the option to buy ad space on Channel A which is 50% 18-49 or Channel B which is 100% 18-49 which do you pick? No way to choose. Maybe Channel A has 10million viewers and Channel B only has 3 million viewers. You're still going to more high volume buyers on channel A even though the percentage is less.
Percentages mean nothing without comparable volumes.
Looks like my hypothesis is about to be tested!
Shock and Amaze! A politician who has made almost no memorable positions known on any domestic policy beyond truism of cooperation is liked by everybody!
Of course he's a top pick by everybody--he's like Opera-- nobody knows what his actual beliefs and agenda is, therefore nobody disagrees with him. If Colin Powell were so audacious as to actually make his position known on a politically hot subject he would suddenly see his popularity plummet.
This is America. If you agree with me you're a good guy. If you don't, you're a muslim terrorist. The only way to be liked by everybody is to say nothing of consequence.
In the real world, people don't just work M-F 9-5.
If they're making you work weekends the least they could do is let you look at a little pinktentacle.com
Truth with a capital T is always dependent upon the assumptions one makes about truth.
If killing someone sends them to heaven and makes everybody they know super happy. If murdering someone improves the world and is a universally (including the person being murdered) beneficial act as best as can be determined... then Murder is Good.
2+2=4 because of empirical observations about the universe which lead us to conclude the universe at least partially contains linear scaling quantities. Addition is not True it's just a good model for our understanding of reality. We very well may have come into being in a universe where there was no such thing as set relative quantities. Addition is based on the Assumption that there are linear quantities. That's an unprovable assumption.
The Truth that religion purports to spread is founded on a million unprovable assumptions. I think you would be very very hard pressed to find a philosopher of reputation is would argue anything other than that God or any form of ethics is anything more than a well reasoned assumption at best.
Why is not an unscientific question. "Why did he kill his wife?" is not some metaphysical extraction of thought it's a scientific/historical question about the emotional and rational state of his wife. "Why do we exist?" only contains a subjective answer if you believe we were created. If the answer were "there is no reason beyond random chance" then you have to support that statement using historical/scientific study. If you say "In order to improve the universe" then you could argue from a humanist perspective "We are capable of improvement therefore we should use our powers to as we understand it better the universe" or from a religious perspective "because we were created by a loving God who instructed us to be Good it's the least we can do in exchange for life."
No question of ethics can be removed from empiricism. If a tree falls on a man in a windstorm we do not hold any ethical questions in mind when understanding what happened. There is a "why" and the answer is "because the tree was weak, the wind was strong and the man was beneath it thereby crushed." If a person placed shaped explosives in the tree and lured a man to underneath the falling point and intentionally crushed the man then ethically we can determine that he was killed by intent. The "Why" is "Because someone wanted to kill him." The further "why" might be because the killer thought it would make him feel good, or it might be because he felt slighted and thought killing the man would better the universe. There is a third way which is often ignored and that is that the universe including ourselves is deterministic in which case we can say that the man who killed the other man with a tree did so without free will and was purely a complex and strangely guided force of nature in which case both wind and humans are amoral forces.
Regardless of which of the three occurs we have really done two things behind the scenes subconscious which are more important to science than to religion:
1) We've determined that the death of the man made the universe worse and is therefore an undesirable action.
and
2) That respectively: The wind was at fault but no corrective action is possible. The Man was at fault by free will and he should be killed, restrained or treated in order to prevent further undesirable action. And the third option which beyond the word "Free will" is identical to the second.
In the case of 2-B and C however the question of 'subjective' ethics is really boiled down to the question of whether or not anything can be done to prevent further undesirable activity. Science answers both "whys" of undesirable activity 1) Was the action really undesirable and 2) If it was can it be corrected.
If morality and ethics cannot be studied then our entire court of law and judicial attempt at answering the questions of what is and is not ethical are a sham. We are eternally studying the nature of human activity and attem
What they should do is put a bit eye-loop on top and make a hook stick. Then you could just put it up in the gutter without even getting out a ladder.
Sounds like an obvious accessory to me.
Could we send in $5 to enable the hot coffee mod?
Or the Japanese people are more considerate of the "commons" and don't want to be a drag on society. They also might not over react like Americans who view this as a Stalinesque totalitarian move to fine citizens for costing the public money.
If you OCR the text and determine that there is no image data you can disard the raster data and compress more heavily leaving the text as vector data.
That's a form of magically synthesizing vector data from raster scans.
But I think you're both being too hard on our poor social networking sites. The reason both are going to die is not because of the services they provide (keeping track of all your personal information and photos in one place) it's the UI fades from popularity.
What Facebook needs to do right now is completely rework their entire site so that it's a standardized, open RSS feed which mandates some sort of "adwords" type injection. Then they can continue making money off of advertisements regardless of what site provides the hippest coolest way to present your name, email address and status.
They need to harness the 8086 model. Create a standard (IBM Compatible running on Microsoft Software) and let individual vendors box the components. Then you have competition working for you instead of against you.
I agree and would take it a step further.
I don't think we're going to program the first sentient AI. I think sentience and Sapent-Type intelligence is the product of fiendishly parallel synchronized processes; to the degree that getting them to work in concert would take someone sitting in a room thinking really really hard to even start to scratch the surface.
I absolutely hate to use the word but the human brain is to some degree "Irreducibly Complex"; not in that it can't be reproduced--just that it's possibly too complex for a group of humans to reproduce. Evolution on multi core systems however does offer the perfect sort of process where you don't have to load the entire concept into some one's brain first to create it. You can try lots and lots and lots of dead ends which slowly evolve towards the final goal. Brute force combined with extremely refined "selection" algorithms however will need extremely powerful hardware.
To say for instance as some do that if AI were real we would have extremely slow versions running now is ridiculous. People need feedback to work if they are to know whether or not they're on the right track. Taking a look at computer graphics is a PERFECT example of this. The "Digital Human" has long been thought of as impossible. There were not even 3D models that looked vaguely human 10 years ago-- even though it would have only taken a couple of days to render. The limitation was not even our understanding of the color science. The limitation was that people didn't have the tools and responsiveness to transfer what an artist knows into a computer. It was a feedback/input software problem. Both obstacles were solved by increasing hardware speeds.
I would say we have the exact same limitation with AI we have a feedback/input problem.
1) We need faster computers to tell us if our methods are on the right track.
and
2) We need far more sophisticated means of interfacing with software to determine if it's working.
I would say further proof of this would be in the field of neural research. Neuroscientists are learning more and more as computers are able to brute force more and more data from the brain. We aren't programming computers which are hard set in their understanding of brain patterns, we're making computers which can adapt to the neural patterns and adjust in real time which in turn allows the brain to adapt to the computer.
My final analogy for AI research is creating a flight simulator. If you created a flight simulator which only could draw a primitive frame once every minute you wouldn't say it's very useful. IF you pre-render a computer flying a set pattern, it's smooth but still not very useful. Only when you have a system in which the brain (through an input device) and the hardware are able to interact with one another can any meaningful work be created.
Whoooops. Headline should be spelled *suppressed*. I wrote that way tooo late last night.
The wireframe of an object is an exceedingly creative task--one in which two people would never create even a relatively simple object identically twice. This would be like saying a very accurate drawing of a car is not copyrightable. 3D models are as much a creative representation as a painting or rendering of a car. It just happens to be 3D.
Hitting "Render" according to the judge all of a sudden makes it a creative work!? Pressing the render button isn't really art. That's when the math kicks in. The scene file has to be setup by a human. Now if you had a lidar scanner which generated a USEABLE mesh automatically then I would say it's simply a digital copy.
Perhaps the modelling company could claim "trade secrets" and argue that their wireframes are proprietary due to the modeling techniques used by their artists.
In fact I would go one step further. A pointcloud is not copyrightable because it simply defines the surface positions of an existing object. However the lines which connect the points are copyrightable as they are (unlike say an alphabetical list) not a utilitarian but creative art form.
Not only does it not work but on my computer (Xp x64) Firefox 3 crashes on MSN.com every single time. Now I'm certain formatting bugs shouldn't crash a browser.
For anyone who actually creates wireframe models they would know that there is creativity and expression within the way in which they are arranged by the artist. I'm going to assume the judge didn't actually open up the copyrights to the degree implied in the article. If the judge did... it needs to be overturned ASAP.
I've used a Samsung Q1 Ultra before through "remote assistance" (just set up an invitation that is valid for like 60 days) and connect to the main machine over wifi. The sweet thing is you are able to browse the net on the primary monitor or put the video controls on the primary screen and not interfere with the video playing on the TV.
If you can't prove your God exists then he's not very useful.
A God whose actions reverberate in this world is a God whom is worthy of interest and investigation. If you can't even demonstrate evidence for a notion then it's as valid of a concept as ANY other. As soon as you reject empiricism as the basis for your assumptions and claims upon any fact then you're almost certainly wrong.
I like to think of all probabilities as infinity and the number of observations as the numerator. If I observe something about the universe and have only that single piece of data then my understanding of it is 1/infinity. If you knew everything about the universe (and could know that you knew everything about the universe) then you would be making an observation of infinity/infinity and have certainty you know what happened. All other assumptions about the universe are scattered along that continuum. A perfect understanding can only ever come from self defined facts of which there are scant few.
If your concept of God is based upon the assumption that there is little to no evidence for it to be true then you're making a fanciful summation of a desire for the way the universe is and you're doing it purely arbitrarily. I would agree with the statement "I like the idea of there being a benevolent God" but I'm an atheist.
I would be curious as to by what means you delineate what you "believe" and what random thoughts just pass through your head if it's not subject to some level of empiricism. (Even if the empiricism is measuring your own emotional and spiritual feelings internally.) Do you believe in rock people who live below your bed? Or do you believe that your desk lamps come to life when you leave the room? At what point does a hope become a 'belief'? Apparently if it's God you skip hope and pass directly to belief. And she's unique in that manner I guess.
I don't know that almost a half a million people can be called a small sect.
I would say it's a pretty notable religious belief. Not to mention I drive past a church every day on the way to work validifies its credibility as a notable group of people.
I think members of The Church of Christ, Scientist might be offended by being called imaginary.