Indeed. The question about whether we should land on the poles or the equator confused me when I first read it. Are we just sending one lander up there? Because that's stupid. Send more, and we can go all over the place. Personally I'd vote for sending the first one to the pole, though, since we've already been to the equator, but that's not based on anything good.
Now, if you're asking where to put a colony, which is a definately bigger undertaking and will probably not see the launch of that many in a short period of time, then you have a good question.
So, in other words Google's inflated stock price fell down temporarily because someone outside of their company screwed up in projecting their profits.
Hey, this gives me an idea! We can bring down Microsoft! Just start a stock analysis company, and project that they'll make $60,000,000,000,000.00, and when they don't make it there (they made about $3 billion in 2005) everybody will drop their stock! Yay!
Almost all fluoride that's produced is merely a biproduct of other chemical reactions. If city governments didn't buy this stuff from chemical plants to put in drinking water, they'd have to dispose of it like any other toxic waste.
Almost all manure that's produced is merely a biproduct of other livestock. If gardeners didn't buy this stuff from farmers to put in their vegetable gardens, they'd have to dispose of it like any other toxic waste to keep it from contaminating the water table.
The verdict on flouride is still controvertial. But just because something is a "waste" or "byproduct" doesn't mean that it's nescessarily bad.
I myself have porcelin veneers, which are pretty strong and nice like that. I'm sure that any staining could be fixed by putting them on (though veneers aren't cheap)
But what I want to know is how they'd be affected by this process.
Re:Everything is contagious, in the social sense
on
Obesity Contagious?
·
· Score: 1
Are we sure there's not a "teenage-couples killed in car accidents" virus?
Well, maybe we can look at this in a good way. They won't be able to try to make another DivX player because, since the "customary historic use" of my DVD's has been that I own the right to view that content in an unlimited fashion! The irony in the bill, too, is that the "broadcast flag" is not within the "customary historic use" of television media! They've locked themselves in, the stupid fools!
Critics say the laws... are unfair to marketers...
Restricting my ability to send advertisements for Viagra to 11 year old girls is an infringement of my inalienable human rights! This is a war crime! Next thing you know they'll be restricting our right to cover people's screens with pop-ups!
The natural state of matter is not consciousness... Trillions of organisms evolving for billions of years to produce even slightly intelligent animals vs. a single network with much less than a billion nodes and no evolutionary forces at work whatsoever.
Indeed. I can see what people are getting at with; the flow of information over a network bares vague similarity to neural networks, but mostly because they're both networks. But there's nothing about the way the information is distributed over the internet that predelicts it to intelligence. I'm not an expert in networking, but it seems to me that the intener is not a decision making network like a neural network, but more of a mail system, like the post office. I can't see the post office becoming intelligent. I COULD, however, see such an AI develop into near-sentience from a less developed structure if the AI were able to modify it's own workings based on the situation (similar to how learning and using different parts of the brain rewires the structure of the brain to make those functions better). But you can't get something from nothing.
It's like how people often make the assumption that the ultimate end of evolution is intelligence. The real ultimate end is survival. Actually, evolution doesn't even have a real point. For example, reproduction. The "purpose" of reproduction is often seen as to "continue the species". The reality is that if an organism did not reproduce then that pattern (i.e. species) of life would die out due to the wear and tear on the bodies. The various organs and other structures of an organism is not so it can survive, but that with those organs and structure a pattern is better able to sustain it's existance. Evolution is not a rule of nature but a consequence of the rules of nature. It's hard to put that into words easily, but the gist of it is that the universe is entirely open-ended. Structures don't develop because of a higher purpose or direction, but because they are the most stable in a given environment. In the given AI discussion, the Internet wouldn't evolve into an intelligent lifeform on it's own simply because there is nothing inherently more "beneficial", "stable", or "useful" to the Internet by it being intelligent.
I know that was a bit of a rant, and was probably mostly unintelligable, but hopefully it'll get my point across.
All societies have taboos, and all societies believe that those taboos protect either all of society or the target of the taboo. Sometimes that holds true, and sometimes it does not.
In the US, we believe in practically ANYTHING justified by "for the kids". We believe corporate profit and domestic security trump personal freedoms. We believe we have quite a lot of rights that the courts regularly laugh out of court.
China believes certain religious, political, and economic philosophies constitute a grave danger to their society. And actually, they have that correct, in that at least on the political and economic front, those banned ideas will eventually destroy their existing government.
The difference is that the American government is elected by the people (it may have it's problems but it's 100 times better than the "you vote communist... or you vote communist" thing China has), and thus represents the people to an extent. With the child porn example, most Americans agree that having sex with 8 year old boys is wrong. With the filesharing example, it's all legal as long as you don't share copyrighted fles. Such sharing (debatedly) "hurts" the owners of the copyrights. (Not debating that the RIAA is right; I think the laws as they are today are too strict, but that with pobbying from citizens and whatnot HOPEFULLY we might be able to change that.)
However, the Chinese government isn't censoring Wikipedia because the Chinese people find the concept of a wiki to be immoral, or whatever. They're censoring it because they don't like Wikipedia's "stubborn neutrality and independence on political issues such as Tibet and Taiwan". That's comparable to the US Government banning Wikipedia because George W. Bush's article has criticisms in it, or they dislike the fact that there are articles covering the Bay of Pigs invasion, Watergate, or the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.
My point is that they're not censoring Wikipedia because the people feel that the information contained within is wrong, immoral, or whatever. They're censoring it because it hurts their government. Yes, there's that kind of censoring in the US and that's wrong, but that still doesn't make China right (especially when they do it more).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but exactly how is a terrorist going to hijack a spacecraft and crash it into even the approximate neighbourhood of Pennsylvania Avenue?
They can't cut that without destroying the whole point of the story.... If Ender just turns out to be surprisingly tough, but lets the bullies live... you've negated the character. Ender doesn't do mercy. If there's a serious threat to his safety, he destroys it totally by any means necessary. That's what they wanted. That's what they built.
Just because they can't doesn't mean they won't. This IS Hollywood we're talking about here after all.
"You can't control a car with one hand (unless specially adapted)"
Apparently, my friend, you've never had the pleasure of driving a stick shift. More than once I've had to turn around 90 degree turns with my hand on the shift so I can be able to get in the right gear as soon as I'm out of the curve. And there are plenty of other times when you're going to want to drive while constantly shifting, like some heavy or stop-and-go traffic situations.
That and, once I ended up getting a car with an automatic transmission, I used to drive 10 minutes to my girlfriend's house during my lunch break eating my sandwich on the way. And all without having to grow a third arm! Now, drinking my soda was another problem, since you can't exactly see the road when you're tilting your head up... But that's a story for another day.
(Not that I'm trying to say you're wrong. I'm just trying to say that it's the conversation that's the problem, not nescessarily the one-handed-driving thing.)
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. The question about whether we should land on the poles or the equator confused me when I first read it. Are we just sending one lander up there? Because that's stupid. Send more, and we can go all over the place. Personally I'd vote for sending the first one to the pole, though, since we've already been to the equator, but that's not based on anything good.
Now, if you're asking where to put a colony, which is a definately bigger undertaking and will probably not see the launch of that many in a short period of time, then you have a good question.
First zombie dogs, now zombie cockroaches! Now that my pets AND my pests have been zombified, I await for my own impending zombie future.
My college voodoology teacher would be proud
Do you suppose Microsoft will try to enter this market, too?
Either way they win!
Kinda like how Bill Gates owns Apple stock.
So, in other words Google's inflated stock price fell down temporarily because someone outside of their company screwed up in projecting their profits.
Hey, this gives me an idea! We can bring down Microsoft! Just start a stock analysis company, and project that they'll make $60,000,000,000,000.00, and when they don't make it there (they made about $3 billion in 2005) everybody will drop their stock! Yay!
Almost all fluoride that's produced is merely a biproduct of other chemical reactions. If city governments didn't buy this stuff from chemical plants to put in drinking water, they'd have to dispose of it like any other toxic waste.
Almost all manure that's produced is merely a biproduct of other livestock. If gardeners didn't buy this stuff from farmers to put in their vegetable gardens, they'd have to dispose of it like any other toxic waste to keep it from contaminating the water table.
The verdict on flouride is still controvertial. But just because something is a "waste" or "byproduct" doesn't mean that it's nescessarily bad.
I myself have porcelin veneers, which are pretty strong and nice like that. I'm sure that any staining could be fixed by putting them on (though veneers aren't cheap)
But what I want to know is how they'd be affected by this process.
Are we sure there's not a "teenage-couples killed in car accidents" virus?
Well, maybe we can look at this in a good way. They won't be able to try to make another DivX player because, since the "customary historic use" of my DVD's has been that I own the right to view that content in an unlimited fashion! The irony in the bill, too, is that the "broadcast flag" is not within the "customary historic use" of television media! They've locked themselves in, the stupid fools!
one out of every eight pounds
You mean 3.53 out of every 14.12 dollars?
Critics say the laws... are unfair to marketers...
Restricting my ability to send advertisements for Viagra to 11 year old girls is an infringement of my inalienable human rights! This is a war crime! Next thing you know they'll be restricting our right to cover people's screens with pop-ups!
The natural state of matter is not consciousness... Trillions of organisms evolving for billions of years to produce even slightly intelligent animals vs. a single network with much less than a billion nodes and no evolutionary forces at work whatsoever.
Indeed. I can see what people are getting at with; the flow of information over a network bares vague similarity to neural networks, but mostly because they're both networks. But there's nothing about the way the information is distributed over the internet that predelicts it to intelligence. I'm not an expert in networking, but it seems to me that the intener is not a decision making network like a neural network, but more of a mail system, like the post office. I can't see the post office becoming intelligent. I COULD, however, see such an AI develop into near-sentience from a less developed structure if the AI were able to modify it's own workings based on the situation (similar to how learning and using different parts of the brain rewires the structure of the brain to make those functions better). But you can't get something from nothing.
It's like how people often make the assumption that the ultimate end of evolution is intelligence. The real ultimate end is survival. Actually, evolution doesn't even have a real point. For example, reproduction. The "purpose" of reproduction is often seen as to "continue the species". The reality is that if an organism did not reproduce then that pattern (i.e. species) of life would die out due to the wear and tear on the bodies. The various organs and other structures of an organism is not so it can survive, but that with those organs and structure a pattern is better able to sustain it's existance. Evolution is not a rule of nature but a consequence of the rules of nature. It's hard to put that into words easily, but the gist of it is that the universe is entirely open-ended. Structures don't develop because of a higher purpose or direction, but because they are the most stable in a given environment. In the given AI discussion, the Internet wouldn't evolve into an intelligent lifeform on it's own simply because there is nothing inherently more "beneficial", "stable", or "useful" to the Internet by it being intelligent.
I know that was a bit of a rant, and was probably mostly unintelligable, but hopefully it'll get my point across.
...just as long as we refrain from listening to Mao's Little Red Book: The Musical on iTunes.
All societies have taboos, and all societies believe that those taboos protect either all of society or the target of the taboo. Sometimes that holds true, and sometimes it does not.
In the US, we believe in practically ANYTHING justified by "for the kids". We believe corporate profit and domestic security trump personal freedoms. We believe we have quite a lot of rights that the courts regularly laugh out of court.
China believes certain religious, political, and economic philosophies constitute a grave danger to their society. And actually, they have that correct, in that at least on the political and economic front, those banned ideas will eventually destroy their existing government.
The difference is that the American government is elected by the people (it may have it's problems but it's 100 times better than the "you vote communist... or you vote communist" thing China has), and thus represents the people to an extent. With the child porn example, most Americans agree that having sex with 8 year old boys is wrong. With the filesharing example, it's all legal as long as you don't share copyrighted fles. Such sharing (debatedly) "hurts" the owners of the copyrights. (Not debating that the RIAA is right; I think the laws as they are today are too strict, but that with pobbying from citizens and whatnot HOPEFULLY we might be able to change that.)
However, the Chinese government isn't censoring Wikipedia because the Chinese people find the concept of a wiki to be immoral, or whatever. They're censoring it because they don't like Wikipedia's "stubborn neutrality and independence on political issues such as Tibet and Taiwan". That's comparable to the US Government banning Wikipedia because George W. Bush's article has criticisms in it, or they dislike the fact that there are articles covering the Bay of Pigs invasion, Watergate, or the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.
My point is that they're not censoring Wikipedia because the people feel that the information contained within is wrong, immoral, or whatever. They're censoring it because it hurts their government. Yes, there's that kind of censoring in the US and that's wrong, but that still doesn't make China right (especially when they do it more).
so, which way is north again?
Emo kids get depressed.
We all get a laugh.
Emo kids get angry.
God help us all.
You could theoretically make a black hole with only a few atoms, provided their shwartz(and some stuff) raduis was suffiecently small.
I see your black hole's shwartz is as big as mine!
What will they try to do, blow up the orbiter?
One word: Space Debris.
Ok. Maybe that was two...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but exactly how is a terrorist going to hijack a spacecraft and crash it into even the approximate neighbourhood of Pennsylvania Avenue?
Maybe they'll just drop inanimate carbon rods.
This is definatly the ultimate in low tech.
But... what about wooden Bender?
They can't cut that without destroying the whole point of the story. ... If Ender just turns out to be surprisingly tough, but lets the bullies live... you've negated the character. Ender doesn't do mercy. If there's a serious threat to his safety, he destroys it totally by any means necessary. That's what they wanted. That's what they built.
Just because they can't doesn't mean they won't. This IS Hollywood we're talking about here after all.
Now all those people selling broken LCD's on eBay will be able to fix them! That means I won't be able to use them to make my DIY LCD Projector
It is kinda funny that two articles involving DIYs on LCDs came out within one week of eachother.
"You can't control a car with one hand (unless specially adapted)"
Apparently, my friend, you've never had the pleasure of driving a stick shift. More than once I've had to turn around 90 degree turns with my hand on the shift so I can be able to get in the right gear as soon as I'm out of the curve. And there are plenty of other times when you're going to want to drive while constantly shifting, like some heavy or stop-and-go traffic situations.
That and, once I ended up getting a car with an automatic transmission, I used to drive 10 minutes to my girlfriend's house during my lunch break eating my sandwich on the way. And all without having to grow a third arm! Now, drinking my soda was another problem, since you can't exactly see the road when you're tilting your head up... But that's a story for another day.
(Not that I'm trying to say you're wrong. I'm just trying to say that it's the conversation that's the problem, not nescessarily the one-handed-driving thing.)
Dude, make that phone I'm in. But only if it comes with a good anti-virus.