"This is why people can't help but look repeatedly at facial deformations; the face is so very familiar that any small irregularity sets off alarms."
Monkeys who live in groups stare at other monkeys with unusual facial features too, whereas non-primates usually ignore faces altogether, but may be extremely sensitive to other visual cues that a monkey wouldn't notice. The reason for this lies in the role that facial expressions play in group primate communication, and therefore also human communication, because we're group primates too.
"We know how our own intelligence works so well that we made a test to measure it."
We have no such test.
"We know how our own intelligence works so well that we made a test to measure it."
IQ tests measure the ability to pass IQ tests. There is a statistical correlation between the ability to pass IQ tests and intelligence, but this does not mean that IQ is in any way a measure of intelligence.
The key is _intelligence_, i.e. the ability to solve new problems with minimal information. We've had programs that can learn for decades (e.g. expert systems, neural networks), but our attempts to simulate intelligence have been hovering around ant level for a fair while despite vast increases in computing power.
" Imagine a huge, HUGE neural network fitted with the ultimate learning algorithms - it will beat humankind easily."
The available evidence is against your assertion, because we already have much bigger neural networks than are present in the brains of most insects, yet those insect brains manage to process a wide variety of sensory inputs to drive a biological autonomous robot around extremely dangerous random courses seeking various goals in ways that make the best of our computer-controlled autonomous robots look pathetic. If gigantic, power guzzling computers can't effectively simulate what nature does with a tiny blob of protoplasm, it's far from a given that our current computers and software models will ever be capable of simulating levels of intelligence that remotely approach our own, let alone exceed it.
"Problem is that the process of learning and adaptation is far from trivial."
The problem is actually that the more we learn about the human brain from observing people with certain types of damage, the more we realise that learning and intelligence are not related. A small number of people for example completely lose the ability to retrieve information from long-term memory, so they immediately forget anything that's more than a few minutes old, including people who they've known all their lives. The fact that these people are intelligent is fairly obvious from their ability to invent sometimes ingenious ways to partially overcoming this notable handicap, and they retain their language skills (both written and spoken), which indicates that memory plays only a minor role in language processing, so they'd have no problem passing the Turing test despite their inability to learn anything for more than a few minutes.
"The creation of AI is analogous to the creation of another human: you don't give the being intelligence, rather you give it the ability to obtain intelligence from its experiences."
For this assertion to be true, all (normal) babies would be equally intelligent, and therefore capable of learning anything that any other baby can learn to an equal level of competency. As this clearly isn't the case, the only reasonable conclusion is that intelligence has a physical component that can be passed on genetically, and as is the case with other physical components governed by genes, there's a considerable amount of variation.
"You don't even need to know how it works!"
That's because we didn't design our reproductive processes. AI on the other hand would have to be designed, and it's extremely difficult to design very complex things without knowing how they work (although one doesn't necessarily have to know _why_ they work).
"That's the beauty of programs that can adapt/self modify."
This is only be relevant if those programs (a) have the capability to produce more complex code over time rather than merely adding more data so that a non-intelligent program could eventually become an intelligent entity by modifying itself (or its descendants); and (b) intelligence can be simulated on binary stored program computers, which doesn't seem to be very likely according to what we currently know.
"Something key is missing. It's not like we've made software that's as smart as a hamster, and now we're working on making it as smart as a dog."
Agreed in full. How far we are from anything approaching AI is revealed by the fact that jumping spiders such as portia labiata with brains the size of a grain of salt have problem solving capabilities that are beyond those of the most powerful computers in existence, none of which can do what these little creatures' visual cortexes manage, let alone all the other things their tiny brains are capable of.
"It's not moving the goalposts, it's simply a clarification of what sentience means: some level of self-awareness. Even a hamster has it, but no software yet does."
I don't agree with this bit, though. The only creatures apart from man that display any self-awareness are other simians, who have the unique capability to learn that their reflection in a mirror is an image of themselves, and not another animal (they're also unique in having a sense of time having passed, and the way that it affects things, including themselves; adult chimpanzees and benobos for example can recognise themselves in photographs taken when they were "small children", and also display signs of sadness when shown images of companions who've died or otherwise departed from their group).
Perceiving of the environment that a creature exists in, an ability to interact with it, and being able to learn new behaviour to suit circumstances should not be mistaken for the extremely rare phenomenon of self-awareness.
"This happened onece before. These pre-humans were pretty dumb. I mean the only technology that had was the sharp rock. Tey only had rocks for a million years then finally 100,000 years ago they invented the "sharp rock tied to a stick"
Homo Erectus was tying sharp rocks to sticks at least 500,000 years ago (i.e. that's the age of the earliest samples we've found, but they're unlikely to be the first ones that were invented). The excellent balance and aerodynamic qualities of their spears (comparable to a modern javelin) indicates that H. Erectus specifically designed them to be thrown accurately over long distances. Such designs would not be possible without the ability to see what worked and what didn't, and progressively refine tool manufacturing techniques to incorporate desirable characteristics and eliminate undesirable ones, i.e. technological progress.
"But the big invention was language which enabled culture and passing on complex skills and ideas. This was the "tipping point" that enabled humans to harness more skill then one person could learn in one lifetime and in 100,000 year the race eploded and took over the Earth."
H. Erectus had a human-like hyoid bone, a larynx situated deep within its throat, and a brain with a speech centre, i.e. all the equipment necessary for a spoken language. Neanderthals likewise had the requisite equipment, and larger brains than modern humans, so they developed tool production lines and complex cultural practices such as ritually burying their dead around 250,000 years ago. It is not therefore correct to say that there was no language or progress before our species appeared.
NB: there are two notable singularity events that were major turning points in the prehistory of modern humans. The first was the emergence of art, which as far as we know appeared around 30,000 years ago (by which time we were the only human species left), and was key to the later development of writing; and the second was inventing agriculture during mesolithic / neolithic transition around 10,000 years ago, without which civilisations and everything associated with them would have been impossible.
"I'm sick of politicians fighting as hard as they can to get reelected."
It tends to happen when you live in a country that elects politicians. Ones that don't elect them do not of course have that particular problem, so their politicians concern themselves with taking measure to avoid being overthrown.
"If they put half as much effort into, you know, running the country sensibly, then this country would be a far better place."
Giving people a cushy job where they get to turn up when they feel like it, vote for their own pay rises, and have fat expense accounts to spend on whatever they like tends to result in a situation where actually doing what they're supposedly paid for is far less important than ensuring that they continue to be paid. This is known as human nature.
"All this stuff happens out there, and not by random gangs of criminals, but by governments, and those who claim ruling status."
The error in this statement lies in the assumption that there is any definable difference "government" as a generic term and a large bunch of organised thugs.
"There is also the fact that this is very likely to be in breach of EU human rights act."
The European Convention on Human Rights is under the auspices of The Council Of Europe, not the EU. There's also a European Charter On Human rights which is from the EU, but it's a political declaration with no legal force.
"Even if this does pass the Lords (unlikely), the European Courts will take interest and may very well overturn it. Remember that the British Courts & Parliment are answerable to Europe. "
The European Court Of Human Rights does not have primacy over the national laws of any member, and the only power they have is expelling transgressors from the Council Of Europe.
"I'm also seriously beginning to think that there is a group of people in this world who consider better communication and record keeping on the part of the masses is a bad thing and should be stopped."
The English language, expressive beastie that it is, already has a term for such groups of people: governments.
Governments classify monitoring and recording technology using the following simple rule:
Technology which allows governments, their agents, and wealthy and powerful people who own both to monitor and record the activities of those who aren't part of the government or its owners is good, and therefore compulsory.
Technology that allows others to monitor and record the activities of the government, its agents, or the wealthy who own them is bad, and must be outlawed or carry the capability to be disabled whenever there is a potential for inconvenience to government, its agents, or their owners.
"My point was simply that the traditional qualifier could theoretically still be considered since they can "mate".
Mating is certainly _a_ definition of species, although the fact that occurs between species in much more complex organisms under the right circumstances (e.g. horses and donkeys, lions and tigers) means that it's not in and of itself sufficient to be _the_ definition.
"That would imply that there could be one genera in two kingdoms. The entire taxonomic structure as we know it would cease to exist! What ever would we do?!"
Decide that living organisms are far too diverse and complex to put in an arbitrary taxonomical classification invented by people?
"In all seriousness, species barriers are fairly arbitrary."
Agreed. As is true with so much in nature, life is a continuum, not a set of discrete chunks that actually correspond with the human brain's need for labelling things and putting them in pigeon holes. It's impossible to know about every living thing that has ever existed on this planet and will ever exist on it, so any conceptual models we build to represent it will at best be very rough approximations, and in the worst case, wildly inaccurate illusions.
"They get seriously crazy when you consider animals that are separate species because they look different and we assumed they were actually different, or those that just don't interact geographically."
To be fair, biologists are currently replacing the old morphological classifications with ones based on genetics, i.e. changing some arbitrary pigeon holes, and moving arbitrary labels to different holes.
"True they can't mate, but that's mostly because they haven't yet learned how to meet a mate on the internet yet. Give it time."
Are you describing life in general here, or Homo Nerdicus in particular?
"If you're going to define things like that there is no superstition at all, and your definition won't be shared by the rest of the world [reference.com]."
1) Distinguishing between superstition and religion doesn't change the definition of superstition at all.
2) your linked definition concurs with mine, because it doesn't say that there is no distinction between religions and superstitions, only that religions contain superstitions. That which contains a thing is not the same as the thing it contains.
"Superstition is all about pattern matching going awry, whether it involves inevitable bad (or good) luck or rituals to change said luck."
Attempts to generalise complex topics are usually a sign of somebody who doesn't know much about them. This is why you generalisation fails to take another important distinction between superstitions and religions into account: religions attempt to explain how and why things happen, whereas superstitions merely say that they will happen.
Superstition: it's bad luck to walk under ladders.
Religion: this is because the ladder spirit wants ladders to be climbed, and becomes angry if people walk under them instead. The bad luck will go away if you placate the ladder spirit by climbing up and down a ritually decorated ladder 5 times at sunrise and 3 times at sunset every day for a month, excepting Thursdays, which are the ladder spirit's day off.
"Spreading the teaching of the Buddha has always been an integral part of Buddhism"
Spreading teaching isn't the same as conversion, because Buddhism doesn't expect its followers to renounce any other religious beliefs they may have before adopting Buddhism.
"regarding the killing of unbelievers, without even getting into the issue of the Sohei and orders like the Shaolin"
The Sohei fought for political ends, not religious ones, and were quite happy to kill Buddhists along with anyone else who got in their way (including other Sohei); Shaolin were likewise involved in political wars, and didn't ask what religion people followed before fighting them.
"Whether or not a religion supports killing unbelievers isn't as important to its survival as that it prohibits killing believers, in most circumstances."
Methinks your ideas are overly influenced by Christianity and Islam rather than a knowledge of religion in general, because several have included practices such as sacrificing believers to placate angry or blood-hungry gods (in some cases with regular mass sacrifices).
"though the latter can be disputed"
Religious temples have been meeting points for their followers since antiquity, and were often the only places where foreigners who didn't speak the local language(s) could find translators, get letters written and sent with some chance that they might reach their destination, and have a chance contacting a decent cross section of the local community.
That this tradition continues today is obvious to anyone who has done any travelling outside their own country with a follower of any religion that has a reasonable presence there, and seen how much help that person receives from members of their church / mosque / synagog / temple / whatever.
"That being said, this may not be the best way to differentiate species in bacteria. But you can still use it, none the less."
No you can't, because interkingdom conjugation can occur between bacteria of different species, and in some cases, different genera (the equivalent of humans being able to mate with lobsters and produce viable offspring).
"Early religions are basically just collections of superstitions and just-so stories about things like thunder and sunrise."
No they aren't. The main thing that distinguishes a religion from a superstition is that religions are based on the assumption that the animistic model of the universe they postulate can be communicated with, and therefore influenced by following a set of proscribed rituals. And before you say that this is also true of some superstitions, those that do have a ritual element are usually hang-overs from pagan religions (e.g. touching wood invokes Odin's protection, throwing salt over one's shoulder and carrying brides into their new home were Roman religious practices).
Superstitions are (often but not always fallacious) statements of cause and effect whose ultimate outcome cannot be changed, e.g. breaking a mirror results in seven years of bad luck. By contrast, religions assume that ultimate outcomes can be altered by ritual means (some of which have been extremely brutal).
"The major modern religions are religions that have survived for thousands of years, and the reason they survived for that long is because they developed traits that ensured they would be passed on and expand, like prohibitions against killing fellow believers (but not, generally, unbelievers) and injunctions to go out and convert people."
Buddhism is a major modern religion of great antiquity which says it's wrong to kill unbelievers too, and makes no active attempt to convert others.
"Religion didn't survive because it's good for humanity, or even because it's good for individual believers; it survived because it's good at surviving. It exists for its own sake, and anything else is just a side-effect."
Religion survives for two reasons:
1) Followers _believe_ that it is beneficial to them (whether it's actually beneficial is irrelevant).
2) It provides a common societal framework that allows people from one community to integrate with other communities that follow the same religion.
"All derived from the same few (magic and fantasy filled) documents"
The same can be said of many accepted historical figures: Apollonius of Tyrana, Nostradamus, Count of St. Germaine, John Dee, and countless others have had magical powers attributed to them by contemporary sources (and indeed themselves in some cases), later writers, or both.
"I must respectfully disagree. Georges LemaÃf®tre [wikipedia.org] is an example of the Church investigating the origins of the Universe."
The parent said "Creationists", not "members of Christian churches". Christians and Creationists are not mutually inclusive.
"Now this isn't the odds for life forming. These are the odds of the universe forming anything of substance at all."
They're not the odds of anything, because it's impossible to calculate probabilities if you don't know all the variables, and we're so far from knowing all the variables which apply to this universe that any claims about the likelihood of matter occurring in others based on our very, very imperfect observations of a statistical sample of 1 are pure baloney.
"And this is just ONE piece of the equations."
Equations that may have no actual correspondence with this universe, let have any relevance whatsoever to others.
"These odds must be multiplied by several other just-as-unlikely happenings that allowed our universe, with planets, starts and the like to exist at all."
The odds are exactly 1:1, because all these things do exist. Any attempt to pretend otherwise is pseudo-scientific smoke and mirrors.
"Unix and C has been with us since the beginning."
No they haven't. FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, Lisp, Algol, Simula, and a bunch of other languages predate C, while GM-NAA I/O, OS 360, TOPS-10, etc. were around before UNIX.
"Anybody who didnt realize that fact shouldn't be in computers, period."
See above. An old proverb about people living in glass houses not casting stones comes to mind here.
The Amiga is a bad example because its demise was entirely due to late-period Commodore's legendary ineptitude. Bone-headed management decisions killed the Amiga, not MS.
"However it probably would not be difficult for Apple to be able to sell an unlock code to allow OSX to be installed from the same Cd/dvd image."
I don't think Apple are currently interested in selling OS X to people who haven't bought Macs.
"while it is all possible, probably would make money for old rope for apple, it would take some persuasion to convince Mr Jobs it would be a good move."
Especially after what happened the last time Apple tried it.
"Apple sells on exclusivity, and this would devalue that to an extent on the other hand most mac enthusiasts would see this as an inferior mac clone and social pressure to upgrade to a real mac would be there."
The problem isn't Mac enthusiasts, but the much larger number of new customers they've gained over the last couple of years. How many of them would have bought Macs if they could've run the OS on a much cheaper generic machine? It's difficult to know for sure, but it's going to something that Apple's marketing people are certain to have thought about.
"I don't think apple have the ambition to increase market share this aggressively, shareholders might."
It's doubtful that Apple's shareholders would even consider trying to force Jobs to do something he's against, because the company would have been bankrupt years ago without him. Only utter fools would risk losing the goose that's laid so many golden eggs to take on MS, who've left the software world littered with the corpses of companies who tried to compete with them on the desktop, and although many shareholders are indeed utter fools, I doubt that many of them are _that_ stupid.
"I wasn't blaming Windows but rather describing the crux of the situation"
I was blaming Windows, because I lay its reliability problems squarely at the feet of those who designed a driver model that allows (or allowed: it's much less of a problem with Vista) an errant driver to bring an entire system down.
"The reliability of 3rd party drivers is always an issue for any OS"
Agreed. However, the way a particular OS handles errors produced by faulty drivers is entirely dependant on the way the OS itself is designed.
"To pinpoint an issue that X-brand sound card has with Y-brand video card, an engineer has to have that hardware/driver combination"
Indeed, but IMO this sort of problem shouldn't result in the entire OS hanging.
"It's not that Apple does not have a variety of hardware drivers already, it's that they can fully test out the variations before market and diagnose problems after it's been sold."
They can't always do that. PowerMacs and MacPro systems for example can be expanded by plugging cards in (many prior Apple systems also had this capability), and there've been entire internal CPU and memory subsystem upgrades sold by by third parties in the past. And as is the case with MS, the onus has always been on the third party to supply drivers for their hardware that work with various versions of Mac OS, and not all of those drivers have been satisfactory in terms of quality or reliability.
"With Apple controlling the hardware, the variation is minimized because they have built that variation."
Except in the case of PowerMacs and MacPro systems, and in the past, systems with internal CPU etc. upgrades.
"For example, Apple doesn't have to support all nVidia, ATI, and Intel video cards, just the ones that are in their machines."
While third parties support their own cards for PoweMac and MacPro systems, as is the case with Windows.
"The variations in video cards in a single manufacturer is daunting."
But the responsibility for supporting each of them on Windows lies with the card manufacturer, not MS.
"MS can never test all possible combinations. At best, the OEMs can test their own hardware but may not in combination with other hardware."
The same is true for Apple. There's less choice of expansion hardware for PowerMac / MacPro systems, but that's a function of relative market share (as indeed are the higher prices for Mac-compatible expansion cards). However, there's enough choice for it to be impossible for Apple to test every combination of expansions out there, so it's extremely common to see posts on both Apple and third party manufacturer fora from customers saying that such-and-such doesn't work properly with a new OS revision or computer.
"Linux has reliability but that is more due to the community than the manufacturers."
Linux has a wide range of hardware support because of efforts from the community, but its reliability comes from the way it's designed to interact with drivers.
"If a manufacturer doesn't want to cooperate with Linux developers, there's only so much that the devs can do in reverse engineering."
Yes, but even partially working or badly written drivers for Linux usually result in restriction or failures in the specific piece of hardware, not Linux itself (unless of course it's something critical such as a hard-disk controller or a key motherboard support component). If a graphics card or other component crashes X, then X has crashed, not the underlying OS, and the same goes for most of the hardware on a computer running Linux.
"The quality of the open source linux drivers tend to be higher as there is some auditing."
There are still a fairly large number of bad ones for hardware that's not very common, because there aren't many people who have both the hardware and the knowledge that's necessary to debug and alter somebody else's driver source code.
"The quality of closed source drivers are unknown. Even a big company like nVidia releases
"University of Texas at Austin (UT) 800,000 years ago. Arizona State University (ASU) 1,000,000 years ago. University of North Texas (UNT) 900,000 years ago."
I'm sure you can cite the papers published in peer reviewed scientific journals from the people who did the dating work. I have access to most of them, including comprehensive back numbers (especially the ones pertaining to archaeology, anthropology, and palaeontology), so it doesn't matter if they're not on the Internet, or are member-only sites. This work does after all refute all current models of Homo Erectus migration and settlement in North Western Europe, so the people responsible and the universities in question would have been very anxious to publish in reputable peer reviewed journals because these are the sorts of things that make the difference between being an also-ran and a world authority on a topic.
"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"
It was blindingly obvious from the layout and wording that the AC post was from yourself. You've posted this stuff all over the Internet, so your style gives you away.
"With the little available wood already used up for housing, no wonder they hunted coal. Thanks for pointing that out."
I suggest you do some reading about four topics before writing things that make you look like an ignorant fool who has no business making any claims about Neolithic Britain:
1. The mesolithic warming period which resulted in glaciers retreating, and its effect on forest growth in North Western Europe, and Britain in particular.
2. The mesolithic / neolithic transition, and human forest clearance for agricultural purposes.
3. The copious amount of scientific evidence which shows that the Stonehenge site was covered with forest when the oldest post holes were made.
4. Archaeological evidence showing the forest reclaimed Stonehenge when it was abandoned for 300 years around 2600 BCE, with forest clearing work being carried out when the site became active again.
"There you go, off again, with your Santa magic pixies rant, why do you believe in Santa magic pixies, bad childhood?"
If this is the best you can come up with, you deserve sympathy rather than contempt.
"The UT conservative date 800,000 years ago, from the 800,000-year-old embedded carbon."
These are obviously really special axes, because no other tools even approaching that age carry any organic carbon residues that are amenable to carbon dating. Of course, the fact that you're at UT could be the reason for these figures rather than than them being due to any unique attributes of the tools themselves.
"In the '56 core samples of the 'Aubrey Holes'"
This is a claim that you've posted all over the Internet, but you're the only one making that claim, so it's once again another case of a wild assertion by you whose supporting evidence is another wild assertion by you.
"Anthracite and bituminous coal in the cores."
See above.
NB: I'm now utterly bored with your self-fabricated "evidence" and glaring ignorance of the nature of the countryside around Stonehenge during its various building phases. The fact that you post this utter tripe on every Stonehenge-related forum topic on the Internet reveals you as someone whose failure to be taken seriously by archaologists, anthropologists, and palaeontologists has resulted in an obsessive need to sit in front of a search engine looking for fora to troll in the hope of finding somebody else daft enough to believe you.
Write whatever you like, because I won't waste any more time on your nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
Two points:
1) Not all speed limits are put there because it's dangerous to exceed them, so breaking a speed limit is not in and of itself an immoral act.
2) How is recklessly endangering one's self immoral?
"This is why people can't help but look repeatedly at facial deformations; the face is so very familiar that any small irregularity sets off alarms."
Monkeys who live in groups stare at other monkeys with unusual facial features too, whereas non-primates usually ignore faces altogether, but may be extremely sensitive to other visual cues that a monkey wouldn't notice. The reason for this lies in the role that facial expressions play in group primate communication, and therefore also human communication, because we're group primates too.
"We know how our own intelligence works so well that we made a test to measure it."
We have no such test.
"We know how our own intelligence works so well that we made a test to measure it."
IQ tests measure the ability to pass IQ tests. There is a statistical correlation between the ability to pass IQ tests and intelligence, but this does not mean that IQ is in any way a measure of intelligence.
"The key is *learning* here."
The key is _intelligence_, i.e. the ability to solve new problems with minimal information. We've had programs that can learn for decades (e.g. expert systems, neural networks), but our attempts to simulate intelligence have been hovering around ant level for a fair while despite vast increases in computing power.
" Imagine a huge, HUGE neural network fitted with the ultimate learning algorithms - it will beat humankind easily."
The available evidence is against your assertion, because we already have much bigger neural networks than are present in the brains of most insects, yet those insect brains manage to process a wide variety of sensory inputs to drive a biological autonomous robot around extremely dangerous random courses seeking various goals in ways that make the best of our computer-controlled autonomous robots look pathetic. If gigantic, power guzzling computers can't effectively simulate what nature does with a tiny blob of protoplasm, it's far from a given that our current computers and software models will ever be capable of simulating levels of intelligence that remotely approach our own, let alone exceed it.
"Problem is that the process of learning and adaptation is far from trivial."
The problem is actually that the more we learn about the human brain from observing people with certain types of damage, the more we realise that learning and intelligence are not related. A small number of people for example completely lose the ability to retrieve information from long-term memory, so they immediately forget anything that's more than a few minutes old, including people who they've known all their lives. The fact that these people are intelligent is fairly obvious from their ability to invent sometimes ingenious ways to partially overcoming this notable handicap, and they retain their language skills (both written and spoken), which indicates that memory plays only a minor role in language processing, so they'd have no problem passing the Turing test despite their inability to learn anything for more than a few minutes.
"The creation of AI is analogous to the creation of another human: you don't give the being intelligence, rather you give it the ability to obtain intelligence from its experiences."
For this assertion to be true, all (normal) babies would be equally intelligent, and therefore capable of learning anything that any other baby can learn to an equal level of competency. As this clearly isn't the case, the only reasonable conclusion is that intelligence has a physical component that can be passed on genetically, and as is the case with other physical components governed by genes, there's a considerable amount of variation.
"You don't even need to know how it works!"
That's because we didn't design our reproductive processes. AI on the other hand would have to be designed, and it's extremely difficult to design very complex things without knowing how they work (although one doesn't necessarily have to know _why_ they work).
"That's the beauty of programs that can adapt/self modify."
This is only be relevant if those programs (a) have the capability to produce more complex code over time rather than merely adding more data so that a non-intelligent program could eventually become an intelligent entity by modifying itself (or its descendants); and (b) intelligence can be simulated on binary stored program computers, which doesn't seem to be very likely according to what we currently know.
"Something key is missing. It's not like we've made software that's as smart as a hamster, and now we're working on making it as smart as a dog."
Agreed in full. How far we are from anything approaching AI is revealed by the fact that jumping spiders such as portia labiata with brains the size of a grain of salt have problem solving capabilities that are beyond those of the most powerful computers in existence, none of which can do what these little creatures' visual cortexes manage, let alone all the other things their tiny brains are capable of.
"It's not moving the goalposts, it's simply a clarification of what sentience means: some level of self-awareness. Even a hamster has it, but no software yet does."
I don't agree with this bit, though. The only creatures apart from man that display any self-awareness are other simians, who have the unique capability to learn that their reflection in a mirror is an image of themselves, and not another animal (they're also unique in having a sense of time having passed, and the way that it affects things, including themselves; adult chimpanzees and benobos for example can recognise themselves in photographs taken when they were "small children", and also display signs of sadness when shown images of companions who've died or otherwise departed from their group).
Perceiving of the environment that a creature exists in, an ability to interact with it, and being able to learn new behaviour to suit circumstances should not be mistaken for the extremely rare phenomenon of self-awareness.
"This happened onece before. These pre-humans were pretty dumb. I mean the only technology that had was the sharp rock. Tey only had rocks for a million years then finally 100,000 years ago they invented the "sharp rock tied to a stick"
Homo Erectus was tying sharp rocks to sticks at least 500,000 years ago (i.e. that's the age of the earliest samples we've found, but they're unlikely to be the first ones that were invented). The excellent balance and aerodynamic qualities of their spears (comparable to a modern javelin) indicates that H. Erectus specifically designed them to be thrown accurately over long distances. Such designs would not be possible without the ability to see what worked and what didn't, and progressively refine tool manufacturing techniques to incorporate desirable characteristics and eliminate undesirable ones, i.e. technological progress.
"But the big invention was language which enabled culture and passing on complex skills and ideas. This was the "tipping point" that enabled humans to harness more skill then one person could learn in one lifetime and in 100,000 year the race eploded and took over the Earth."
H. Erectus had a human-like hyoid bone, a larynx situated deep within its throat, and a brain with a speech centre, i.e. all the equipment necessary for a spoken language. Neanderthals likewise had the requisite equipment, and larger brains than modern humans, so they developed tool production lines and complex cultural practices such as ritually burying their dead around 250,000 years ago. It is not therefore correct to say that there was no language or progress before our species appeared.
NB: there are two notable singularity events that were major turning points in the prehistory of modern humans. The first was the emergence of art, which as far as we know appeared around 30,000 years ago (by which time we were the only human species left), and was key to the later development of writing; and the second was inventing agriculture during mesolithic / neolithic transition around 10,000 years ago, without which civilisations and everything associated with them would have been impossible.
"I'm sick of politicians fighting as hard as they can to get reelected."
It tends to happen when you live in a country that elects politicians. Ones that don't elect them do not of course have that particular problem, so their politicians concern themselves with taking measure to avoid being overthrown.
"If they put half as much effort into, you know, running the country sensibly, then this country would be a far better place."
Giving people a cushy job where they get to turn up when they feel like it, vote for their own pay rises, and have fat expense accounts to spend on whatever they like tends to result in a situation where actually doing what they're supposedly paid for is far less important than ensuring that they continue to be paid. This is known as human nature.
"All this stuff happens out there, and not by random gangs of criminals, but by governments, and those who claim ruling status."
The error in this statement lies in the assumption that there is any definable difference "government" as a generic term and a large bunch of organised thugs.
"There is also the fact that this is very likely to be in breach of EU human rights act."
The European Convention on Human Rights is under the auspices of The Council Of Europe, not the EU. There's also a European Charter On Human rights which is from the EU, but it's a political declaration with no legal force.
"Even if this does pass the Lords (unlikely), the European Courts will take interest and may very well overturn it. Remember that the British Courts & Parliment are answerable to Europe. "
The European Court Of Human Rights does not have primacy over the national laws of any member, and the only power they have is expelling transgressors from the Council Of Europe.
"I'm also seriously beginning to think that there is a group of people in this world who consider better communication and record keeping on the part of the masses is a bad thing and should be stopped."
The English language, expressive beastie that it is, already has a term for such groups of people: governments.
Governments classify monitoring and recording technology using the following simple rule:
Technology which allows governments, their agents, and wealthy and powerful people who own both to monitor and record the activities of those who aren't part of the government or its owners is good, and therefore compulsory.
Technology that allows others to monitor and record the activities of the government, its agents, or the wealthy who own them is bad, and must be outlawed or carry the capability to be disabled whenever there is a potential for inconvenience to government, its agents, or their owners.
"My point was simply that the traditional qualifier could theoretically still be considered since they can "mate".
Mating is certainly _a_ definition of species, although the fact that occurs between species in much more complex organisms under the right circumstances (e.g. horses and donkeys, lions and tigers) means that it's not in and of itself sufficient to be _the_ definition.
"That would imply that there could be one genera in two kingdoms. The entire taxonomic structure as we know it would cease to exist! What ever would we do?!"
Decide that living organisms are far too diverse and complex to put in an arbitrary taxonomical classification invented by people?
"In all seriousness, species barriers are fairly arbitrary."
Agreed. As is true with so much in nature, life is a continuum, not a set of discrete chunks that actually correspond with the human brain's need for labelling things and putting them in pigeon holes. It's impossible to know about every living thing that has ever existed on this planet and will ever exist on it, so any conceptual models we build to represent it will at best be very rough approximations, and in the worst case, wildly inaccurate illusions.
"They get seriously crazy when you consider animals that are separate species because they look different and we assumed they were actually different, or those that just don't interact geographically."
To be fair, biologists are currently replacing the old morphological classifications with ones based on genetics, i.e. changing some arbitrary pigeon holes, and moving arbitrary labels to different holes.
"True they can't mate, but that's mostly because they haven't yet learned how to meet a mate on the internet yet. Give it time."
Are you describing life in general here, or Homo Nerdicus in particular?
"If you're going to define things like that there is no superstition at all, and your definition won't be shared by the rest of the world [reference.com]."
1) Distinguishing between superstition and religion doesn't change the definition of superstition at all.
2) your linked definition concurs with mine, because it doesn't say that there is no distinction between religions and superstitions, only that religions contain superstitions. That which contains a thing is not the same as the thing it contains.
"Superstition is all about pattern matching going awry, whether it involves inevitable bad (or good) luck or rituals to change said luck."
Attempts to generalise complex topics are usually a sign of somebody who doesn't know much about them. This is why you generalisation fails to take another important distinction between superstitions and religions into account: religions attempt to explain how and why things happen, whereas superstitions merely say that they will happen.
Superstition: it's bad luck to walk under ladders.
Religion: this is because the ladder spirit wants ladders to be climbed, and becomes angry if people walk under them instead. The bad luck will go away if you placate the ladder spirit by climbing up and down a ritually decorated ladder 5 times at sunrise and 3 times at sunset every day for a month, excepting Thursdays, which are the ladder spirit's day off.
"Spreading the teaching of the Buddha has always been an integral part of Buddhism"
Spreading teaching isn't the same as conversion, because Buddhism doesn't expect its followers to renounce any other religious beliefs they may have before adopting Buddhism.
"regarding the killing of unbelievers, without even getting into the issue of the Sohei and orders like the Shaolin"
The Sohei fought for political ends, not religious ones, and were quite happy to kill Buddhists along with anyone else who got in their way (including other Sohei); Shaolin were likewise involved in political wars, and didn't ask what religion people followed before fighting them.
"Whether or not a religion supports killing unbelievers isn't as important to its survival as that it prohibits killing believers, in most circumstances."
Methinks your ideas are overly influenced by Christianity and Islam rather than a knowledge of religion in general, because several have included practices such as sacrificing believers to placate angry or blood-hungry gods (in some cases with regular mass sacrifices).
"though the latter can be disputed"
Religious temples have been meeting points for their followers since antiquity, and were often the only places where foreigners who didn't speak the local language(s) could find translators, get letters written and sent with some chance that they might reach their destination, and have a chance contacting a decent cross section of the local community.
That this tradition continues today is obvious to anyone who has done any travelling outside their own country with a follower of any religion that has a reasonable presence there, and seen how much help that person receives from members of their church / mosque / synagog / temple / whatever.
"That being said, this may not be the best way to differentiate species in bacteria. But you can still use it, none the less."
No you can't, because interkingdom conjugation can occur between bacteria of different species, and in some cases, different genera (the equivalent of humans being able to mate with lobsters and produce viable offspring).
"Thing is, we have a lot - and I mean millions - of really stupid, gullible, deceived people who couldn't think their way out of a wet paper bag."
That statement is applicable to any country with a population in the millions.
"Early religions are basically just collections of superstitions and just-so stories about things like thunder and sunrise."
No they aren't. The main thing that distinguishes a religion from a superstition is that religions are based on the assumption that the animistic model of the universe they postulate can be communicated with, and therefore influenced by following a set of proscribed rituals. And before you say that this is also true of some superstitions, those that do have a ritual element are usually hang-overs from pagan religions (e.g. touching wood invokes Odin's protection, throwing salt over one's shoulder and carrying brides into their new home were Roman religious practices).
Superstitions are (often but not always fallacious) statements of cause and effect whose ultimate outcome cannot be changed, e.g. breaking a mirror results in seven years of bad luck. By contrast, religions assume that ultimate outcomes can be altered by ritual means (some of which have been extremely brutal).
"The major modern religions are religions that have survived for thousands of years, and the reason they survived for that long is because they developed traits that ensured they would be passed on and expand, like prohibitions against killing fellow believers (but not, generally, unbelievers) and injunctions to go out and convert people."
Buddhism is a major modern religion of great antiquity which says it's wrong to kill unbelievers too, and makes no active attempt to convert others.
"Religion didn't survive because it's good for humanity, or even because it's good for individual believers; it survived because it's good at surviving. It exists for its own sake, and anything else is just a side-effect."
Religion survives for two reasons:
1) Followers _believe_ that it is beneficial to them (whether it's actually beneficial is irrelevant).
2) It provides a common societal framework that allows people from one community to integrate with other communities that follow the same religion.
"All derived from the same few (magic and fantasy filled) documents"
The same can be said of many accepted historical figures: Apollonius of Tyrana, Nostradamus, Count of St. Germaine, John Dee, and countless others have had magical powers attributed to them by contemporary sources (and indeed themselves in some cases), later writers, or both.
"I'm pretty sure Socrates, Homer, and Siddartha Guatama were real people"
You may well be wrong about Homer, because his existence is a matter of considerable debate among scholars.
"I must respectfully disagree. Georges LemaÃf®tre [wikipedia.org] is an example of the Church investigating the origins of the Universe."
The parent said "Creationists", not "members of Christian churches". Christians and Creationists are not mutually inclusive.
"Now this isn't the odds for life forming. These are the odds of the universe forming anything of substance at all."
They're not the odds of anything, because it's impossible to calculate probabilities if you don't know all the variables, and we're so far from knowing all the variables which apply to this universe that any claims about the likelihood of matter occurring in others based on our very, very imperfect observations of a statistical sample of 1 are pure baloney.
"And this is just ONE piece of the equations."
Equations that may have no actual correspondence with this universe, let have any relevance whatsoever to others.
"These odds must be multiplied by several other just-as-unlikely happenings that allowed our universe, with planets, starts and the like to exist at all."
The odds are exactly 1:1, because all these things do exist. Any attempt to pretend otherwise is pseudo-scientific smoke and mirrors.
"Unix and C has been with us since the beginning."
No they haven't. FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, Lisp, Algol, Simula, and a bunch of other languages predate C, while GM-NAA I/O, OS 360, TOPS-10, etc. were around before UNIX.
"Anybody who didnt realize that fact shouldn't be in computers, period."
See above. An old proverb about people living in glass houses not casting stones comes to mind here.
"If you were an A) Amiga person"
The Amiga is a bad example because its demise was entirely due to late-period Commodore's legendary ineptitude. Bone-headed management decisions killed the Amiga, not MS.
"However it probably would not be difficult for Apple to be able to sell an unlock code to allow OSX to be installed from the same Cd/dvd image."
I don't think Apple are currently interested in selling OS X to people who haven't bought Macs.
"while it is all possible, probably would make money for old rope for apple, it would take some persuasion to convince Mr Jobs it would be a good move."
Especially after what happened the last time Apple tried it.
"Apple sells on exclusivity, and this would devalue that to an extent on the other hand most mac enthusiasts would see this as an inferior mac clone and social pressure to upgrade to a real mac would be there."
The problem isn't Mac enthusiasts, but the much larger number of new customers they've gained over the last couple of years. How many of them would have bought Macs if they could've run the OS on a much cheaper generic machine? It's difficult to know for sure, but it's going to something that Apple's marketing people are certain to have thought about.
"I don't think apple have the ambition to increase market share this aggressively, shareholders might."
It's doubtful that Apple's shareholders would even consider trying to force Jobs to do something he's against, because the company would have been bankrupt years ago without him. Only utter fools would risk losing the goose that's laid so many golden eggs to take on MS, who've left the software world littered with the corpses of companies who tried to compete with them on the desktop, and although many shareholders are indeed utter fools, I doubt that many of them are _that_ stupid.
"The wording of that seems to have nothing to do with the legality of sharing files."
That's because non-commercial copying is legal is Spain, so their media industry failed when they tried to claim it wasn't in court.
"I wasn't blaming Windows but rather describing the crux of the situation"
I was blaming Windows, because I lay its reliability problems squarely at the feet of those who designed a driver model that allows (or allowed: it's much less of a problem with Vista) an errant driver to bring an entire system down.
"The reliability of 3rd party drivers is always an issue for any OS"
Agreed. However, the way a particular OS handles errors produced by faulty drivers is entirely dependant on the way the OS itself is designed.
"To pinpoint an issue that X-brand sound card has with Y-brand video card, an engineer has to have that hardware/driver combination"
Indeed, but IMO this sort of problem shouldn't result in the entire OS hanging.
"It's not that Apple does not have a variety of hardware drivers already, it's that they can fully test out the variations before market and diagnose problems after it's been sold."
They can't always do that. PowerMacs and MacPro systems for example can be expanded by plugging cards in (many prior Apple systems also had this capability), and there've been entire internal CPU and memory subsystem upgrades sold by by third parties in the past. And as is the case with MS, the onus has always been on the third party to supply drivers for their hardware that work with various versions of Mac OS, and not all of those drivers have been satisfactory in terms of quality or reliability.
"With Apple controlling the hardware, the variation is minimized because they have built that variation."
Except in the case of PowerMacs and MacPro systems, and in the past, systems with internal CPU etc. upgrades.
"For example, Apple doesn't have to support all nVidia, ATI, and Intel video cards, just the ones that are in their machines."
While third parties support their own cards for PoweMac and MacPro systems, as is the case with Windows.
"The variations in video cards in a single manufacturer is daunting."
But the responsibility for supporting each of them on Windows lies with the card manufacturer, not MS.
"MS can never test all possible combinations. At best, the OEMs can test their own hardware but may not in combination with other hardware."
The same is true for Apple. There's less choice of expansion hardware for PowerMac / MacPro systems, but that's a function of relative market share (as indeed are the higher prices for Mac-compatible expansion cards). However, there's enough choice for it to be impossible for Apple to test every combination of expansions out there, so it's extremely common to see posts on both Apple and third party manufacturer fora from customers saying that such-and-such doesn't work properly with a new OS revision or computer.
"Linux has reliability but that is more due to the community than the manufacturers."
Linux has a wide range of hardware support because of efforts from the community, but its reliability comes from the way it's designed to interact with drivers.
"If a manufacturer doesn't want to cooperate with Linux developers, there's only so much that the devs can do in reverse engineering."
Yes, but even partially working or badly written drivers for Linux usually result in restriction or failures in the specific piece of hardware, not Linux itself (unless of course it's something critical such as a hard-disk controller or a key motherboard support component). If a graphics card or other component crashes X, then X has crashed, not the underlying OS, and the same goes for most of the hardware on a computer running Linux.
"The quality of the open source linux drivers tend to be higher as there is some auditing."
There are still a fairly large number of bad ones for hardware that's not very common, because there aren't many people who have both the hardware and the knowledge that's necessary to debug and alter somebody else's driver source code.
"The quality of closed source drivers are unknown. Even a big company like nVidia releases
"University of Texas at Austin (UT) 800,000 years ago.
Arizona State University (ASU) 1,000,000 years ago.
University of North Texas (UNT) 900,000 years ago."
I'm sure you can cite the papers published in peer reviewed scientific journals from the people who did the dating work. I have access to most of them, including comprehensive back numbers (especially the ones pertaining to archaeology, anthropology, and palaeontology), so it doesn't matter if they're not on the Internet, or are member-only sites. This work does after all refute all current models of Homo Erectus migration and settlement in North Western Europe, so the people responsible and the universities in question would have been very anxious to publish in reputable peer reviewed journals because these are the sorts of things that make the difference between being an also-ran and a world authority on a topic.
"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"
It was blindingly obvious from the layout and wording that the AC post was from yourself. You've posted this stuff all over the Internet, so your style gives you away.
"With the little available wood already used up for housing,
no wonder they hunted coal. Thanks for pointing that out."
I suggest you do some reading about four topics before writing things that make you look like an ignorant fool who has no business making any claims about Neolithic Britain:
1. The mesolithic warming period which resulted in glaciers retreating, and its effect on forest growth in North Western Europe, and Britain in particular.
2. The mesolithic / neolithic transition, and human forest clearance for agricultural purposes.
3. The copious amount of scientific evidence which shows that the Stonehenge site was covered with forest when the oldest post holes were made.
4. Archaeological evidence showing the forest reclaimed Stonehenge when it was abandoned for 300 years around 2600 BCE, with forest clearing work being carried out when the site became active again.
"There you go, off again, with your Santa magic pixies rant,
why do you believe in Santa magic pixies, bad childhood?"
If this is the best you can come up with, you deserve sympathy rather than contempt.
"The UT conservative date 800,000 years ago,
from the 800,000-year-old embedded carbon."
These are obviously really special axes, because no other tools even approaching that age carry any organic carbon residues that are amenable to carbon dating. Of course, the fact that you're at UT could be the reason for these figures rather than than them being due to any unique attributes of the tools themselves.
"In the '56 core samples of the 'Aubrey Holes'"
This is a claim that you've posted all over the Internet, but you're the only one making that claim, so it's once again another case of a wild assertion by you whose supporting evidence is another wild assertion by you.
"Anthracite and bituminous coal in the cores."
See above.
NB: I'm now utterly bored with your self-fabricated "evidence" and glaring ignorance of the nature of the countryside around Stonehenge during its various building phases. The fact that you post this utter tripe on every Stonehenge-related forum topic on the Internet reveals you as someone whose failure to be taken seriously by archaologists, anthropologists, and palaeontologists has resulted in an obsessive need to sit in front of a search engine looking for fora to troll in the hope of finding somebody else daft enough to believe you.
Write whatever you like, because I won't waste any more time on your nonsense.