You don't understand the Theory of Evolution. There is NO "next logical step" for a species which develops intelligence, and there is NO reason why not colonising space makes us a "dead end branch". As the late, great Jay Gould has pointed out, the main form of life on Earth (by biomass and by effect on the planet) is now, and has been for a very long time, bacteria. Bacteria achieve great adaptability without intelligence.
Eventually, even the bacteria will go extinct without a space program.
It won't be tomorrow, 100, 1000, or even 1,000,000 years from now, but if we are talking about evolution (the scale of hundreds of millions of years and even billions) something on a cosmic scale will eventually kill all life on earth.
Eventually earth will be hit by an object large enough to eliminate the atmosphere.
Eventually the sun will expand and consume earth.
Eventually the sun will die.
Eventually all the stars will die.
Eventually all matter will be consumed by black holes.
Eventually all the black holes will die.
(And I'm not listing all the other events that makes most of the universe unfriendly to life between now and then)
Unless there is some bacteria that can still exist in a universe after heat death, there is no future in evolution without intelligence.
Just saying, without intelligence, life is eventually doomed down the line.
If you take a view of natural selection is evolution, the universe tends to kill off life regardless its prior traits and that it takes intelligence to get past those "out of context" problems.
As they say... The dinosaurs died out because they didn't have a space program.
And I would wager eventually the only life to survive the universe will be intelligent life simply because everything else (including the bacteria) died to cosmic events.
That's all it means. It is just a simple way of summing up our court system. It is NOT a command to the population at large. Individuals are free to believe what they wish, and use whatever standard for evidence they wish. People aren't required to view everyone as innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. They are welcome o hold opinions as they see fit.
When juries are composed by individuals of the population at large, I would hope they will take the "innocent until proven guilty" into consideration if I have to sit on the receiving end of their decision.
I know the judge does instruct juries to keep this in mind (I've had to go to Jury duty like everyone else), but if the general population has already made up their mind about someone before sitting in on the jury then that is a bad habit for the general population to have.
If you are ever accused of a crime you did not commit, then I suspect you too hope the population at large does not simply make up its mind about you before your case is presented.
The main character is a trader who buys gold and makes a vast fortune.
Ok. Stop right there. The author of the book has no understanding of economics if he wrote that in. No one... No one... Has ever gotten rich of investing in gold in the history of modern economies for the past 200 years. The only reason that gold maintained value during great depression was because of government price fixing. Of course the US government back then was the largest holder of gold and did not want the price to drop, but after the price of gold was allowed to move on its own to market values in the 1960s the price did go up, but this was mainly due to an interest bubble and anyone who bought gold in 1980 has lost money due to inflation if they wanted to sell their gold today.
Even if the USD collapse in a fit of bad managment and if there was hyper inflation out the wazoo, gold will not automatically go up in value because its value is demand driven. The average joe is more interested in buying food for his family than he is bars of gold to sit on.
Secondly...
Unemployment benefit claims balloon, and in the face of imminent default and chaos, the president courageously proposes and passes a plan to cut the government down to actual income levels and shears off roughly half the government. There are various riots initially, but things finally settle down to a hard and thrifty recovery.
Sounds like the opposite of what happened during the great depression.
Simply reducing government spending does not solve the problem.
And lastly... The US Government will never go bankrupt simply because of the IRS tax system. Read into that Monster of Jekyll Island book and realize that the reason that the USD is valuable is because the US Government forces its citizens at a point of a gun to value the USD as their way of paying taxes.
Same with government loans to other nations.
There is currently no other currency or commodity that puts the USD at danger (except maybe the Yen and oil).
Really, its about a market of faith if you look at it pragmatically and as long as people get up and go to work and do things constructively then the economy will continue. If it requires government intervention, then it will happen whether we like it or not.
As I've posted before, this type of "Earth exceptionalism" is more related to the field of religion than science. There is no a priori reason to believe that the Earth is an unusual planet unless you buy in to the creation myths of some peoples who lived in the Near East circa 4000-2000 years ago.
That said, even if earth is a common type of planet, there is strong evidence that intelligent life is rare simply because evolution tends to favor lifeforms such as the dinosaurs or bacteria.
One could argue that it was a fluke that a meteor did exterminate the dinosaurs and that tool making mammals were able to evolve into a state that they could develop inter-planetary communication before another meteor hits.
Relying on physical means to control your child's behaviour only sends the message that physical means are the only means to control their behaviour and if they can avoid or counter the physical means, they can behave as they wish. Are the people who proposed this bill afraid of their own children? Is physical control what they rely on?
Maybe the EU parliament members are too young to have read Clockwork Orange or even bothered to see the movie.
Except that Intel and AMD hold vital patents to the set of technologies that are part of the x86 architeture. They have to cross license because they depend on each other, but they have no obligation to license to NVidia.
Rumor has it that when nVidia bought 3dfx, they also bought their x86 licenses.
Destruction's army takes site 1, Order takes 2, 3 is left open, Destruction moves to 2, Order to 3, etc, then Destruction to 3, Order to 1 and so on. Each massive army seeing no actual Combat, except against the meagre force of enemy NPCs guarding the checkpoints, and all they're really doing is farming renown, XP and Influence.
You are playing on the wrong server.
Play on Dark Crag.
Yes, it is open and there is a lot newbie ganking on T1, but in T4 there are massive battles because it is the highest pop server.
Like 200vs300 battles... It helps to be in a guild like Ruin which basically has 1000+ members on its Roster so that you know where the action is.
Re:Because you don't need more cycles in biz
on
Less Is Moore
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· Score: 1
Let's be honest here. What does the average office PC run? A word processor, a spreadsheet, an SAP frontend, maybe a few more tools. And then we're basically done. This isn't really rocket science for a contemporary computer, it's neither heavy on the CPU nor on the GPU.
Eh. If you really worked IT for non-IT people, you'd know that there is never a "fast enough".
I can't tell you how many times I have gotten "I need a faster computer. I spend 10 minutes each morning booting up!"
Or they mess things up by holding the power button down to turn the box off because they thought it was freezing...
To a lot of Joe-Six packs, "fast enough" won't be enough until they can push the power button and the thing comes on and when they click the application is up and running before they lift their finger off the mouse button.
The holy grail for computers for them is of course for their computer to act just like their TV.
Maybe as those who work with computers for a living have gotten so used to it (and if fact users tell me all the time that I have the patience of a saint when I'm waiting for their computer to reboot) just because of waiting for installs and reboots to go through makes you go insane or stressed, then you would have left Desktop IT a long time ago.
The Turing test is for apparent 'human' intelligence, where robotics adds communications via 'expressiveness'. These are two different vectors: rote intelligence and capacity to communicate (via body language, and the rest of linguistics/heuristics).
I don't think the body language is the hard part and that important considering the majority of human communication these days either involves just test or voice without seeing the other person. (That and certain persons can't interpret body language anyways)
The key problem with AI is:
Context Context Context
The number one failure that most Turing programs is that they only respond to the sentence you just said without any context to the conversation before hand. A really good AI would be able to keep on topic and understand what has been discussed previously so that they can expand on the topic without simply just responding to the current line.
There are several ways to achieve this, but right now I don't think there is any program out there that at least I know of that does this right. The easiest way to tell if you are talking to a chat bot is to refer to something previous in the conversation and see if they respond appropriately.
I have nothing to say against Jobs or even particularly against Apple, but if shareholders are so stupid as to throw money into a company on the basis of hype surrounding one personality, I can't say I am overwhelmed with sympathy if they lose every cent.
To be fair, Steve Jobs did save the company back in early 2000's since most of us in the computer world had written off Apple as on their death bed back then.
Secondly, he isn't the only company that has such a cult that keeps shareholder's invested. Warren Buffet with Halthway Berkshire (sp?) come's to mind.
Replacing a CEO and naming a CEO has to be considered insider knowledge by the SEC rules.
So its not just APPL, but any company who uses replacement of the CEO to purposely manipulate stock price. Say the board of directors are going to fire a CEO but if they with hold that knowledge from the public, then that raises some problems.
In theory, people who have knowledge of Steve Jobs health have insider trading status.
Like it or not, the health of Job's does affect the price price.
If say, Job's doctor diagnoses him with terminal cancer and the doctor calls his broker the next day to short AAPL to kingdom come, then you've got some problem that SEC is very concerned with.
So the main question is if Apple mislead the public about Job's health in order to manipulate share price. If so, then it is a big deal.
Good luck on removing conflicting ideologies and justifications for armed conflict. But it is certainly a nice thought. At least we will have a clean place to bury the dead.
Well, I think the idea of space colonization is that people of conflicting ideologies can go get their own planets and leave other alone.
At least until those planets get over populated and we get an intergalactic war 5,000 years in the future, but at least it won't be our problem.
"Triples your risk" - well, what are the risks WITHOUT coffee? I drink coffee all day long, yet I haven't had a hallucination since 1982
The average human can and will hallucinate without the aid of chemical substance, lack of sleep, or stress. They are just more likely to under those conditions.
What could be the case is that the human mind is not really comprehending 100% of the data input correctly. There are not enough neurons to process all of the light photons that enter your eye so your brain just makes a guesstimation. This is why looking those optical illusion pictures on the web make you feel funny or make you believe in something (like that size difference or color difference optical illusions) that is not true.
Which really might mean that the hallucination was always there but the person might just not take notice until they are under conditions which makes such visualization stand out.
However, often times it is very hard to get someone to differentiate between a hallucination and a false memory.
They claim they might have seen something that did not exist, but did a faulty brain really see it or did it simply have a faulty memory?
Maybe this would be the kick in the pants our species needs.
Not really. The dinosaurs didn't die out because their blackberries didn't work anymore. They died out because they didn't have a working space program.
Without sufficient technology to detect and deflect large incoming space objects, any long term chance of survival is 0%.
It might be 10, 100, or 100,000 or even a 1,000,000 years from now, but a species without sufficient technology will go extinct even if they simply live harmoniously with the Earth without figuring out the real problem of getting off Earth.
This place is a deceiving death trap if you don't look at the big picture.
The irony is that if we got hit say in 2012 by a sunstorm that knocks out most of our satellites and communications system, only to take finally recover in 2030 to realize that Apophis has only a few days to hit earth.
Suggestion to Asus: Lose the LCD on the end of the keyboard.
I dunno. If it was a touch pad screen then it would be cool as heck, but I'm too tired to read the article beyond to pictures to find out if that is the case.
What we really need is an alien race to show up, blow up a major city or two,
What we really need is a small asteroid to hit in a rural area causing a large explosion that doesn't cause a misinterpretation of a nuclear attack which scares the public into realizing without a space program they are going to eventually end up like the dinosaurs.
Sadly, I suspect the asteroid won't be so polite to where it lands.
What you're not realizing is that to a generation of gamers older than you (most likely) that price is an INCREDIBLE bargain. And still even if you had a working console to this day, those are the prices I would expect to play for cartridges at flea markets/auctions and in my opinion is a completely reasonable price to pay.
Except you don't get the cartridge, manual, or anything physical.
That and the flea market usually sell the 100 in 1 cartridges for $10 with those famicon knock offs.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't understand the Theory of Evolution. There is NO "next logical step" for a species which develops intelligence, and there is NO reason why not colonising space makes us a "dead end branch". As the late, great Jay Gould has pointed out, the main form of life on Earth (by biomass and by effect on the planet) is now, and has been for a very long time, bacteria. Bacteria achieve great adaptability without intelligence.
Eventually, even the bacteria will go extinct without a space program.
It won't be tomorrow, 100, 1000, or even 1,000,000 years from now, but if we are talking about evolution (the scale of hundreds of millions of years and even billions) something on a cosmic scale will eventually kill all life on earth.
Eventually earth will be hit by an object large enough to eliminate the atmosphere.
Eventually the sun will expand and consume earth.
Eventually the sun will die.
Eventually all the stars will die.
Eventually all matter will be consumed by black holes.
Eventually all the black holes will die.
(And I'm not listing all the other events that makes most of the universe unfriendly to life between now and then)
Unless there is some bacteria that can still exist in a universe after heat death, there is no future in evolution without intelligence.
Just saying, without intelligence, life is eventually doomed down the line.
If you take a view of natural selection is evolution, the universe tends to kill off life regardless its prior traits and that it takes intelligence to get past those "out of context" problems.
As they say... The dinosaurs died out because they didn't have a space program.
And I would wager eventually the only life to survive the universe will be intelligent life simply because everything else (including the bacteria) died to cosmic events.
I'm pretty sure that, no matter what, you can't authorize anything other than another human adult to act on your behalf.
Could you in theory, agree to have some guy in India or China $0.01 to agree to remove into your computer and click I agree?
Of course, there might be some other unintended complications if they can watch your screen.
That's all it means. It is just a simple way of summing up our court system. It is NOT a command to the population at large. Individuals are free to believe what they wish, and use whatever standard for evidence they wish. People aren't required to view everyone as innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. They are welcome o hold opinions as they see fit.
When juries are composed by individuals of the population at large, I would hope they will take the "innocent until proven guilty" into consideration if I have to sit on the receiving end of their decision.
I know the judge does instruct juries to keep this in mind (I've had to go to Jury duty like everyone else), but if the general population has already made up their mind about someone before sitting in on the jury then that is a bad habit for the general population to have.
If you are ever accused of a crime you did not commit, then I suspect you too hope the population at large does not simply make up its mind about you before your case is presented.
The main character is a trader who buys gold and makes a vast fortune.
Ok. Stop right there. The author of the book has no understanding of economics if he wrote that in. No one... No one... Has ever gotten rich of investing in gold in the history of modern economies for the past 200 years. The only reason that gold maintained value during great depression was because of government price fixing. Of course the US government back then was the largest holder of gold and did not want the price to drop, but after the price of gold was allowed to move on its own to market values in the 1960s the price did go up, but this was mainly due to an interest bubble and anyone who bought gold in 1980 has lost money due to inflation if they wanted to sell their gold today.
Even if the USD collapse in a fit of bad managment and if there was hyper inflation out the wazoo, gold will not automatically go up in value because its value is demand driven. The average joe is more interested in buying food for his family than he is bars of gold to sit on.
Secondly...
Unemployment benefit claims balloon, and in the face of imminent default and chaos, the president courageously proposes and passes a plan to cut the government down to actual income levels and shears off roughly half the government. There are various riots initially, but things finally settle down to a hard and thrifty recovery.
Sounds like the opposite of what happened during the great depression.
Simply reducing government spending does not solve the problem.
And lastly... The US Government will never go bankrupt simply because of the IRS tax system. Read into that Monster of Jekyll Island book and realize that the reason that the USD is valuable is because the US Government forces its citizens at a point of a gun to value the USD as their way of paying taxes.
Same with government loans to other nations.
There is currently no other currency or commodity that puts the USD at danger (except maybe the Yen and oil).
Really, its about a market of faith if you look at it pragmatically and as long as people get up and go to work and do things constructively then the economy will continue. If it requires government intervention, then it will happen whether we like it or not.
As I've posted before, this type of "Earth exceptionalism" is more related to the field of religion than science. There is no a priori reason to believe that the Earth is an unusual planet unless you buy in to the creation myths of some peoples who lived in the Near East circa 4000-2000 years ago.
That said, even if earth is a common type of planet, there is strong evidence that intelligent life is rare simply because evolution tends to favor lifeforms such as the dinosaurs or bacteria.
One could argue that it was a fluke that a meteor did exterminate the dinosaurs and that tool making mammals were able to evolve into a state that they could develop inter-planetary communication before another meteor hits.
There lies the problem.
How many cars have internet service?
I listen to internet radio on the bus to work. Does that count?
As long as you have 3g coverage, unlimited data plan, and a phone that allows 3rd party apps then you have internet radio anywhere you go.
Relying on physical means to control your child's behaviour only sends the message that physical means are the only means to control their behaviour and if they can avoid or counter the physical means, they can behave as they wish. Are the people who proposed this bill afraid of their own children? Is physical control what they rely on?
Maybe the EU parliament members are too young to have read Clockwork Orange or even bothered to see the movie.
Except that Intel and AMD hold vital patents to the set of technologies that are part of the x86 architeture. They have to cross license because they depend on each other, but they have no obligation to license to NVidia.
Rumor has it that when nVidia bought 3dfx, they also bought their x86 licenses.
Destruction's army takes site 1, Order takes 2, 3 is left open, Destruction moves to 2, Order to 3, etc, then Destruction to 3, Order to 1 and so on. Each massive army seeing no actual Combat, except against the meagre force of enemy NPCs guarding the checkpoints, and all they're really doing is farming renown, XP and Influence.
You are playing on the wrong server.
Play on Dark Crag.
Yes, it is open and there is a lot newbie ganking on T1, but in T4 there are massive battles because it is the highest pop server.
Like 200vs300 battles... It helps to be in a guild like Ruin which basically has 1000+ members on its Roster so that you know where the action is.
Let's be honest here. What does the average office PC run? A word processor, a spreadsheet, an SAP frontend, maybe a few more tools. And then we're basically done. This isn't really rocket science for a contemporary computer, it's neither heavy on the CPU nor on the GPU.
Eh. If you really worked IT for non-IT people, you'd know that there is never a "fast enough".
I can't tell you how many times I have gotten "I need a faster computer. I spend 10 minutes each morning booting up!"
Or they mess things up by holding the power button down to turn the box off because they thought it was freezing...
To a lot of Joe-Six packs, "fast enough" won't be enough until they can push the power button and the thing comes on and when they click the application is up and running before they lift their finger off the mouse button.
The holy grail for computers for them is of course for their computer to act just like their TV.
Maybe as those who work with computers for a living have gotten so used to it (and if fact users tell me all the time that I have the patience of a saint when I'm waiting for their computer to reboot) just because of waiting for installs and reboots to go through makes you go insane or stressed, then you would have left Desktop IT a long time ago.
ust because some of us use the internet on a regular basis, that doesn't mean that everyone would be better off for it.
Some of us?
Have you tried to apply for a job without the internet lately?
Even my home repair contractor carries around an iPhone.
Of course if you are retired or have guaranteed income, you probably won't need to worry so much though. Just saying...
Of course they want it. They just don't want to pay scary fees for it.
Yeah. The key problem with US broad band is the people providing the broadband and not the customers.
I would almost suspect this kind of report would be used by the providers as an excuse not to roll out to rural areas.
Of course, these same companies will quash any rural municipality attempt to create their own network.
Don't get me wrong, I have a great respect for these scientists, I just wonder how these sorts of real robots will fare on the market.
I think the idea is that robots will be used to do things that humans aren't willing to put up with.
Which means if you can't find someone to put up with you, then maybe a robot is for you.
The Turing test is for apparent 'human' intelligence, where robotics adds communications via 'expressiveness'. These are two different vectors: rote intelligence and capacity to communicate (via body language, and the rest of linguistics/heuristics).
I don't think the body language is the hard part and that important considering the majority of human communication these days either involves just test or voice without seeing the other person. (That and certain persons can't interpret body language anyways)
The key problem with AI is:
Context
Context
Context
The number one failure that most Turing programs is that they only respond to the sentence you just said without any context to the conversation before hand. A really good AI would be able to keep on topic and understand what has been discussed previously so that they can expand on the topic without simply just responding to the current line.
There are several ways to achieve this, but right now I don't think there is any program out there that at least I know of that does this right. The easiest way to tell if you are talking to a chat bot is to refer to something previous in the conversation and see if they respond appropriately.
I have nothing to say against Jobs or even particularly against Apple, but if shareholders are so stupid as to throw money into a company on the basis of hype surrounding one personality, I can't say I am overwhelmed with sympathy if they lose every cent.
To be fair, Steve Jobs did save the company back in early 2000's since most of us in the computer world had written off Apple as on their death bed back then.
Secondly, he isn't the only company that has such a cult that keeps shareholder's invested. Warren Buffet with Halthway Berkshire (sp?) come's to mind.
And those are people who pay $150,000 per share.
Replacing a CEO and naming a CEO has to be considered insider knowledge by the SEC rules.
So its not just APPL, but any company who uses replacement of the CEO to purposely manipulate stock price. Say the board of directors are going to fire a CEO but if they with hold that knowledge from the public, then that raises some problems.
Same thing here except its about health issues.
So what does the SEC have to argue here.
In theory, people who have knowledge of Steve Jobs health have insider trading status.
Like it or not, the health of Job's does affect the price price.
If say, Job's doctor diagnoses him with terminal cancer and the doctor calls his broker the next day to short AAPL to kingdom come, then you've got some problem that SEC is very concerned with.
So the main question is if Apple mislead the public about Job's health in order to manipulate share price. If so, then it is a big deal.
Good luck on removing conflicting ideologies and justifications for armed conflict. But it is certainly a nice thought. At least we will have a clean place to bury the dead.
Well, I think the idea of space colonization is that people of conflicting ideologies can go get their own planets and leave other alone.
At least until those planets get over populated and we get an intergalactic war 5,000 years in the future, but at least it won't be our problem.
"Triples your risk" - well, what are the risks WITHOUT coffee? I drink coffee all day long, yet I haven't had a hallucination since 1982
The average human can and will hallucinate without the aid of chemical substance, lack of sleep, or stress. They are just more likely to under those conditions.
What could be the case is that the human mind is not really comprehending 100% of the data input correctly. There are not enough neurons to process all of the light photons that enter your eye so your brain just makes a guesstimation. This is why looking those optical illusion pictures on the web make you feel funny or make you believe in something (like that size difference or color difference optical illusions) that is not true.
Which really might mean that the hallucination was always there but the person might just not take notice until they are under conditions which makes such visualization stand out.
However, often times it is very hard to get someone to differentiate between a hallucination and a false memory.
They claim they might have seen something that did not exist, but did a faulty brain really see it or did it simply have a faulty memory?
Maybe this would be the kick in the pants our species needs.
Not really. The dinosaurs didn't die out because their blackberries didn't work anymore. They died out because they didn't have a working space program.
Without sufficient technology to detect and deflect large incoming space objects, any long term chance of survival is 0%.
It might be 10, 100, or 100,000 or even a 1,000,000 years from now, but a species without sufficient technology will go extinct even if they simply live harmoniously with the Earth without figuring out the real problem of getting off Earth.
This place is a deceiving death trap if you don't look at the big picture.
The irony is that if we got hit say in 2012 by a sunstorm that knocks out most of our satellites and communications system, only to take finally recover in 2030 to realize that Apophis has only a few days to hit earth.
No we need all the time we can get.
Says so in the first paragraph. So much for my laziness.
Hook up an external monitor and this thing is sweet.
Reminds me of a deck from Shadowrun.
Suggestion to Asus: Lose the LCD on the end of the keyboard.
I dunno. If it was a touch pad screen then it would be cool as heck, but I'm too tired to read the article beyond to pictures to find out if that is the case.
What we really need is an alien race to show up, blow up a major city or two,
What we really need is a small asteroid to hit in a rural area causing a large explosion that doesn't cause a misinterpretation of a nuclear attack which scares the public into realizing without a space program they are going to eventually end up like the dinosaurs.
Sadly, I suspect the asteroid won't be so polite to where it lands.
There are more dangerous animals that would hunt and kill you in the middle of New York city than any wild area in the world.
Actually, NYC has less murder to population ratio than even most rural areas these days.
If you were talking about Detroit, Camdem, or Philadelhia...
What you're not realizing is that to a generation of gamers older than you (most likely) that price is an INCREDIBLE bargain. And still even if you had a working console to this day, those are the prices I would expect to play for cartridges at flea markets/auctions and in my opinion is a completely reasonable price to pay.
Except you don't get the cartridge, manual, or anything physical.
That and the flea market usually sell the 100 in 1 cartridges for $10 with those famicon knock offs.