It is amazing to me how many people do not believe that we have a sixth sense, the ability to know someone is looking at you even though they are not in your field of vision.
Try this today.
1. Get in a car and drive until you reach a red stop light. 2. Look at other person. 3. Watch them instantly look back at you.
Or in reverse
1. Get in a car and drive until you reach a red stop light. 2. Don't look at other person until you feel them looking. 3. Look at them quickly and watch them turn their head away.
One of those things that always bothered me is that you can usually tell when another person is looking at you while driving.
At the same time, this is a rather ingenious way of creating a virtual toll for roads.
Its free to enter NJ, but you have to pay to get out.
But on a more serious note, Jersey has the cheapest gas rates compared to PA and NY. (Sometimes up to $0.25 difference per gallon if you find the right spot) They subsidize this by interstate tolls on people traveling between NY, DE, and PA so that residents don't have to foot the bill while out of state people who use their roads do.
But doesn't make up for the fact that most of NJ isn't that great of a place to live so I'm not moving across the border any time soon.
Isn't the whole point of a company making an MMORPG to not have a ending?
Technically, World War II Online has an ending when one side wins or looses and the server resets and they go back to starting era weapons and vehicles.
The world is not there for your wishful may or may not convenience.
But I thought that was the point of politics to provide to the citzens in the first place.;)
Should be like you driving test. If you want it , turn up and fucking do it.
I hate to break it to you, but I showed up to a test once about 15 years ago and now I just renew my license online (my state supports online registration)
All I have to do is show up at a valid photo booth with the information the State DOT mails me and they take a photo of me at an approved photo location. (Your state may differ)
Also... You forget that some people are handicapped, don't own a car, or generally unavailable (over seas) would benefit from this. (Some states do provide absentee ballots for the military or handicapped. Not all of them do this the same though)
Lastly, this would also alleviate local voting issues when there aren't enough polls around to allow people to vote in a timely manner. Remember in 2004 when people had 3-9 hour waits in places where the booths were understaffed and under equipped.
Personally, I think they should making voting a national holiday and encourages business to close much like Christmas or New Year's and let people know that this is something that should be celebrated and encouraged in all forms.
Since we haven't had a significant nuclear accident since the Carter administration, which even then affected roughly NO ONE, I'll stick with my current supplier, thanks.
I don't mind nuclear myself, but I can't build a reactor in my back yard (well maybe, but I don't think my neighbors would like it)
With solar, I can put it in my back yard effectively offsetting my own power needs without paying anyone else in the process. Currently, it isn't cost effective to do so with the price of solar cells, but if they get to a point where they are more efficient and cheaper than their current forms, I'd slap a few on my roof in an instant.
Maybe in the far flung future I could use solar to produce my own hydrogen and gas my car.
That way... I would have complete control over my energy needs and would not have to deal with failures at the central level or price fluctuations.
Penrose said unique thought and intellegence requires cosmic rays firing random neurons. Without this you have a deterministic machine, and not a brain.
How do we not know the cosmic rays aren't deterministic?;)
However, there is an alternate theory of consciousness, based on quantum physics [quantumconsciousness.org]. It is inherently non-deterministic and cannot be modeled in a computer.
I think the biggest argument against this is that synapses do not work on the atomic level. They are made of atoms, but quantum states do not seem to overtly affect organic matter at cellular level.
Of course I could be wrong about this, but since decisions are usually the next best move it could simply be a matter of weighting what the "intelligence" applies to his rules as next best move.
The problem with General Artificial Intelligence is that "the next best move" is often open ended and too many possible choices often give our current computation a run for its money unless its put into some form of predefined rules.
The reason humans do so well is because we have certain criteria encouraging us to do things (hunger, pain, altruism, fear, etc etc)
Hence, our general intelligence goals aren't that complex (usually... to feel good about oneself and one's life) and that our true intelligence is being able to recognize things that improve upon that given a set amount of rules we know.
Which makes us very deterministic.
Even rebelling against the crowd can often be very predictable in humans.
Do we even want to, wouldn't that take away some of the mystery behind humans. Afterall if we can figure ourselves out then doesn't that mean that we aren't really all that complex?
Would it bother you to wake up one day and realize you don't have free will?
Or perhaps the soul is nothing more than chemical reactions that only came about through random chance?
Truth be told, the brain exists in a semi-logical universe where rules are applied and must adhere to the laws of physics.
The question of having free will or a soul makes no difference to how the human mind works on a chemical level. It would work regardless of how we thought on the matter (maybe just different regions) but it would still function.
So if we find tomorrow exactly how the human brain functions on an atomic level or forget the whole matter entirely, it will change nothing of how it is made and how it actually works.
And we might as well try to figure it out, because leaving well enough alone would have left us in caves thinking that fire was a bad idea.
If black holes have an event horizon beyond which no matter can return, and there is a wormhole with a black hole on each side, then if you went into the black hole and try to get out the other side, you'd find that you're behind the other black hole's event horizon and are unable to escape.
Of course the other universe could be one that time is reverse and everything is made of anti-matter in which the black holes spew instead of attract.
Of course, if you some how survived the trip, as soon as you touched something you would be annihilated considering you are made of matter and now exist in a universe full of anti-matter.
My college, which is private, doesn't allow even iTunes sharing amongst the students
I went to a state college in the 90's and they kept the dorm networks completely separate from the school networks. I don't know if it was foresight or not, but they appeared to keep the college system up and running all the time, but the dorm network often slowed to a crawl (and this was before Napster) and you had to foot it out to a lab if you needed something off the network.
What about people that gain weight going from ~ 120lbs to say, 260. As its done over time, the body adapts and they are still able to walk around and live normally (although it does have adverse health effects) I think it is possible for people to adapt, but it will not be comfortable, especially for the first generation, and they will probably live a lot shorter.
By the time we get someone out there, we will most likely be dealing with trans-humans who may have genetically enhanced bodies or perhaps humans who have replaced their organs with machines. I'm sure anyone that would consider colonizing the planet (or staying there) would have gone through strenuous training or genetic modification.
I'm not trolling, I'm no shill and I definitely do not work for Microsoft.. but I just really believe that "too" much choice sucks.
Sounds like a personal problem if they aren't up to the task to making decisions and from my understanding if you are employed and given the responsibility to make decisions then perhaps they should find someone else who is up to the task.
Of course... Less decisions make any decision easier, but sometimes people need to do major research and actually work at finding out what they really should choose rather than having a vendor sweet talk them in with free swag and lunches.
(And anyone who makes decisions based of swag and lunches should not be making decisions)
Ok... have you ever actually ran into a browser that you DON'T know how to use? Aren't they basically all the same?
Take Ad block plug for Firefox. It works on OS X, Windows, and Linux.
Off the top of my head I don't know how you would acheive the same thing in IE, Safari, or Camino.
I'm sure it could be done, but I don't want to have to spend anymore time than I have to when I'm working cross platform. If I learn it once on Firefox on any OS then I know exactly where to find the menu on another.
Hopefully, mankind in the next few years will patent every obvious idea possible so that by 2030 we can get back to actually inventing real non-obvious inventions.
Of course, I suppose this could happen on a single planet that's periodically struck by meteors. It will take longer, but in the end you'll end up with everything that can't survive meteors dying out.
Maybe my scale was a bit smaller than I intended. On a galactic scale, I would say that evolved life could not survive something like Heat Death or a black hole without some type of develop understanding of the issue. The only life that could survive either scenario without understanding would be life that exists in places where neither scenario occurs.
All life that does meet either scenario will have no option for survival and no evolution after that point will occur.
Truth be told, I can't sit through a Pokemon cartoon unless I'm drunk, but the Pokemon games are damn fun regardless (even more tthan most Xbox games for me)
Same applies for the Yu-Gi-Oh games for the DS. The Anime is horrid, but the games are really fun.
What happens when technology improves to the point where authors do not die? I know this is far thinking, but there will come a day in the next few centuries where people live for thousands of years.
Do you account for people who own copyrights that will never become public domain because of life extension? I would just say 100 years tops for any authored copyrights and the same for corporate.
What does common sense have to do with anything? The way we experience the world wasn't set up to be able to understand it, but to survive in it.
Actually, I would argue that in the end, if you don't understand the universe that it will ultimatley kill you.
If this is from climate change, meteor impact, cosmic ray burst, or a neutron star or a black hole passing within a few light years of us... Well... Evolutionary survival will not save you.
Otherwise the dinosaurs would have a nifty system of repealing their doom that would most resemble a space program.
Of course one could argue that "understanding" is a result of evolutionary process and emergence. And that survival of the fittest requires a species that understands how to avoid such things as meteor impacts and even such things of deaths of their stars.
Otherwise... One day in the far flung future there will be no life (or sentient beings) to actually contemplate the nature of reality and quantum physics.
If your evolutionary process does not involve comprehension of reality then you won't be around for very long at the cosmic scale.
Of course, we may or may not be around in a few billion years to debate this or not...
The problem is that in practice it cannot possibly work the way it's designers envisioned it because they didn't take human nature into account.
I would beg to differ. Communism worked under Stalin.
If you execute thousands of people and sends millions off to gulags on a yearly basis, then Communism works as Stalin intended and can basically overcome anything capitalism throws at it. They went from a backwards medieval agricultural country to a technological/industrial super power in less than 20 years.
Of course this requires an external enemy and that you don't get assassinated by your underlings in the process, but a Stalinist economy can outperform and advance faster than any other except most likely National Socialism (who also employed masses of slave labor I might add).
That said... I wouldn't like to live under Stalinism or National Socialism and I wouldn't recommend it to any politician since it is morally objectionable.
Of course if you are talking about "as designers intended" I am assuming as Stalin intended rather than Marx.
It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if Lenin had lived or Trotsky had taken power instead of Stalin, but it might have ended up the same.
The same applies to Mao except he was so anti-intellectual he killed off all his engineers and scientists (rather than Stalin who employed them as prisoner engineers)which left China backwards until the 1980s.
Basically, Communism collapsed in the USSR because their leaders were not longer willing to be brutal like Stalin because (you are right) of human nature. Fear and pain work just as well as greed and reward in that respect.
I would say that China's economies resemble Germany's National Socialism model with allowing capitalism but with nationalistic fervor and cooperation for those goals.
Slashdot Mirror
are they securing their future and/or slowing solar tech down?
Maybe they know their business model is about to die a very bad death due to market changes we don't know about.
Remember, the oil companies came up with the Peak Oil theory, not the environmentalists.
It is amazing to me how many people do not believe that we have a sixth sense, the ability to know someone is looking at you even though they are not in your field of vision.
Try this today.
1. Get in a car and drive until you reach a red stop light.
2. Look at other person.
3. Watch them instantly look back at you.
Or in reverse
1. Get in a car and drive until you reach a red stop light.
2. Don't look at other person until you feel them looking.
3. Look at them quickly and watch them turn their head away.
One of those things that always bothered me is that you can usually tell when another person is looking at you while driving.
Umm... I was thinking "shooting Arabs" would be the key part of your statement rather than location would cause more trouble for the military.
Seeing that it would make more hostilities towards the soldiers.
And not to nitpick, but Iraqis aren't Arabs. Unless of course you are talking about foreign fighters.
At the same time, this is a rather ingenious way of creating a virtual toll for roads.
Its free to enter NJ, but you have to pay to get out.
But on a more serious note, Jersey has the cheapest gas rates compared to PA and NY. (Sometimes up to $0.25 difference per gallon if you find the right spot) They subsidize this by interstate tolls on people traveling between NY, DE, and PA so that residents don't have to foot the bill while out of state people who use their roads do.
But doesn't make up for the fact that most of NJ isn't that great of a place to live so I'm not moving across the border any time soon.
Isn't the whole point of a company making an MMORPG to not have a ending?
Technically, World War II Online has an ending when one side wins or looses and the server resets and they go back to starting era weapons and vehicles.
The world is not there for your wishful may or may not convenience.
;)
But I thought that was the point of politics to provide to the citzens in the first place.
Should be like you driving test. If you want it , turn up and fucking do it.
I hate to break it to you, but I showed up to a test once about 15 years ago and now I just renew my license online (my state supports online registration)
All I have to do is show up at a valid photo booth with the information the State DOT mails me and they take a photo of me at an approved photo location. (Your state may differ)
Also... You forget that some people are handicapped, don't own a car, or generally unavailable (over seas) would benefit from this. (Some states do provide absentee ballots for the military or handicapped. Not all of them do this the same though)
Lastly, this would also alleviate local voting issues when there aren't enough polls around to allow people to vote in a timely manner. Remember in 2004 when people had 3-9 hour waits in places where the booths were understaffed and under equipped.
Personally, I think they should making voting a national holiday and encourages business to close much like Christmas or New Year's and let people know that this is something that should be celebrated and encouraged in all forms.
I've never had to walk more than 200m to get to vote - maybe if you can't be bothered to make that effort then your vote shouldn't count...
Its not the walk that bothers most people, but rather the 3 hour line in some places due to underfunding of local elections.
I know some states have laws that say employers must allow time off to vote, but most states don't.
Since we haven't had a significant nuclear accident since the Carter administration, which even then affected roughly NO ONE, I'll stick with my current supplier, thanks.
I don't mind nuclear myself, but I can't build a reactor in my back yard (well maybe, but I don't think my neighbors would like it)
With solar, I can put it in my back yard effectively offsetting my own power needs without paying anyone else in the process. Currently, it isn't cost effective to do so with the price of solar cells, but if they get to a point where they are more efficient and cheaper than their current forms, I'd slap a few on my roof in an instant.
Maybe in the far flung future I could use solar to produce my own hydrogen and gas my car.
That way... I would have complete control over my energy needs and would not have to deal with failures at the central level or price fluctuations.
Penrose said unique thought and intellegence requires cosmic rays firing random neurons. Without this you have a deterministic machine, and not a brain.
;)
How do we not know the cosmic rays aren't deterministic?
However, there is an alternate theory of consciousness, based on quantum physics [quantumconsciousness.org]. It is inherently non-deterministic and cannot be modeled in a computer.
I think the biggest argument against this is that synapses do not work on the atomic level. They are made of atoms, but quantum states do not seem to overtly affect organic matter at cellular level.
Of course I could be wrong about this, but since decisions are usually the next best move it could simply be a matter of weighting what the "intelligence" applies to his rules as next best move.
The problem with General Artificial Intelligence is that "the next best move" is often open ended and too many possible choices often give our current computation a run for its money unless its put into some form of predefined rules.
The reason humans do so well is because we have certain criteria encouraging us to do things (hunger, pain, altruism, fear, etc etc)
Hence, our general intelligence goals aren't that complex (usually... to feel good about oneself and one's life) and that our true intelligence is being able to recognize things that improve upon that given a set amount of rules we know.
Which makes us very deterministic.
Even rebelling against the crowd can often be very predictable in humans.
Do we even want to, wouldn't that take away some of the mystery behind humans. Afterall if we can figure ourselves out then doesn't that mean that we aren't really all that complex?
Would it bother you to wake up one day and realize you don't have free will?
Or perhaps the soul is nothing more than chemical reactions that only came about through random chance?
Truth be told, the brain exists in a semi-logical universe where rules are applied and must adhere to the laws of physics.
The question of having free will or a soul makes no difference to how the human mind works on a chemical level. It would work regardless of how we thought on the matter (maybe just different regions) but it would still function.
So if we find tomorrow exactly how the human brain functions on an atomic level or forget the whole matter entirely, it will change nothing of how it is made and how it actually works.
And we might as well try to figure it out, because leaving well enough alone would have left us in caves thinking that fire was a bad idea.
If black holes have an event horizon beyond which no matter can return, and there is a wormhole with a black hole on each side, then if you went into the black hole and try to get out the other side, you'd find that you're behind the other black hole's event horizon and are unable to escape.
Of course the other universe could be one that time is reverse and everything is made of anti-matter in which the black holes spew instead of attract.
Of course, if you some how survived the trip, as soon as you touched something you would be annihilated considering you are made of matter and now exist in a universe full of anti-matter.
My college, which is private, doesn't allow even iTunes sharing amongst the students
I went to a state college in the 90's and they kept the dorm networks completely separate from the school networks. I don't know if it was foresight or not, but they appeared to keep the college system up and running all the time, but the dorm network often slowed to a crawl (and this was before Napster) and you had to foot it out to a lab if you needed something off the network.
I believe the way they're using engrossed implies that people have more empathy for TV and movie characters then they do for video game characters.
You can't tell me that you didn't cry when Sephiroth killed Aeris?
Or when Dogmeat always died in his useless suicidal charge...
What about people that gain weight going from ~ 120lbs to say, 260. As its done over time, the body adapts and they are still able to walk around and live normally (although it does have adverse health effects) I think it is possible for people to adapt, but it will not be comfortable, especially for the first generation, and they will probably live a lot shorter.
By the time we get someone out there, we will most likely be dealing with trans-humans who may have genetically enhanced bodies or perhaps humans who have replaced their organs with machines. I'm sure anyone that would consider colonizing the planet (or staying there) would have gone through strenuous training or genetic modification.
I'm not trolling, I'm no shill and I definitely do not work for Microsoft.. but I just really believe that "too" much choice sucks.
Sounds like a personal problem if they aren't up to the task to making decisions and from my understanding if you are employed and given the responsibility to make decisions then perhaps they should find someone else who is up to the task.
Of course... Less decisions make any decision easier, but sometimes people need to do major research and actually work at finding out what they really should choose rather than having a vendor sweet talk them in with free swag and lunches.
(And anyone who makes decisions based of swag and lunches should not be making decisions)
Ok... have you ever actually ran into a browser that you DON'T know how to use? Aren't they basically all the same?
Take Ad block plug for Firefox. It works on OS X, Windows, and Linux.
Off the top of my head I don't know how you would acheive the same thing in IE, Safari, or Camino.
I'm sure it could be done, but I don't want to have to spend anymore time than I have to when I'm working cross platform. If I learn it once on Firefox on any OS then I know exactly where to find the menu on another.
Well... 15 years ain't that long.
Hopefully, mankind in the next few years will patent every obvious idea possible so that by 2030 we can get back to actually inventing real non-obvious inventions.
Of course, I suppose this could happen on a single planet that's periodically struck by meteors. It will take longer, but in the end you'll end up with everything that can't survive meteors dying out.
Maybe my scale was a bit smaller than I intended. On a galactic scale, I would say that evolved life could not survive something like Heat Death or a black hole without some type of develop understanding of the issue. The only life that could survive either scenario without understanding would be life that exists in places where neither scenario occurs.
All life that does meet either scenario will have no option for survival and no evolution after that point will occur.
Truth be told, I can't sit through a Pokemon cartoon unless I'm drunk, but the Pokemon games are damn fun regardless (even more tthan most Xbox games for me)
Same applies for the Yu-Gi-Oh games for the DS. The Anime is horrid, but the games are really fun.
Is it still the same game that I played 10 years ago with just more pokemon?
In a sense, but the Wifi abilities actually makes it worth it though. No more having to find people in the person to battle with.
Life of the author plus 70 years.
What happens when technology improves to the point where authors do not die? I know this is far thinking, but there will come a day in the next few centuries where people live for thousands of years.
Do you account for people who own copyrights that will never become public domain because of life extension? I would just say 100 years tops for any authored copyrights and the same for corporate.
What does common sense have to do with anything? The way we experience the world wasn't set up to be able to understand it, but to survive in it.
Actually, I would argue that in the end, if you don't understand the universe that it will ultimatley kill you.
If this is from climate change, meteor impact, cosmic ray burst, or a neutron star or a black hole passing within a few light years of us... Well... Evolutionary survival will not save you.
Otherwise the dinosaurs would have a nifty system of repealing their doom that would most resemble a space program.
Of course one could argue that "understanding" is a result of evolutionary process and emergence. And that survival of the fittest requires a species that understands how to avoid such things as meteor impacts and even such things of deaths of their stars.
Otherwise... One day in the far flung future there will be no life (or sentient beings) to actually contemplate the nature of reality and quantum physics.
If your evolutionary process does not involve comprehension of reality then you won't be around for very long at the cosmic scale.
Of course, we may or may not be around in a few billion years to debate this or not...
When Windows 2000 came out people said the same thing.
Actually, most techies I know saw Windows 2000 they immediately switched because of its NT functionality.
It had the stability and actually ran games better than Win98 (at least the new ones coming out at the time).
The problem is that in practice it cannot possibly work the way it's designers envisioned it because they didn't take human nature into account.
I would beg to differ. Communism worked under Stalin.
If you execute thousands of people and sends millions off to gulags on a yearly basis, then Communism works as Stalin intended and can basically overcome anything capitalism throws at it. They went from a backwards medieval agricultural country to a technological/industrial super power in less than 20 years.
Of course this requires an external enemy and that you don't get assassinated by your underlings in the process, but a Stalinist economy can outperform and advance faster than any other except most likely National Socialism (who also employed masses of slave labor I might add).
That said... I wouldn't like to live under Stalinism or National Socialism and I wouldn't recommend it to any politician since it is morally objectionable.
Of course if you are talking about "as designers intended" I am assuming as Stalin intended rather than Marx.
It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if Lenin had lived or Trotsky had taken power instead of Stalin, but it might have ended up the same.
The same applies to Mao except he was so anti-intellectual he killed off all his engineers and scientists (rather than Stalin who employed them as prisoner engineers)which left China backwards until the 1980s.
Basically, Communism collapsed in the USSR because their leaders were not longer willing to be brutal like Stalin because (you are right) of human nature. Fear and pain work just as well as greed and reward in that respect.
I would say that China's economies resemble Germany's National Socialism model with allowing capitalism but with nationalistic fervor and cooperation for those goals.