Even if we discard all our simple radio gear and go with all this funky stuff that emits "random noise", surely that doesn't make us undetectable to a long-term observer. If you were observing the sun with a radio telescope, you'd notice this unusual amount of radio noise that varies according to a 24-hour (approximately) cycle, again for no apparent reason. Wouldn't you?
Sure, that's a lot harder than pointing a telescope at the Sun and having "HELLO WORLDS" coming at you in Morse Code on a single frequency, but it's still possible.
There was a guy who came up with a vague patent describing the general idea of an automobile (which was obvious for some time before its actual development) back in the 1870's, kept on revising the patent for a decade as development of actual cars progressed, then enabled the patent just as the first actual cars were produced. He then used the patent to set up a cosy cartel of makers who kept costs artificially high.
Along came Henry Ford, who along with perfecting mass production of the automobile, busted the cartel and the ridiculous patents.
The guy that went psycho at Monash and killed those students bought and owned his guns perfectly legally. Handguns are not banned in Australia, though there are strict licensing and registration requirements and you can't carry legally carry around concealed weapons.
From all the reports (and of course apply necessary salting), your self-defence arguments wouldn't have applied to the Monash case. The guy was almost certainly mentally ill, so he was unlikely to be deterred by the risk of being killed himself, and even if somebody had have been carrying a concealed weapon he still would have had time to kill people before a defensive weapon could be retrieved and used.
Nor does it apply to our friend the Washington sniper, for that matter. Nobody has even seen him pull the trigger. People could carry around 50-cal sniper rifles, SAWs, or RPG's and it wouldn't help defend against him.
In my experience, most people involved in business IT decision making have heard of Linux by now.
That's not true for home users, though. That market will come eventually, but we'll see Linux on corporate desktops before it's widely used in the non-geek home market.
However, in the past we have been very successful in managing complexity by dividing big incomprehensible problems into smaller comprehensible subproblems and solving those.
Re:But I disagree with your basic unprovable premi
on
Downloading The Mind
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· Score: 1
Ockham's Razor isn't a proof, it's a method of comparing unproven theories.
Which is exactly the context I used it in, if you bothered to actually read my post carefully.
Re:But I disagree with your basic unprovable premi
on
Downloading The Mind
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· Score: 2
Prove it.
No, *you* prove that God exists:)
There are lots of things I can't prove. I can't prove, in the logical sense, that evolution is the cause of the profusion of various lifeforms on Earth today. I can't prove that the world wasn't created in 4004 BC (or whenever it was). Heck, I can't prove the world wasn't created five minutes ago. Can you?
Nor can I prove that there's no supernatural soul in the brain, but I can suggest to you why I think it's highly unlikely. Ever since the dawn of science, scientists have had things that they haven't been able to explain with present knowledge. Therefore, they and others have invoked God's intervention as an explanation. Subsequent investigation, again and again, reveals a theory that satisfies most people by repeated testing. The use of God to explain the currently scientifically unexplainable has come to be characterised as "God of the gaps", and every time a scientific discovery fills in one of those gaps the arguments looks ever-sillier.
Alternatively, I could just invoke Ockham's Razor. The hypothesis that the brain is somehow God's supernatural work and impossible for mortals to understand requires far more assumptions than the alternative. Until I can reject the simple explanation (the brain is just normal matter organised interestingly) I will stick with it over your alternative.
But I hardly think you'll be able to understand the underlying processes going on in the brain, particularly how the brain evolves new pathways etc.
If you're claiming that we don't know that much about how the brain works, I'd agree with you. If you're claiming that it's going to be tough to figure out how it all works, I'd probably agree with you there as well.
However, if you're claiming that science can never understand the brain, I'd have to strongly disagree with you. As an atheist, I don't think there's anything so special about the brain. There's no soul there, put there by some random deity. There's no magic. It's just a lump of protein mixed with water, in essence. Sure, it's a marvellously complex lump of protein. but it's still a lump of protein. We've made a heck of a lot of progress understanding the behaviour of lots of other types of stuff using science. What makes this particular lump of protein any different?
Can anyone give me a non-religious argument why, at some stage in the possibly distant future, that the workings of the brain won't be entirely comprehensible to humans?
I read a book called "The Mighty Micro", published in 1979 by a guy called Chris Evans. He made a lot of predictions about future computers. Many, such as planetwide computer networks, have come true. However, his central thesis shared much with Kurzweil - that Moore's law was inevitably going to lead to ultraintelligent machines. Evans predicted it to occur by the 1990's. Kurzweil is saying 2029 or so.
The key failure of both books, as described for instance hereis that Moore's Law hasn't made computers any more intelligent yet, and doesn't show any particular evidence of doing so. What's disappointing is that people are still giving the same argument credence twenty years on.
Additionally, Kurzweil clearly either doesn't understand digital encryption and quantum computing, or thought it acceptable to funge facts
to make an argument. That kind of thing doesn't give me confidence in anything else the guy says.
I don't reject the possibility of one day doing brain dumps, or artificially intelligent machines, at all. I just dismiss the idea that the incremental advance of hardware technology is going to give it to us for free. We need fundamental breakthroughs from something else.
It received minimal publicity, but Boeing signed a contract (probably a very large one, but the exact size was classified IIRC) to build the next generation of spy sats a couple of years ago.
To me, a more interesting question than the ultimate resolution of these babies is the *number* and scope of cameras on them. Can they watch a car drive along a Cairo backstreet? Can they do this to 20 (or 200 or 2000) cars simultaneously?
Australia has a super-long-range radar system, the Jindalee over-the-horizon radar, that lets us watch pretty much anything coming in from the north for at least 2000 miles. It can detect stealth aircraft quite well.
I don't the US is too worried about us though, particularly as Lockheed Martin is a joint venture partner in the project...
When I said "a bit of respect" I meant just that - I didn't mean going overboard. It's unreasonable to expect that people will blithely lie if they're asked what they think of, say, the treatment of animals in Chinese zoos (to take one example where Westerners would likely be shocked).
Also, there's nothing wrong with Americans being proud of their country and I'm not saying they have to deny it. Just don't proclaim it from the rooftops every second of every fscking day.
Finally, some people are just pricks who'll hate you for being American (or Australian, or British, or whatever) regardless of how you behave.
As far as the real loonies are concerned we're all infidels.
If you're concerned about general less friendly reception rather than just your security, you might find that going in with a sense of humor, a bit of respect for the local way of doing things, and refrain from regularly proclaiming to anyone who asks and plenty who don't that the US is the greatest country on earth and we do things better at home (even if you think it's true) tends to help ameliorate that problem.
But if you drive a car, you're much more likely to die from *that* than you are from terrorism. Not to mention the fact that September 11 demonstrates that terrorists can just as easily kill you at home as abroad.
Unfortunately, some of the more "radical" HCI approaches seem to contradict what's necessary to build reliable software.
As far as I can tell, many of the prominent HCI researchers argue that you should place the UI at the centre of your design and munge everything else to fit.
This goes against the common wisdom amongst software developers, particularly in the Un*x world, that you should design the cleanest, simplest, most modular backend possible, and graft a wetware translation module over the top. If you don't do so, you're likely to end up with a nasty, unmaintainable mess, and the bugginess of GUI systems when compared with systems without such complex UI code tends to give credence to such an argument. But if you do it this way, is the UI going to end up compromised? Probably.
So how do you find a way through this? Evolutionary software models seem to help. Talent and experience tend to assist a bit:) But as for a systematic way to cope with the problems this culture clash raises, I've no idea.
But the track. Oooh, the track, it's a smoooooth gentle nicely laid ribbon of steel, designed to be travelled at speeds up to 250 miles per hour.
With an electric wire on top, adding to the cost. The point of this train is, presumably, that you don't need to electrify the system. It'll still be expensive to upgrade the rails and reroute the track in parts, but not as expensive as the TGV.
If it isn't too expensive, I'd like to see this used a lot more. Can existing trains be retrofitted with one of these things? Or is this just for trains of the (not too distant) future?
I doubt that existing trains will be able to be retrofitted with one of these things - at least, they won't be able to to take full advantage.
If you're trying to build a high-speed train, all the running gear has to be rated for that high speed. That means suspension, brakes, etc. etc, and applies to all the carriages, not just the locomotive.
Just adding one of these to a train would be like bolting a Formula One race engine in a Civic - it could probably be done, but it wouldn't be safe to use anywhere near its full potential.
Not to mention that train tracks have maximum rated speeds also, so if you upgrade to high-speed trains you have to upgrade to appropriate track standards. Such upgrades are potentially quite expensive (you have to widen bends to reduce lateral G's, for instance).
You could either GPG sign the MD5 hash of the tarball, or GPG sign the tarball itself to guarantee that the tarball was signed off by the appropriate person.
I was making the point that people get very upset about cheating and unsporting tactics in other games, so why shouldn't they get upset about cheating and unsporting tactics in this one?
You placed a different interpretation on my analogy to that intended.
Who cares if a football player's taking steroids..
on
Unmaking The Game
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· Score: 5, Insightful
It's just a game.
I don't play EQ, but it seems a lot of people do, and if people are cheating to spoil the game it's of interest.
Wonder if the results are generalizable to men as well.
I vaguely recall reading somewhere that male and female responses to pain are somewhat different (beyond the obvious differential responses to anaesthetics caused by different body weight). Any of the anaesthetists who've posted care to comment?
This is slightly OT, but I've always wondered about how effective these shows are in getting kids interested in science. Sure, they enjoy them greatly when they go, but do they actually care about why all this is happening, and how people figured out all this stuff?
How do you get people enthused about the actual process of science - coming up with hypotheses, figuring out how to test them, analysing the results, and so on?
At my old university, the med students take a subject in first year called "human sexuality" or some such, and, as part of such, there's a screening of a film just to make sure that the students have some idea of what they're talking about.
Funnily enough, each year that particular lecture is filled to capacity with people who dress and sound a lot more like engineers than med students:)
If it turns out that this method is indeed provably unbreakable as you claimed, and you're a postgrad student, have you considered that open publication of it is going to make you "famous" (at least within the cryptographic community) and probably get you a job at a prominent research university or at one of the big private research labs if that's what you want.
Not to mention the fact that if you consulted your supervisor or used university property in the process of coming up with the method they probably own it for the purposes of patenting it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, that's a lot harder than pointing a telescope at the Sun and having "HELLO WORLDS" coming at you in Morse Code on a single frequency, but it's still possible.
Along came Henry Ford, who along with perfecting mass production of the automobile, busted the cartel and the ridiculous patents.
From all the reports (and of course apply necessary salting), your self-defence arguments wouldn't have applied to the Monash case. The guy was almost certainly mentally ill, so he was unlikely to be deterred by the risk of being killed himself, and even if somebody had have been carrying a concealed weapon he still would have had time to kill people before a defensive weapon could be retrieved and used.
Nor does it apply to our friend the Washington sniper, for that matter. Nobody has even seen him pull the trigger. People could carry around 50-cal sniper rifles, SAWs, or RPG's and it wouldn't help defend against him.
That's not true for home users, though. That market will come eventually, but we'll see Linux on corporate desktops before it's widely used in the non-geek home market.
However, in the past we have been very successful in managing complexity by dividing big incomprehensible problems into smaller comprehensible subproblems and solving those.
Which is exactly the context I used it in, if you bothered to actually read my post carefully.
No, *you* prove that God exists :)
There are lots of things I can't prove. I can't prove, in the logical sense, that evolution is the cause of the profusion of various lifeforms on Earth today. I can't prove that the world wasn't created in 4004 BC (or whenever it was). Heck, I can't prove the world wasn't created five minutes ago. Can you?
Nor can I prove that there's no supernatural soul in the brain, but I can suggest to you why I think it's highly unlikely. Ever since the dawn of science, scientists have had things that they haven't been able to explain with present knowledge. Therefore, they and others have invoked God's intervention as an explanation. Subsequent investigation, again and again, reveals a theory that satisfies most people by repeated testing. The use of God to explain the currently scientifically unexplainable has come to be characterised as "God of the gaps", and every time a scientific discovery fills in one of those gaps the arguments looks ever-sillier.
Alternatively, I could just invoke Ockham's Razor. The hypothesis that the brain is somehow God's supernatural work and impossible for mortals to understand requires far more assumptions than the alternative. Until I can reject the simple explanation (the brain is just normal matter organised interestingly) I will stick with it over your alternative.
If you're claiming that we don't know that much about how the brain works, I'd agree with you. If you're claiming that it's going to be tough to figure out how it all works, I'd probably agree with you there as well.
However, if you're claiming that science can never understand the brain, I'd have to strongly disagree with you. As an atheist, I don't think there's anything so special about the brain. There's no soul there, put there by some random deity. There's no magic. It's just a lump of protein mixed with water, in essence. Sure, it's a marvellously complex lump of protein. but it's still a lump of protein. We've made a heck of a lot of progress understanding the behaviour of lots of other types of stuff using science. What makes this particular lump of protein any different?
Can anyone give me a non-religious argument why, at some stage in the possibly distant future, that the workings of the brain won't be entirely comprehensible to humans?
The key failure of both books, as described for instance hereis that Moore's Law hasn't made computers any more intelligent yet, and doesn't show any particular evidence of doing so. What's disappointing is that people are still giving the same argument credence twenty years on.
Additionally, Kurzweil clearly either doesn't understand digital encryption and quantum computing, or thought it acceptable to funge facts to make an argument. That kind of thing doesn't give me confidence in anything else the guy says.
I don't reject the possibility of one day doing brain dumps, or artificially intelligent machines, at all. I just dismiss the idea that the incremental advance of hardware technology is going to give it to us for free. We need fundamental breakthroughs from something else.
To me, a more interesting question than the ultimate resolution of these babies is the *number* and scope of cameras on them. Can they watch a car drive along a Cairo backstreet? Can they do this to 20 (or 200 or 2000) cars simultaneously?
I don't the US is too worried about us though, particularly as Lockheed Martin is a joint venture partner in the project...
Also, there's nothing wrong with Americans being proud of their country and I'm not saying they have to deny it. Just don't proclaim it from the rooftops every second of every fscking day.
Finally, some people are just pricks who'll hate you for being American (or Australian, or British, or whatever) regardless of how you behave.
If you're concerned about general less friendly reception rather than just your security, you might find that going in with a sense of humor, a bit of respect for the local way of doing things, and refrain from regularly proclaiming to anyone who asks and plenty who don't that the US is the greatest country on earth and we do things better at home (even if you think it's true) tends to help ameliorate that problem.
But if you drive a car, you're much more likely to die from *that* than you are from terrorism. Not to mention the fact that September 11 demonstrates that terrorists can just as easily kill you at home as abroad.
As far as I can tell, many of the prominent HCI researchers argue that you should place the UI at the centre of your design and munge everything else to fit.
This goes against the common wisdom amongst software developers, particularly in the Un*x world, that you should design the cleanest, simplest, most modular backend possible, and graft a wetware translation module over the top. If you don't do so, you're likely to end up with a nasty, unmaintainable mess, and the bugginess of GUI systems when compared with systems without such complex UI code tends to give credence to such an argument. But if you do it this way, is the UI going to end up compromised? Probably.
So how do you find a way through this? Evolutionary software models seem to help. Talent and experience tend to assist a bit :) But as for a systematic way to cope with the problems this culture clash raises, I've no idea.
With an electric wire on top, adding to the cost. The point of this train is, presumably, that you don't need to electrify the system. It'll still be expensive to upgrade the rails and reroute the track in parts, but not as expensive as the TGV.
I doubt that existing trains will be able to be retrofitted with one of these things - at least, they won't be able to to take full advantage.
If you're trying to build a high-speed train, all the running gear has to be rated for that high speed. That means suspension, brakes, etc. etc, and applies to all the carriages, not just the locomotive.
Just adding one of these to a train would be like bolting a Formula One race engine in a Civic - it could probably be done, but it wouldn't be safe to use anywhere near its full potential.
Not to mention that train tracks have maximum rated speeds also, so if you upgrade to high-speed trains you have to upgrade to appropriate track standards. Such upgrades are potentially quite expensive (you have to widen bends to reduce lateral G's, for instance).
No solution is perfect, but some additional peace of mind could be provided with not a lot of extra effort.
You could either GPG sign the MD5 hash of the tarball, or GPG sign the tarball itself to guarantee that the tarball was signed off by the appropriate person.
You placed a different interpretation on my analogy to that intended.
I don't play EQ, but it seems a lot of people do, and if people are cheating to spoil the game it's of interest.
I vaguely recall reading somewhere that male and female responses to pain are somewhat different (beyond the obvious differential responses to anaesthetics caused by different body weight). Any of the anaesthetists who've posted care to comment?
How do you get people enthused about the actual process of science - coming up with hypotheses, figuring out how to test them, analysing the results, and so on?
Funnily enough, each year that particular lecture is filled to capacity with people who dress and sound a lot more like engineers than med students :)
Not to mention the fact that if you consulted your supervisor or used university property in the process of coming up with the method they probably own it for the purposes of patenting it.