but the more we know, the more it goes towards "some kind of dualism", although certainly not a religious one
I'd have to ask where you're getting this from. It's one thing to suggest that science does not yet have a good answer and so the actual mechanism are unclear, but it is quite another to suggest that a lack of understanding suggests a kind of mysticism that people refer to as dualism. In fact, I think that as we progress we'll eventually find that consciousness is hardly unique, but is merely that result of having enough sophisticated hardware wired together in the correct way. We're only scraping at the crust in terms of understanding the human brain and as our tools and knowledge improves, so too will our ability to make better hypotheses.
We're also approaching answers to these questions with computers. I recall a story were researchers were able to model a simple brain in software and use a hardware interface to simulate the body by using sensor feedback to represent input to the software brain. It turned out that this robot behaved quite similarly to the organism which is was modeled after. In time we'll be able to build more complex robots that more closely model our own selves, and I suspect that consciousness is merely an emergent property of the way our brains are physically arranged.
We're increasingly finding more support for this as personality traits (empathy, aggressiveness, etc.) or other characteristics (sexual attraction, gender perception) are tied to different areas or the physical arrangements of parts of the brain. There's still a lot of work to be done to fully understand how the mechanism works, and studies that can show a casual relationship still need to be conducted, but we're getting closer and technological advances will allow us to conduct the types of experiments in the future, that are not currently possible.
What will become more interesting is when humans unlock the knowledge required to build advanced consciousnesses or to modify our own biology in such a way to free ourselves from evolutionary baggage that often clouds or consciousness or manifests itself in other undesirable ways. Eventually consciousness will be no more remarkable than phototropism.
Personally I think people should be allowed to use the quick one-button solution. It let's me know who I can unfriend/unfollow for being a prat.
But who I am kidding, most user generated content on social media sites isn't much better than this spam. I hope the kill off the rest of the "share to x" buttons out there because there's plenty of other crap beyond just Amazon or online retailers.
I had a great idea for a Facebook replacement, but it turns out there's already plenty of prior art for meeting at a pub and having a beer with friends so I don't think I can get a patent.
It's a largely free market economy. The Hollywood movie start isn't becoming wealthy for purely arbitrary reasons, but because a large number of individuals value the services provided by that performer. Assuming that people stopped valuing those services, the actor would cease making as much money, which we tend to see in a lot of actors as they become older or can no longer play the parts that people wanted to see in their entertainment.
This case is more interesting because even prior to the digital age, once you had produced a movie, it was relatively inexpensive to make copies compared to actually making the original. The construction worker can't quite so easily mass produce buildings for wide distribution. A better example would be a stage actor who like our construction worker can't infinitely reproduce their work for a fraction of the cost of creating the original. As such, stage actors tend to make a lot less money than movie stars. Assuming a construction worker could pull a Hollywood and bring what's essentially stage performance to a wider audience at a lower cost, that construction worker would no doubt be more wealthy as a result.
People have decided that movie stars do provide a tangible benefit to society or at least fulfill some need of the human condition. If people didn't value seeing a movie, listening to a piece of music, etc. as much as some other good or service, then they would not purchase that movie, music, etc. Whether you think that makes any sense at all hardly matters. Some people consider what I do for entertainment to be pretty damned pointless as well.
A basic income shouldn't allow someone to live in a well furnished house and to eat expensive meals every night. A basic income should be just about at subsistence level such that you can afford to eat and have a place to live, but it might require you to get a roommate or two to share the space.
It turns out that people always want more, so I would imagine that a lot of the lazy gadabouts will probably get a part time job for 10 - 20 hours a week to make enough supplemental income to pay for their xbox, get a few drinks at a bar from time to time, or to engage in other activities. The people too lazy to do even that much are more than likely already living on the government's dime, probably at a greater cost than a basic income.
A lot of the stuff done for Mad Max was just adding matting to enhance the look of the landscape to better suit the tone and feel of the movie or combining effects from multiple shots. They still had real vehicles and a lot of stunt work, which several videos showcase. Of course they're going to use the standard editing tricks, but other directors would have put even more CGI into the film in place of those practical effects. In Mad Max the CGI was there to enhance the film, not to make big chunks of it.
I don't use Bitcoin, but from what little I've read from previous stories here or elsewhere is that the scaling issue at current is due to conflicts within the community and not an inherent problem with the blockchain concept. Someone who was in favor of increasing the size even used a similar example that it would need to be larger in order to handle all of the transactions for a major credit card company.
Given the rapid pace of advancements in the computer industry, over a relatively short timeline this center and everything currently in it will be outdated long before we start to worry about a large scale disaster. Even though Moore's law is falling off in terms of how quickly those advancements are occurring, within 30 years we're fairly likely to have seen about two orders of magnitude increase in performance. The data center as a concept may be completely obsolete or have morphed into something that no longer requires large facilities.
With the current caps and bandwidth limits in place, adding more speed is like dropping a bigger engine in a Ferrari that can only be driven on a quarter-mile track with a giant brick wall at the end. What's the point besides getting to crash into the wall that much sooner?
However, given how bloated websites are getting due to so much javascript, shitty advertising, and other cruft, they may need the speed boost just to keep the page load times reasonable.
Perhaps he did notice and simply didn't care, or he in turn may have lifted it from some other more obscure source, in which case it wouldn't be prudent to raise a fuss about it.
We've observed war-like behavior in other primates, so it's likely that it predates homo sapiens entirely and is something carried over from our genetic past. A lot of other animals are territorial as well. If other species were capable of developing complex tools, they would probably use them for fighting as well.
My guess is the existing board changed it, which may well also be within their rights based on the existing by-laws. As to why, my best guess might be because they don't like Karen Sandler, who was previously running the GNOME Foundation at the time when they ran out of money (previously discussed here) after blowing a lot of it on outreach programs for women developers.
It's hardly a stretch to assume that they don't want someone around who will complain about not having enough developers or contributors so satisfy those more concerned with the type of genitalia possessed by those writing the code than the quality of it. Of course no one will come out and say this directly, but after watching other open source projects get crapped on by moral-crusaders that contribute little or nothing of actual use to the project, it's not too hard to read between the lines and conclude the Linux Foundation wants to keep those people out to avoid the hassle of dealing with them.
Even the earlyacademic studies (PDF warning) of the effectiveness of pair programming found that you didn't quite get as much out of a pair team as two individuals working independently. However the code quality is generally a lot better in terms of correctness or readability.
If you have a few individuals who are new to an organization or becoming acclimated to a new project they've not worked on previously, pairing can make some sense. On the other hand if you've got a rock-star developer that's head-and-shoulders above the rest, it's probably not worthwhile to pair them with another person.
And the other day the Human Rights Campaign endorsed Clinton over Sanders for president even though Sanders has a far longer and better track record when it comes to support for gays and Clinton was even previously opposed to gay marriage for a good chunk of her political career.
Politics makes for strange bedfellows and it wouldn't surprise me if Elissa was another one of those feminists who has more in common with someone like Benny Hinn than they do with supporting the actual ideals of the movement. I've never heard of her before, so I have no idea what she believes in or supports as far as positions go, but it does stand out as strange. Then again, the overreaction related to Eich was pretty damned ridiculous to begin with, so it may be something anyone with half a brain could look past when there are bigger things at stake. So perhaps she's not one of those idiots more interested in grandstanding on platitudes or ideological purity and someone who'd prefer to get something with actual significance accomplished.
The easy fix would be to only accept comments from people who passed the class. That probably weeds out the idiots who didn't even make an effort and would just complain. If someone still passed and thought it was a hard class or didn't like the instruction style, then as far as I'm concerned they probably have some valid criticism. Alternatively, you can also list the pass/fail rate for the class which should clue students in to the difficulty of the material.
Besides, there are already plenty of other external sites where students can rate professors or classes, so it's not like there aren't bad students already complaining about different courses or instructors online.
It's the same problem with all metrics in that if base all of your considerations on them or treat them as the only important aspect of outcomes it shouldn't come as any surprise when people only care about the metrics even if it's detrimental in one or more ways.
To some degree that's because most of AMD's CPUs are still being fabbed on an older 28nm (or even 32nm) node, which Intel moved beyond almost four years ago. Right now Intel has such a leg up on them due to process differences that there's no way AMD can legitimately compete at the high-end. The best they can do is crank up the clock speed and use a more powerful cooler, but Intel is shipping chips on a 14nm node right now. That comes out to a 4x difference in transistor density.
AMD still provides really good value for a regular consumer machine, and with them finally having some CPUs on a newer process node (14nm supposedly based on Samsung tech) later this year they might even be able to compete with Intel at the higher end of the charts, though I doubt they'll nab any performance crowns.
If you could make a perfect copy to hardware, you can reset it back to a known good state whenever you need to or it goes insane. Also, if you could put a human consciousness into a computer, you'd need some hardware to interface with or some other way to approximate human sensations. Imagine your brain waking up and having no sense of sight, hearing, touch, etc. You wouldn't need a centuries-long trip through space for a mind to go insane.
Putting it in a computer would be a neat trick, but downloading it back into a new meat sack would be far more interesting. Upload the consciousness to a computer and store it and drift through space for hundreds of years or more. When you get to the other end, start growing some perfect clones and reinstate the consciousness. As far as the person is concerned, practically no time has passed,
Not that seriously though. Like most large companies they're more than willing to open source their software when it doesn't cost them anything or there's no practical benefit to keeping the source closed, but Microsoft isn't going to open source their OS or other products that make them the bulk of their money. This is true of others like Apple or Google that contribute to various open source projects or have open sourced some of their code, but the software that's responsible for most of their income is still locked down tightly.
The biggest issue right now as far as most people are concerned is javascript that hijacks a browser and tricks people into thinking their computer is completely locked up and that they need to call some tech support number to get it fixed. I recently had a relation call me about this because they didn't want to pay the $400 to get it fixed, which is what the website says they need to do.
All you need to do is just force quit the browser to fix the problem, but most people are too computer illiterate to know that. A short while after that, I saw a segment on the news about the exact same thing and warning people not to fall for the scam, because apparently hundreds of people had already been taken. You don't need to write complicated malware that exploits security holes in a system when you can be a shitty script kiddy and take advantage of people's lack of critical thinking.
What really perplexed me (besides the fact that what virus would advertise who to call in order to fix it) was that these people were claiming to be from Microsoft, but the person who called me had a Mac. It's far easier to just convince a stupid user to hand you their money or to install a program that will let them talk to horny singles in their area.
Most operating systems are fairly secure these days, but the weak point is still the people using them. If you're going to go to the trouble of exploiting some operating system security holes, you're far better off targeting an online retailer who has credit card information on file for thousands of people or enough of their personal information to facilitate identity theft. I don't expect we'll see the kinds of attacks that we used to see in the past with Windows. There are easier ways to make money from single targets that don't require security holes, and there are fatter targets that are more worthwhile to attack if you do find a security hole like that.
Not necessarily. The cause could be due to issues not completely related to the drug itself. Perhaps a bad batch was manufactured and participants were given something outright poisonous, or it was combined with something else that produced this outcome. Maybe the people running the study screwed up and dosed people at one hundred times the recommended amount.
Also, any drug already on the market is unsafe if you take enough of it. Take a sufficient number of aspirin and it will result in illness or outright kill you.
What's important is figuring out why this happened so it can be prevented from occurring again.
I was curious, so I took a peek. Can anyone tell me what the hell a "Happiness Hero" is or does? I'm guess customer service or HR, but a title like that is so damned saccharine they'd have to pay an extra $5,000 for the necessary dental coverage.
Mobile devices typically contain physical hardware decoders built in to the SoC so that they don't have to use their CPU cores, which would be much less efficient or practically impossible in the days of slow, single core mobile devices.
Considering that programmers (in the U.S.) skew heavily in that direction, you'd probably be correct, but you should also consider the possibility that it was contracted out to a group of brown Hindu males.
Of course the current algorithm used by the police is pretty damned biased, so I can't imagine this one being any worse. Hell, you could probably just feed a generic machine-learning algorithm data from previous offenders if you wanted to be really lazy and bilk the government for a bit of dosh.
Slashdot Mirror
but the more we know, the more it goes towards "some kind of dualism", although certainly not a religious one
I'd have to ask where you're getting this from. It's one thing to suggest that science does not yet have a good answer and so the actual mechanism are unclear, but it is quite another to suggest that a lack of understanding suggests a kind of mysticism that people refer to as dualism. In fact, I think that as we progress we'll eventually find that consciousness is hardly unique, but is merely that result of having enough sophisticated hardware wired together in the correct way. We're only scraping at the crust in terms of understanding the human brain and as our tools and knowledge improves, so too will our ability to make better hypotheses.
We're also approaching answers to these questions with computers. I recall a story were researchers were able to model a simple brain in software and use a hardware interface to simulate the body by using sensor feedback to represent input to the software brain. It turned out that this robot behaved quite similarly to the organism which is was modeled after. In time we'll be able to build more complex robots that more closely model our own selves, and I suspect that consciousness is merely an emergent property of the way our brains are physically arranged.
We're increasingly finding more support for this as personality traits (empathy, aggressiveness, etc.) or other characteristics (sexual attraction, gender perception) are tied to different areas or the physical arrangements of parts of the brain. There's still a lot of work to be done to fully understand how the mechanism works, and studies that can show a casual relationship still need to be conducted, but we're getting closer and technological advances will allow us to conduct the types of experiments in the future, that are not currently possible.
What will become more interesting is when humans unlock the knowledge required to build advanced consciousnesses or to modify our own biology in such a way to free ourselves from evolutionary baggage that often clouds or consciousness or manifests itself in other undesirable ways. Eventually consciousness will be no more remarkable than phototropism.
But I think ransomware operators are worse, and need to be strung up by the fucking balls.
It's this kind of sexism that keeps women out of the Russian ransomware field.
Personally I think people should be allowed to use the quick one-button solution. It let's me know who I can unfriend/unfollow for being a prat.
But who I am kidding, most user generated content on social media sites isn't much better than this spam. I hope the kill off the rest of the "share to x" buttons out there because there's plenty of other crap beyond just Amazon or online retailers.
I had a great idea for a Facebook replacement, but it turns out there's already plenty of prior art for meeting at a pub and having a beer with friends so I don't think I can get a patent.
It's a largely free market economy. The Hollywood movie start isn't becoming wealthy for purely arbitrary reasons, but because a large number of individuals value the services provided by that performer. Assuming that people stopped valuing those services, the actor would cease making as much money, which we tend to see in a lot of actors as they become older or can no longer play the parts that people wanted to see in their entertainment.
This case is more interesting because even prior to the digital age, once you had produced a movie, it was relatively inexpensive to make copies compared to actually making the original. The construction worker can't quite so easily mass produce buildings for wide distribution. A better example would be a stage actor who like our construction worker can't infinitely reproduce their work for a fraction of the cost of creating the original. As such, stage actors tend to make a lot less money than movie stars. Assuming a construction worker could pull a Hollywood and bring what's essentially stage performance to a wider audience at a lower cost, that construction worker would no doubt be more wealthy as a result.
People have decided that movie stars do provide a tangible benefit to society or at least fulfill some need of the human condition. If people didn't value seeing a movie, listening to a piece of music, etc. as much as some other good or service, then they would not purchase that movie, music, etc. Whether you think that makes any sense at all hardly matters. Some people consider what I do for entertainment to be pretty damned pointless as well.
A basic income shouldn't allow someone to live in a well furnished house and to eat expensive meals every night. A basic income should be just about at subsistence level such that you can afford to eat and have a place to live, but it might require you to get a roommate or two to share the space.
It turns out that people always want more, so I would imagine that a lot of the lazy gadabouts will probably get a part time job for 10 - 20 hours a week to make enough supplemental income to pay for their xbox, get a few drinks at a bar from time to time, or to engage in other activities. The people too lazy to do even that much are more than likely already living on the government's dime, probably at a greater cost than a basic income.
A lot of the stuff done for Mad Max was just adding matting to enhance the look of the landscape to better suit the tone and feel of the movie or combining effects from multiple shots. They still had real vehicles and a lot of stunt work, which several videos showcase. Of course they're going to use the standard editing tricks, but other directors would have put even more CGI into the film in place of those practical effects. In Mad Max the CGI was there to enhance the film, not to make big chunks of it.
I don't use Bitcoin, but from what little I've read from previous stories here or elsewhere is that the scaling issue at current is due to conflicts within the community and not an inherent problem with the blockchain concept. Someone who was in favor of increasing the size even used a similar example that it would need to be larger in order to handle all of the transactions for a major credit card company.
Given the rapid pace of advancements in the computer industry, over a relatively short timeline this center and everything currently in it will be outdated long before we start to worry about a large scale disaster. Even though Moore's law is falling off in terms of how quickly those advancements are occurring, within 30 years we're fairly likely to have seen about two orders of magnitude increase in performance. The data center as a concept may be completely obsolete or have morphed into something that no longer requires large facilities.
Speed isn't an issue for me, it's bandwidth.
With the current caps and bandwidth limits in place, adding more speed is like dropping a bigger engine in a Ferrari that can only be driven on a quarter-mile track with a giant brick wall at the end. What's the point besides getting to crash into the wall that much sooner?
However, given how bloated websites are getting due to so much javascript, shitty advertising, and other cruft, they may need the speed boost just to keep the page load times reasonable.
Perhaps he did notice and simply didn't care, or he in turn may have lifted it from some other more obscure source, in which case it wouldn't be prudent to raise a fuss about it.
We've observed war-like behavior in other primates, so it's likely that it predates homo sapiens entirely and is something carried over from our genetic past. A lot of other animals are territorial as well. If other species were capable of developing complex tools, they would probably use them for fighting as well.
My guess is the existing board changed it, which may well also be within their rights based on the existing by-laws. As to why, my best guess might be because they don't like Karen Sandler, who was previously running the GNOME Foundation at the time when they ran out of money (previously discussed here) after blowing a lot of it on outreach programs for women developers.
It's hardly a stretch to assume that they don't want someone around who will complain about not having enough developers or contributors so satisfy those more concerned with the type of genitalia possessed by those writing the code than the quality of it. Of course no one will come out and say this directly, but after watching other open source projects get crapped on by moral-crusaders that contribute little or nothing of actual use to the project, it's not too hard to read between the lines and conclude the Linux Foundation wants to keep those people out to avoid the hassle of dealing with them.
Even the early academic studies (PDF warning) of the effectiveness of pair programming found that you didn't quite get as much out of a pair team as two individuals working independently. However the code quality is generally a lot better in terms of correctness or readability.
If you have a few individuals who are new to an organization or becoming acclimated to a new project they've not worked on previously, pairing can make some sense. On the other hand if you've got a rock-star developer that's head-and-shoulders above the rest, it's probably not worthwhile to pair them with another person.
At least it's far less creepy than alternative methods that are being used. I can only imagine the less scrupulous software in the future that will start hiding that functionality in the app without notifying users.
And the other day the Human Rights Campaign endorsed Clinton over Sanders for president even though Sanders has a far longer and better track record when it comes to support for gays and Clinton was even previously opposed to gay marriage for a good chunk of her political career.
Politics makes for strange bedfellows and it wouldn't surprise me if Elissa was another one of those feminists who has more in common with someone like Benny Hinn than they do with supporting the actual ideals of the movement. I've never heard of her before, so I have no idea what she believes in or supports as far as positions go, but it does stand out as strange. Then again, the overreaction related to Eich was pretty damned ridiculous to begin with, so it may be something anyone with half a brain could look past when there are bigger things at stake. So perhaps she's not one of those idiots more interested in grandstanding on platitudes or ideological purity and someone who'd prefer to get something with actual significance accomplished.
The easy fix would be to only accept comments from people who passed the class. That probably weeds out the idiots who didn't even make an effort and would just complain. If someone still passed and thought it was a hard class or didn't like the instruction style, then as far as I'm concerned they probably have some valid criticism. Alternatively, you can also list the pass/fail rate for the class which should clue students in to the difficulty of the material.
Besides, there are already plenty of other external sites where students can rate professors or classes, so it's not like there aren't bad students already complaining about different courses or instructors online.
It's the same problem with all metrics in that if base all of your considerations on them or treat them as the only important aspect of outcomes it shouldn't come as any surprise when people only care about the metrics even if it's detrimental in one or more ways.
To some degree that's because most of AMD's CPUs are still being fabbed on an older 28nm (or even 32nm) node, which Intel moved beyond almost four years ago. Right now Intel has such a leg up on them due to process differences that there's no way AMD can legitimately compete at the high-end. The best they can do is crank up the clock speed and use a more powerful cooler, but Intel is shipping chips on a 14nm node right now. That comes out to a 4x difference in transistor density.
AMD still provides really good value for a regular consumer machine, and with them finally having some CPUs on a newer process node (14nm supposedly based on Samsung tech) later this year they might even be able to compete with Intel at the higher end of the charts, though I doubt they'll nab any performance crowns.
If you could make a perfect copy to hardware, you can reset it back to a known good state whenever you need to or it goes insane. Also, if you could put a human consciousness into a computer, you'd need some hardware to interface with or some other way to approximate human sensations. Imagine your brain waking up and having no sense of sight, hearing, touch, etc. You wouldn't need a centuries-long trip through space for a mind to go insane.
Putting it in a computer would be a neat trick, but downloading it back into a new meat sack would be far more interesting. Upload the consciousness to a computer and store it and drift through space for hundreds of years or more. When you get to the other end, start growing some perfect clones and reinstate the consciousness. As far as the person is concerned, practically no time has passed,
Not that seriously though. Like most large companies they're more than willing to open source their software when it doesn't cost them anything or there's no practical benefit to keeping the source closed, but Microsoft isn't going to open source their OS or other products that make them the bulk of their money. This is true of others like Apple or Google that contribute to various open source projects or have open sourced some of their code, but the software that's responsible for most of their income is still locked down tightly.
Probably not.
The biggest issue right now as far as most people are concerned is javascript that hijacks a browser and tricks people into thinking their computer is completely locked up and that they need to call some tech support number to get it fixed. I recently had a relation call me about this because they didn't want to pay the $400 to get it fixed, which is what the website says they need to do.
All you need to do is just force quit the browser to fix the problem, but most people are too computer illiterate to know that. A short while after that, I saw a segment on the news about the exact same thing and warning people not to fall for the scam, because apparently hundreds of people had already been taken. You don't need to write complicated malware that exploits security holes in a system when you can be a shitty script kiddy and take advantage of people's lack of critical thinking.
What really perplexed me (besides the fact that what virus would advertise who to call in order to fix it) was that these people were claiming to be from Microsoft, but the person who called me had a Mac. It's far easier to just convince a stupid user to hand you their money or to install a program that will let them talk to horny singles in their area.
Most operating systems are fairly secure these days, but the weak point is still the people using them. If you're going to go to the trouble of exploiting some operating system security holes, you're far better off targeting an online retailer who has credit card information on file for thousands of people or enough of their personal information to facilitate identity theft. I don't expect we'll see the kinds of attacks that we used to see in the past with Windows. There are easier ways to make money from single targets that don't require security holes, and there are fatter targets that are more worthwhile to attack if you do find a security hole like that.
Not necessarily. The cause could be due to issues not completely related to the drug itself. Perhaps a bad batch was manufactured and participants were given something outright poisonous, or it was combined with something else that produced this outcome. Maybe the people running the study screwed up and dosed people at one hundred times the recommended amount.
Also, any drug already on the market is unsafe if you take enough of it. Take a sufficient number of aspirin and it will result in illness or outright kill you.
What's important is figuring out why this happened so it can be prevented from occurring again.
Hipsters always have burned tongues because they're always drinking something before it was cool.
I was curious, so I took a peek. Can anyone tell me what the hell a "Happiness Hero" is or does? I'm guess customer service or HR, but a title like that is so damned saccharine they'd have to pay an extra $5,000 for the necessary dental coverage.
Mobile devices typically contain physical hardware decoders built in to the SoC so that they don't have to use their CPU cores, which would be much less efficient or practically impossible in the days of slow, single core mobile devices.
I recall from several years ago when Apple released iMovie for their iDevices, that they could encode videos more quickly than their high-end, vastly more expensive Intel-based computers simply because the dedicated hardware encoder in the SoC could beat the Intel CPUs.
Considering that programmers (in the U.S.) skew heavily in that direction, you'd probably be correct, but you should also consider the possibility that it was contracted out to a group of brown Hindu males.
Of course the current algorithm used by the police is pretty damned biased, so I can't imagine this one being any worse. Hell, you could probably just feed a generic machine-learning algorithm data from previous offenders if you wanted to be really lazy and bilk the government for a bit of dosh.