I know fine what sin is (going to church for 24 years can do that). I just thought the last sentence made no sense. It would have been a bit funnier without it.. but not much as puns go.
Duct Tape* I used to think it was duck tape too. But then I got arrested by the RSPCB and put through their re-education program, kinda like in that Clockwork Orange thingy.
Just interested, do you mean writing actual applications or just doing web design? I'm doing all my code in perl at the moment, building pretty simple forms and tables to interact with a database that is used to keep track of the condition and location of some of our assets as they move around the world on jobs, I've never felt the urge for anything more fancy than using an editor that has line numbers so that if I get an error in the apache log, I can track it - and even then I only need the line numbers a few times a day, in the module that does all the database access - I usually just edit all the interface pages in wordpad. While I liked having all the pretty coloured text in languages like C and Pascal, I'm pretty happy just working in black and white for the moment. And while it's useful to have your IDE point out mistakes like a lack of termination in a string, it isn't really a substitute for good debugging skills/coding habits either.. I once wrote a few small source files (think it was in C) for our 3rd year university group project entirely in a text editor, didn't even compile it as I didn't have any compiler on my system at that time, sent it into the group leader, and he said that other than a couple of semi-colons missing I think it was, that it all ran fine. Was quite chuffed with that considering that during Uni I stopped coding almost entirely compared to what I was doing before.. anyway, I'll stop rambling shall I? A nice IDE specially designed for checking perl/html/SQL may increase my efficiency by a small amount, but at the moment a text editor, firefox, and SQL query interface for checking up my database code seems to be working pretty well.. if only my users stopped moving the goalposts with what they want then I'd be all done by now.. d'oh!:P
It could be a bigger barrier getting everyone to stop playing Solar System of Warcraft long enough to get onboard the faster than light vessel... unless perhaps they have an exclusive SSoW expansion pack onboard the ship.. hmm..
I hereby judge that WikiLeak's DNS entry is not allowed to pass within 100 feet of any US DNS server, on penalty of having to memorise himself in IPv6 form
Please don't start with the craziness again! Aren't blue lasers the best for accuracy/data density at the moment? We want to just keep it blu-ray disc for now, otherwise we'll end up with Big Disk, Very Big Disc, Amazingly Big Disk, Ultimate Big Disk and such. I say enough it's time to end all the disc waving!
That sounds a bit contradictory to your first argument - arguable one guy with a bright mind and some decent equipment beat out a whole bunch of guys who had a better environment. No doubt national interest will affect funding, but it isn't *always* about the money..
How is nanotech playing God any more than other methods of medical treatment, such as antidepressants and other behavioural modification drugs for example? I somehow doubt that ethics are the main stumbling block in the field of nanotechnology at the moment. In genetic engineering sure, but nanotech doesn't always have to do with genetics?
You're pretty much confirming the hypothesis set forth in the summary then - which is pretty obvious to anyone who has ever suggested a free program as an alternative to commercial software and been met with "huh, why is it free?". I'm not sure that's the primary reason that Linux isn't number one on the desktop though.
And yes I really don't think that 'web people' count for a lot;) If you expand to other types of designers then yes, but using Dreamweaver as an excuse not to use Linux? Gimme a break. There must be equivalent open source versions. You'll have to excuse me for not knowing - maybe I'm just weird but I prefer to write my HTML in a text editor (and more recently I've been writing it with perl scripts which I write in a text editor..). They had dreamweaver on our web course at University and after opening it once just to see what all the fuss was about, I went right back to doing it by hand. If I was doing web pages allllll the time then I may get fed up of doing it that way, of course, though I couldn't guarantee that..
Damnit, Chasing Amy is the only Vue Askew film I haven't seen yet (well I've not seen Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back yet, but I doubt the plot matters too much there)!:p I wonder what people on here would say if they knew that I haven't seen the Princess Bride yet >_>
Hmm.. even if/when we do achieve the power to simulate an entire brain, there is still the developmental element involved in it learning, it would presumably have to be taught how to communicate and so on, unless we were able to somehow start it from a state captured from a living human brain. If we were able to do that then the thing would probably freak out though, unless we gave it a suitable virtual world to live in.. complete with sight, sound, smell, taste and so on. I only just realised this as I was writing the comment. I started off with the intention of saying that if we did manage to simulate a brain, the guy/girl/it may turn out to be a real jerk, or a dumbass with an IQ of 80;)
As a few people have pointed out there is a lot more to intelligence than having the processing power. We wouldn't even have to simulate a whole brain to achieve human intelligence anyway, as a lot of the brain is just involved with keeping our body functioning, balancing, regulating heat and such. I wrote some bots for Counter-Strike a few years back, and it occured to me that it isn't really that difficult to create a player in most games that would be indistinguishable from a human (obviously notwithstanding being able to chat). You don't need a neural network to simulate or approximate a real player's actions in a game, a lot of the time you just need to insert a random factor in and an observer wouldn't be able to tell if what it was seeing is a result of a human deciding what to do, or just a random computation. Since my bots were called 'TEAMbot', I saw a comment by someone on a forum once saying that the bots were covering each other's backs in a way that I *knew* I hadn't programmed in there (I programmed them to respond to requests for help, and to be more confident in groups and such, but what this guy said he saw definitely wasn't a result of intelligence of any kind, though I can't remember what it was now). Kinda got off track there, but there are so many facets to human 'intelligence', such as understanding and speaking complex sentences (which requires storing to and drawing from a large organised knowledgebase to have any kind of usefulness), pathfinding, then navigating through the world avoiding dangers and such.. so many different things that when you separate them aren't necesarily difficult to model, but which people like to lump together into a whole that they call 'intelligence', something that will just magically manifest itself and be able to do all this stuff, but that's not very likely to happen. And if it did happen.. would it need to sleep? Would it get cranky if we woke it up while it was organising its memories/dreaming? Hmm. I still think we don't really 'get' just what is going to be necessary for a true AI, people are still on about processing power, when as a couple of guys here pointed out, it's all about the algorithms and processes, and nothing to do with how fast you can do them (apart from the fact that if the processes take 100 years we're never going to get to test our code very easily). And I think what I've been coming to realise just by talking about this stuff is that the results we get from giving a computer actual intelligence and free will, are probably gonna be some kinda angsty "**** the man!" teenager, or Marvin the paranoid android...
I would have played it to completion but my save game was deleted like 75% into the game, and that took a *lot* of work in 'realistic' mode. I didn't want to start it again on easy, and neither could I be assed, sorry but that's just how I am with games - even with the separate plotlines in Deus Ex I didn't want to start over - mostly probably because my bro had completed it a few times on easy so I knew the plot differences anyway, he loves replaying games. In the same way, I don't re-read books until years after I originally read them otherwise I remember the plot too much and it is dull for me. I would play Deus Ex again these days, if I had the time, it was a truly excellent game and even though I still remember a fair bit of it (bearing in mind that I played it about 8 years ago was it?) it would be fun to go through it again. I still probably would only go for hard rather than realistic though, it's very difficult playing a single player FPS when you can die just as easily as the enemies can.. have you ever played it on 'realistic'?
I've only read a couple of Shakespeare's plays (Macbeth and R&J). While the archaic language made a couple of the jokes require an explanation, the plots themselves weren't exactly mind bending. There have been a fair few videogames with excellent complex/dynamic plots and subtle references - Deus Ex is a big one, if you've never played it then go give it a shot (unfortunately my dad deleted my save by mistake, and since I'd been playing through on 'Realistic' mode, where basically one shot kills you, I didn't have the will to start all over again, partially because I have a good memory and get bored easily when replaying games.. partially because it took me hours of loading up save points just to complete some of the more difficult scenarios). Half-life has a pretty good plot, and was hailed as one of the most revolutionary games of its time for the storytelling and gameplay, as well as spawning hundreds of excellent mods - both some very good single player expansions and extremely playable multiplayer mods (Counter-Strike! The Opera! 'The Ship', which I never actually played but sounded also like it could be the kind of thing that you'd enjoy). Video games are often much more complex than books because their outcome doesn't have to follow a set path - especially if it is a multiplayer game. And while subtlety is usually out when it comes to pleasing todays gamers, that's not to say that it doesn't occasionally show up. The MGS series and its stealth'em'up clones involved some good puzzle solving skills, though I tend to find the 3rd person view isn't to my liking. Anyway, while I agree that they are two completely different mediums, I wouldn't say that either is superior. Both have their place, and both can be as in depth or as shallow as you choose to make them.
As another thing I just remembered.. try out a decent MUD sometime. A MUD (Multi User Dungeon) is a multiplayer text based RPG, a few of them aspire to be roleplay oriented (as opposed to combat oriented), and have some nice prose in their world descriptions that make the game world feel like a living book.
As far as the premise of this article goes.. what a load of crap. People have always played games. Humans enjoying leisure time not a fad. Games have opened up a whole new realm of possibilities for our leisure time, and their scope keeps widening (look no further than the Wii for example, though then look at Grand Theft Auto IV and be amazed at the way a whole city has been modelled and the amount of different activities you can do, from just driving around admiring the view, to playing pool, delivering pizzas, yada yada..). But meh.. if you want to close your eyes to the possibilities here then go ahead, keep to your linear little books, keep letting someone else do your thinking for you;)
Slashdot Mirror
Damnit so I didn't have to change my terminology after all >_> people used to make fun of me and everything *Cries*
I know fine what sin is (going to church for 24 years can do that). I just thought the last sentence made no sense. It would have been a bit funnier without it.. but not much as puns go.
"Samples of semen, hair, and other tissues may be taken without a suspect's consent."
Wow. I'm not going to visit America unless they make the police force all female - and preferably all prom queens, or runners up.
Put the batteries in the other way round.. I mean duh, it isn't exactly brain surgery.
Sounds like you have more than just your fist up your ass if you think religious views bear any relevance to correct use of latin phrases..
Duct Tape* I used to think it was duck tape too. But then I got arrested by the RSPCB and put through their re-education program, kinda like in that Clockwork Orange thingy.
I thought that was caused by people adding comments boxes to webpages? You don't need XML to do web 2.0 type stuff :o
Just interested, do you mean writing actual applications or just doing web design? I'm doing all my code in perl at the moment, building pretty simple forms and tables to interact with a database that is used to keep track of the condition and location of some of our assets as they move around the world on jobs, I've never felt the urge for anything more fancy than using an editor that has line numbers so that if I get an error in the apache log, I can track it - and even then I only need the line numbers a few times a day, in the module that does all the database access - I usually just edit all the interface pages in wordpad. While I liked having all the pretty coloured text in languages like C and Pascal, I'm pretty happy just working in black and white for the moment. And while it's useful to have your IDE point out mistakes like a lack of termination in a string, it isn't really a substitute for good debugging skills/coding habits either.. I once wrote a few small source files (think it was in C) for our 3rd year university group project entirely in a text editor, didn't even compile it as I didn't have any compiler on my system at that time, sent it into the group leader, and he said that other than a couple of semi-colons missing I think it was, that it all ran fine. Was quite chuffed with that considering that during Uni I stopped coding almost entirely compared to what I was doing before.. anyway, I'll stop rambling shall I? A nice IDE specially designed for checking perl/html/SQL may increase my efficiency by a small amount, but at the moment a text editor, firefox, and SQL query interface for checking up my database code seems to be working pretty well.. if only my users stopped moving the goalposts with what they want then I'd be all done by now.. d'oh! :P
In pictures 5 & 6, mr 3-phase power conditioner looks really pooped out. Kinda like "-.-"
It could be a bigger barrier getting everyone to stop playing Solar System of Warcraft long enough to get onboard the faster than light vessel... unless perhaps they have an exclusive SSoW expansion pack onboard the ship.. hmm..
I thought something similar. It's like in HHGTTG where they put all the hairdressers onto one ship.
How is that insightful? o_o
I hereby judge that WikiLeak's DNS entry is not allowed to pass within 100 feet of any US DNS server, on penalty of having to memorise himself in IPv6 form
Please don't start with the craziness again! Aren't blue lasers the best for accuracy/data density at the moment? We want to just keep it blu-ray disc for now, otherwise we'll end up with Big Disk, Very Big Disc, Amazingly Big Disk, Ultimate Big Disk and such. I say enough it's time to end all the disc waving!
Hard Drive? >_> That's what I used to identify it as anyway ;)
That sounds a bit contradictory to your first argument - arguable one guy with a bright mind and some decent equipment beat out a whole bunch of guys who had a better environment. No doubt national interest will affect funding, but it isn't *always* about the money..
How is nanotech playing God any more than other methods of medical treatment, such as antidepressants and other behavioural modification drugs for example? I somehow doubt that ethics are the main stumbling block in the field of nanotechnology at the moment. In genetic engineering sure, but nanotech doesn't always have to do with genetics?
You're pretty much confirming the hypothesis set forth in the summary then - which is pretty obvious to anyone who has ever suggested a free program as an alternative to commercial software and been met with "huh, why is it free?". I'm not sure that's the primary reason that Linux isn't number one on the desktop though.
;) If you expand to other types of designers then yes, but using Dreamweaver as an excuse not to use Linux? Gimme a break. There must be equivalent open source versions. You'll have to excuse me for not knowing - maybe I'm just weird but I prefer to write my HTML in a text editor (and more recently I've been writing it with perl scripts which I write in a text editor..). They had dreamweaver on our web course at University and after opening it once just to see what all the fuss was about, I went right back to doing it by hand. If I was doing web pages allllll the time then I may get fed up of doing it that way, of course, though I couldn't guarantee that..
And yes I really don't think that 'web people' count for a lot
Damnit, Chasing Amy is the only Vue Askew film I haven't seen yet (well I've not seen Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back yet, but I doubt the plot matters too much there)! :p I wonder what people on here would say if they knew that I haven't seen the Princess Bride yet >_>
Hmm.. even if/when we do achieve the power to simulate an entire brain, there is still the developmental element involved in it learning, it would presumably have to be taught how to communicate and so on, unless we were able to somehow start it from a state captured from a living human brain. If we were able to do that then the thing would probably freak out though, unless we gave it a suitable virtual world to live in.. complete with sight, sound, smell, taste and so on. I only just realised this as I was writing the comment. I started off with the intention of saying that if we did manage to simulate a brain, the guy/girl/it may turn out to be a real jerk, or a dumbass with an IQ of 80 ;)
As a few people have pointed out there is a lot more to intelligence than having the processing power. We wouldn't even have to simulate a whole brain to achieve human intelligence anyway, as a lot of the brain is just involved with keeping our body functioning, balancing, regulating heat and such. I wrote some bots for Counter-Strike a few years back, and it occured to me that it isn't really that difficult to create a player in most games that would be indistinguishable from a human (obviously notwithstanding being able to chat). You don't need a neural network to simulate or approximate a real player's actions in a game, a lot of the time you just need to insert a random factor in and an observer wouldn't be able to tell if what it was seeing is a result of a human deciding what to do, or just a random computation. Since my bots were called 'TEAMbot', I saw a comment by someone on a forum once saying that the bots were covering each other's backs in a way that I *knew* I hadn't programmed in there (I programmed them to respond to requests for help, and to be more confident in groups and such, but what this guy said he saw definitely wasn't a result of intelligence of any kind, though I can't remember what it was now). Kinda got off track there, but there are so many facets to human 'intelligence', such as understanding and speaking complex sentences (which requires storing to and drawing from a large organised knowledgebase to have any kind of usefulness), pathfinding, then navigating through the world avoiding dangers and such.. so many different things that when you separate them aren't necesarily difficult to model, but which people like to lump together into a whole that they call 'intelligence', something that will just magically manifest itself and be able to do all this stuff, but that's not very likely to happen. And if it did happen.. would it need to sleep? Would it get cranky if we woke it up while it was organising its memories/dreaming? Hmm. I still think we don't really 'get' just what is going to be necessary for a true AI, people are still on about processing power, when as a couple of guys here pointed out, it's all about the algorithms and processes, and nothing to do with how fast you can do them (apart from the fact that if the processes take 100 years we're never going to get to test our code very easily). And I think what I've been coming to realise just by talking about this stuff is that the results we get from giving a computer actual intelligence and free will, are probably gonna be some kinda angsty "**** the man!" teenager, or Marvin the paranoid android...
I knew there was something evil about our WSUS server
I would have played it to completion but my save game was deleted like 75% into the game, and that took a *lot* of work in 'realistic' mode. I didn't want to start it again on easy, and neither could I be assed, sorry but that's just how I am with games - even with the separate plotlines in Deus Ex I didn't want to start over - mostly probably because my bro had completed it a few times on easy so I knew the plot differences anyway, he loves replaying games. In the same way, I don't re-read books until years after I originally read them otherwise I remember the plot too much and it is dull for me. I would play Deus Ex again these days, if I had the time, it was a truly excellent game and even though I still remember a fair bit of it (bearing in mind that I played it about 8 years ago was it?) it would be fun to go through it again. I still probably would only go for hard rather than realistic though, it's very difficult playing a single player FPS when you can die just as easily as the enemies can.. have you ever played it on 'realistic'?
I've only read a couple of Shakespeare's plays (Macbeth and R&J). While the archaic language made a couple of the jokes require an explanation, the plots themselves weren't exactly mind bending. There have been a fair few videogames with excellent complex/dynamic plots and subtle references - Deus Ex is a big one, if you've never played it then go give it a shot (unfortunately my dad deleted my save by mistake, and since I'd been playing through on 'Realistic' mode, where basically one shot kills you, I didn't have the will to start all over again, partially because I have a good memory and get bored easily when replaying games.. partially because it took me hours of loading up save points just to complete some of the more difficult scenarios). Half-life has a pretty good plot, and was hailed as one of the most revolutionary games of its time for the storytelling and gameplay, as well as spawning hundreds of excellent mods - both some very good single player expansions and extremely playable multiplayer mods (Counter-Strike! The Opera! 'The Ship', which I never actually played but sounded also like it could be the kind of thing that you'd enjoy). Video games are often much more complex than books because their outcome doesn't have to follow a set path - especially if it is a multiplayer game. And while subtlety is usually out when it comes to pleasing todays gamers, that's not to say that it doesn't occasionally show up. The MGS series and its stealth'em'up clones involved some good puzzle solving skills, though I tend to find the 3rd person view isn't to my liking. Anyway, while I agree that they are two completely different mediums, I wouldn't say that either is superior. Both have their place, and both can be as in depth or as shallow as you choose to make them.
;)
As another thing I just remembered.. try out a decent MUD sometime. A MUD (Multi User Dungeon) is a multiplayer text based RPG, a few of them aspire to be roleplay oriented (as opposed to combat oriented), and have some nice prose in their world descriptions that make the game world feel like a living book.
As far as the premise of this article goes.. what a load of crap. People have always played games. Humans enjoying leisure time not a fad. Games have opened up a whole new realm of possibilities for our leisure time, and their scope keeps widening (look no further than the Wii for example, though then look at Grand Theft Auto IV and be amazed at the way a whole city has been modelled and the amount of different activities you can do, from just driving around admiring the view, to playing pool, delivering pizzas, yada yada..). But meh.. if you want to close your eyes to the possibilities here then go ahead, keep to your linear little books, keep letting someone else do your thinking for you
It could be something to do with that irony stuff that everyone keeps going on about.
Really - they're buying IBM, HP, Cray, Dell and Sun? Wowee.