"Aesthetic life" only matters is you value your worth by the shine of your baubles; I don't. I'm not part of the mammon religion. My car is nothing but transportation to me, all I care about is good gas mileage, reasonable performance, a comfy seat, good HVAC, and a killer stereo. When it costs more to repair it than payments would cost, I'll get a different one. Until then I don't care what it looks like.
The world of the future they envisioned was also one where they still controlled all content distribution.....They never really thought about the implications of people being able to store and transmit massive video libraries on their own
A good example of what you're talking about is Murray Leinster's 1946 short story A Logic Named Joe (the story is at the supplied link).
True, but rare. My uncle became rich despite the fact that my grandparents were dirt-poor. But again, that's rare, and one needs to be incredibly lucky (and gifted in other ways) for that to happen.
I think the commercials for Donald Trump's "how to get rich" book are hilarious. WTF would someone born into great wealth know about becoming rich?
Alcoholics undergoing withdrawal show the same shakiness as Parkensons victims, I wonder if an alkie going through DTs would show up as Parkinsons with this test?
No, it is correct that Windows is the only OS that can get a virus (and I'm not sure they still can get them). The International Business Times is a terrible source of tech news; wtf does an MBA know about computers?
They show their ignorance when they state
Microsoft had its Schadenfreude moment in early April, when a Russian antivirus company discovered that hundreds of thousands of Macs were infected with a variant of the Flashback trojan horse, which reportedly was able to exploit several vulnerabilities in Java, allowing itself to install onto the user's browser without any intervention or action on the user's part.
They're confusing the Flashback Trojan with Trojan BackDoor.Flashback, which is a worm. Worms and trojans can and often do contain viruses (most of the boot sector viruses in the '80s and '90s were also trojans).
The wiki article on this worm says "The trojan, however, will only infect the user visiting the infected web page, meaning other users on the computer are not infected unless their user accounts have been infected separately. This is due to the UNIX security system". NOT a virus. It has to be able to self-replicate and spread by itself to be a virus.
Any computer can get a trojan, and Unix systems have been hit by worms (an example is the Morris worm that almost took down the internet back in the '90s).
Unix and its bretheren, like BSD, Linux, and Mac, were designed from the beginning to be for networked, multi-user machines. Windows was never designed from the ground up to be for network computers, and MS now pays the price. Apple was smart to move to a Unix-like system when internet access became normal.
I just "fixed" an old "virus-laden" Dell last week that ran so slowly it would barely boot. But there were no worms or viruses, just useless memory-eating toolbars (I consider these to be malware, they do nothing or very little for the user and eat your performance for corporations' sake). It runs like a top now.
Odd how Norton won't warn you about that kind of crap, which slows your computer down as badly as being on a botnet.
It was the same for the "it's now safe to shut off your computer" screen. I changed mine to read "It's not safe to shut off your computer" on my work PC. I wonder how many people copied that "now ok" file, renamed it BMP and put it as wallpaper on a co-worker's box?
I've heard of folks not getting sound on a Linux system, although I haven't experienced it firsthand. If you're happy with Windows, there's no reason to switch. KDE has features Windows lacks that I sorely miss on my Windows box; laziness is that only thing keeping Linux off of it (that and I have a few other computers I'm trying to bring back to life). But if I'd never been annoyed with Windows I'd probably still be using it.
Laziness is another reason I prefer Linux, it takes far less maintenance than Windows.
I don't know about groceries and utilities, but restaraunt and bar prices in Chicago are rediculous, but it makes sense that when real estate is expensive, everything else will be, too; the rent is a large part of a business' overhead. If I moved 50 miles south to Mount Olive, real estate would be cheaper, but that's such a small town that the grocery store, bar, etc. has no real competetion and can pretty much charge what they want.
What makes a computer "just a tool" that cannot also be applied to a human being "just a tool"?
The same thing that makes an automobile just a tool and a person not. Look at the wikipedia link. If you understand logic gates, how an ALU works, and how to program a computer using a low lwvel language like assembly, you know that computers aren't sentient.
It's not a typo when you misspell the same word the same way three times in one comment, that's just ignorance. Tgis is a typo. I have trouble giving credence to someone who apparently doesn't read much. Literacy metters. I can't take an aliterate seriously (an aliterate is someone who can read, but doesn't).
There's nothing wrong with the term "subwoofer". It generally refers to speakers which have a response intentionally limited to somewhere between 100 and 200Hz, which is well below the 500Hz-4kHz woofer crossover frequency you'd find in typical two and three way enclosures.
Then the woofers in my old (alas, stolen from me when I was burglarized) Kenwoods were really subwoofers then, because the crossover for the woofers (they were four ways, with six drivers in each enclodure) only reproduced sounds up to 300 Hz. They had a flat response from 20 Hz to 30kHz (as if anybody would hear the sounds coming from the supertweeters!)
The woofers in the JBLs I've had for 20 years are twelve inches, and I think the woofer response on them is about 50-300 Hz. So they would still be subwoofers, I guess.
I doubt there'd be significant benefit from extra speakers in the Y dimension
Probably not in a home setup, but in a movie theater it would certainly add to the experience. Some things that make sounds go up and down, not just right and left.
And I'm with you 100% on spoken vs written, though what I don't get is that since speaking is much slower than reading
For you and me, yes, but I suspect that for your typical aliterate (I've read that only 3% of people read books, it kind of shows on messageboards) reads slower than he can talk.
Many have suggested that our oversized moon (oversized relative to Earth) is responsible for higher life, intelligent life, technological life, etc.
At least one biochemist put that as a premise in some fiction -- Dr. Isaac Asimov, in the later Foundation books. In the Foundation universe, nothing more advanced than moss developed on any other planet but Earth.
One could also go nuts with religious implications.
I couldn't find "artical" in the dictionary, what is an artical? Is that an artsy calorie or something? And how would one go about reading it, with an artsy thermometer?
We have successfully built systems that are as autonomous and self learning as lower order animals
Not that I've ever heard of, you're going to have to back up that absurd statement with a credible link, preferably a site with an edu extension.
but children are initially grown and given an initial neural layout, so it is not quite as simple as 'someone built it'.
Exactly.
At some point both cases start off essentially blank
Incorrect. The sperm swims to the egg, the egg "decides" (via a chemical reaction, which is all thought really is) which of the millions it lets in.
I posted this ten years ago at my old gaming site and and reposted it here a few days ago. One would think it's two sentient beings communicating, but as the author of Artificial Insanity I assure you that it's all smoke and mirrors. Art isn't sentient and neither is Alice, but from the transcript (which was real BTW) you'd swear they were.
Have you ever read the TTL Cookbook? If you knew how computers actually worked and how they were constructed, you woudn't fool yourself into thinking that computers can think. There's no Harry Potter magic to it, but David Copperfield smoke and mirror magic on a computer is easy.
Move out of your expensive city. I'm twice as rich as someone 200 miles away in Chicago who earns the same salary as me, because everything costs twice as much up there (or more). Someone making my salary in New York City would probably be living in a cardboard box, but I live a comfortable middle class life here in Springfield.
I don't know what a Coke costs at a movie, but in a thread a while back a bunch of people pegged me as being a cheapass for leaving a quarter tip for a draft beer -- which I pay $1.25 for. That's a 20% tip, but everyone assumed I was paying five bucks for one like they do in Chicago.
Getting a little more on topic here, TFA was incredibly useless; youtube is firewalled off here. What is it with the lack of literacy these days? I don't absorb spoken information nearly as well as written information, TFA doesn't even say how many channels this is, where the speakers are placed, or anything. It does mention two "subwoofers" (we used to call 'em woofers in the stone age when every speaker enclosure had one, many of them fifteen inces or bigger, I've seen "subwoofers" only five inches across) and that's about it.
I've been putting down surround sound since the '70s when they first trotted out quadrophonics for home stereos. You needed two of everything but the turntable, including speakers (the most expensive part) plus a demodulator. And who sits in the middle of an orchestra to hear the symphony? In theaters it's just annoying when a phone rings from the exit sign two meters to the right of the screen (Gran Torino), and even worse when something explodes behind you (Star Wars V), destroying the immersion. I maintain that a movie only needs four channels, one at each corner of the screen.
Is 62.2 sixty two channels plus two woofers? I don't see how this would sound any more realistic than a channel for each corner.
If Moore's law continues, by 2030, computers will have exceeded the capacity of the human brain.
Capacity isn't sentience, or wikipedia would have an IQ equaling Q's. Before anybody makes a sentient machine w're going to have to find out exactly what sentience is and what causes it. Just because your chess program can beat you dodn't mean it's more intelligent than you.
Yet I am sure you are ok with them seeing violence.
I wouldn't let my kids watch The Teminator when they were little for the same reason I wouldn't let them watch Deep Throat. It would be a sick individual who would subject a child to either of them.
OTOH their favorite TV show was Pee Wee's Playhouse (I enjoyed it, too, and watched it with them) so I let them see the scene in that Cheech and Chong movie where Pee Wee gets arrested, and the other one where he snorts coke and goes crazy.
Nudity isn't pornography. I, too, wonder why when they show Terminator on TV they cut the sex scene and language, but leave in all the blood, gore, and violence.
watching Elmer fudd unload a shotgun in donald ducks face is perfectly fine.
Dude... it's a CARTOON. Even a two year old knows it isn't real.
Slashdot Mirror
"Aesthetic life" only matters is you value your worth by the shine of your baubles; I don't. I'm not part of the mammon religion. My car is nothing but transportation to me, all I care about is good gas mileage, reasonable performance, a comfy seat, good HVAC, and a killer stereo. When it costs more to repair it than payments would cost, I'll get a different one. Until then I don't care what it looks like.
Sun Tzu disagreed with you, although I'm not sure I do.
The world of the future they envisioned was also one where they still controlled all content distribution.....They never really thought about the implications of people being able to store and transmit massive video libraries on their own
A good example of what you're talking about is Murray Leinster's 1946 short story A Logic Named Joe (the story is at the supplied link).
I read the article, but didn't bother to look at the date. But even though TFA is nine months old, it was news to me.
Shouldn't this tech be born by now?
Indeed, weren't alligators and crocodiles around when dinasaurs were? Yep. Animals only need to evolve when their environments change.
(Ok, they have shanged some since the cretatious as the wiki article says)
True, but rare. My uncle became rich despite the fact that my grandparents were dirt-poor. But again, that's rare, and one needs to be incredibly lucky (and gifted in other ways) for that to happen.
I think the commercials for Donald Trump's "how to get rich" book are hilarious. WTF would someone born into great wealth know about becoming rich?
Alcoholics undergoing withdrawal show the same shakiness as Parkensons victims, I wonder if an alkie going through DTs would show up as Parkinsons with this test?
How can someone with a six digit /.UID not know what a reality distortion field is? The phrase was coined 31 years ago and spoken of here quite often.
But none of that matters legally! It's quite similar to selling alcholol to a minor.
Funniest typo I've seen all day!
No, it is correct that Windows is the only OS that can get a virus (and I'm not sure they still can get them). The International Business Times is a terrible source of tech news; wtf does an MBA know about computers?
They show their ignorance when they state
They're confusing the Flashback Trojan with Trojan BackDoor.Flashback, which is a worm. Worms and trojans can and often do contain viruses (most of the boot sector viruses in the '80s and '90s were also trojans).
The wiki article on this worm says "The trojan, however, will only infect the user visiting the infected web page, meaning other users on the computer are not infected unless their user accounts have been infected separately. This is due to the UNIX security system". NOT a virus. It has to be able to self-replicate and spread by itself to be a virus.
Any computer can get a trojan, and Unix systems have been hit by worms (an example is the Morris worm that almost took down the internet back in the '90s).
Unix and its bretheren, like BSD, Linux, and Mac, were designed from the beginning to be for networked, multi-user machines. Windows was never designed from the ground up to be for network computers, and MS now pays the price. Apple was smart to move to a Unix-like system when internet access became normal.
I just "fixed" an old "virus-laden" Dell last week that ran so slowly it would barely boot. But there were no worms or viruses, just useless memory-eating toolbars (I consider these to be malware, they do nothing or very little for the user and eat your performance for corporations' sake). It runs like a top now.
Odd how Norton won't warn you about that kind of crap, which slows your computer down as badly as being on a botnet.
It was the same for the "it's now safe to shut off your computer" screen. I changed mine to read "It's not safe to shut off your computer" on my work PC. I wonder how many people copied that "now ok" file, renamed it BMP and put it as wallpaper on a co-worker's box?
I've heard of folks not getting sound on a Linux system, although I haven't experienced it firsthand. If you're happy with Windows, there's no reason to switch. KDE has features Windows lacks that I sorely miss on my Windows box; laziness is that only thing keeping Linux off of it (that and I have a few other computers I'm trying to bring back to life). But if I'd never been annoyed with Windows I'd probably still be using it.
Laziness is another reason I prefer Linux, it takes far less maintenance than Windows.
I don't know about groceries and utilities, but restaraunt and bar prices in Chicago are rediculous, but it makes sense that when real estate is expensive, everything else will be, too; the rent is a large part of a business' overhead. If I moved 50 miles south to Mount Olive, real estate would be cheaper, but that's such a small town that the grocery store, bar, etc. has no real competetion and can pretty much charge what they want.
What defines sentience?
A dictionary or an encyclopedia.
What makes a computer "just a tool" that cannot also be applied to a human being "just a tool"?
The same thing that makes an automobile just a tool and a person not. Look at the wikipedia link. If you understand logic gates, how an ALU works, and how to program a computer using a low lwvel language like assembly, you know that computers aren't sentient.
It's not a typo when you misspell the same word the same way three times in one comment, that's just ignorance. Tgis is a typo. I have trouble giving credence to someone who apparently doesn't read much. Literacy metters. I can't take an aliterate seriously (an aliterate is someone who can read, but doesn't).
There's nothing wrong with the term "subwoofer". It generally refers to speakers which have a response intentionally limited to somewhere between 100 and 200Hz, which is well below the 500Hz-4kHz woofer crossover frequency you'd find in typical two and three way enclosures.
Then the woofers in my old (alas, stolen from me when I was burglarized) Kenwoods were really subwoofers then, because the crossover for the woofers (they were four ways, with six drivers in each enclodure) only reproduced sounds up to 300 Hz. They had a flat response from 20 Hz to 30kHz (as if anybody would hear the sounds coming from the supertweeters!)
The woofers in the JBLs I've had for 20 years are twelve inches, and I think the woofer response on them is about 50-300 Hz. So they would still be subwoofers, I guess.
I doubt there'd be significant benefit from extra speakers in the Y dimension
Probably not in a home setup, but in a movie theater it would certainly add to the experience. Some things that make sounds go up and down, not just right and left.
And I'm with you 100% on spoken vs written, though what I don't get is that since speaking is much slower than reading
For you and me, yes, but I suspect that for your typical aliterate (I've read that only 3% of people read books, it kind of shows on messageboards) reads slower than he can talk.
Many have suggested that our oversized moon (oversized relative to Earth) is responsible for higher life, intelligent life, technological life, etc.
At least one biochemist put that as a premise in some fiction -- Dr. Isaac Asimov, in the later Foundation books. In the Foundation universe, nothing more advanced than moss developed on any other planet but Earth.
One could also go nuts with religious implications.
Asimov was an athiest.
First off i did read the artical
I couldn't find "artical" in the dictionary, what is an artical? Is that an artsy calorie or something? And how would one go about reading it, with an artsy thermometer?
We have successfully built systems that are as autonomous and self learning as lower order animals
Not that I've ever heard of, you're going to have to back up that absurd statement with a credible link, preferably a site with an edu extension.
but children are initially grown and given an initial neural layout, so it is not quite as simple as 'someone built it'.
Exactly.
At some point both cases start off essentially blank
Incorrect. The sperm swims to the egg, the egg "decides" (via a chemical reaction, which is all thought really is) which of the millions it lets in.
I posted this ten years ago at my old gaming site and and reposted it here a few days ago. One would think it's two sentient beings communicating, but as the author of Artificial Insanity I assure you that it's all smoke and mirrors. Art isn't sentient and neither is Alice, but from the transcript (which was real BTW) you'd swear they were.
Have you ever read the TTL Cookbook? If you knew how computers actually worked and how they were constructed, you woudn't fool yourself into thinking that computers can think. There's no Harry Potter magic to it, but David Copperfield smoke and mirror magic on a computer is easy.
We don't have to worry about Skynet just yet.
Dupe, dupe ... dupe of Earl?
I'm just tryin' ta be a better slashdot. My name is Dupe!
I wonder if these two planets are in their death throws in terms of meeting one another
Great pun, I loved it!
$4 Coke?! Fill me in with your discount method!
Move out of your expensive city. I'm twice as rich as someone 200 miles away in Chicago who earns the same salary as me, because everything costs twice as much up there (or more). Someone making my salary in New York City would probably be living in a cardboard box, but I live a comfortable middle class life here in Springfield.
I don't know what a Coke costs at a movie, but in a thread a while back a bunch of people pegged me as being a cheapass for leaving a quarter tip for a draft beer -- which I pay $1.25 for. That's a 20% tip, but everyone assumed I was paying five bucks for one like they do in Chicago.
Getting a little more on topic here, TFA was incredibly useless; youtube is firewalled off here. What is it with the lack of literacy these days? I don't absorb spoken information nearly as well as written information, TFA doesn't even say how many channels this is, where the speakers are placed, or anything. It does mention two "subwoofers" (we used to call 'em woofers in the stone age when every speaker enclosure had one, many of them fifteen inces or bigger, I've seen "subwoofers" only five inches across) and that's about it.
I've been putting down surround sound since the '70s when they first trotted out quadrophonics for home stereos. You needed two of everything but the turntable, including speakers (the most expensive part) plus a demodulator. And who sits in the middle of an orchestra to hear the symphony? In theaters it's just annoying when a phone rings from the exit sign two meters to the right of the screen (Gran Torino), and even worse when something explodes behind you (Star Wars V), destroying the immersion. I maintain that a movie only needs four channels, one at each corner of the screen.
Is 62.2 sixty two channels plus two woofers? I don't see how this would sound any more realistic than a channel for each corner.
We're simply out to push our political and religious values on the rest of the world by whatever means are necessary.
Since America's dominant religioun is the worship of money, I'd say its "religious values" are economic policies... and you'd still be right.
People think the US is a predominantly Christian nation. It isn't, or smoking pot would be legal, and adultery would not be.
If Moore's law continues, by 2030, computers will have exceeded the capacity of the human brain.
Capacity isn't sentience, or wikipedia would have an IQ equaling Q's. Before anybody makes a sentient machine w're going to have to find out exactly what sentience is and what causes it. Just because your chess program can beat you dodn't mean it's more intelligent than you.
Yet I am sure you are ok with them seeing violence.
I wouldn't let my kids watch The Teminator when they were little for the same reason I wouldn't let them watch Deep Throat. It would be a sick individual who would subject a child to either of them.
OTOH their favorite TV show was Pee Wee's Playhouse (I enjoyed it, too, and watched it with them) so I let them see the scene in that Cheech and Chong movie where Pee Wee gets arrested, and the other one where he snorts coke and goes crazy.
Nudity isn't pornography. I, too, wonder why when they show Terminator on TV they cut the sex scene and language, but leave in all the blood, gore, and violence.
watching Elmer fudd unload a shotgun in donald ducks face is perfectly fine.
Dude... it's a CARTOON. Even a two year old knows it isn't real.