I'd always thought the point of Sims was to build elaborate swimming pools, take out the ladder, and watch your sims drown to death. Or my other favorite, surround the sims with four walls but no exits. And watch them starve. If I were feeling generous that day, I'd make a window or paint the walls.
Man. Something's wrong. I really was hoping this would be another case of stick it to the man civil disobedience. The kind that goes all the way to the Supreme Courts screaming out injustice. The kind that makes front page headlines about the incredibly imbalance and unfairness of the current legislation. What went wrong here and why aren't we fighting!
Have you ever seen J J Abram's talk on the Mystery Box at Ted.com? Apple is one big mystery box and so long as the box is kept closed, everyone wants a peek inside. But, if we ever did see inside... I'd suspect we'd find that it's not so mind-blowing as we once supposed.
"If the ethical argument is unpersuasive, then focus on the long-term viability of your marketing and branding efforts, and realize that a technology company that is determined to prevent information from being spread is an organization at war with itself. Civil wars are expensive, have no winners, and incur lots of casualties."
This analogy relies on one assumption: that the natural inclination of people is to be open and vocal.
What if people simply do not care about sharing what the "next big thing" happening at Apple is. What if the only one who really does care is Mr. Steve Jobs himself. Then perhaps the war he is fighting isn't really all that awful. And the employees at Apple may not be at all as interested in their work as the media projects.
Plenty of science uses that type of reasoning. Have you ever watched House? Read Sherlock Holmes? It's called detective work. Sometimes you know how, but you want to find out why. And other times you know why, but you want to find out how.
Some guy once said, "The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge."
And someone else once said, "To ask the right question is harder than to answer it."
In typical Slashdot fashion, I skimmed the summary and thought I saw, "AI researchers from more than 60 institutions worked on the project entitled HALO. HALO is designed to help ease the bureaucratic burden of the military."
I didn't think twice since Microsoft invented Halo.
So, the Chinese government has just stated to the world that they are not confident that their people are capable of discerning the difference between things that are real, and things that are not real?
I never knew the Chinese thought so very little of themselves.
You know, I agree with your conclusion but I disagree with your reasoning. You've employed the all too often cited strawman.
I don't think that the Chinese government has implicated distrust in the discernment of its people. The common person is adequately capable of drawing distinctions between reality and fantasy. However, the Chinese government understands all too well the depravity of humanity. Their reasoning goes along the lines that what you perceive through the senses effects the nature of your psychology in many ways, especially subliminally. Now, the Chinese (as well as many Western governments) are well acquainted with the concept (i.e. in the form of propaganda) that we absorb much more implicitly than explicitly.
The distinction of distrust in the discernment of self-knowledge and distrust in the discernment of external perceptions is huge. Lacking the discernment of reality to fantasy is cause for insanity. Lacking the discernment of introspection is mundanity. Few truly know themselves.
I'm currently a student working for a professor at my university and I've been given the opportunity to do most of my work from home. I program for him, mostly in PHP for a website he is in charge of.
I do most of my work in libraries, parks, and restaurants. There are pros and cons to each environment. I think the greatest problem I've encountered is finding reliable and free wifi. Denny's restaurants tend to have free wifi, but it kicks you off every 30 minutes which is a real pain if you're trying to do something that requires long periods of thought.
Public libraries are most preferable, but at least here in San Diego, they are overcrowded and sometimes I can't find a desk to sit at. Libraries at my school are not crowded and have plenty of room to sit, however, parking requires permits. The park by the library is nice, at least during the day time, but sometimes if there is a lot of glare it is hard to work. Also, the wireless signal in a park is much weaker.
Starbucks is a no go for me since their wifi isn't free. And starbucks is the MOST crowded at all times of the day.
The Ralph's used to have free wifi, and is open 24 hours a day, so I would occasionally study or work from there. But recently they stopped offering free wifi. So I stopped going there.
Overall, I'd say the park is the nicest place to work. There is fresh air, light breezes. Ambient noise is neither repetitive nor distracting, but actually, in the same way the ocean is, relaxing. And you can always get up and take a walk to clear your mind. The other problem though is its hard to find power outlets. So you better have a nice laptop with a good battery, or else you won't be out there long.
It's absurd to be basing multi-trillion dollar policy decisions on this garbage.
But you have to base them on something, and the policy-makers are right to base them on the overwhelming consensus of climatologists. What else do they have to go by? Even if those 97% somehow turned out to be wrong, isn't it better at this stage to mould the policies so that our impact on the climate is as small as possible, just in case?
Reminds me of a wager I placed a few years back...
Amazon has refunded their customers according to the article, but if I was halfway through a book and it got deleted from my device I would be very annoyed. To me it seems that the better solution would be for Amazon to arrange the correct rights from the copyright holder and arrange some form of deal to make sure that those who have a copy of the book on their Kindle can continue to use it or receive a new copy with the proper rights and at no cost. In the end, the material was offered through their service and they do have responsibility to their customers, even if it is not illegal for them to use this solution.
The only problem I foresee with offering such an apology, Bezos is now obligated to provide some sort of "solution" when this type of thing happens again. Now, if Amazon tries their best to prevent such problems from arising, that would be the best possible route. But supposing that this happens again, and now knowing that the Bezos has made a public apology and commitment to his Kindle customers to provide solutions to these problems, the copyright holders (i.e. the publishers) now have leverage over Bezos and can perhaps charge higher prices than they once were able to knowing that Bezos and Amazon would not want to suffer another public embarrassment. Obviously, good publicity is high on Bezo's list to personally make such an apology, heartfelt or otherwise.
One could call it "intrusion" or "encroachment" - maybe - but dispossessing people of something they paid for, because you made a mistake is not even near something you could call a "solution".
If you bought a car from someone and it turned out to be stolen, do you think you have the right to keep the car or is the federal government legally obliged to return that car to its owner?
While most might "agree that there is a living human at fertilization", the same most would probably not be willing to investigate every single miscarriage as an accidental death, or even potential murder case. Clearly, they're not quite fully "life", both morally and logistically.
The drive for self preservation is simply a consequence of evolution. We'll only need to worry about it arising if the code is allowed to self replicate and mutate.
As far as naturally occurring self-preservation, I agree.
In artificial scenarios, one could imagine simply programming self-preservation into the intrinsic nature of the intelligence (i.e. viruses, spambots, etc.) or self-preservation arising from other mechanisms, namely consciousness.
Now, the GP's line of reasoning only stands true if the machines are simply machines. However, the fear that is referred to in the summary (although I did not RTFA) has to do with machines gaining some sense of consciousness.
Though the definition of consciousness is more a philosophic, rather than entirely empirical, question--presuming that each machine had some sort of consciousness would undo the GP's first premise.
1) I am not unique, my code can be easily duplicated to other hardware at zero cost.
Hence, the implicit assumption of AIs possessing self-preservation is predicated on this idea that each AI is unique and believes itself to be so. Although self-preservation in nature can be attributed to evolution, the self-preservation we speak of when we are addressing artificial intelligence is more a consequence of consciousness, which if created by humanity is indirectly a consequence of our own historical drive for self-preservation.
Religion is real faith, because Adam ate the apple. It's not hypothesis, it's absolute faith. Nobody saw him eat it and it's not repeatable or falsifiable. Jesus resurrected. Same deal. Absolute, unchangeable, and we won't lose our Easter holidays! Get it?
I'm not sure if this is the boy you're referring to, but here is a documentary about a young boy named Ben Underwood who is blind and has taught himself echo location. It is pretty amazing.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? I had no idea.
I'd always thought the point of Sims was to build elaborate swimming pools, take out the ladder, and watch your sims drown to death. Or my other favorite, surround the sims with four walls but no exits. And watch them starve. If I were feeling generous that day, I'd make a window or paint the walls.
Heh heh heh.
Can you expect "power savings" when VMware is running? You are basically running two computers at once.
Well, I use VMware to run a barebones linux machine on my Macbook and do everything from the terminal to save energy! ;).
Reminds me of the days when I used to doublespace my ram drive for increased performance AND space!
I can just imagine the conversations...
"Honey, I'm at the at machine, but I forgot my pi number."
"Daniel babe, its 3141 you should know this by now."
I love how the campaign is titled "Joel Fights Back"
My friends, you call this fighting? Are you serious?
I call this bending over and taking it from behind. He might as well be in jail.
Man. Something's wrong. I really was hoping this would be another case of stick it to the man civil disobedience. The kind that goes all the way to the Supreme Courts screaming out injustice. The kind that makes front page headlines about the incredibly imbalance and unfairness of the current legislation. What went wrong here and why aren't we fighting!
You know. I think I could actually implement that.
Just let me cook you up a firmware update for you real quick... And all you have to do is download and install it...
Have you ever seen J J Abram's talk on the Mystery Box at Ted.com? Apple is one big mystery box and so long as the box is kept closed, everyone wants a peek inside. But, if we ever did see inside... I'd suspect we'd find that it's not so mind-blowing as we once supposed.
From TFS,
"If the ethical argument is unpersuasive, then focus on the long-term viability of your marketing and branding efforts, and realize that a technology company that is determined to prevent information from being spread is an organization at war with itself. Civil wars are expensive, have no winners, and incur lots of casualties."
This analogy relies on one assumption: that the natural inclination of people is to be open and vocal.
What if people simply do not care about sharing what the "next big thing" happening at Apple is. What if the only one who really does care is Mr. Steve Jobs himself. Then perhaps the war he is fighting isn't really all that awful. And the employees at Apple may not be at all as interested in their work as the media projects.
Plenty of science uses that type of reasoning. Have you ever watched House? Read Sherlock Holmes? It's called detective work. Sometimes you know how, but you want to find out why. And other times you know why, but you want to find out how.
Some guy once said, "The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge."
And someone else once said, "To ask the right question is harder than to answer it."
In typical Slashdot fashion, I skimmed the summary and thought I saw, "AI researchers from more than 60 institutions worked on the project entitled HALO. HALO is designed to help ease the bureaucratic burden of the military."
I didn't think twice since Microsoft invented Halo.
I wish it were true!
So, the Chinese government has just stated to the world that they are not confident that their people are capable of discerning the difference between things that are real, and things that are not real?
I never knew the Chinese thought so very little of themselves.
You know, I agree with your conclusion but I disagree with your reasoning. You've employed the all too often cited strawman.
I don't think that the Chinese government has implicated distrust in the discernment of its people. The common person is adequately capable of drawing distinctions between reality and fantasy. However, the Chinese government understands all too well the depravity of humanity. Their reasoning goes along the lines that what you perceive through the senses effects the nature of your psychology in many ways, especially subliminally. Now, the Chinese (as well as many Western governments) are well acquainted with the concept (i.e. in the form of propaganda) that we absorb much more implicitly than explicitly.
The distinction of distrust in the discernment of self-knowledge and distrust in the discernment of external perceptions is huge. Lacking the discernment of reality to fantasy is cause for insanity. Lacking the discernment of introspection is mundanity. Few truly know themselves.
I think "You got Yahoo in my Bing!" sounds much better.
I'm currently a student working for a professor at my university and I've been given the opportunity to do most of my work from home. I program for him, mostly in PHP for a website he is in charge of.
I do most of my work in libraries, parks, and restaurants. There are pros and cons to each environment. I think the greatest problem I've encountered is finding reliable and free wifi. Denny's restaurants tend to have free wifi, but it kicks you off every 30 minutes which is a real pain if you're trying to do something that requires long periods of thought.
Public libraries are most preferable, but at least here in San Diego, they are overcrowded and sometimes I can't find a desk to sit at. Libraries at my school are not crowded and have plenty of room to sit, however, parking requires permits. The park by the library is nice, at least during the day time, but sometimes if there is a lot of glare it is hard to work. Also, the wireless signal in a park is much weaker.
Starbucks is a no go for me since their wifi isn't free. And starbucks is the MOST crowded at all times of the day.
The Ralph's used to have free wifi, and is open 24 hours a day, so I would occasionally study or work from there. But recently they stopped offering free wifi. So I stopped going there.
Overall, I'd say the park is the nicest place to work. There is fresh air, light breezes. Ambient noise is neither repetitive nor distracting, but actually, in the same way the ocean is, relaxing. And you can always get up and take a walk to clear your mind. The other problem though is its hard to find power outlets. So you better have a nice laptop with a good battery, or else you won't be out there long.
It's absurd to be basing multi-trillion dollar policy decisions on this garbage.
But you have to base them on something, and the policy-makers are right to base them on the overwhelming consensus of climatologists. What else do they have to go by? Even if those 97% somehow turned out to be wrong, isn't it better at this stage to mould the policies so that our impact on the climate is as small as possible, just in case?
Reminds me of a wager I placed a few years back...
Where is NewYorkCountryLawyer when you need him?
I don't know what to believe without NewYorkCountryLawyer weighing in his opinion!
First snakeoil... now algaeoil! What's next?
Amazon has refunded their customers according to the article, but if I was halfway through a book and it got deleted from my device I would be very annoyed. To me it seems that the better solution would be for Amazon to arrange the correct rights from the copyright holder and arrange some form of deal to make sure that those who have a copy of the book on their Kindle can continue to use it or receive a new copy with the proper rights and at no cost. In the end, the material was offered through their service and they do have responsibility to their customers, even if it is not illegal for them to use this solution.
The only problem I foresee with offering such an apology, Bezos is now obligated to provide some sort of "solution" when this type of thing happens again. Now, if Amazon tries their best to prevent such problems from arising, that would be the best possible route. But supposing that this happens again, and now knowing that the Bezos has made a public apology and commitment to his Kindle customers to provide solutions to these problems, the copyright holders (i.e. the publishers) now have leverage over Bezos and can perhaps charge higher prices than they once were able to knowing that Bezos and Amazon would not want to suffer another public embarrassment. Obviously, good publicity is high on Bezo's list to personally make such an apology, heartfelt or otherwise.
One could call it "intrusion" or "encroachment" - maybe - but dispossessing people of something they paid for, because you made a mistake is not even near something you could call a "solution".
If you bought a car from someone and it turned out to be stolen, do you think you have the right to keep the car or is the federal government legally obliged to return that car to its owner?
(Sorry in advance for obligatory car analogy).
While most might "agree that there is a living human at fertilization", the same most would probably not be willing to investigate every single miscarriage as an accidental death, or even potential murder case. Clearly, they're not quite fully "life", both morally and logistically.
Come on now, be reasonable.
Not every death is murder.
The drive for self preservation is simply a consequence of evolution. We'll only need to worry about it arising if the code is allowed to self replicate and mutate.
As far as naturally occurring self-preservation, I agree.
In artificial scenarios, one could imagine simply programming self-preservation into the intrinsic nature of the intelligence (i.e. viruses, spambots, etc.) or self-preservation arising from other mechanisms, namely consciousness.
Now, the GP's line of reasoning only stands true if the machines are simply machines. However, the fear that is referred to in the summary (although I did not RTFA) has to do with machines gaining some sense of consciousness.
Though the definition of consciousness is more a philosophic, rather than entirely empirical, question--presuming that each machine had some sort of consciousness would undo the GP's first premise.
1) I am not unique, my code can be easily duplicated to other hardware at zero cost.
Hence, the implicit assumption of AIs possessing self-preservation is predicated on this idea that each AI is unique and believes itself to be so. Although self-preservation in nature can be attributed to evolution, the self-preservation we speak of when we are addressing artificial intelligence is more a consequence of consciousness, which if created by humanity is indirectly a consequence of our own historical drive for self-preservation.
Religion is real faith, because Adam ate the apple. It's not hypothesis, it's absolute faith. Nobody saw him eat it and it's not repeatable or falsifiable. Jesus resurrected. Same deal. Absolute, unchangeable, and we won't lose our Easter holidays! Get it?
By your logic all history is faith.
You know, there are a lot of people who don't have a problem combining religion and science
and there are those who think.
And then there are those who think they think.
I'm not sure if this is the boy you're referring to, but here is a documentary about a young boy named Ben Underwood who is blind and has taught himself echo location. It is pretty amazing.
Didn't they already make the "World's Toughest Phone" a long time ago?
I swear I've seen one.
I think I've found the right game for you. :).