Well, as you say this goes over many peoples' heads, therefore what is considered "informative" can't be immediately determined as true or false. If the scientific community has such different views of the matter, how do you think that Slashdot will be able to come to a stable conclusion? People are modding up whatever sounds good, which is the right thing to do, as it brings the more sound arguments for and against a controversial theory to the forefront, which is the best we can do in this situation.
As for the value of the paper itself, most of your arguments in its favour are inconsequential to its veracity. Many papers are published in scientific journals that prove not to be true. The whole reason these journals publish papers is that they can be peer-reviewed, a very similar process to what is occurring here on Slashdot.
Also, his support is by no means overwhelming. He may have some prominent supporters, but he also has prominent detractors. It even mentions that this goes directly against one of Hawking's theories, and without any other evidence I'd be more inclined to trust Hawking to someone I haven't previously heard of.
The comments on the difficulties he had getting this printed, his lack of credentials, and the reaction of the academia say nothing about the value of his work. He does seem to be an underdog, but an appeal to our emotional response to such a situation is not a point for his side. There are many, many people who can't get published, have no credentials, and are disregarded by educated physicists. This is often because they don't know what they're talking about.
And comparing him to Einstein is not helpful either. Einstein was a particularly special case, and his work rose to the top due to its own merit. If Lynds' work is truly of the same calibre, it will do so as well. The suggestion that physicists pay attention to every amateur with a theory because he may be the next Einstein doesn't make sense. The reason they generally don't pay attention to amateurs is precisely because they are amateurs. Your average physicist is busy enough working on his own theories and examining other professional physicists' theories. Why should he devote even more time working on the theories of someone outside the field? Physics hobbyists are generally far less knowledgeable in the area, and are far more prone to erroneous conclusions compared to one that is educated in the field.
Basically, this paper may have merit and it may not. It might be a great breakthrough or completely worthless. Apparently both opinions exist in varying quantities. It's a theory coming to unusual (or in some cases obvious) conclusions coming from someone that is not actually a physicist with no mathematical proofs. That really lowers the chances of its being accepted because it lowers its chances of being true. There isn't some big physics conspiracy going on here. That's just how science works.
Ah. "Meaning" was a vague term to me, so I misinterpreted where you were applying it. Which reinforces your point about the lack of word meaning, amusingly enough.
I still don't see the connection between Lynds' attempt to disprove the idea of a moment in time and the decline of meaning in language, though, other than the relatively modern desire to reanalyze and attempt to remove abstractions that we have taken for granted. And I think that was a view that was reflected in the humanities rather than one that originated in that realm.
Keep in mind that I really haven't studied the humanities, and most of what I know of it I've learned from debating with people more knowledgeable than me.
Also, I can't really vouch for the scientific value of Lynds' paper in the first place, since it's making some huge claims without much evidence to back it up.
That's quite a comparison you make there. For one thing, there is a difference between a unit of meaning as it is used in the humanities and a unit of time. A big difference. In the arts, they're talking about an objective reference point for values and ideas within the human mind and reflected in our view of the universe. This paper refers to a unit, or more specifically a moment, as a specific point of existence in the (in his view non-existent) flow of time of the universe irrespective of humans, though obviously perceived by us.
Also, as someone else mentioned, from what I can tell this paper is basically just philosophy anyway, which falls under the humanities.
There's a big difference between ADD (or ADHD or whatever) and a general lack of discipline. I've been having problems for my whole life with it, and have just recently been diagnosed. For a long time I figured I just wasn't trying hard enough, or approaching things from the right direction, but after thinking a lot and talking to people, I realized that my problems were rather unusual compared to others.
When talking about a lack of discipline, the problem is getting work done when you're not interested in it. You have to write a program or do a term paper, then you think of going onto the web or playing a game, and you wander off and do that instead. A lot of my friends described having problems with this in college when I would talk about my difficulties.
What I've been experiencing is a little different than this, though. I just couldn't focus on things in general. I'd avoid watching movies because of the effort it would take to keep track of a story for an hour and a half. I'd try to read an article and trail off halfway into it, realizing a few minutes later that I've been sitting there with a magazine, going through the motions of reading, but not absorbing any of it. Lord knows reading an actual book was incredibly difficult. It wasn't that I found other things to do. It was more like I'd sit there trying to focus and blanking out until I either forgot what I was doing completely or got so frustrated I gave myself a migraine. And when I could do focus on something, if someone were to distract me at all, I'd get so startled I'm jump into the air, and get very angry. Sometimes I'd be able to sit down and write a really good term paper, but get an F for it because I wasn't able to read the one page of text that gave the instructions on how it was to be written.
There were other, less specific problems, too. I couldn't clean my room, practically ever, not because I was lazy, but because when I'd try I couldn't pay attention to any specific item apart from the general mess well enough to figure out how to clean it. I'd literally sit there for five or ten minutes looking around trying to figure out what it was that made my room so messy. I couldn't separate the clothes from the soda bottles or the computer equipment in my mind.
Also, as a kid I was really socially awkward. I just couldn't deal with people at all. I had a couple of friends that I would hang out with pretty comfortably, but when I got into a group I would get completely overwhelmed. Looking back on it, I realized that I couldn't process all the sound of different people talking at once. After a certain point, I'd hear them but not really understand anything they were saying. That would definitely make it hard to make friends at parties.
When I got on Wellbutrin (initially for depression) and, more recently, Adderall (I hate the stuff, but it helps), I started noticing large changes. With the Wellbutrin I still had trouble focusing on specific things, but I noticed my confusion went way down. I could deal easily with people, and could pay attention to what was going on around me. That helps a lot when driving. When I started taking the Adderall, I suddenly found it very easy to pay attention to one thing separate from others. I could remember to get my mail or take out the trash. I could separate my clothes and actually do my laundry. I could organize the tasks involved in getting my dishes washed, rather than not eating because I couldn't find a clean plate. I found myself starting to draw more (which I've always loved but never really practiced) because I could actually visualize in my head what I wanted to draw, rather than scribble around until I either had something or I didn't. I actually even sat down and started reading a few of the many books that I've gathered through the years, meaning to read. It's not particularly easy to sit down and write out an organised essay, design a program, or reorganize all the crap in my room, but I can actually sit and think of how I would go about doing it, and even remember
I was really depressed when I found out that ThinkNIC went under. Despite what a lot of people say about thin clients, those machines had a lot of potential. They built a really clean interface that ran through the browser, making it easy to use for almost everyone. On the other side of things, if you knew what you were doing, you could make a new cd image so that it could do anything you wanted.
I contracted with the company for a while, specifically to make a hardware testing platform for new ThinkNICs after they went off the assembly line. I played around with it afterwards, and managed to set it up to do quite a few neat things.
Just one word of advice if you find one somewhere. Do not reboot your computer with the ThinkNIC cd in your cdrom drive. I managed to wipe out my root partition that way. Twice.
Re:This would be PERFECT...if...
on
Lindows Webstation
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· Score: 2, Informative
ThinkNIC used flash ram in its cd-based PC, actually. It was quite handy.
"In my view - and I know it is controversial - kids should be playing games from early on, from three years old, say."
Why the hell is this considered controversial? There's something horribly broken in the adult mind if playing games and learning are separated so badly. Why do people think kids have this urge to play anyway? Learning is the whole point! That's why they do it!
Play is a natural technique for young people and animals to learn the skills they will need as adults. Social skills, survival skills, everything. Our brains are wired so that we play to learn and learn best while playing. It's as simple as that. If educators got this into their heads we would have a much better school system.
Yeah, they're fairly mainstream, but not nearly mainstream enough these days. And their newest CD was released in 2002. It's just that nobody heard about it since they don't play it on the radio or MTV.
Well, the History Channel's actually pretty popular these days, so many Americans are pretty informed about history. Well, Nazi-related history, at least. Maybe a little about guns and prostitutes in the Old West.
No, I suppose not. It just gives off the impression that they're more interested in business than normal users. I'd prefer to see a more normal (read: geeky and overly technical) post about it on slashdot, though.
Have they always been formatted like that? Most of the press releases I've seen basically say "Hey, look, new version. It's got neat stuff." This one is written in a particularly self-congratulatory manner. It sounds like they're in the commercial sector, trying to please stockholders.
I actually moved to Windows for a while because I disliked MacOS 8 and 9 so much. Of course, I stopped using Windows after about 6 months when I set up Linux, but the point stands. MacOS X looks pretty neat, but I'm pretty much entrenched in my old Linux system by now. I still love MacOS 7, though. I used a Mac IIsi for about five years, and if it were able to decently run any software these days, I'd still have it up.
What's with that press release? Since when did KDE have a marketing department? This frightens and disturbe me. Well, as long as they don't implement a version of Clippy, I think we're okay.
The great thing about watching the Matrix in a theater in Mountain View, CA, is that when that hacking scene came up, half the theater laughed or cheered. We're all geeks here.
Microsoft actually uses the word "innovation" in internal documents as well? I figured it was just outward-facing marketspeak, since they bring it up so much in PR notices and advertisements. The fact that they actually talk that way is... creepy.
How can you prove that you exist? How do you know that we're not all in the Matrix right now? How do you know that the world exists when you're not looking at it? Whoa, it's all deep and philosophical and unanswered and stuff.
Seriously, those questions have no meaning. If we created a machine that can interact with the world, learn things on its own, and evolve past the initial programming, we have an intelligent machine. Arguments about consciousness are pointless until we get to the point where we can ask the machine, and that's quite a ways off. In the meantime, AI research continues to have many positive benefits in other computer fields.
The main association is that many feel that to be truly intelligent, a machine would have to be able to sense the world around it, otherwise it would have no understanding. It makes sense. You can't really teach abstract concepts and ideas to a program if it can't even relate to concrete ones. Everything needs a frame of reference.
You're taking me a little too literally here. I'm talking about Linux, BSD, and MacOS X, as is the article. They follow most Unix standards, their aim is to be as much like the official Unix as possible, and in the case of BSD, they have as much or even more influence on Unix culture than the official licensed UNIX(tm) itself. They're enough like Unix that they might as well be, and stepping around the term is just awkward and unnecessary in most usage.
I don't really understand why some people get upset about using the world "Unix" to describe Unix-like operating systems. It's like asking for a Kleenex and someone getting angry because the box is actually just a generic brand of tissues. The only real reason to react like that is if you're part of the company that holds the trademark. For everyone else, it looks like Unix, it acts like Unix, it smells like Unix. It's Unix.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, as you say this goes over many peoples' heads, therefore what is considered "informative" can't be immediately determined as true or false. If the scientific community has such different views of the matter, how do you think that Slashdot will be able to come to a stable conclusion? People are modding up whatever sounds good, which is the right thing to do, as it brings the more sound arguments for and against a controversial theory to the forefront, which is the best we can do in this situation.
As for the value of the paper itself, most of your arguments in its favour are inconsequential to its veracity. Many papers are published in scientific journals that prove not to be true. The whole reason these journals publish papers is that they can be peer-reviewed, a very similar process to what is occurring here on Slashdot.
Also, his support is by no means overwhelming. He may have some prominent supporters, but he also has prominent detractors. It even mentions that this goes directly against one of Hawking's theories, and without any other evidence I'd be more inclined to trust Hawking to someone I haven't previously heard of.
The comments on the difficulties he had getting this printed, his lack of credentials, and the reaction of the academia say nothing about the value of his work. He does seem to be an underdog, but an appeal to our emotional response to such a situation is not a point for his side. There are many, many people who can't get published, have no credentials, and are disregarded by educated physicists. This is often because they don't know what they're talking about.
And comparing him to Einstein is not helpful either. Einstein was a particularly special case, and his work rose to the top due to its own merit. If Lynds' work is truly of the same calibre, it will do so as well. The suggestion that physicists pay attention to every amateur with a theory because he may be the next Einstein doesn't make sense. The reason they generally don't pay attention to amateurs is precisely because they are amateurs. Your average physicist is busy enough working on his own theories and examining other professional physicists' theories. Why should he devote even more time working on the theories of someone outside the field? Physics hobbyists are generally far less knowledgeable in the area, and are far more prone to erroneous conclusions compared to one that is educated in the field.
Basically, this paper may have merit and it may not. It might be a great breakthrough or completely worthless. Apparently both opinions exist in varying quantities. It's a theory coming to unusual (or in some cases obvious) conclusions coming from someone that is not actually a physicist with no mathematical proofs. That really lowers the chances of its being accepted because it lowers its chances of being true. There isn't some big physics conspiracy going on here. That's just how science works.
Ah. "Meaning" was a vague term to me, so I misinterpreted where you were applying it. Which reinforces your point about the lack of word meaning, amusingly enough.
I still don't see the connection between Lynds' attempt to disprove the idea of a moment in time and the decline of meaning in language, though, other than the relatively modern desire to reanalyze and attempt to remove abstractions that we have taken for granted. And I think that was a view that was reflected in the humanities rather than one that originated in that realm.
Keep in mind that I really haven't studied the humanities, and most of what I know of it I've learned from debating with people more knowledgeable than me.
Also, I can't really vouch for the scientific value of Lynds' paper in the first place, since it's making some huge claims without much evidence to back it up.
That's quite a comparison you make there. For one thing, there is a difference between a unit of meaning as it is used in the humanities and a unit of time. A big difference. In the arts, they're talking about an objective reference point for values and ideas within the human mind and reflected in our view of the universe. This paper refers to a unit, or more specifically a moment, as a specific point of existence in the (in his view non-existent) flow of time of the universe irrespective of humans, though obviously perceived by us.
Also, as someone else mentioned, from what I can tell this paper is basically just philosophy anyway, which falls under the humanities.
Unfortunately, people often confuse quantum physics and philosophy. Even more unfortunately, some of these people are quantum physicists.
There's a big difference between ADD (or ADHD or whatever) and a general lack of discipline. I've been having problems for my whole life with it, and have just recently been diagnosed. For a long time I figured I just wasn't trying hard enough, or approaching things from the right direction, but after thinking a lot and talking to people, I realized that my problems were rather unusual compared to others.
When talking about a lack of discipline, the problem is getting work done when you're not interested in it. You have to write a program or do a term paper, then you think of going onto the web or playing a game, and you wander off and do that instead. A lot of my friends described having problems with this in college when I would talk about my difficulties.
What I've been experiencing is a little different than this, though. I just couldn't focus on things in general. I'd avoid watching movies because of the effort it would take to keep track of a story for an hour and a half. I'd try to read an article and trail off halfway into it, realizing a few minutes later that I've been sitting there with a magazine, going through the motions of reading, but not absorbing any of it. Lord knows reading an actual book was incredibly difficult. It wasn't that I found other things to do. It was more like I'd sit there trying to focus and blanking out until I either forgot what I was doing completely or got so frustrated I gave myself a migraine. And when I could do focus on something, if someone were to distract me at all, I'd get so startled I'm jump into the air, and get very angry. Sometimes I'd be able to sit down and write a really good term paper, but get an F for it because I wasn't able to read the one page of text that gave the instructions on how it was to be written.
There were other, less specific problems, too. I couldn't clean my room, practically ever, not because I was lazy, but because when I'd try I couldn't pay attention to any specific item apart from the general mess well enough to figure out how to clean it. I'd literally sit there for five or ten minutes looking around trying to figure out what it was that made my room so messy. I couldn't separate the clothes from the soda bottles or the computer equipment in my mind.
Also, as a kid I was really socially awkward. I just couldn't deal with people at all. I had a couple of friends that I would hang out with pretty comfortably, but when I got into a group I would get completely overwhelmed. Looking back on it, I realized that I couldn't process all the sound of different people talking at once. After a certain point, I'd hear them but not really understand anything they were saying. That would definitely make it hard to make friends at parties.
When I got on Wellbutrin (initially for depression) and, more recently, Adderall (I hate the stuff, but it helps), I started noticing large changes. With the Wellbutrin I still had trouble focusing on specific things, but I noticed my confusion went way down. I could deal easily with people, and could pay attention to what was going on around me. That helps a lot when driving. When I started taking the Adderall, I suddenly found it very easy to pay attention to one thing separate from others. I could remember to get my mail or take out the trash. I could separate my clothes and actually do my laundry. I could organize the tasks involved in getting my dishes washed, rather than not eating because I couldn't find a clean plate. I found myself starting to draw more (which I've always loved but never really practiced) because I could actually visualize in my head what I wanted to draw, rather than scribble around until I either had something or I didn't. I actually even sat down and started reading a few of the many books that I've gathered through the years, meaning to read. It's not particularly easy to sit down and write out an organised essay, design a program, or reorganize all the crap in my room, but I can actually sit and think of how I would go about doing it, and even remember
I was really depressed when I found out that ThinkNIC went under. Despite what a lot of people say about thin clients, those machines had a lot of potential. They built a really clean interface that ran through the browser, making it easy to use for almost everyone. On the other side of things, if you knew what you were doing, you could make a new cd image so that it could do anything you wanted.
I contracted with the company for a while, specifically to make a hardware testing platform for new ThinkNICs after they went off the assembly line. I played around with it afterwards, and managed to set it up to do quite a few neat things.
Just one word of advice if you find one somewhere. Do not reboot your computer with the ThinkNIC cd in your cdrom drive. I managed to wipe out my root partition that way. Twice.
ThinkNIC used flash ram in its cd-based PC, actually. It was quite handy.
Why the hell is this considered controversial? There's something horribly broken in the adult mind if playing games and learning are separated so badly. Why do people think kids have this urge to play anyway? Learning is the whole point! That's why they do it!
Play is a natural technique for young people and animals to learn the skills they will need as adults. Social skills, survival skills, everything. Our brains are wired so that we play to learn and learn best while playing. It's as simple as that. If educators got this into their heads we would have a much better school system.
Yeah, they're fairly mainstream, but not nearly mainstream enough these days. And their newest CD was released in 2002. It's just that nobody heard about it since they don't play it on the radio or MTV.
Well, the History Channel's actually pretty popular these days, so many Americans are pretty informed about history. Well, Nazi-related history, at least. Maybe a little about guns and prostitutes in the Old West.
No, I suppose not. It just gives off the impression that they're more interested in business than normal users. I'd prefer to see a more normal (read: geeky and overly technical) post about it on slashdot, though.
Have they always been formatted like that? Most of the press releases I've seen basically say "Hey, look, new version. It's got neat stuff." This one is written in a particularly self-congratulatory manner. It sounds like they're in the commercial sector, trying to please stockholders.
I actually moved to Windows for a while because I disliked MacOS 8 and 9 so much. Of course, I stopped using Windows after about 6 months when I set up Linux, but the point stands. MacOS X looks pretty neat, but I'm pretty much entrenched in my old Linux system by now. I still love MacOS 7, though. I used a Mac IIsi for about five years, and if it were able to decently run any software these days, I'd still have it up.
What's with that press release? Since when did KDE have a marketing department? This frightens and disturbe me. Well, as long as they don't implement a version of Clippy, I think we're okay.
Don't get any ideas, KDE Team!
I did say "half the theatre." I went to see it with five girls.
The great thing about watching the Matrix in a theater in Mountain View, CA, is that when that hacking scene came up, half the theater laughed or cheered. We're all geeks here.
Hey, it looks like Galeon saved the subject from my last post. How... useful.
Cool use: Ability to keep track of your girlfriend/boyfriend/significant other.
Frightening abuse: Your girlfriend/boyfriend/significant other keeping track of you.
Microsoft actually uses the word "innovation" in internal documents as well? I figured it was just outward-facing marketspeak, since they bring it up so much in PR notices and advertisements. The fact that they actually talk that way is... creepy.
Especially when you're building stupid robots with big weapons that try to destroy each other. It's robot fightin' time!
How can you prove that you exist? How do you know that we're not all in the Matrix right now? How do you know that the world exists when you're not looking at it? Whoa, it's all deep and philosophical and unanswered and stuff.
Seriously, those questions have no meaning. If we created a machine that can interact with the world, learn things on its own, and evolve past the initial programming, we have an intelligent machine. Arguments about consciousness are pointless until we get to the point where we can ask the machine, and that's quite a ways off. In the meantime, AI research continues to have many positive benefits in other computer fields.
The main association is that many feel that to be truly intelligent, a machine would have to be able to sense the world around it, otherwise it would have no understanding. It makes sense. You can't really teach abstract concepts and ideas to a program if it can't even relate to concrete ones. Everything needs a frame of reference.
How about we do both? It's not like we have to choose one or the other. Advances are being made in both areas.
And artificial intelligence doesn't necessarily have to reflect human intelligence.
You're taking me a little too literally here. I'm talking about Linux, BSD, and MacOS X, as is the article. They follow most Unix standards, their aim is to be as much like the official Unix as possible, and in the case of BSD, they have as much or even more influence on Unix culture than the official licensed UNIX(tm) itself. They're enough like Unix that they might as well be, and stepping around the term is just awkward and unnecessary in most usage.
I don't really understand why some people get upset about using the world "Unix" to describe Unix-like operating systems. It's like asking for a Kleenex and someone getting angry because the box is actually just a generic brand of tissues. The only real reason to react like that is if you're part of the company that holds the trademark. For everyone else, it looks like Unix, it acts like Unix, it smells like Unix. It's Unix.