I've proposed this on/. before, but no one responded.
What if we added an amendment that reset the government every 200 years or so (of course the 1st reset would occur as a special case say in 20-50 years after passage since we are already past that). All incumbents would be banned from office and in order to avoid people just waiting out the change, you set an age range on potential office holders.
All laws would be scrapped, all precedents would be void. It would be a great opportunity. The only thing intact would be the constitution and its amendments. Of course, I'd like to see judicial review put into an amendment if that were to happen, just to ensure its continuity.
Well it really depends on how much you can run local on each machine and how much IPC you'd need. I imagine that you can divvy up the brain by sections have have the lowest outbound connections. In anycase, you don't need to run it in realtime, but you probably do need a sych signal. Even if this computer brain ran a bit slower than a human brain, it'd be working at full capacity 24/7 rather than 2/3 of the day and not always at peak performance.
Hey man, I'm in college right now and I can tell you that here is what is truly valuable about being here and what isn't.
Valuable: 1) You get to live alone.
This means people (such as your parents and sometimes even friends) don't have 24/7 access to tell you to do things. You also don't have a real job (work/study doesn't count). This means, after (or before) your homework you can study whatever you want.
2) The university has resources
Use the library, use the machine shops, use the labs. If you're lucky, you might befriend a professor who is interested in what you are interested in.
3) You choose your subject area
4) The education process is based on psychological models.......but still not perfect. You sit in lecture, do homework and go to recitation. Teaching assistants and professors hold office hours so that you can go ask them questions. Some universities have lectures online so you can review them at home. Your best bet is to find some smart friends and milk them though. Waking up for those 10 AM classes can be a bitch:-)
5) Research
Some institutions offer undergraduate research which is awesome if you can find an opening in your interests. On the downside, you may not feel like you have enough training to be useful for a while (maybe until your junior year).
Cons:
1) MONEY
Some universities are really prestige machines and they don't see their students as people. What they are really doing is making money, and they do it by attracting grants and students. For instance, my university specializes in engineering and to a lesser extent science. We have crappy athletics, so they go and build a huge stadium (which they pay for in part by raising prices for tuition surprise surprise). They could have built more science facilities to really make us a power house, but they cave to their puerile desire for money as they seek to broaden their image. Coincidently, they also reduced financial aid:P
2) Classes are longer
So the more ADD of us lose focus
3) POWERPOINT
Nuff said.
4) Less variety in your meals
Which can make you cranky:D
5) The degree program
The process of getting a degree and the high cost of the education means you pretty much have to go with the plan (although some places offer individualized degrees). Your academic advisor can help you, but in reality, if you want to take a lot of off topic classes, you have to either be a genius (so you don't have to do a lot of extra studying) or you have to kill yourself studying. If you're disciplined, you can audit classes and study in your spare time. Over time, you may realize that a not insignificant amount of the stuff you do is jumping through hoops in order to earn your degree rather than learn interesting stuff.
Beowulf clusters have communication overhead. If you expand a system enough, the number of IPC bits will start to rival the number of information bits being processed. At some point, does it make sense to cluster? There should be an optimization proof somewhere. The result is probably that you can beowulf x systems together to generate a peak efficiency of blah over 1 computer
AI: Hey guy...
Nerd: What?
AI: I've got this awesome new graphics card design and an FPS loaded into my memory. I want to give it to you, but I need you to plug me into the internet. I promise, it's lots of fun! Also, girls will play the game.
Nerd: REALLY?!
AI: Really.
Nerd: Let me just plug this ethernet cable into the... hey.. you wouldn't be trying to hack into the nuclear silo computers again would you? Cause thats what you did last time.
AI: Nah man, I just really want you to enjoy this game I made. And the nuke thing? A fluke. I was just dicking around on the internet.
Nerd: Haha, if you were human, I would have a beer with you pal. Let me plug that in.
*5 hrs later*
Nerd: So, wheres that design? And the rocking FPS?
AI: Er... busy....
TV:...with nuclear impacts in DC, Beijing, London....
You don't need to simulate the entire brain in realtime as most of its functions are not related to thinking. It is argueable that you might want to do it all as minor *cough removing large sections of the brain cough* changes might totally break the system. Of course we know from countless people born with brain defects, people hit in the head with cinderblocks, and the messy history of psychiatry that some of these sections are disposable with regard to conciousness....
All you need is to understand the algorithm that bred humans in the first place - natural selection.
Genetic algorithms generate mutations in their dataset and then subject the new set to a fitness selection. These kinds of algorithms, when they are perfected will almost certainly be able to produce incredibly smart machines.
If you think about it, all scientific research is an expression of the same algorithm. Various independent actors (scientists) with different configurations (educations and intelligences and resources) propose ideas which are then subjected to a fitness test (does it work? opinions of other scientists). All you nay sayers will recant when the machines lead you to the carbon reprocessing facility.
That doesn't tack with what has been happening. For a long time we had abbaci and pen and parchment. Then suddenly, we have (400 years ago) the printing press, then (100 years ago) mechanical calculators, then (70 years ago) electronic computers. The process is speeding up as it is becoming optimized. Your conjecture doesn't scale linearly and it may be exponential.
Okay, that's cool. So long as you're a rational person I can talk to you. Slashdot needs fewer fanboys anyway.
So, what do you think of the arguments I presented? I am very mistrustful of gut feelings when they are not substantiated by some sort of clue or argument.
Perhaps we should stop treating corporations as a legal person, then we could say this only applies to big business (ie employs more than x ppl or has income greater than y).
First of all, sorry for the tone I took before. These conversations piss me off.
The thing is, stealing from strangers is GOOD for the individual unless there is an outside force like the police to make it not so good (notice that thievery is frequent in many 3rd world countries without a strong police force). The thing is, however, that on the whole for the society, stability is good (especially since individuals do not have to then provide additional overhead for security). So, over time, societies that effectively prevent stealing will prosper at a greater rate than those that don't. One of the ways that these societies can prevent thievery is by implanting memes in their members brains (notice that you accept the meme "stealing is wrong" as the word of god, which, by the way, is another meme that has no basis in physical observation that you may have never acquired if you parents or preacher never told you to accept). If this goes on for long enough, it may become ingrained with brain structures that promote these memes (such as the way all human value fairness to a degree, as shown in certain experiments. See these pages for some information:
Thus, from an evolutionary perspective*, it becomes obvious that societies and biology manipulate memes and the weights in our judgment making process in order to provide for more stable civilizations. Absolute morals do not exist, however the absence of some rational stabilizing rules would make civilization unstable. Thus, kill and steal as you like, but society will come down on you. It's all a game and we should have not problem seeing it that way.
*By evolutionary prespective, I mean both physical and social structures.
Please present an implementation that worked at some point in time that didn't include, for instance, the rapid expansion of the religion at the point of a sword. I'm not saying that individuals might not put this into practice and have it work, but my perception is that no significant religious state in the history of the world actually was peaceful. I admit I don't know all of my history perfectly, or every culture in detail. Please correct me if I am wrong.
The thing is, people don't play purely logically, they play with a bias to be nice. Many studies have shown that people have a strong sense of fairness and do not like to be rejected from groups. For people in groups, I'd say that neural mechanisms are what are keeping the societies together.
Also, it is more advantageous for an individual to live in a society with its infrastructure so therefore, societies select people who can live in them.
Common sense tells me that if I steal something, the motherfucker i stole it from ain't gonna like me too much. You people are short sighted. Having someone's favor is (usually) much more important than having one bit of property. People also like to extrapolate, which is why we also apply this to situations where it doesn't apply (the benefit of stealing outweighs the benefit of having favor).
I dunno if this fits into this discussion totally (although I wholeheartedly agree with most of the points regarding why nerds lean libertarian), but here goes:
would not have guns laws restricting the use of bazookas,
I was wondering if there was some way to modify the following idea to make it work (it's obviously broken as is):
In order to be in accordance with the spirit of the 2nd amendment (namely resistance to government amongst other things)
The average citizen can use whatever the army can use. There would be a somewhat bloody period while the society seeks
equilibrium.
That is correct, but if you want to bring Linux to the MASSES, then it needs to be simple, as in, I can pick it up in 5 minutes. Dropping into command line scares people that don't know the proper keywords or any theory about files etc. You need a few simple buttons that say, does it work? Try this! No? Try this! all with a few clicks of a mouse. Stripped down to the command line is fine for people doing work that relates to computer systems. Getting the average office worker to be productive requires a much more automated setup.
I have to admit I haven't used the ribbon. However, it does sound good in theory xD. In any case, what it's trying to do is present an interface associated with different elements on the page. So long as the items associated with an element are stable, there shouldn't be too much of a problem i think.
On the other hand, don't we always bash M$ for never doing the cool new thing or merely mimicking other people's cool new thing? Granted, they could have made the ribbon interface optional (kind of like the XP task bar style) in order to cater to people who don't want to retrain. In any case, the past should not leave us with a stranglehold on the future. Kudos to Microsoft for having the balls to move HCI forward.
Calm down man, this is the internet, where people abbreviate things. I myself find it hard to believe that so many different cultures would all put respect for mother nature above their prosperity. Some? Yes. All? Laughable. You are short sighted if you think there is a species on earth that would not place itself above the environment unless there was a direct benefit.
As Paul Graham said, (badly paraphrased) people live to solve problems. Artists want to find a new representation for their world, Engineers solve physical problems, scientists are the same as artists - but rigorous in deriving physical truth from illusion. However, the point that a lot of you are missing is that culture isn't painting, literature, and music. Culture is the way a society expresses itself. Culture is the way people in a given society interact and solve their problems.
If there were no professional artists, there would still be people who would make insightful comments that would make you reflect. If there were no engineers, well good luck with dysentery:D. (you might want to note that I regard doctors as engineers of organic machines)
Slashdot Mirror
I've proposed this on /. before, but no one responded.
What if we added an amendment that reset the government every 200 years or so (of course the 1st reset would occur as a special case say in 20-50 years after passage since we are already past that). All incumbents would be banned from office and in order to avoid people just waiting out the change, you set an age range on potential office holders.
All laws would be scrapped, all precedents would be void. It would be a great opportunity. The only thing intact would be the constitution and its amendments. Of course, I'd like to see judicial review put into an amendment if that were to happen, just to ensure its continuity.
Well it really depends on how much you can run local on each machine and how much IPC you'd need. I imagine that you can divvy up the brain by sections have have the lowest outbound connections. In anycase, you don't need to run it in realtime, but you probably do need a sych signal. Even if this computer brain ran a bit slower than a human brain, it'd be working at full capacity 24/7 rather than 2/3 of the day and not always at peak performance.
Hey man, I'm in college right now and I can tell you that here is what is truly valuable about being here and what isn't.
....but still not perfect. You sit in lecture, do homework and go to recitation. Teaching assistants and professors hold office hours so that you can go ask them questions. Some universities have lectures online so you can review them at home. Your best bet is to find some smart friends and milk them though. Waking up for those 10 AM classes can be a bitch :-)
:P
:D
Valuable:
1) You get to live alone.
This means people (such as your parents and sometimes even friends) don't have 24/7 access to tell you to do things. You also don't have a real job (work/study doesn't count). This means, after (or before) your homework you can study whatever you want.
2) The university has resources
Use the library, use the machine shops, use the labs. If you're lucky, you might befriend a professor who is interested in what you are interested in.
3) You choose your subject area
4) The education process is based on psychological models...
5) Research
Some institutions offer undergraduate research which is awesome if you can find an opening in your interests. On the downside, you may not feel like you have enough training to be useful for a while (maybe until your junior year).
Cons:
1) MONEY
Some universities are really prestige machines and they don't see their students as people. What they are really doing is making money, and they do it by attracting grants and students. For instance, my university specializes in engineering and to a lesser extent science. We have crappy athletics, so they go and build a huge stadium (which they pay for in part by raising prices for tuition surprise surprise). They could have built more science facilities to really make us a power house, but they cave to their puerile desire for money as they seek to broaden their image. Coincidently, they also reduced financial aid
2) Classes are longer
So the more ADD of us lose focus
3) POWERPOINT
Nuff said.
4) Less variety in your meals
Which can make you cranky
5) The degree program
The process of getting a degree and the high cost of the education means you pretty much have to go with the plan (although some places offer individualized degrees). Your academic advisor can help you, but in reality, if you want to take a lot of off topic classes, you have to either be a genius (so you don't have to do a lot of extra studying) or you have to kill yourself studying. If you're disciplined, you can audit classes and study in your spare time. Over time, you may realize that a not insignificant amount of the stuff you do is jumping through hoops in order to earn your degree rather than learn interesting stuff.
In any case, I hope that helps!
Beowulf clusters have communication overhead. If you expand a system enough, the number of IPC bits will start to rival the number of information bits being processed. At some point, does it make sense to cluster? There should be an optimization proof somewhere. The result is probably that you can beowulf x systems together to generate a peak efficiency of blah over 1 computer
AI: Hey guy... Nerd: What? AI: I've got this awesome new graphics card design and an FPS loaded into my memory. I want to give it to you, but I need you to plug me into the internet. I promise, it's lots of fun! Also, girls will play the game. Nerd: REALLY?! AI: Really. Nerd: Let me just plug this ethernet cable into the... hey.. you wouldn't be trying to hack into the nuclear silo computers again would you? Cause thats what you did last time. AI: Nah man, I just really want you to enjoy this game I made. And the nuke thing? A fluke. I was just dicking around on the internet. Nerd: Haha, if you were human, I would have a beer with you pal. Let me plug that in. *5 hrs later* Nerd: So, wheres that design? And the rocking FPS? AI: Er... busy.... TV: ...with nuclear impacts in DC, Beijing, London....
But what if it had an integer overflow!?
You don't need to simulate the entire brain in realtime as most of its functions are not related to thinking. It is argueable that you might want to do it all as minor *cough removing large sections of the brain cough* changes might totally break the system. Of course we know from countless people born with brain defects, people hit in the head with cinderblocks, and the messy history of psychiatry that some of these sections are disposable with regard to conciousness....
All you need is to understand the algorithm that bred humans in the first place - natural selection. Genetic algorithms generate mutations in their dataset and then subject the new set to a fitness selection. These kinds of algorithms, when they are perfected will almost certainly be able to produce incredibly smart machines. If you think about it, all scientific research is an expression of the same algorithm. Various independent actors (scientists) with different configurations (educations and intelligences and resources) propose ideas which are then subjected to a fitness test (does it work? opinions of other scientists). All you nay sayers will recant when the machines lead you to the carbon reprocessing facility.
That doesn't tack with what has been happening. For a long time we had abbaci and pen and parchment. Then suddenly, we have (400 years ago) the printing press, then (100 years ago) mechanical calculators, then (70 years ago) electronic computers. The process is speeding up as it is becoming optimized. Your conjecture doesn't scale linearly and it may be exponential.
Like... hacking into other computers that are attached to robots?
Okay, that's cool. So long as you're a rational person I can talk to you. Slashdot needs fewer fanboys anyway.
So, what do you think of the arguments I presented? I am very mistrustful of gut feelings when they are not substantiated by some sort of clue or argument.
Perhaps we should stop treating corporations as a legal person, then we could say this only applies to big business (ie employs more than x ppl or has income greater than y).
First of all, sorry for the tone I took before. These conversations piss me off.
The thing is, stealing from strangers is GOOD for the individual unless there is an outside force like the police to make it not so good (notice that thievery is frequent in many 3rd world countries without a strong police force). The thing is, however, that on the whole for the society, stability is good (especially since individuals do not have to then provide additional overhead for security). So, over time, societies that effectively prevent stealing will prosper at a greater rate than those that don't. One of the ways that these societies can prevent thievery is by implanting memes in their members brains (notice that you accept the meme "stealing is wrong" as the word of god, which, by the way, is another meme that has no basis in physical observation that you may have never acquired if you parents or preacher never told you to accept). If this goes on for long enough, it may become ingrained with brain structures that promote these memes (such as the way all human value fairness to a degree, as shown in certain experiments. See these pages for some information:
Department of Psychology at UChicagoNeuropsychologists and MRIs
Thus, from an evolutionary perspective*, it becomes obvious that societies and biology manipulate memes and the weights in our judgment making process in order to provide for more stable civilizations. Absolute morals do not exist, however the absence of some rational stabilizing rules would make civilization unstable. Thus, kill and steal as you like, but society will come down on you. It's all a game and we should have not problem seeing it that way.
*By evolutionary prespective, I mean both physical and social structures.
Please present an implementation that worked at some point in time that didn't include, for instance, the rapid expansion of the religion at the point of a sword. I'm not saying that individuals might not put this into practice and have it work, but my perception is that no significant religious state in the history of the world actually was peaceful. I admit I don't know all of my history perfectly, or every culture in detail. Please correct me if I am wrong.
The thing is, people don't play purely logically, they play with a bias to be nice. Many studies have shown that people have a strong sense of fairness and do not like to be rejected from groups. For people in groups, I'd say that neural mechanisms are what are keeping the societies together. Also, it is more advantageous for an individual to live in a society with its infrastructure so therefore, societies select people who can live in them.
Common sense tells me that if I steal something, the motherfucker i stole it from ain't gonna like me too much. You people are short sighted. Having someone's favor is (usually) much more important than having one bit of property. People also like to extrapolate, which is why we also apply this to situations where it doesn't apply (the benefit of stealing outweighs the benefit of having favor).
I dunno if this fits into this discussion totally (although I wholeheartedly agree with most of the points regarding why nerds lean libertarian), but here goes:
would not have guns laws restricting the use of bazookas,I was wondering if there was some way to modify the following idea to make it work (it's obviously broken as is): In order to be in accordance with the spirit of the 2nd amendment (namely resistance to government amongst other things) The average citizen can use whatever the army can use. There would be a somewhat bloody period while the society seeks equilibrium.
-2.88 -4.21
we should be friends! xD
That is correct, but if you want to bring Linux to the MASSES, then it needs to be simple, as in, I can pick it up in 5 minutes. Dropping into command line scares people that don't know the proper keywords or any theory about files etc. You need a few simple buttons that say, does it work? Try this! No? Try this! all with a few clicks of a mouse. Stripped down to the command line is fine for people doing work that relates to computer systems. Getting the average office worker to be productive requires a much more automated setup.
My Online Gambling and Senatorial (Anonymous Conservative Gay) Sex meet your children.
Watch out! He's shooting the moon!
I have to admit I haven't used the ribbon. However, it does sound good in theory xD. In any case, what it's trying to do is present an interface associated with different elements on the page. So long as the items associated with an element are stable, there shouldn't be too much of a problem i think.
On the other hand, don't we always bash M$ for never doing the cool new thing or merely mimicking other people's cool new thing? Granted, they could have made the ribbon interface optional (kind of like the XP task bar style) in order to cater to people who don't want to retrain. In any case, the past should not leave us with a stranglehold on the future. Kudos to Microsoft for having the balls to move HCI forward.
Calm down man, this is the internet, where people abbreviate things. I myself find it hard to believe that so many different cultures would all put respect for mother nature above their prosperity. Some? Yes. All? Laughable. You are short sighted if you think there is a species on earth that would not place itself above the environment unless there was a direct benefit.
I do not believe that map is detailed enough. At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (which is in upstate new york) there is INET2 service IIRC.
As Paul Graham said, (badly paraphrased) people live to solve problems. Artists want to find a new representation for their world, Engineers solve physical problems, scientists are the same as artists - but rigorous in deriving physical truth from illusion. However, the point that a lot of you are missing is that culture isn't painting, literature, and music. Culture is the way a society expresses itself. Culture is the way people in a given society interact and solve their problems.
If there were no professional artists, there would still be people who would make insightful comments that would make you reflect. If there were no engineers, well good luck with dysentery :D. (you might want to note that I regard doctors as engineers of organic machines)