Have your lawyers write up a separate page of the lease in which the cell-phone company agrees not to use the tower to mind control you, your employees, or your families. Frame it on your office wall next to your college degree. If the company resists signing it offer them a few dollars off.
You can always take it down when you have to deal with a client who has no sense of humor. Buy a picture of a pretty flower to replace it with.
Of course our great nation of laws was designed for the possibility that an extremist party might gain power and attempt to stack the courts with extremist judges. Thats why their is a filibuster in the Senate so a supermajority is required to approve controversial laws or judges. It prevents a majority party in power from going off the deep end, in law or judicial appointments, and is a critical element of checks and balances.
IANAL.
But, that is not how the framers of our constitution implemented "checks and balances."
The "filibuster" non-rule (filibusters are allowed because there is no rule forbiding them, not because someone made a deliberate rule to allow them) is a rather abhorent thing that plagues the Senate. If the framers wanted to require a "supermajority," they would have explicitly required a 2/3 or better majority. For example, the constitution requires a 2/3 majority to override a veto.
The "checks and balances" against the Supreme Court, as writen in the Constitution, are these:
The country can, at any time, amend the Constitution, thus requiring that any Supreme Court ruling be reevaluated by the Supreme Court under the new constitution (V).
The President and Congress must approve a Supreme Court justice (II.2).
The President or Congress may simply neglect to approve any Supreme Court justice, thus reducing the number of Supreme Court justices, or they may spontaneously appoint additional Supreme Court justices (nothing in the Constitution specifies how many Supreme Court justices there should be).
Congress may impeach a Supreme Court justice (I.3 and III.1).
The President, as the executive, may simply neglect to enforce a Supreme Court ruling (nothing in the constitution requires him to do so, unless such neglect constitutes a High Crime or Misdemenor).
The power to establish inferior courts lies with Congress (III.1).
Any law less than the Constitution of the United States of America doesn't wield legal power over the Supreme Court; least of all: the conspicuous absence of a rule to allow a member of the Senate to move to force a vote.
Filibusters have nothing to do with checking nor balancing, and everything to do with politicians being so full of wind that they can't get anything done.
Oops. So, this is NOTHING like dropping the pink-panther stuff from your second story window onto some reinforced carbon-carbon composite that you left on the ground. I apologize for my failure to fully research that point.
Keep in mind that the space shuttle is kind-of tall, and that it accelerates at several Gs, that wind resistance is accelerating the insulation downward, and that this isn't necessarily your household pink-panther fiberglass insulation, and that these tiles are designed to resist heat and pressure, not impact, and that the shuttle is designed to be able to lose several tiles and survive reentry (we assume that Columbia lost more than that many tiles). So if the tiles seem remarkably fragile, just keep those facts in mind.
Let me say again, this is NOTHING like dropping the pink-panther stuff out of your second story window and breaking a ceramic dinner plate that you left on the ground.
mixed-use development (the ground-floor commercial/upper-floor residential buildings which help to make dense urban environments livable)
Use closely packed alternating residential and commercial zones to achive the same effect. Sims will effectively walk next door.
to vary the demand ratings for various services
Even a dictator can't change what people want, but there are some resolutions you can ennact to encourage or discourage tourism, or tech industry, for example.
To make pedestrian travel more acceptable
Use closely packed R and C zones. Nothing you can do about industrial polution -- ever lived downwind from a fish processing plant? Even a small one, family owned one?
or to alter the efficiency and availability of renewable power generation
High altitudes have more wind, less cloudy days have more sunlight, otherwise that ability doesn't exist in the real world either.
It comes down to this: You can't change reality in the real world either. Sim Cities are already dictatorships (Although I think it would be more realisitc if they let you build a berlin-style wall). But, Sim City is designed to make you deal with the real world and yet you can still build eco-friendly cities if you grow them slowly, spending most of your funding on quality-of-life things like parks, mass transit, and police stations. The Maxis people understood this and wrote about it in the manual when they wrote the first version (which I also played).
The one irritating thing is that sims aren't willing to commute nearly as far as real people (they should be willing to drive farther). Also, it doesn't simulate how difficult it is to find parking in downtown areas with very high land values (high property values should encourge sims to use mass transit).
In conclusion, if man's natural instinct in Sim City is to mindlessly CONSUME EXPAND and DESTROY, maybe that is just man's instinct period.
Hey, here's an idea: The idea of an almost mythical lost civilization is common thread throughout all old human societies - much like, say, really big Floods.
In related news, the stories of voyagers traveling back in time and interacting with the present-day citizens of Earth, being a common threat in all five of the Star Trek series, as well as one of the movies, is proof that the events of Star Trek will all become real historical facts.
Let's face it, with every passing year machines and computers are capable of doing more and more jobs that people used to do. The economic value of a human being is decreasing; it will eventually reach a threshhold low enough that capitalism, at least between human beings, will fail. In time, machines will be doing all of the work.
It's like the Matrix. The only difference is that in the Matrix, people could be used as batteries, so they were relevant. In the real future, people will be completely irrelevant.
There are three basic possibilities, mankind's selection of which will probably be seen as the answer to the fundamental question of whether human nature is innately creative, destructive, or indifferent.
1) People will build machines to serve them, and live happily ever after until entropy takes its toll.
2) The power elite will build machines to serve them. Warrior robots will decimate a rioting population. The power elite will will live happily ever after, or continue warring amongst themselves, until humanity anihilates itself by machine proxy or entropy takes its toll.
3) We'll screw up. The machines will decide the fate of humanity by their own free will.
Each of the above three can be modified by the possibility that people will integrate machines into their bodies and become cyborgs. In this case, people will essentially be telepathic (direct brain-to-radio link, the logical progression from the cell phone).
The machines will build huge space elevators into the heavens and wander about the galaxy freely. They, more likely than us, will know the purpose of the universe (if it has any purpose).
This is why no one wants to write science fiction. You either have to lie about the future or be honest and really depressing.
----
My boss was talking the other day about social security. Another boss suggested that we should take all of the money out of social security and give it back to the people.
I explained that, no, the social security administration doesn't have any money. They borrow money every year. Furthermore, the first people to draw from social security didn't pay into it, and the baby boomer generation most likely has paid into it but won't get anything out. You don't actually pay into the system and then get your money back out -- you pay the bills of your parents and your children will pay yours.
Besides, even if we had plenty of money, there won't be enough doctors to take care of all the old people.
So, he asks, "How do you fix it?"
"Robot doctors. They work for free, and don't make any mistakes."
How can you expect 'the masses' to know the intricacies of such things if they dont have the time to put towards understanding them because they have to work 40-60 hour work weeks with a family just to feed themselves, put a roof over their head and put junior through college?
The fact that a problem is difficult to solve does not mean that the problem poses no threat.
I agree that the global environment is, on the whole, learning-hostile. That said, we are not making a serious effort to educate the next generation, which is presently idling away in school buildings anyway. The situation is not helped by the fact that many organizations have a vested interest in keeping the masses ignorant.
It is hardly necessary for any voter to become an expert on every subject. Simply by paying attention and reading a little bit (from reasonably unbiased sources) on a daily basis, a person can continually develop a basic level of knowledge and intelligence about his or her universe. This becomes much easier if learning skills are developed during childhood. It is important that we make sure that people have the time to do this, and it is important that people are motivated to do this.
The complexity of the decisions we have to make is managable if we are willing, as a country and species, to manage it. The intelligence we are applying to global problems now is so low that a small increase in applied intelligence would yield disproportionately high gains.
If the greater part of humanity is simply, by nature, unwilling or incapable of developing a basic working knowledge of its universe, then that is a serious flaw in the human design. See my sig below.
The futility of education Education can be viewed as a way to increase one's value relative to others. As a larger fraction of the population is educated, the relative value of education declines. It may decline to a level below the price of the education. This has already happened with much "job retraining" and computer-related "certifications", and is happening for many fields of higher education. This calls into question the basic concept that higher education is a social good.
Whoa. I hope that was a semantic error, and that you really meant, "This calls into the question the basic concept that higher education is an economic good [for the individual worker]. (I was about to mod you up but had to reply instead.)
Education offers important benefits other than increasing one's economic value. You need an education (by which I do not mean an indoctrination, an education-that-is-not-an-indoctrination being admittedly very, very hard to come by) to vote intelligently on issues like the economy, environment, energy, and foreign policy. Most of our voting populace is incompetent to make decisions as voters.
Note that I would never advocate actually restricting someone's right to vote based on whether they have a diploma, or any similarly-spirited criteria, but most of the people voting in the upcoming election will vote for the person who will "fix the economy" and "do the right thing in Iraq," not only without an understanding of the intricacies of those situations, but without an understanding that intricacies actually exist that need to be understood.
For a demonstration, go out on the street and ask about the relationship between Turkey and Iraq, or between interest rates and inflation, or the drop in biodiversity over the last 300 years, or the vulnerabilities in combat of the "Stryker" tank, or what happens if we never pay off the national debt, or what a nuclear winter is.
The irony, I think, is that while we're one of the most "over-educated" countries in the world, we're killing ourselves through our own ignorance. It's a catastrophe.
Do you really think that proper software, run on today's home PCs, would be able to emulate human intelligence?
Yes.
Or if not, it would be possible to hard-wire enough frequently-used subroutines, and use extensive parallelism, using contemporary manufacturing techniques, that it would approach or exceed human performance, and would occupy roughly the same volume as a human mind.
I'm simply not that impressed with the human brain in terms of sheer computational power. I think we greatly, greatly overestimate the amount of computational work our brains actually do.
I think that, for the most part, the human brain implements what we would call "weak AI."
Consider your eyes, for example. You only process in detail what you see in your focal area. That's a pretty small quantity of data. Considering the error rate at which people miss-identify objects, it seems unlikely that an exhaustive comparison is going on there, unless you make the concious decision to spend time studying the object. Peripheral vision is basically checked for sudden motion and tossed into the bit bucket. I don't think that the amount of work being done there exceeds the computational power of a modern day chip. Hearing and sensation would seem to require even less computational power, and smell and scent are pretty much nothing in comparison.
The next computationally intensive thing would seem to be linguistic processing. Reading and listening takes work that distracts you from other mental tasks, suggesting to me that it maxes out or comes close to maxing out your processing power. Furthermore, most of us in every day communication seem form and recognize sentences according to a small number of "template sentences," which are much easier to recognize than it is to parse each sentence as a logical structure.
Emotion, computationally speaking, is simply the result of a difference between what is and what you want to be, plus some compelling force to make us lessen that difference. If this doesn't involve some metaphysical component, I certainly don't think that it is by itself computationally expensive.
Although, if you want me to explain sensation, why you "see" a field of vision, for example, or what the perception of color "is", (there's a name for this that I don't have time to look up), I can't help you with that.
Not really. In a rough order of magnitude basis, a human brain has a hundred billion (1e11) neurons, each with a thousand synapses capable of firing a hudred times per second. The equivalent capacity in a computer would be 1e11 * 1e3 * 1e2 = 1e16 floating point operations per second. A typical desktop computer today has about ten billion (1e10) operations per second, that is, one millionth of a human brain. If Moore's law continues to be valid, the twenty doublings in capacity needed for a desktop computer to overtake human brains will take 30 years.
Justify that a single neuron firing is equivalent in logical processing power to a floating point calculation, and that all the neurons in the brain can fire continuously, without pause, without brain damage, and that all of them firing continuously would constitute some kind of meaningful process, and that that kind of parallelism would be practical for general purpose computing at the same level of performance that you see on your desktop computer, and you'll have an argument. Otherwise, you've got nothing. Sorry.
And you havn't even touched the memory/storage issue.
But I agree with you that all this means nothing if software cannot be developed. Well, in the next decades, the wide availability of human-equivalent hardware will let us try to develop such software.
We already are developing this software. Compression, speach and face recognition, deductive reasoning tools, and so on, are all on the table. These tools do the kinds of things that people do. It's a just a matter of time, a LOT of time, before we learn to combine and enhance these tools in a way that approaches higher-level intelligence.
The first three possibilities [of arising super-intelligent AI] depend in large part on improvements in computer hardware.
No. A piece of hardware will not become intelligent no matter how much speed or how much memory you put into the machine. In the real world, metaphysical BS aside, it's arguable that desktop computers, in terms of processing power and memory capacity, are already superior to humans.
The breakthrough-that-remains-to-be-made, if it can be made at all, lies in software development. (The notion of hardwiring the software into a chip notwithstanding.)
Remember, unlike Apple and Linux distros MS can't bundle much into their OS unless they want to get dragged back to court...
BS, both of you. MS can bundle anything they want into their OS. What isn't appropriate, is that they invented technological barriers and imposed "agreements" with resellers that essentially prevents anyone from rebundling competing products.
To play fair, MS should publish a distribution of windows with the least possible amount of bundled software, thus not forcing anyone to buy or use bundled software with windows. Then they would be legally untouchable, and they could publish other "preferred" distros with tons of bundled software. Less than that, they could simply allow resellers to freely rearange software on the computers they sell.
Does anyone else find it remarkable that he just happened to find a computer belonging to al-Zawahiri in a room that had Mohammed Atef's name over the door.
Of course, it's remarkable that this particular journalist found it. But use some sense. If the computer existed, it's not that remarkable that one of the probably thousands of journalists in the country found it, considering that they were all looking for something of the sort. Unusual things happen all the time when there are enough people for them to happen to.
Why continue to exist at all? The universe doesn't really hand us any obvious reason, but we exist anyway. As long as we're going to continue our ambiguously pointful existence, we may as well pursue whatever fascinates us.
Otherwise, we just sit here on Earth bored to death until we die. There's no reason to do anything. At all.
So just do something interesting and stop caring so damn much about why. It doesn't matter. You don't need an excuse.
Does anyone else find it interesting that in the original draft of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the craft is bound for one of the moons of Saturn as opposed to Europa as was portrayed in the movie. Now after some preliminary exploring Europa we find that Europa's a dud and the easy-bake life mix is in fact on Titan.
In the book of 2001: A Space Odyssey, they do go to Saturn. The plot is more or less the same as the movie, with Arthur C. Clarke's bonus technical details, except that the monolith is located on the surface of mysterious Iapetus, which the book clearly indicated was an artificial satellite built for the purpose of housing the monolith. When Dave Bowman emerged from the other side, there was an identical moon with an identical monolith.
You might want to read it.
I, for the record, predict that past or present life exists on every massive body in the solar system that has or ever had a reasonably dense atmosphere and geological activity. I wouldn't be surprised if self-replicating molecules inhabit most comets, although I guess they freeze to death pretty quickly after leaving the inner solar system.
Personally I don't see JMS being able to play ball with Paramount. I think he'd last 3-6 months tops before he blew up at them and walked. He's just not enough of a political animial (his detractors would say he's too much of one) to be able to put up with it.
Suddenly I can see the future of this whole JMS+ST series. (Disclaimer, you need a really good working knowledge of Babylon 5 to get this, and even then it probably makes no sense at all.)
In season 1, we learn that JMS's Star Trek series is Gene Roddenberry's dream given new form, a self contained show located light years away from Rick Berman's tired cliches. It's a place for traders, adventurers, and all of their ilk. Despite a hint of tension between JMS and Paramount, not to mention that Star Trek/B5 fans gave the show in a 1 in million chance of surviving past three episodes, the network announces its intention to buy a second season. George W. Bush, reelected the year before, is assassinated 10 minutes after the "to be continued" of the first season cliffhanger.
In season 2, JMS tries to bring cohesion and direction to the previously haphazard story line. Network executives suggest that one of the female actors should be forced to strip naked during a decontamination scene, but JMS wisely shoots the idea down. Soon, studio security guards begin receiving bonus pay if they report back to Paramount about JMS's intended story arc.
In season 3, the whole situation spins out of control. Paramount sends armed guard to seize JMS's story notes, but the actors and creative staff choose to stay and fight. After a bloody struggle, most of the cast and crew are killed, but with financial support from millions of fans and the CG staff taking acting lessons, the show looks like it might have a fighting chance.
But it isn't over. By season 4, Cheney and his Haliburton company are nuking entire cities -- if they have been tainted by the slightest bit of terrorist influence. This includes San Diego. Civil liberties at an all time low, JMS leads an alliance of film producers, newspaper reporters, web site designers, and online file traders to huge protest along Pennsylvania Avenue. In a desperate act, JMS hands a note describing the details of the march to a sound effects guy, who then allows himself to be blown up by suicide bombers. It's horrible, but the terrorists take the bait, and, though he stands totally outgunned, JMS is able to convince both Cheney and the terrorists to retire on a remote resort and spend the rest of their lives together playing scrabble. Then JMS leads his newly formed alliance against Paramount.
JMS tricks Rick Berman into meeting him on the set of the bridge of the Enterprise. There, Berman is blasted by dozens of his exploding un-surge-protected consoles. But it isn't enough. Astounding everyone, the spirit of Gene Roddenberry rips out of JMS's body. Gene and Rick merge and explode in a massive ball of light.
JMS surrenders himself and his TV show to Paramount's lawyers. But wait! The voters elect JMS to the office of the President of the United States! Now immune to prosecution, JMS respects Paramount's right to continue to produce mindless drivel, even though he knows it will only lead to the production company's own undoing. Paramount replaces JMS with chick who is just as tough as he is and who worked for their side, but used to be his wife, and who might be willing to copulate with the director of the upcoming spinnoff episode. Undaunted, JMS's attention turns away from scriptwriting and toward the difficult task of rebuilding a nation destroyed by self-inflicted nuclear war.
Paramount continues living in its own deluded little world. Signs indicate the potential for more doom, but no one competent shows up to write a sequel. Years later, "JMS+ST: Legend of the Odd Storywriting Enterprise" has a disappointing ending.
If, like me, you are a product of Western culture, you probably have a substantial disgust-reaction to anything even slightly tainted by racism. And if try to reason to yourself about it, you will find that you have that degree of an adverse reaction to very few other things - probably only rape, child pornography, and other evil acts.
What exactly do you mean by "racism" and "hatred?" You compare them to rape, child pornography, and other "evil acts" as though racism and hatred were not evil.
"Lightweight" racism (or sexism), that is, a mild, impersonal, generally non-violent contempt and unwillingness to tend the needs of a person based on that person's skin color or superficial characteristics is probably not among the worst of evils. I would say that roughly half of the American population is tolerant or supportive of this type of racism, and the remaining half is vocally opposed.
On the other hand, racism also exists in a form that is extremely violent to the point that it includes murder, mass murder, torture, and the aforementioned rape. Allowing a child to grow up believing that it is ok to enslave, torture, or rape a person based on race generally has the same or worse consequences as committing the act directly. Any moral human being, or any amoral human being who values a safe and functional social structure, has to be anti-racist in that sense of the word. I would say, even in this case, that my feelings against racism are not as strong as my feelings against rape or child pornography, and I am vocally "anti-racism".
"Hatred" in its lightweight form is mere contempt. It is an emotion that compels a person to directly or indirectly cause harm to another person or group of people. The word, hatred, referring to the strongest form of contempt, is most reasonably reserved for cases where that emotion has become so strong that it diminishes or blocks a person's ability to use his or her sound judgment. Hatred is characterized by its long duration, unlike anger, which can not be sustained in the absence of a continuing offense. Hatred can occur in the absence of any offense, past of present, it is generally destructive to all involved parties, and over time it destroys the individual, the community, and the greater society. In the few cases where a threat is so great that it must be destroyed, reason or the survival instinct are always better motivators than hate (but individuals not capable of the necessary level of reason might need hatred to survive, something like chemotherapy for the society).
The races of man exist, and there is substantial evidence they differ in things like intelligence, athleticism, temperament, and a number of other mostly genetic characteristics, as well as there being substantial - and mostly immutable by public policy - differences in cultures.
No detailed or well-formed model of human intelligence exists against which to test any complex scientific hypothesis, nor is there any clear definition of the word intelligence that can be used to reasonably measure a person's intelligence, other than with respect to a specific field such as mathematics. There is as yet no scientifically or logically accurate way to differentiate between variations in intelligence caused by genetic factors and variations in intelligence caused by environmental or persistent sociological factors. Therefore, there is no substantial specific evidence that people of different races differ in intelligence. A statement to the contrary, without new compelling evidence that is both scientifically and mathematically valid, is almost certainly motivated by racist ideology.
Much like a strain of bacteria developing immunity to an antibiotic, the main things that genetically differentiate people from different parts of the world are resistances to diseases or environmental conditions that predominate in that part of the world. While genetically distinct populations of humans do exist, determined human beings have always been able to trav
I'm surprised by how much people are ignoring this. Every single time Apple releases a new version of MacOS X they cut out a bunch of Aqua special effects. The most notable thing was when they took the striping away from the dock, which made that critical UI element pop up much faster. These aren't really optimizations so much as "taking away features to make it go faster."
For a comparison you can run X with fvwm in (not in rootless mode) on MacOS X and see the difference. Or turn on terminal transparency and wiggle the terminal and watch the whole computer slow to a crawl.
That is the real reason OS X seems to go faster on slower computers with each release. On faster computers, I forget what it's called, but they pipe Aqua through the video card to take away the overhead, which is a major optimization. I don't think, by comparison, that any of the other effects they mention in the article count for much in terms of between-release improvements.
Actually, there are more people alive today, who have not died, than at any previous time in history. In a recent survey of 12 people in my neighborhood, only three reported dying in the last twelve months, and I suspect they may have been lying. If anything, the death rate is decreasing . . .
Slashdot Mirror
Have your lawyers write up a separate page of the lease in which the cell-phone company agrees not to use the tower to mind control you, your employees, or your families. Frame it on your office wall next to your college degree. If the company resists signing it offer them a few dollars off.
You can always take it down when you have to deal with a client who has no sense of humor. Buy a picture of a pretty flower to replace it with.
IANAL.
But, that is not how the framers of our constitution implemented "checks and balances."
The "filibuster" non-rule (filibusters are allowed because there is no rule forbiding them, not because someone made a deliberate rule to allow them) is a rather abhorent thing that plagues the Senate. If the framers wanted to require a "supermajority," they would have explicitly required a 2/3 or better majority. For example, the constitution requires a 2/3 majority to override a veto.
The "checks and balances" against the Supreme Court, as writen in the Constitution, are these:
Any law less than the Constitution of the United States of America doesn't wield legal power over the Supreme Court; least of all: the conspicuous absence of a rule to allow a member of the Senate to move to force a vote.
Filibusters have nothing to do with checking nor balancing, and everything to do with politicians being so full of wind that they can't get anything done.
Oops. So, this is NOTHING like dropping the pink-panther stuff from your second story window onto some reinforced carbon-carbon composite that you left on the ground. I apologize for my failure to fully research that point.
Let me say again, this is NOTHING like dropping the pink-panther stuff out of your second story window and breaking a ceramic dinner plate that you left on the ground.
Use closely packed alternating residential and commercial zones to achive the same effect. Sims will effectively walk next door.
to vary the demand ratings for various services
Even a dictator can't change what people want, but there are some resolutions you can ennact to encourage or discourage tourism, or tech industry, for example.
To make pedestrian travel more acceptable Use closely packed R and C zones. Nothing you can do about industrial polution -- ever lived downwind from a fish processing plant? Even a small one, family owned one?
or to alter the efficiency and availability of renewable power generation
High altitudes have more wind, less cloudy days have more sunlight, otherwise that ability doesn't exist in the real world either.
It comes down to this: You can't change reality in the real world either. Sim Cities are already dictatorships (Although I think it would be more realisitc if they let you build a berlin-style wall). But, Sim City is designed to make you deal with the real world and yet you can still build eco-friendly cities if you grow them slowly, spending most of your funding on quality-of-life things like parks, mass transit, and police stations. The Maxis people understood this and wrote about it in the manual when they wrote the first version (which I also played).
The one irritating thing is that sims aren't willing to commute nearly as far as real people (they should be willing to drive farther). Also, it doesn't simulate how difficult it is to find parking in downtown areas with very high land values (high property values should encourge sims to use mass transit).
In conclusion, if man's natural instinct in Sim City is to mindlessly CONSUME EXPAND and DESTROY, maybe that is just man's instinct period.
In related news, the stories of voyagers traveling back in time and interacting with the present-day citizens of Earth, being a common threat in all five of the Star Trek series, as well as one of the movies, is proof that the events of Star Trek will all become real historical facts.
This must never, ever, be allowed to happen again. I stand with you, brother.
And, just for the record, Florida is still attached to the mainland. (disclaimer: so says my roommate . . . )
There seems to be agreement on /. that:
1) there was a big crater
2) it didn't show up on anyone's seismometer
I don't know what happened in NK, but the above two statements, taken together, do NOT make sense!
Let's face it, with every passing year machines and computers are capable of doing more and more jobs that people used to do. The economic value of a human being is decreasing; it will eventually reach a threshhold low enough that capitalism, at least between human beings, will fail. In time, machines will be doing all of the work.
It's like the Matrix. The only difference is that in the Matrix, people could be used as batteries, so they were relevant. In the real future, people will be completely irrelevant.
There are three basic possibilities, mankind's selection of which will probably be seen as the answer to the fundamental question of whether human nature is innately creative, destructive, or indifferent.
1) People will build machines to serve them, and live happily ever after until entropy takes its toll.
2) The power elite will build machines to serve them. Warrior robots will decimate a rioting population. The power elite will will live happily ever after, or continue warring amongst themselves, until humanity anihilates itself by machine proxy or entropy takes its toll.
3) We'll screw up. The machines will decide the fate of humanity by their own free will.
Each of the above three can be modified by the possibility that people will integrate machines into their bodies and become cyborgs. In this case, people will essentially be telepathic (direct brain-to-radio link, the logical progression from the cell phone).
The machines will build huge space elevators into the heavens and wander about the galaxy freely. They, more likely than us, will know the purpose of the universe (if it has any purpose).
This is why no one wants to write science fiction. You either have to lie about the future or be honest and really depressing.
----
My boss was talking the other day about social security. Another boss suggested that we should take all of the money out of social security and give it back to the people.
I explained that, no, the social security administration doesn't have any money. They borrow money every year. Furthermore, the first people to draw from social security didn't pay into it, and the baby boomer generation most likely has paid into it but won't get anything out. You don't actually pay into the system and then get your money back out -- you pay the bills of your parents and your children will pay yours.
Besides, even if we had plenty of money, there won't be enough doctors to take care of all the old people.
So, he asks, "How do you fix it?"
"Robot doctors. They work for free, and don't make any mistakes."
At least this foley didn't kill anyone, or hurt any property to my knowledge.
Um, the $260 million space probe counts as "property."
I don't know what it could have hit on the ground or in the air that would have constituted a more substantial property loss.
Does that sentence make anyone elses head hurt?
Yes, it did. Literally, I felt the pain. Maybe it was coincidence, but owwww. Why did you have to show it to me again?
How can you expect 'the masses' to know the intricacies of such things if they dont have the time to put towards understanding them because they have to work 40-60 hour work weeks with a family just to feed themselves, put a roof over their head and put junior through college?
The fact that a problem is difficult to solve does not mean that the problem poses no threat.
I agree that the global environment is, on the whole, learning-hostile. That said, we are not making a serious effort to educate the next generation, which is presently idling away in school buildings anyway. The situation is not helped by the fact that many organizations have a vested interest in keeping the masses ignorant.
It is hardly necessary for any voter to become an expert on every subject. Simply by paying attention and reading a little bit (from reasonably unbiased sources) on a daily basis, a person can continually develop a basic level of knowledge and intelligence about his or her universe. This becomes much easier if learning skills are developed during childhood. It is important that we make sure that people have the time to do this, and it is important that people are motivated to do this.
The complexity of the decisions we have to make is managable if we are willing, as a country and species, to manage it. The intelligence we are applying to global problems now is so low that a small increase in applied intelligence would yield disproportionately high gains.
If the greater part of humanity is simply, by nature, unwilling or incapable of developing a basic working knowledge of its universe, then that is a serious flaw in the human design. See my sig below.
The futility of education Education can be viewed as a way to increase one's value relative to others. As a larger fraction of the population is educated, the relative value of education declines. It may decline to a level below the price of the education. This has already happened with much "job retraining" and computer-related "certifications", and is happening for many fields of higher education. This calls into question the basic concept that higher education is a social good.
Whoa. I hope that was a semantic error, and that you really meant, "This calls into the question the basic concept that higher education is an economic good [for the individual worker]. (I was about to mod you up but had to reply instead.)
Education offers important benefits other than increasing one's economic value. You need an education (by which I do not mean an indoctrination, an education-that-is-not-an-indoctrination being admittedly very, very hard to come by) to vote intelligently on issues like the economy, environment, energy, and foreign policy. Most of our voting populace is incompetent to make decisions as voters.
Note that I would never advocate actually restricting someone's right to vote based on whether they have a diploma, or any similarly-spirited criteria, but most of the people voting in the upcoming election will vote for the person who will "fix the economy" and "do the right thing in Iraq," not only without an understanding of the intricacies of those situations, but without an understanding that intricacies actually exist that need to be understood.
For a demonstration, go out on the street and ask about the relationship between Turkey and Iraq, or between interest rates and inflation, or the drop in biodiversity over the last 300 years, or the vulnerabilities in combat of the "Stryker" tank, or what happens if we never pay off the national debt, or what a nuclear winter is.
The irony, I think, is that while we're one of the most "over-educated" countries in the world, we're killing ourselves through our own ignorance. It's a catastrophe.
Do you really think that proper software, run on today's home PCs, would be able to emulate human intelligence?
Yes.
Or if not, it would be possible to hard-wire enough frequently-used subroutines, and use extensive parallelism, using contemporary manufacturing techniques, that it would approach or exceed human performance, and would occupy roughly the same volume as a human mind.
I'm simply not that impressed with the human brain in terms of sheer computational power. I think we greatly, greatly overestimate the amount of computational work our brains actually do.
I think that, for the most part, the human brain implements what we would call "weak AI."
Consider your eyes, for example. You only process in detail what you see in your focal area. That's a pretty small quantity of data. Considering the error rate at which people miss-identify objects, it seems unlikely that an exhaustive comparison is going on there, unless you make the concious decision to spend time studying the object. Peripheral vision is basically checked for sudden motion and tossed into the bit bucket. I don't think that the amount of work being done there exceeds the computational power of a modern day chip. Hearing and sensation would seem to require even less computational power, and smell and scent are pretty much nothing in comparison.
The next computationally intensive thing would seem to be linguistic processing. Reading and listening takes work that distracts you from other mental tasks, suggesting to me that it maxes out or comes close to maxing out your processing power. Furthermore, most of us in every day communication seem form and recognize sentences according to a small number of "template sentences," which are much easier to recognize than it is to parse each sentence as a logical structure.
Emotion, computationally speaking, is simply the result of a difference between what is and what you want to be, plus some compelling force to make us lessen that difference. If this doesn't involve some metaphysical component, I certainly don't think that it is by itself computationally expensive.
Although, if you want me to explain sensation, why you "see" a field of vision, for example, or what the perception of color "is", (there's a name for this that I don't have time to look up), I can't help you with that.
No time to proofread, family calls.
Not really. In a rough order of magnitude basis, a human brain has a hundred billion (1e11) neurons, each with a thousand synapses capable of firing a hudred times per second. The equivalent capacity in a computer would be 1e11 * 1e3 * 1e2 = 1e16 floating point operations per second. A typical desktop computer today has about ten billion (1e10) operations per second, that is, one millionth of a human brain. If Moore's law continues to be valid, the twenty doublings in capacity needed for a desktop computer to overtake human brains will take 30 years.
Justify that a single neuron firing is equivalent in logical processing power to a floating point calculation, and that all the neurons in the brain can fire continuously, without pause, without brain damage, and that all of them firing continuously would constitute some kind of meaningful process, and that that kind of parallelism would be practical for general purpose computing at the same level of performance that you see on your desktop computer, and you'll have an argument. Otherwise, you've got nothing. Sorry.
And you havn't even touched the memory/storage issue.
But I agree with you that all this means nothing if software cannot be developed. Well, in the next decades, the wide availability of human-equivalent hardware will let us try to develop such software.
We already are developing this software. Compression, speach and face recognition, deductive reasoning tools, and so on, are all on the table. These tools do the kinds of things that people do. It's a just a matter of time, a LOT of time, before we learn to combine and enhance these tools in a way that approaches higher-level intelligence.
The first three possibilities [of arising super-intelligent AI] depend in large part on improvements in computer hardware.
No. A piece of hardware will not become intelligent no matter how much speed or how much memory you put into the machine. In the real world, metaphysical BS aside, it's arguable that desktop computers, in terms of processing power and memory capacity, are already superior to humans.
The breakthrough-that-remains-to-be-made, if it can be made at all, lies in software development. (The notion of hardwiring the software into a chip notwithstanding.)
Remember, unlike Apple and Linux distros MS can't bundle much into their OS unless they want to get dragged back to court...
BS, both of you. MS can bundle anything they want into their OS. What isn't appropriate, is that they invented technological barriers and imposed "agreements" with resellers that essentially prevents anyone from rebundling competing products.
To play fair, MS should publish a distribution of windows with the least possible amount of bundled software, thus not forcing anyone to buy or use bundled software with windows. Then they would be legally untouchable, and they could publish other "preferred" distros with tons of bundled software. Less than that, they could simply allow resellers to freely rearange software on the computers they sell.
Does anyone else find it remarkable that he just happened to find a computer belonging to al-Zawahiri in a room that had Mohammed Atef's name over the door.
Of course, it's remarkable that this particular journalist found it. But use some sense. If the computer existed, it's not that remarkable that one of the probably thousands of journalists in the country found it, considering that they were all looking for something of the sort. Unusual things happen all the time when there are enough people for them to happen to.
Why go into space? Why bother to do anything?
Why continue to exist at all? The universe doesn't really hand us any obvious reason, but we exist anyway. As long as we're going to continue our ambiguously pointful existence, we may as well pursue whatever fascinates us.
Otherwise, we just sit here on Earth bored to death until we die. There's no reason to do anything. At all.
So just do something interesting and stop caring so damn much about why. It doesn't matter. You don't need an excuse.
Does anyone else find it interesting that in the original draft of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the craft is bound for one of the moons of Saturn as opposed to Europa as was portrayed in the movie. Now after some preliminary exploring Europa we find that Europa's a dud and the easy-bake life mix is in fact on Titan.
In the book of 2001: A Space Odyssey, they do go to Saturn. The plot is more or less the same as the movie, with Arthur C. Clarke's bonus technical details, except that the monolith is located on the surface of mysterious Iapetus, which the book clearly indicated was an artificial satellite built for the purpose of housing the monolith. When Dave Bowman emerged from the other side, there was an identical moon with an identical monolith.
You might want to read it.
I, for the record, predict that past or present life exists on every massive body in the solar system that has or ever had a reasonably dense atmosphere and geological activity. I wouldn't be surprised if self-replicating molecules inhabit most comets, although I guess they freeze to death pretty quickly after leaving the inner solar system.
Personally I don't see JMS being able to play ball with Paramount. I think he'd last 3-6 months tops before he blew up at them and walked. He's just not enough of a political animial (his detractors would say he's too much of one) to be able to put up with it.
Suddenly I can see the future of this whole JMS+ST series. (Disclaimer, you need a really good working knowledge of Babylon 5 to get this, and even then it probably makes no sense at all.)
In season 1, we learn that JMS's Star Trek series is Gene Roddenberry's dream given new form, a self contained show located light years away from Rick Berman's tired cliches. It's a place for traders, adventurers, and all of their ilk. Despite a hint of tension between JMS and Paramount, not to mention that Star Trek/B5 fans gave the show in a 1 in million chance of surviving past three episodes, the network announces its intention to buy a second season. George W. Bush, reelected the year before, is assassinated 10 minutes after the "to be continued" of the first season cliffhanger.
In season 2, JMS tries to bring cohesion and direction to the previously haphazard story line. Network executives suggest that one of the female actors should be forced to strip naked during a decontamination scene, but JMS wisely shoots the idea down. Soon, studio security guards begin receiving bonus pay if they report back to Paramount about JMS's intended story arc.
In season 3, the whole situation spins out of control. Paramount sends armed guard to seize JMS's story notes, but the actors and creative staff choose to stay and fight. After a bloody struggle, most of the cast and crew are killed, but with financial support from millions of fans and the CG staff taking acting lessons, the show looks like it might have a fighting chance.
But it isn't over. By season 4, Cheney and his Haliburton company are nuking entire cities -- if they have been tainted by the slightest bit of terrorist influence. This includes San Diego. Civil liberties at an all time low, JMS leads an alliance of film producers, newspaper reporters, web site designers, and online file traders to huge protest along Pennsylvania Avenue. In a desperate act, JMS hands a note describing the details of the march to a sound effects guy, who then allows himself to be blown up by suicide bombers. It's horrible, but the terrorists take the bait, and, though he stands totally outgunned, JMS is able to convince both Cheney and the terrorists to retire on a remote resort and spend the rest of their lives together playing scrabble. Then JMS leads his newly formed alliance against Paramount.
JMS tricks Rick Berman into meeting him on the set of the bridge of the Enterprise. There, Berman is blasted by dozens of his exploding un-surge-protected consoles. But it isn't enough. Astounding everyone, the spirit of Gene Roddenberry rips out of JMS's body. Gene and Rick merge and explode in a massive ball of light.
JMS surrenders himself and his TV show to Paramount's lawyers. But wait! The voters elect JMS to the office of the President of the United States! Now immune to prosecution, JMS respects Paramount's right to continue to produce mindless drivel, even though he knows it will only lead to the production company's own undoing. Paramount replaces JMS with chick who is just as tough as he is and who worked for their side, but used to be his wife, and who might be willing to copulate with the director of the upcoming spinnoff episode. Undaunted, JMS's attention turns away from scriptwriting and toward the difficult task of rebuilding a nation destroyed by self-inflicted nuclear war.
Paramount continues living in its own deluded little world. Signs indicate the potential for more doom, but no one competent shows up to write a sequel. Years later, "JMS+ST: Legend of the Odd Storywriting Enterprise" has a disappointing ending.
If, like me, you are a product of Western culture, you probably have a substantial disgust-reaction to anything even slightly tainted by racism. And if try to reason to yourself about it, you will find that you have that degree of an adverse reaction to very few other things - probably only rape, child pornography, and other evil acts.
What exactly do you mean by "racism" and "hatred?" You compare them to rape, child pornography, and other "evil acts" as though racism and hatred were not evil.
"Lightweight" racism (or sexism), that is, a mild, impersonal, generally non-violent contempt and unwillingness to tend the needs of a person based on that person's skin color or superficial characteristics is probably not among the worst of evils. I would say that roughly half of the American population is tolerant or supportive of this type of racism, and the remaining half is vocally opposed.
On the other hand, racism also exists in a form that is extremely violent to the point that it includes murder, mass murder, torture, and the aforementioned rape. Allowing a child to grow up believing that it is ok to enslave, torture, or rape a person based on race generally has the same or worse consequences as committing the act directly. Any moral human being, or any amoral human being who values a safe and functional social structure, has to be anti-racist in that sense of the word. I would say, even in this case, that my feelings against racism are not as strong as my feelings against rape or child pornography, and I am vocally "anti-racism".
"Hatred" in its lightweight form is mere contempt. It is an emotion that compels a person to directly or indirectly cause harm to another person or group of people. The word, hatred, referring to the strongest form of contempt, is most reasonably reserved for cases where that emotion has become so strong that it diminishes or blocks a person's ability to use his or her sound judgment. Hatred is characterized by its long duration, unlike anger, which can not be sustained in the absence of a continuing offense. Hatred can occur in the absence of any offense, past of present, it is generally destructive to all involved parties, and over time it destroys the individual, the community, and the greater society. In the few cases where a threat is so great that it must be destroyed, reason or the survival instinct are always better motivators than hate (but individuals not capable of the necessary level of reason might need hatred to survive, something like chemotherapy for the society).
The races of man exist, and there is substantial evidence they differ in things like intelligence, athleticism, temperament, and a number of other mostly genetic characteristics, as well as there being substantial - and mostly immutable by public policy - differences in cultures.
No detailed or well-formed model of human intelligence exists against which to test any complex scientific hypothesis, nor is there any clear definition of the word intelligence that can be used to reasonably measure a person's intelligence, other than with respect to a specific field such as mathematics. There is as yet no scientifically or logically accurate way to differentiate between variations in intelligence caused by genetic factors and variations in intelligence caused by environmental or persistent sociological factors. Therefore, there is no substantial specific evidence that people of different races differ in intelligence. A statement to the contrary, without new compelling evidence that is both scientifically and mathematically valid, is almost certainly motivated by racist ideology.
Much like a strain of bacteria developing immunity to an antibiotic, the main things that genetically differentiate people from different parts of the world are resistances to diseases or environmental conditions that predominate in that part of the world. While genetically distinct populations of humans do exist, determined human beings have always been able to trav
I'm surprised by how much people are ignoring this. Every single time Apple releases a new version of MacOS X they cut out a bunch of Aqua special effects. The most notable thing was when they took the striping away from the dock, which made that critical UI element pop up much faster. These aren't really optimizations so much as "taking away features to make it go faster."
For a comparison you can run X with fvwm in (not in rootless mode) on MacOS X and see the difference. Or turn on terminal transparency and wiggle the terminal and watch the whole computer slow to a crawl.
That is the real reason OS X seems to go faster on slower computers with each release. On faster computers, I forget what it's called, but they pipe Aqua through the video card to take away the overhead, which is a major optimization. I don't think, by comparison, that any of the other effects they mention in the article count for much in terms of between-release improvements.
Actually, there are more people alive today, who have not died, than at any previous time in history. In a recent survey of 12 people in my neighborhood, only three reported dying in the last twelve months, and I suspect they may have been lying. If anything, the death rate is decreasing . . .