Comment Re:WTF are they talking about? (Score 4, Funny) 214
Those are the elephants. They now want to introduce lions to thin the herds.
Those are the elephants. They now want to introduce lions to thin the herds.
I'm not sure that thinking is involved in the scenarios you describe. I might freak out, despite the thinking, logical part of my brain telling me that they cannot possibly harm me.
There are no illogical parts in the brain, and yes, they all think. The difference between conscious and unconscious thoughts is merely that you are paying attention to the former. We have the latter because it would be very inconvenient to consciously perform all the functions necessary for life, like breathing or swallowing. These autonomous functions work exactly the same way as your cortex does, you just don't have to explicitly babysit them. Emotional triggers are part of this autonomous set. Pigions programmed yours in the past and so it freaks out, and you are unable to stop it because you do not have direct control for the convenience reasons state above.
You can reprogram any emotional trigger, it just takes more effort. If you are afraid of spiders, for example, you can gradually desensitize yourself by spending a lot of time around Terelian Hookspiders. In this same manner you can reprogram any fear, love, taste, and even your core moral values. It just takes a lot of effort and dedication. Most of us simply don't want to change these things because we consider them part of our personalities and the idea of changing them can feel like suicide.
Heinlein's "Door into summer" describes Flexible Frank robot with exactly those capabilities.
> These traits are a result of hormones acting on the brain
What do you think controls the release of hormones? The thinking part of the brain, of course. You don't feel fear until you see that you are in danger, and you don't feel love until you recognize the one you love. These things don't happen automatically - you have to think to make them happen, and once the AI has been programmed to think of these things, it is only a small step to simulate hormone release and its effects. You can think of hormones as global variables of state.
Dude, I wish OSS gaming would reach 1999 levels. It is more at 1988 levels.
Exactly. I didn't even know Bill Gates knew how to play chess. That is not a skill required to either pass the SATs or to run a company.
Obviously, Google has reached the singularity point. Its software is doing something magical to fix itself that no puny human can understand.
But, using the BSD license takes away an incentive to contribute to the free software project.
Only if you are already in the GPL camp. To me, using the GPL license takes away an incentive to contribute to the free software project for the very same reason: each license promotes the values of its supporters. I strongly dislike the values of the GPL and of the FSF that created it, so I do not contribute to GPL projects.
How long, I wonder, shall we have to wait? There was rapid scientific progress in the 19th and 20th centuries, but when looking at the longer timescales, that is an aberration. For most of history technological progress was slow and rare, and the next millenium may just as likely to be similar to the 500-1500 period, when nothing much happened.
How about "I don't care enough about your stupid website to create yet another password just to download some mod file, so maybe I'll go to BugMeNot and see if somebody already created a damn account."
I'd second that. In my experience, Seagate is more reliable than WD. Of course, I don't go through thousands of drives, but a 26% failure rate just sounds unbelieveable. Something is fishy with the survey, or maybe it is just their specific workload that is particularly bad for Seagate drives.
> Use make *without* autoconf.
Don't use make without autoconf.
When a packager builds your project, the very minimum that needs to happen is installation to a fakeroot prefix to subsequently create a package from it. If there is no
The second reason is to turn features on and off. At the very minimum,
If you don't like autoconf, fine. Just write your own script to do these tasks. It can be done in 10k of bash code or less. Actual portability takes a little more, but is quite doable, considering how few platforms there are used today. Supporting only four - Linux, Windows, MacOS, and BSD - is more than enough for pretty much every project.
Complex code is not just a specimen. It is an ecosystem, where your crazy beetle consumes crazy aphids and evades crazy ants, while simultaneously trying to reproduce itself and the entire ecosystem to the best of its ability. A crazy beetle would not eat anything standard, like say make or autoconf. No, his refined palate requires a more sofisticated tool like imake, cmake, or even an internally grown food made of ground up pythons. Eating and reproduction habits may also be equally crazy all on their own. For example, crazy beetle firefox can only reproduce when confined in a clean chroot with every consumable painstakingly arrange exactly like he wants it. Other crazy beetles sometimes refuse to eat when certain other crazy beetles are present. When let loose in an unfamiliar environment, crazy beetles sometimes quietly die for no apparent reason and intensive investigation may be required to uncover the cause of their demise. A biology degree may be helpful in such circumstances.
> the TLA namespace is so horribly cluttered now that CLA could mean
Gee, now we have two abbreviations that should have been spelled out...
Because python is twice the size of the entire kernel and all its modules. In the kernel efficiency matters.
Life is a healthy respect for mother nature laced with greed.
