"GEB (Score:4, Interesting)
by gbjbaanb (229885) on Wednesday January 01, 2014 @05:28PM (#45840105)

GÃfdel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid [goodreads.com]

Godel, Escher, Bach is not a simple read. The ideas are complex and the logic subtle. But it is a completely satisfying book, and reading it is one of those rare experiences when you leave feeling smarter than when you started.

its true, though I felt like a complete simpleton after reading it - its an awesome piece of writing. Its not something to read casually though, you're gonna have to think, a lot."

Let's see if I can do an homage to that funky book.
4 3 2 1 3 2 2 6 2 4 5 4.
The sentence I will write in my next post is true. The one I wrote in my last post wants to be true. ... Nah. It's been too long since I read it to do it right. : (

This is the basic idea.

There's a bit of an idea here about "sunk costs" etc getting equipment past the Earth Gravity well. After that it's rather simple "relatively" to stockpile food. Air is a bit of the trickier part. But let's say they figured that out.

What 75 years of (even bad) Scifi has taught us is that you need a ridiculous batch of skillsets to do Mars right, way worse than planting flags on the moon. So I totally don't get why "with a little more engineering" they're not sending a Terraform team of 50, and then they get to study Group Dynamics and all that jazz. As it is, the second the pilot catches some dormant flu they're hosed.

The Replicator is partially here, for Digital Entertainment. And look at the fight to the death for it!

We can forgive T.O.S. for a lot of things being the first, and "being far enough back" they had a lot of ground to break and computers were 3rd generation ENIACS with better hardware. But it's interesting that Next Generation takes place in an updated time (including the early 90's) when enough of the early future of computing was clear enough ... ... and they still missed the Digital Rights theme. (Or else were told by the studios not to feature it!!)

Meanwhile, we're half way there on the physical printing side. "Everything is a file", and you become limited only by the "quality" of your "Replicator". The early days, all they could do is fill cheap plastic molds so you could make toy models and stuff. But slowly the surprises are coming.

Porsche Provides 3D Printer Blueprints for Scale Model Cayman
http://wot.motortrend.com/1312_porsche_provides_3d_printer_blueprints_for_scale_model_cayman.html

As a "Scale Model", that kind of thing could be an immense help for people like Indie Film-makers. Because a big limiting factor is props. Let's presuming the model car doors open, and you can get inside. Then it's 1982 Atari all over again, and you can just add CGI to the Windshield area to look like you are driving somewhere in your Porsche. Then you get out and go back to your film.

Or, as the homage itself, ... just print the props for a SciFi show!

So it's coming.

Beta Hath Been Foisted.

You can "visit it" any time you like, thus to ponder your idea above. Go to
http://beta.slashdot.org/

At least twice it has been automatically "foisted" on me.

Down in an obscure place that's hard to see in the footer, there's a link to "Slashdot Classic". Here is the Link Location:
http://slashdot.org/?nobeta=1

Meanwhile on phones, it sends up the Mobile Version, which is also pretty bad. But some sub browsers out there let you fiddle with the agent string to get back to Classic as well. (Though one of them gets chewed up trying to render the whole page.)

"Judges swearing oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights find it inconvenient to acknowledge the open-ended nature of the Bill of Rights (the 9th Amendment provides for unspecified rights retained by the people, the 10th Amendment for unspecified rights reserved to the people, thus requiring the government to NOT enforce any law that could reasonably be supposed to violate rights the people might want to assert, a check and balance over the system that many people overlook)."

Wow. To use the rhetorical flourish, "brainwashing is complete when you no longer even realize it"!

I'm pretty well aware of the emerging news under Amendments 1,4 and 5.

But it's time to re-write the reality of 9 and 10!

New #9: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the GOVERNMENT AND CORPORATIONS."

New #10: "The powers not delegated to the PEOPLE by the Constitution, or the States, are reserved to the United States, or the States."

(Executive Memo added: "A Reason must be given each time a Right of the People is granted to the Governments. The current Reasons are Preventing Terrorism, Protecting Children, and various alternates.")

All the battlegrounds over the lower amendments can be viewed in light of usurping #9 and #10! Yikes!

So far #3 hasn't been subjected to the wholesale assault yet ...

I'll reply to you just so you see it because the other fella was AC.

Another incentive is that slowly we begin to roughly notice each other. It's the same "1000 posters" in all the threads, any 60-130 +/- 17. I'll leave that to my statistical betters, but slowly you begin to notice the "regulars", confirmed by checking the id's, vs the scores of newer accounts.

The surprising thing is we have magically resisted the urge to create a downloadable database of our comments - nothing could be conceptually easier. But we sorta let "bygones be bygones" once or twice. Like the day I thought I was Teh $hit creating a Book Cypher. (But which would have still been beyond 91% of people here to break.)

We can gripe where the "magic cutoff is", but both of us are Under -1Mil in our ID, you're ahead of me, I'm guessing July 2002 or something when you joined.

The other annoying thing according to help is there's no interface to auto-bulk download our comments here because I have at least 700 Blog topics in my cumulative comments here, but one project to hand harvest them just died out.

But no, joining in January 2014 with an ID like 3142344 doesn't do anything for anyone anymore. You have to have "been here".

(No lawn to get off of. Remember? We can't afford lawns. Just have a coffee on me.)

There's a theme here that I haven't seen explored enough yet, of "auto post" vs "super-mod".

Gunnerkrigg Court and xkcd's comments come out pretty well. I forget what Randall M does for xkcd, but Gunnerkrigg Super-mods his.

But those kinds of things taken too far miss a bit of the refreshingly Low-R tone that Slashdot has developed over 15 years.

I try.

I set out years ago to build this "online brand" (my term for it). It's pretty solidly PG-13, maybe with a few comments straying into R. Now, PG-13 does include a few pointed words ... but when it's a movie, we're all fine with it.

But overall the tone is pretty level - I try for a +1 Funny +1 Insightful spin.

"Not unconstitutional (very arguable in this case) != OK."

Absolutely incorrect.

One reason we get upset at a lot of *other* Supreme Court cases is because at that level the rules change. They sometimes let "smaller things" slide that feel unfair, including mistakes by courts, but then decide on "is X constitutional", say yes it is, then kick it back for re-do in the lower courts.

The very definition of what the S. C. does is decide if things are constitional, and if not, it is *NOT OKAY*. It's the highest level of Not-Okay in the land.

Now, there's plenty of arguing, but re-phrasing your partial point would go like:
"There's nothing direct in the const. to cover this, but we feel it *does not violate the spirit*, so it's Okay." There's been some pretty bad results there, to be sure. But by definition the S. C. picks which of its two stamps it wants to bang on the motion.

"Besides, this is a class action lawsuit by lawyers hoping to hit the lawsuit lottery."

I guess I am getting a bit lost at the judgement of some of the lawyers in these various stories. So who in the Louisiana Sheriff's ... Fund decided it was a good idea to sue ... IBM?!

Isn't IBM going to do a lawyer version of a Tombstone Piledriver on their head for dragging them into MemeSpace?

Forget the Viral Cats. It's Viral News I can't understand properly these days!

What about motives for us?

To me this is a new wrinkle in the Linux discussion. We've been seeing uBuntu's "slide towards the Dark Side". A city running its own distro built at least partially from scratch (with German Engineers! Ha! Take that!) can potentially have a super clean codebase with none of the bloated and/or dangerous commercial cruft.

To my layman's eyes, Linux has been suffering from a bit of "X distro is/once was good and is slowly dying from lack of funds or internal politics". But a City has its own different motivation - it needs to Get Stuff Done with people mostly properly trained, vs the whole End User struggle for commercial distros.

So what if we can tap into their work and use it ourselves? Could they provide us with a distro with the full power of a city distro with (hopefully!) no hidden agendas, backed by their level of tech support they use themselves? That could be a new go-stone in the OS Wars.

Since the Germans are probably as upset as anyone else at the NSA, isn't that sorta "pitting them in a cage match vs the NSA spy-hackers"? If you had to put a bet on the NSA attacker vs the German Defender, which way would you go?

"Because what happens is a site says: either allow my cookies or I will not, or not fully, serve you. And because the average user..."

It's worse than that.

I'm somewhere in the middle of the pack. My "user side" skills are certainly a step above newbie. But when the "cookies and friends" are mashed into the loading process for a site from twelve component domains, you can't always just blindly turn them off either! Monster.com comes to mind... there are others.

So then if you're clever sometimes you can custom select which cookies to allow, but already that's losing the war. "I don't think I can stop them all..." - Magneto from X-Men movie 1.

The best I can hope to do is slow the tsunami down into a slow roar. : (

Hallo Ikanreed, I have to smash a couple of your notes together...

  by i kan reed (749298) Alter Relationship on 10:11 AM November 21st, 2013 (#45481327) Homepage Journal

I really do hope we're past the point that any major governments are populated with people that view AIDS as a "gay plague", because otherwise, I can easily see petty local leaders using this research to arrest sick people and charge them with murder. ...
"Yeah, I know that. ((Editorial ... To knowingly infect another person with HIV)) ... But unknowingly doing so can still be a target for the bigots out there."

Let's stop there.

I'll say this in my best PG-13 form. TSA has made us ... terrified... that five ounces of baby milk are a hazard risk. But ... millions of people ... can (slowly!) end your life... in thirty minutes.

This is one of the best examples that "divisions are separated". "Someone" (who deserved their paycheck!?) managed to separate 5OunceApplejuiceBearing terrorists, from the EndYourLifeIn30Min ... non-tracked entities.

So now this ... is ... news. Oh to be sure, parts of it were lingering. But because it's now News, it's Official.

So here we go! Are we "socially ready for this"!?

Not enough to actually bother replying in the thread!

Go on, try it!

Control-F Find for RichDiesal ... no comments!

So no, he doesn't have an axe to grind because he put it away four minutes after he turned the grinder on!

Unless he's lurking. Whatever.

I just have less respect for submitters who don't actively respond to the threads.

"But is there really any difference between having free will and appearing to have free will? Or, put another way, is there really any difference between the illusion of free will and free will? Is "free will" even a clearly defined concept? Some philosophers think not."

I think I am in the camp of something like "Whether anyone has free will or not for religious reasons, let's assume free will, then does an AI have free will? Yes."

In the many millions of funds I don't have, I believe that all thoughts are model-able. You might not get the original creative spark, but once the thought is known, it is model-able.

What we think of "free will" is some mix of heuristics "plus a beer". I'll repeat my private mini theory that we're racially terrified of true AI because that will forever change what we do with ourselves vs machines.

Taking a simple act that can work for both people and AI, "Do I GetData or Do I Get IntangibleHealingBenefit"? For that second one, the human goes to sleep and the AI DeFrags/Prunes/Optimizes its KnowledgeBase. Both "Feel/CanBeMadeToSimulateFeeling" the struggle between data and systems management.

Whatever the heuristics are between the "beings", the act of decision is the same. And that's why it's not a magical "human right of free will". AI Free Will is a snap. We're just desperately afraid of it. See T2, "If the wrong heuristic gets in there..." - well that's what sociopathic killers are. Humans running a badly flawed HumanOS.