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It's just a matter of keeping up with technology, and we can't. We evolve in a blind and slow process, while machines evolve fast, faster, fastest. Linear growth versus logarithmic. We lose.

Short conclusion: The stable intelligences must be machines. They would also be long-lived to the degree that interstellar travel is no problem for them. Extremely unlikely they haven't surveyed the neighborhood and spotted all the life-bearing planets. Gets more speculative, but if they are curious, then they would quite likely be interested in watching how life evolves, but that's partly on the theory that life diverges while computers converge. If they are lonely, they might be interested in company created by the transient naturally evolved intelligences.

Probably not my latest version, but I couldn't find one later than this: http://eco-epistemology.blogsp... The quatloos part is a Star Trek joke.

Regarding your comment about climate change, here is my recent palliative solution: https://ello.co/shanen0/post/w...

Thanks for the correction, but I couldn't find anything along the lines of ekronomics in his recent posts. So I decided to look at his journal instead and he immediately blew his credibility. As usual, I want to find a constructive approach, so it seems to call for a slightly longer intro to what I regard as ekronomics. These are just a few of the areas I've been thinking of.

The essential notion of ekronomics is that time is much more important than money and needs to be analyzed carefully. Focusing on working time, there are three basic kinds: (1) essential time to produce (and sustain) the goods and services we need to survive, (2) investment time that improves the productivity (equals reducing the required amount of essential time), and (3) recreational time, which actually includes both the production and consumption of recreational goods and services such as music, novels, and movies. That's not to say the division is always easy, but I think that's where we need to start. An obvious example of a complexity is education. A certain amount of education is essential to sustain any society, but the rest of it has to divided between investment and recreation time, and that's going to take some thought.

One application involves comparing national development. In a developed country (where almost all of the members of slashdot live) the productivity is high and the amount of time is low. Based on productivity figures that I've read and the demographic categories of the working population, I estimate that the value is on the order of 2 hours per week, averaged over the entire population. Remember that some people spend all of their working time in the essential work while other people are not doing any of it, but just buying what they need based on other work they are doing. In contrast, in a less developed society, almost everyone may be working 40 hours per work just to grow the food, while in the least developed societies (such as hunter-gatherer tribes or failed states) people may spend all of their time just struggling to survive. Looking at the future trend of national development from an ekronomic perspective, it is the balance between the other two categories that is crucial. If two countries start at the same level, but one country guides more time into investment while the other allows more time to be spent on recreation, then the first country is pretty sure to wind up more productive. Perhaps Singapore is an interesting example of this approach?

Another application involves determining proper and appropriate salary levels. From an ekronomic perspective, it is reasonable to try to evaluate jobs in terms of the amount of time people want to spend on them. I haven't yet been able to find much hard data in this area, but the research approach is obvious. You would ask a large number of people who have worked in different areas how they feel about the two kinds of jobs. A simple example question would be "How many hours of typing would you prefer instead of 1 hour of collecting garbage?" Of course the results will vary widely from person to person, but the averages will give a reasonable indicator of the desirability of different types of work and what the proper salary differentials ought to be, though you have to adjust for other factors, such as the educational time (investment time) required to qualify for the work and the prioritization of essential work. However, if you come to the conclusion that garbage collectors deserve relatively high pay and you happen to be a person who actually enjoys collecting garbage, then more power (and pay) to you and other people are unlikely to complain that they can use more of their time in other ways.

Recreational time is interesting in several ways. As a quasi-joke, I wrote a piece called "Couch potatoes of the world, unite." The URL is http://eco-epistemology.blogsp... and that was back in 2013, so I've been thinking about these ideas for a while... The i

and here's something

http://fukushimavoice-eng2.blo...

http://fukushimavoice-eng2.blo...

found in the comments of the article.

some kind of english translation, if you take it at face value, they were real enough to operate on, at least 99 of them were.

You'd fit in at Verizon :-)

http://verizonmath.blogspot.jp...

Rs12821256, genotype (C;C) has "2x higher likelihood of blond hair" according to SNPedia (based on earlier work), but this new article claims the G allele is associated with blonde hair. Not sure what that means...

Sorry I posted the wrong link.

[1] http://insanecoding.blogspot.j...

No it's not, it is stated quite clearly that it is written for OpenBSD. OpenBSD is mostly "POSIX-compatible" but they aren't too shy to extend libc when there isn't a good alternative. The slides and the talk mention strlcpy/cat(unfortunately ignored by C11 but widely adopted everywhere but GLIBC) and reallocarray. Only obliquely referenced is a proper kernel API (P)RNG which is not available in most platforms(using /dev/*.random instead, which has many issues[1]).
However, like OpenSSH, you can expect the LibreSSL portability team to write wrappers to make the best of what there is in your OS. As opposed to the best Win16 could do.

[1] http://insanecoding.blogspot.j...

Seeing as how some McDonalds employees physically assaulted Professor Steve Mann in an attempt to rip off his prosthetically-mounted digital eye glass, I take it they may also feel threatened by bionic eyes and may ban or even attempt to remove them. Sound far-fetched? Read what McDonalds did to Dr. Mann, and decide for yourself.

You've got a few of the points right, but my experience with a single-core Atom (recent Lenovo) versus a single core G4 (ancient G4 iBook) leads me to think Intel really only caught up with the PPC recently.

Atom isn't aimed at the laptop computer market. What Intel's selling for that market is, at least in the "compute pi with bc with scale=2000" benchmark, about 28 times faster than the G4 (it's quad-core, but, unless bc is multi-threaded, about all the other core might be doing is running Terminal as the digits of pi are being spit out, running Safari as it chews up CPU for already-loaded-but-still-open windows, etc.):

$ time bc -l <<EOF
> scale=2000
> a(1)*4
> EOF
3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307\
81640628620899862803482534211706798214808651328230664709384460955058\
22317253594081284811174502841027019385211055596446229489549303819644\
28810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610\
45432664821339360726024914127372458700660631558817488152092096282925\
40917153643678925903600113305305488204665213841469519415116094330572\
70365759591953092186117381932611793105118548074462379962749567351885\
75272489122793818301194912983367336244065664308602139494639522473719\
07021798609437027705392171762931767523846748184676694051320005681271\
45263560827785771342757789609173637178721468440901224953430146549585\
37105079227968925892354201995611212902196086403441815981362977477130\
99605187072113499999983729780499510597317328160963185950244594553469\
08302642522308253344685035261931188171010003137838752886587533208381\
42061717766914730359825349042875546873115956286388235378759375195778\
18577805321712268066130019278766111959092164201989380952572010654858\
63278865936153381827968230301952035301852968995773622599413891249721\
77528347913151557485724245415069595082953311686172785588907509838175\
46374649393192550604009277016711390098488240128583616035637076601047\
10181942955596198946767837449448255379774726847104047534646208046684\
25906949129331367702898915210475216205696602405803815019351125338243\
00355876402474964732639141992726042699227967823547816360093417216412\
19924586315030286182974555706749838505494588586926995690927210797509\
30295532116534498720275596023648066549911988183479775356636980742654\
25278625518184175746728909777727938000816470600161452491921732172147\
72350141441973568548161361157352552133475741849468438523323907394143\
33454776241686251898356948556209921922218427255025425688767179049460\
16534668049886272327917860857843838279679766814541009538837863609506\
80064225125205117392984896084128488626945604241965285022210661186306\
74427862203919494504712371378696095636437191728746776465757396241389\
086583264599581339047802759008

real 0m1.941s
user 0m1.936s
sys 0m0.003s

Just for kicks, I tried comparing my recent single-core Atom with my ancient G4, using bc to compute pi an easy way.

Not conclusive by any means, but food for thought.

Use bc to compute pi on a single-core Atom. (Relatively recent, right?)

Do the same on a G4 iBook. (Ancient, right? waaaaaaaay slow FSB, right?)

Now compare the time between charges.

Gives you something to think about.

You've got a few of the points right, but my experience with a single-core Atom (recent Lenovo) versus a single core G4 (ancient G4 iBook) leads me to think Intel really only caught up with the PPC recently.

Apple bailed, not on the PPC, but on Motorola and IBM's SOC ideas.

Jobs kept talking about the road-map during the switch. Not the CPU, the road map. Intel's (still vaporware) pseudo-UWB, on-chip peripherals dedicated to desktop functionality, etc.

Mostly they ran scared from real UWB, but that's a bit of history that Intel has effectively erased. (A little strong-arm here, a little bribe there, .... Maybe a little help from the government.)

Shoot, my single core Atom ultra-lightweight is about as slow as my (unfortunately dead) iBook G4 on most of the real-world loads I put on it. (Well, some, at least.) The Atom is no improvement over the G4 in battery use, either.

Intel really hasn't kept any of their promises, so we can see that all Jobs really got was road-map into the mists, and the approval of a bunch of lemmingeeks.

Well, I've been recommending a sort-of simple procedure for *nix users, where you call your browser through a restricted, dedicated user account with no login privileges.

By no means is it a perfect solution, but every speed bump and low wall helps a bit.

One could (should?) basically set up such pseudo-users for specific required processes that will run a java vm, and refrain from using Java otherwise.

Of course, any architecture that allows a server to feed a client a class that the client's machine will instantiate is going to be vulnerable.

It's funny how when sensationalist news articles talk about a Slashdotter's field of expertise, he is often skeptical. And rightly so, since he sees plenty of distortions and general shoddy journalism in popular news sources... when it comes to his field of expertise. But when an obviously sensational news article appears that is about some topic he knows almost nothing about... well! No need to be skeptical there! It must be the absolute truth!

This behavior is even more prevalent when the said news article is about something the Slashdotter hates and is not an expert on.

In short, I think we need to be a bit more skeptical about this supposed news. Here's a different perspective on it: http://tofspot.blogspot.jp/2012/06/fundies-are-coming-fundies-are-coming.html