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Like the IEEE says, it's bullshit in the sense that it's not quantum in the sense usually understood and it's no more effective than a traditional computer. What is more, as with all snake-oil, it has not allowed peer review.

It would be interesting to see how the money flows from the citizen-taxpayer via the government through Lockheed into D-Wave and finally back to the people in government who set up the purchase.

Here's a paper on the same subject from 18 years ago, and that was just the first result I found on google scholar!

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=256563

Obviously, there have been advances since then but this certainly isn't a new idea by any stretch of the imagination.

better link. Also, I didn't realize it at first, this is the person mostly responsible for it. She is from Australia and she decided to do this. I wonder what the catch with her is...

There should be a System Admin "Code of Ethics". The closest is the IEEE "Code of Ethics", or the ACM "Code of Conduct" if they happen to have joined.

The first is "bite sized", the second is probably more relevant but way more wordy, but how many people even bother joining either?

We are unorganized as a group at large, and the lack of standards to adhere to is part of the problem that we, as a Profession; including Admins, Programmers/Developers, Support Techs; need to address somehow.

(/rant) :)

computer professionals for social responsibility

cpsr.org

http://cpsr.org/issues/ethics/index.html

FTFY

That scratching sound is onda technology getting added to the "don't use" list all around the world.

+1 insightful

Wether he was right or wrong in being the only person with admin access, and wether that was a situation he created, or was thrust upon him, I am APPALLED by the fact that he attempted to hold the system for ransom.

There should be a System Admin "Code of Ethics". The closest is the IEEE "Code of Ethics", or the ACM "Code of Conduct" if they happen to have joined.

The first is "bite sized", the second is probably more relevant but way more wordy, but how many people even bother joining either?

We are unorganized as a group at large, and the lack of standards to adhere to is part of the problem that we, as a Profession; including Admins, Programmers/Developers, Support Techs; need to address somehow.

(/rant) :)

• Coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear waste.
• Nobody died because of Chernobyl (comfortable to believe).
• Nuclear waste is not a problem, the French reprocess their waste easily (they don't).
• All issues with nuclear (raising costs, aging designs, no R&D, etc) are basically due to environmentialist whackos/Jimmie Carter.
• Sun doesn't shine at night so solar energy is unusable.
• Thank God nuclear energy is our only option.

According to this article it has a range of 3 km.

depending on size - having not gotten to TFA yet

Here's a better article on it with some pictures that show scale (in case you're not on board with the video craze): http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/military-robots/aeryon-scout-quadrotor-spies-on-bad-guys-from-above
It can easily fit in a small suitcase, so no, you're not going to be mounting firearms on it.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/humanoid-robot-justin-learning-to-fix-satellites

What is indeed news is that intel is fielding them first.

Well, while it is nice a slashdot article has finally been written about FinFET's - there may already have been one, I just can't remember - these devices have been widely guessed to be a part of the 22 nm technology node for quite some time. (see: http://www.itrs.net/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/22_nanometer ).

They offer more effectivity for your gates as the field is not coming from one, but from 3 sides to the channel. That means a bit more scalability, but not much more. There is only a bit of improvement possible for the future in putting the gate below the channel as well (as hard as that may be, i, personally, don't think it would be worthwhile), so this won't save moore's law in the end.

It may not surprise you that they actually haven't been invented by intel, and are not new.

The term has been coined more than 10 years ago ( http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=823848 ) (find one of the free pdf's of this classic paper for yourself)

What is more interesting is how far down these transistors will scale in the extreme ultraviolet processes that are emerging right now.

The previous "crowning moment" of an underwater search and recovery was the cargo door from United 811. The door blew out on a flight from Hawaii, killing 9 people. After an extensive search 15,000 ft underwater (chapter 5, page 4-16) they found and recovered the cargo door from the floor of the Pacific. It was vital to determining that a design flaw in the door's locking mechanism caused the accident. (I remember the Oceans '91 paper being better, but it's behind a paywall.)

Finding something this small in the middle of the Atlantic at these depths is quite an accomplishment. The cargo door at least was large enough to generate a return on sidescan sonar, and was sitting in relatively flat terrain.

Sorry, I should have clarified I was referring to standard crystalline silicon pv. PV was too general a term.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell#Efficiency

In terms of the fundamental limit, carnot comes into play:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F4915369%2F5021489%2F05021557.pdf%3Farnumber%3D5021557&authDecision=-203

There are different estimates out there for exactly where we'll hit it with solar, but it is well short of 100%.

"Although [we have an incomplete brain model description]."

I think the same thing could be achieved with just an RC filter. If I'm following this correctly, the difference here is a "demonstrated variation in synaptic strength, a key neural mechanism associated with memory and learning." Things will really start to get interesting when something like this circuit can be made that is also capable of amplification. That would be a complete artificial neuron.

Perhaps, but the model would still be wrong -- They're still fundamentally doing it wrong.

Brain waves form magnetic eddy currents which induce currents in near-by neurons that are NOT EVEN CONNECTED to each other.

This is where almost all AI research gets the brain wrong... The neuron connections are only part of the brain -- Actual thought is carried along the connections as well as in neurons that are physically close to each other (and to a lesser degree the neurons they are attached to).

There are so many papers on the therapeutic use of magnetic induction on the human brain, I see it as a failure that this subject is largely ignored by AI network design.

"Although there are a multitude of variations in synapses, we have modeled a typical cortical synapse. Action potentials, the signals from other neurons that arrive at the synapses are about a millisecond in duration and about 100 mV in amplitude. Under certain conditions, the synapse responds with an output potential of around 5-10 mV that lasts around 10 ms. Thus the synapse slows and spreads the effect of the action potential, synchronizing its effect with other action potentials, since not all action potentials arriving at the postsynaptic neuron will arrive simultaneously...The resulting postsynaptic potentials produced by many synapses combine to create enough potential (voltage) for the postsynaptic neuron to generate an action potential and fire."

I think the same thing could be achieved with just an RC filter. If I'm following this correctly, the difference here is a "demonstrated variation in synaptic strength, a key neural mechanism associated with memory and learning." Things will really start to get interesting when something like this circuit can be made that is also capable of amplification. That would be a complete artificial neuron.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5754178

Reminds me of the Greek wiretapping scandal. In that version of the wiretapping scandal, a very technically sophisticated attacker (possibly an insider in the phone company) installed wiretap software into the phone network's routers. News broke after a top exec at the phone company hanged himself. Though surely there's a lot we don't know, it was almost certainly not official company policy to cooperate with government wiretaps on political opposition.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/processors/the-truth-about-benders-brain I didn't realize that Apple would be responsible for Bender's MOS 6502 brain. Apparently David X Cohen programmed assembly for the Apple ][ in high school.

There are ALWAYS tons of Apple/Mac/6502 jokes and references in Futurama.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/processors/the-truth-about-benders-brain I didn't realize that Apple would be responsible for Bender's MOS 6502 brain. Apparently David X Cohen programmed assembly for the Apple ][ in high school.

> Oh yes, if he can fund a test launch, he can surely fund a trip to mars to set up a greenhouse. That makes total sense.

If he wants to, pretty much, yeah. The work SpaceX has already been doing with heat shields, solar power, and propulsive landing potentially makes it even more feasible now than it was back when Musk would have had to start from scratch. The biggest barrier he faced back in 2001 was the cost of launch. Here's a more recent (2009) recollection of Musk's about the Mars Oasis project:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/risky-business/0

At first, I thought I'd use some of my PayPal money to popularize the idea of life on Mars. I settled on a mission called Mars Oasis, which would land a small robotic greenhouse that would establish life on another planet and show great images of green plants on a red background. It would get the public excited, and we'd learn a lot about what it takes to sustain plant life on the surface of Mars.
I quickly found that the biggest obstacle was the cost of the launch. A U.S. Delta II rocket would cost $60 million, while a refurbished Russian intercontinental ballistic missile would cost $10 million -- without the necessary third stage.
I gathered a group of engineers from the space industry to find a way to get the launch cost down. We determined that we could do it by optimizing the design for cost and by making the rocket reusable. Of course, we also had to ensure that it performed at least as well as other available rockets. I dropped the greenhouse idea; my goal now was to make it technically and financially possible to extend life to Mars. In 2002 I founded Space Exploration Technologies.

There was an IEEE spectrum article a few weeks back, proposing a continuous transmission system. Here it is: http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/beyond-the-black-box

http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/beyond-the-black-box

Yes this is being talked about

That's a really interesting design, thanks for posting it. However, from their paper (paywall) it seems like the RBW (to use the spectrum analyzer term) is dependent on how many of these filters you put in. If you want a fine resolution over a wide band, you're going to need hundreds of these things per decade, and thousands overall. Certainly possible, and I wouldn't be surprised to start seeing them before long, but maybe not that much cheaper than conventional spec ans -- remember, a lot of that $10k price tag is for software, support, testing, calibration, etc. And they won't be replacing conventional spec ans, because it doesn't seem like this tech is scalable down to really fine bandwidths (~1 Hz RBW).

Also, I disagree on the cochlea being incorporated into every mobile RF device. There's no reason for most devices to care what's going on outside of their operating band, so why waste space and power on this? It certainly isn't sensitive enough to replace the receiver, especially not while taking up less space.

Before you go pokin other people's eye's out with your 'knowledge stick', you may want to make sure it's properly sharpened.

And don't shove it in your own eye.

Moore NEVER said ANYTHING about PERFORMANCE NOR did he EVER say ANYTHING about TWO YEARS.

tyvm, turn in your badge at the door. And pick up a rock of meth on the way out.

-AI

[emphasis added]

Al,

From Wikipedia:

Moore's original statement that transistor counts had doubled every year can be found in his publication "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits", Electronics Magazine 19 April 1965: ... Moore slightly altered the formulation of the law over time, in retrospect bolstering the perceived accuracy of his law.[16] Most notably, in 1975, Moore altered his projection to a doubling every two years.[Original source: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1478174 subscription required] Despite popular misconception, he is adamant that he did not predict a doubling "every 18 months". However, David House, an Intel colleague,[18] had factored in the increasing performance of transistors to conclude that integrated circuits would double in performance every 18 months.[19]

I got it partially wrong. I admit it and I embarrassed myself in front of thousands (hundreds?) of slashdotters.

I *should* have said that Moore predicted that transistor density on ICs would double every two years. That's absolutely not performance. I incorrectly combined the predictions of Mr. Moore and Mr. House.

However, the poster I responded to (based on their comment) couldn't find their ass with both hands and a mirror.

BTW, thanks for being wrong too. please drop your badge next to mine and I'll save you a rock, bud!

Moore's Law ensures that every year people will find that their computer is too slow , and they will buy a new one , which in turn provides revenue for the manufacturers.

That's not what Moore's law says at all http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1478174 [subscription required].

Moore predicted that IC *performance* would double every two years.

Are you that uninformed or just addled by crystal meth?

Before you go pokin other people's eye's out with your
'knowledge stick', you may want to make sure it's properly
sharpened.

And don't shove it in your own eye.

Moore NEVER said ANYTHING about PERFORMANCE
NOR did he EVER say ANYTHING about TWO YEARS.

tyvm, turn in your badge at the door. And pick up a rock
of meth on the way out.

-AI

Moore's Law ensures that every year people will find that their computer is too slow , and they will buy a new one , which in turn provides revenue for the manufacturers.

That's not what Moore's law says at all http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=1478174 [subscription required].

Moore predicted that IC *performance* would double every two years. Are you that uninformed or just addled by crystal meth?

I might have to call this one bullshit. I briefly checked Asahi, Mainichi and Yomiuri, the three major newspapers in Japan. Only Mainichi has this news.

Few details, but here is a samplng of stories about eployment of the Global Hawk UAV and its capabilities:

Global Hawk offers images of quake's destruction [March 18]

Guam Global Hawks Surveying Earthquake Damage [March 18]

Japan Earthquake: Global Hawk UAV May Be Able to Peek Inside Damaged Reactors [March 17]

And leave toxic waste as well as hot nuclear material that has to be guarded so terrorist won't get their hands on it.

I think Goodwin's Law needs to be updated

What, so that any mention of the possible disadvantages of nuclear power automatically ends the thread? That's a terrific idea, well done!

Reprocessing the spent fuel can remove all the extremely radioactively hot material which can then be fissioned in the reactor again. That'll break it down into much cooler material.

You might want to tell France how to do it then.
"France’s engineers tried harder than those in any other country to build and run breeder reactors reliably at a commercial scale, but ultimately they failed. The result is that even in France--the best real-world model of what reprocessing can accomplish--the technology remains a tantalizing but only partial solution to the problem of high-level nuclear waste."

Falcon

And leave toxic waste as well as hot nuclear material that has to be guarded so terrorist won't get their hands on it.

I think Goodwin's Law needs to be updated

Fast breeder reactors can burn that waste leaving material with a half life of mere decades.

And leave toxic waste as well as hot nuclear material that has to be guarded so terrorist won't get their hands on it.

Falcon

Double-precision linpack performance increase over a CPU-only system is ~288GFLOPS per Tesla M2050 card (up to 4 cards per system - adding more doesn't help without going to exotic motherboards. See news report of IBM study). Raw performance is 515GFLOPS/card (double precision), so you're looking at ~56% utilization. Others report 53% overall on a massively parallel setup ( See: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=5470353 )

A rough rule of thumb for linpack double-precision is 25% of the theoretical single-precision performance. The gain is 4-8x over a standard processor depending on whether the metric is peak performance, performance/$ or performance/W. If you can live with 1.5GB non-ECC (GTX480), then it's about 8-32x gain depending on what you're comparing it to. Some applications will see a smaller gain, some larger. If it's matrix math under the hood, then linpack should be in the ballpark.

See gpgpu.org for papers and news on different applications.

The pictures and video are pretty interesting, but also awfully short. It would be neat to see some combined expressions rather than just simple blinking and mouth movement. Speaking of the movement in the video, was anyone else reminded of Not Quite Human? Haven't thought about that movie in quite a while :)

Also, can anyone say "uncanny valley"? They've definitely made progress, but there's still something... not quite right about it. Considering that the easiest part of creating an android is probably the static external features such as skin, hair, and eyes (lots of practice from movie/TV makeup), it's interesting that a still photo still triggers the cues which tell us "that's not real."

Now only a few things left to do:

1. Create an evil twin bent death, carnage, and annihilation
3. ???
4. Profit! (well, that, or doom the human race)

Some of the manufacturing shots are pretty disturbing, though.

this one, for instance feeds exclusively on human fear...

http://spectrum.ieee.org/image/1803983 ...that's a younger, albeit undead, John Cleese o.O

Google isn't the first to do this, not by a long shot. Last year, there was a story about an autonomous car driving from Italy to China

Actually Google is among the first. They have hired the Stanford engineers that were first and second at the DARPA challenges. They have the brains, and most likely the money.
Citing your article:

Unlike the Darpa vehicles, the VisLab van is not driving fully autonomously from start to finish. [...]
Two vans travel in line. The first uses maps and GPS to drive itself whenever possible, but a human driver is in control most of the time. The second van uses its cameras and navigation system to follow the first;

Google cars on the other hand are driving autonomously almost all the time.

I'll wait until they make on like this so I can call 900 numbers.

Google isn't the first to do this, not by a long shot. Last year, there was a story about an autonomous car driving from Italy to China. There were humans on board to take over in the event of a problem, of course. I'm sure there are other examples as well.

It is cool tech, but I think it'll be a long time before it's mature, and an even longer time before it gains acceptance. People want to be in control of their lives, even if they're better off relinquishing control. Whether it's long road trips due to fear of flying or keeping a gun in their nightstand, people often choose to do something that is statistically more dangerous rather than put their lives in someone else's hands. I'm not saying that that's a bad thing or a stupid thing, just that it's human nature. Not many people will be willing to trust a computer to drive them, even if it's safer.

Why hasn't it occurred? Because powerful computing hardware has never been so cheap and abundant. That is the new, disruptive change. It still growing by leaps and bounds. You can already buy cards with 64 cores running linux and put them in your PC or robot. Mobile devices are already going multicore. Distributed machine learning is already a reality. Those things did not exist before. and that is why there hasn't been 50% unemployment due directly to automation. Forget Asimov and Bradbury, they did not foresee it. Try Marshall Brain instead.

Thanks for both of your replies - interesting stuff. Someone else posted this link in reply, it goes into pretty fine grained detail about efforts to model a fruit fly brain, pretty fascinating. The article points out that in addition to the extreme complexity of the actual connections, it is even more complex in that "firings" of the neurons aren't simple on/off firings, they can each fire at at different percentages. It also goes into the storage space required to store what they find - it's staggering.

you must have never heard of Janelia Farm, the home base of HHMI foundation, where they have a huge project of reconstructing fly brain http://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/ethics/reverse-engineering-the-brain

I originally thought of the nixie tube.

It seems to be popular with hobbyists and collectors, but it's unlikely to be used as a work tool anymore.

I think there's less reason for doubt than is generally believed. There's been a fair bit of interest in resource extraction. Primarily for the moon, but likewise for Mars. The present players seem fairly comfortable with the engineering aspects. The main concern relates more to legal title to the resources once extracted. The wealth locked up in NEOs is unfathomable and the private sector is in a far better position to leverage it than government.

This is covered somewhat in this spectrum article:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/materials/graphene-electronics-unzipped/0

Too bad we can't fashion graphene into a full replacement for silicon, but only a complement. Unlike silicon, graphene is ambipolar, which means it lets current go through regardless of whether a positive or negative gate voltage is applied. Doped silicon, by contrast, is unidirectional—that is, it allows current flow only when the gate voltage is at a certain polarity (say, positive or negative). Ambipolarity may seem like a bug rather than a feature, but with a little thought, electrical engineers can design around this problem and even create devices that take advantage of it. Researchers at MIT have demonstrated an elegant example of this by using ambipolar graphene FETs as frequency multipliers, which double the frequency of an electromagnetic signal in radio communications and other applications. (This device employs pure graphene FETs, enabling it to perform a function that carbon can handle but silicon cannot.)

because after I seen the statement on gap, I searched and immediately got an article - graphene not only can be equipped with gap, but tunable one. just make double layer graphene: http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/materials/graphene-makes-transistors-tunable

Links (or anything, really, keywords, a name, an airplane model), please. The question whether there is even the possibility of personal electronic devices interfering with commercial air liners seems to be at the heart of the issue.

The TFA is a good start. Another article linked in the TFA is another. Short answer: Interference from unwanted EM radiators in cabin is rare, but has been documented.

Policy issue: How much hassle do you want to impose on people to minimize rare, but potentially disastrous issues, especially when it revolves around doing something as stupid as playing 'Angry Birds'?

Very specific models of phones have been shown to mess with small aircraft's displays. See page 4 of this article http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/unsafe-at-any-airspeed I swear that the IEEE also released an article specifically naming some cellphone models, but I can't find that paper right now.

IEEE did as thorough of a study as they could (since they dont' own the planes or airlines, etc). Fairly interesting read: http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/unsafe-at-any-airspeed

http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/mining-the-moon

It looks like the idea is to mine the moon for materials to make fuel for space exploration.

Also, if we ever get fusion going, heavy isotopes of hydrogen and helium become possible targets.

That's no excuse. The T-800 series Terminators and Bender both ran a 6502 at their core and performed quite well.

Connecting to a wireless router usually means obtaining IP settings via DHCP. In the process, the MAC address of your network adapter (which is supposed to unique) will be recorded on the router, at least for some period of time. Therefore, if you want to connect without leaving an obvious fingerprint pointing back to your computer, first modify the MAC address that your network card is putting out. On Windows machines, drivers often provide a way to specify your MAC address under the "advanced properties" of the adapter. On my Intel network adapter, for example, the setting is listed as "Locally Administered Address", and is undefined by default.

You might even spoof a specific make of network adapter by choosing an "Organizationally Unique Identifier" from the OUI Public Listing.

I want my Hrp-4c: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/how-to-make-a-robot-dance