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You don't correct the grammar of a quote, douchebag.

You do if the quote is quoted incorrectly with poor grammar, douchebag.

There's only been one scene with sex scenes in it that I've enjoyed in recent years, and that's 'Free Enterprise'.

Great flick, btw... They even got William Shatner to play as imaginary version of himself:

Imaginary William Shatner: What'd he say?
Young Robert: You really don't want to know.
Imaginary William Shatner: I really do want to know!
Young Robert: He said that Han Solo was cooler than Captain Kirk.
Imaginary William Shatner: Kick the little fucker's ass!

That bit of dialogue alone almost makes it worth the price of entry, but the rest of it's pretty good too.

- Free Enterprise IMDb page

Any "Universal Health Care" plan must by necessity mean that people are coerced into buying their own or paying for others to have health care.

Oh I agree. I don't think anyone should be coerced into paying into any health care scheme if they don't want to. Therefore I oppose any sort of universal health care.

Competition in health insurance will lower insurance premiums.

And has it? Or has it resulted in insurance companies lowering costs by providing fewer benefits?

My point is there is no free market in health insurance. Most people in the US who have it get it through their employer, where the employer contributes to the insurance. Because of laws it's cheaper for employers to do this than for employers to pay employees more. If they could pay employees more without them or the employees having a large tax bill then they will. One of the issues today between the US auto manufacturers and the United Auto Workers, UAW, is health insurance. Because the cost of providing health insurance to employees is raising the auto companies want workers to pay more for insurance. However the workers don't want to pay more. This goes away if employees were paid more. I don't know the costs now but say GM can pay employees $1000 a year more tax free, with 10,000s if not 100,000s of UAW members insurance companies will step up to offer health insurance to those people, and to try to sell as many policies as they can they'd lower premiums and or offer different plans. Someone single may only want catastrophic coverage and will pay out of pocket for normal expenses. They may be able to get coverage for $500, then they can put the other $500 into a medical savings plan. A married couple with two children may want full coverage. So they may have $2000 to pay. With 3, 4, or more insurance companies compeating against each other they will be willing to lower insurance premiums to entice the couple to go with them, they'd rather have a more people paying a little less, having 100,000 people paying $900 per person is better than 10,000 paying $1000.

Maybe that's fine if you're completely pro-free market and don't mind that some people can't afford and thus don't have health care,

As stated above, with competition from a free market insurance companies will lower their insurance premiums and more people will be able to afford coverage. If for some reason some people are unable to afford any insurance Civil Society can provide assistance. A concerned group like the Rotary Club or Elks Lodge can open up a free clinic on a street corner. The Shriners Hospitals have treated many, many children. Saint Jude Children's Research Hospital started by Danny Thomas threats many more children for free. " St. Jude is the only pediatric research center where families never pay for treatment not covered by insurance, and families without insurance are never asked to pay." Imagine how many more would step up to the plate if they could keep more of the money they work to earn.

I can't wait for the robot-themed remake of The Fly.

I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids., general Jack D. Ripper

is that hawt orange bikini Halle Berry slithered out of the water in on 'Die Another Day' back in 2002. Don't worry, they will, and they'll likely be done in together, in the same spot, around the same time, in the same type of vehicle http://www.car-accidents.com/pages/stats.html. You humans are so predictable ! Halle Berry on the other hand, is a fantastic example of what you humans may assimilate someday: http://www.imdb.com/gallery/ss/0246460/Ss/0246460/au2_14s.jpg.html?path=gallery&path_key=0246460 which would truly be worth Dying Another Day ! (I know I'm getting modded wayyy down for including that nasty IMDB in a post!)

Anyone else think of this movie after reading the summary?

That movie was already made. It was called "Signs" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0286106/

It is a short sory by Isaac Asimov called "Breeds there a Man...?".

If you like that, I'd recommend the movie Pi which has similar ideas.

That sounds very much like the basis for Vantage Point (IMDB link), a movie whose trailer I saw just last night for the first time. 8 different witnesses from different places in the crowd each have a different bit of knowledge contributing to figuring out who shot the US president. I thought it looked worth seeing, if only for the multiple vantage point concept that you describe.

Miss Lippenreider : Scream. Scream. Help me! Do not pull my arm!

You've just perfectly described "Signs."

"Monster appears in deserted area" has been done many times. My favorite is "The Navy vs. The Night Monsters". Monsters appear on tropical island. After various adventures, people on island get on radio and call in an air strike. Jet fighters are dispatched, blow up monsters. Final scene shows black smoke rising out of jungle. No more monsters.

The 1950s were a very confident period in the US. After winning WWII, no conceivable monster or monsters looked like a serious threat. '50s SF reflects that.

Is this close enough to monsters popping up out of the city?

If your premise was to assume that in the future all robots are going to be highly intelligent, then sure, I agree with you, but I don't necessarily see that becoming the case, I think very few will be.

Nothing so grandiose. My point was rather that there are too aspects to intelligence (well, probably many, but let's focus on two): one is having the "componentry" of intelligent behavior, that is, one-or-more general purpose problem solvers (whether or not any good) and a bunch of sensors and actuators; the other is "being able to use those devices well". When you say "highly intelligent", no, I don't mean it in the sense most people would think of that. But I mean it in the sense that a 2-year-old might be seen to be a great intelligence. It sees things, it runs around, it has a primitive goal structure and ability to reason, it has no common sense, and a great deal of ability to do a lot of damage. That I expect there to be a lot of.

An apparent premise of yours (though perhaps not one you intended?) is that we will build a number of special-purpose devices limited to a single task, and I don't expect that to happen. The economics of it don't work. That's like seeing the early game industry, and the free-standing Pong game, and assuming that future game processors would contain exactly one game. Or like assuming that future calculators would do exactly and only what was on the buttons. Everyone knows that programming is maleable, and there will be instant market pressure for that. Besides, just as Star Trek has driven other things, everyone--even some who have seen and shed a tear during The Measure of a Man (Star Trek: The Next Generation)--will want to own a Data. There probably won't be one worthy of the character for quite some time. But there will be money to be made by selling anything that can be plausibly claimed to be close. (Nor will the data be all in until it plausibly supports a claim of being "fully functional".)

You could try to convince me that people will have self-control and won't allow pushing the line of what's possible--that they'll demand prudence in what capabilities are given such a device. But, if you were so inclined to take that tack, you couldn't even answer for email and web browsers. You'd think we as human beings would not have relinquished the right of the machine to start programs on its own just because it or someone or something thought it was a good idea, but that's precisely what happens when client-side scripting occurs, for example. It's the delivery backbone along which viruses and worms travel. And the primary reason it's a threat is that human beings are too lazy to actually answer questions every time one of those things needs to run, and not well enough qualified to answer the questions anyway. To compensate, they haven't gone to school to learn more or allocated extra hours in the day to answer queries. Rather, they have simply lowered the bar on safeguards they are willing to tolerate until things are able to run on their own without human intervention, all in the service of saving time and energy. Why will robot safeguards follow any different path?

If there's something to fear it's not robot intelligence. It's developmental phases, like the terrible twos, that we'd have to live through to get there. And while I'm not bullish on the Singularity coming any time soon, I don't think the earlier, pre-Singularity, phases are something we can ignore.

If your premise was to assume that in the future all robots are going to be highly intelligent, then sure, I agree with you, but I don't necessarily see that becoming the case, I think very few will be.

Nothing so grandiose. My point was rather that there are too aspects to intelligence (well, probably many, but let's focus on two): one is having the "componentry" of intelligent behavior, that is, one-or-more general purpose problem solvers (whether or not any good) and a bunch of sensors and actuators; the other is "being able to use those devices well". When you say "highly intelligent", no, I don't mean it in the sense most people would think of that. But I mean it in the sense that a 2-year-old might be seen to be a great intelligence. It sees things, it runs around, it has a primitive goal structure and ability to reason, it has no common sense, and a great deal of ability to do a lot of damage. That I expect there to be a lot of.

An apparent premise of yours (though perhaps not one you intended?) is that we will build a number of special-purpose devices limited to a single task, and I don't expect that to happen. The economics of it don't work. That's like seeing the early game industry, and the free-standing Pong game, and assuming that future game processors would contain exactly one game. Or like assuming that future calculators would do exactly and only what was on the buttons. Everyone knows that programming is maleable, and there will be instant market pressure for that. Besides, just as Star Trek has driven other things, everyone--even some who have seen and shed a tear during The Measure of a Man (Star Trek: The Next Generation)--will want to own a Data. There probably won't be one worthy of the character for quite some time. But there will be money to be made by selling anything that can be plausibly claimed to be close. (Nor will the data be all in until it plausibly supports a claim of being "fully functional".)

You could try to convince me that people will have self-control and won't allow pushing the line of what's possible--that they'll demand prudence in what capabilities are given such a device. But, if you were so inclined to take that tack, you couldn't even answer for email and web browsers. You'd think we as human beings would not have relinquished the right of the machine to start programs on its own just because it or someone or something thought it was a good idea, but that's precisely what happens when client-side scripting occurs, for example. It's the delivery backbone along which viruses and worms travel. And the primary reason it's a threat is that human beings are too lazy to actually answer questions every time one of those things needs to run, and not well enough qualified to answer the questions anyway. To compensate, they haven't gone to school to learn more or allocated extra hours in the day to answer queries. Rather, they have simply lowered the bar on safeguards they are willing to tolerate until things are able to run on their own without human intervention, all in the service of saving time and energy. Why will robot safeguards follow any different path?

If there's something to fear it's not robot intelligence. It's developmental phases, like the terrible twos, that we'd have to live through to get there. And while I'm not bullish on the Singularity coming any time soon, I don't think the earlier, pre-Singularity, phases are something we can ignore.

Something like Signs?

Kryten: [to Lister] Waste disposal unit armed and ready, sir.
Rimmer: Kryten, will this work?
Kryten: [to himself] Lie mode.
[to Rimmer]
Kryten: Of course it'll work, sir! No worries!

It was called Tremors.

Yo Grark

As other physicists will tell you, there are all kinds of ways in which you can define a death. I would strongly encourage you to mess with Conway's Game of life, because that is exactly how it works for us humans. In fact, the page I just linked to loads with a perfect example -- a glider. You'll probably want to download a bigger version of this, drop the scale down to one pixel, maybe, but the essential result is the same: A glider can be observed as an entity which moves across the screen, wiggling as it goes, where, in fact, it is a bunch of tiny organisms (think of them as bacteria) living and dying every step of the way. Nothing in the Game of life moves, but new things are born and old ones die.

The glider is also very cool for other reasons, too -- it's an emergent phenomenon. Grab any Game of Life simulator, set the resolution to one pixel per bacterium, scribble a nonsensical pattern on it with your mouse, and let it run -- it's almost a certainty that more than a few gliders will spin off of it and go sliding off towards the edge of the screen. It is an example of how patterns arise from chaos, and a very visual demonstration of why evolution works.

But back to the subject at hand... Various parts of your body live and die at different rates. I'm not sure how long it takes to replace everything, but I think it's only a month or so.

You can approach this two ways: Either get over your fear of death, or start to identify yourself as a pattern -- a meme, a program, a chunk of data. Even cloning doesn't diminish you -- if anything, it makes you stronger.

However, if you insist on the depressing/disturbing interpretation, watch The Prestige. I'll say no more, just watch it.

This was specifically basically an 'evolution simulation', so by design these robots were able to develop original new behaviours to their individual (or possibly 'species') benefit (it's not some inherent emergent behaviour or quality of even neural nets - this required significant additional effort that can't really come about by accident). Generalising this behaviour to 'all robots' is not correct ...

That "really can't come about by accident"? I don't buy that.

I'll give you that it may well have been not by the "conventional" means. In fact, it's very hard to read useful data into a news report that merely describes the behavior of the bots, and doesn't say why they took the behavior, and especially a news report that uses phrases like "eerily wicked", "calmly", etc. to describe behaviors. But ok, let's give you at least that the evolutionary form had some effect.

Note well that in evolution, not every aspect of the machine evolves. Some parts are held constant. So an evolved model of something may have a learned behavior that is learned not because of the evolution but merely because of the situational structure and the basic learning mechanism. But, as I said, let's ignore that and assume you're right on this, because it will make my real point simpler.

Even if we knew evolution was used as the catalyzing mechanism, I think it would be an extraordinary claim if you were able to say that this is something that we were safe from seeing in a non-evolved robot that had the basic ability to evaluate and score its environment, select its goals, etc. I assume someone has done the (probably not difficult) legwork to show that this already implements a Turing machine. (I assume that mostly on the basis that a Turing machine isn't very complicated, and these robots sound moreso... I'd allege a good strong stake in the ground like "eerily wicked" implies Turing powerful. Though maybe someone is going to tell me that one of the evolutionary steps was provably to cross the Turing power line... I'm guessing it started already well across that line or it couldn't have performed at all, much less evolved, in the first iteration and/or it couldn't have reached this level by only 50 iterations. But it would depend even then on the initial construction and I'm willing to be surprised.)

But my point is that once Turing power is reached, and clearly we won't be stopping robots from doing that, I don't see how you can speak comfortably that this behavior won't happen due to regular neural nets. All you can say is that it hasn't. But I don't see anything fundamental about the computations involved in evolution that are likely to be any more elaborate than running a hypothetical, seeing the results, adjusting one's parameters, and trying again (vaguely like happens to the computer at the end of Wargames if you can stomach a somewhat whimsy visual metaphor in a serious discussion of computational complexity). People learn and re-learn processes, and I expect us to put that into robots. And even if we don't, the word "emergent" suggests that if it has survival value, it will end up happening.

It seems to me that it would be an extraordinary claim if you could really prove your statement

it remains the case that a more deterministically programmed robot is highly unlikely to ever develop such unpredictable and undesired behaviour.

That would seem to me tantamount to a claim that there are two different kinds of intelligent processors and that you know a class of computations that can only be done on one and not on the other. To my knowledge, the ability to seriously prove such a claim is the holy grail of much investigation in computation science, and many hypothesize that it simply cannot be. But whether it can or cannot be, I don't think it's known now.

Sorry: The Island: http://imdb.com/title/tt0399201/ Freejack: http://imdb.com/title/tt0104299/

Sorry: The Island: http://imdb.com/title/tt0399201/ Freejack: http://imdb.com/title/tt0104299/

Madagascar is just off the coast of Africa, its more like a day trip yhan a migration...

Slow down there, space cowboy...

Your points are absolutely valid in your context, but I think we are dangerously placing the cart before our collective ass.

Just like the military, NASA has experienced declining general interest. This is not a SETI-esque venture to solve the great mysteries of space travel, nor is it some kind of "Last Starfighter" quest for an Alex Rogan. It is a valid, overdue tossing of kerosene onto a thirsty and faltering flame; a genuine attempt to generate interest among young people regarding space exploration, and we both can support something like that.

It's sort of a "hook em' while they're young" deal, and the casualty-to-mission rating of NASA is nothing like that of the Army. The excitement factor of NASA pales in comparison to that of the Army. Hopefully, this game lands where these demand curves intersect.

Last Starfighter kicks ass!

Funny that you mention that, as there's a New Zealand movie called Black Sheep about exactly that.

Except everything goes horribly wrong, and they end up with 1000s of zombie sheep running about the place, eating everyone (and turning bitten survivors into weresheep).

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0779982/

Sometimes I think sports should have Open Class and Stock Class. Stock Class athletes would be required to compete with a standard human body -- no enhancing drugs, no springy feet, etc. Open Class athletes could use anything they wanted: prosthetics, drugs, whatever.

There is a down side to Open Class...

"And it's one minute to go... 'Wild Man Jones' is injecting his final enhancers... whoa, look at those convulsions! And there's the bell... they're off and running, except for Jones. Guess those latest enhancers were still Beta-test quality, heh heh... oh wait, he stopped moving. Yikes, look at that head explode! I haven't seen anything like this since I watched Scanners!"

Of course sometimes I think the above would make sports MORE popular. :-/

First of all, you suck for linking to the sequel and not to the original: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051622/

Secondly, these scientists aren't trying to invent teleportation, they're trying to extract stem cells. Teleportation (and giant flies) are another department.

but now don't care so much about archiving

God, I miss my old Humax. It was so perfect for that purpose. I still have several shows that I watch that I had archived on that unit. The most important (and I'm so glad I saved it off to DVD-R) was a 2-part miniseries that aired on the National Geographic Channel called Space Race. This was one of the most fascinating documentaries on the Russian and U.S. space programs I've ever seen (in fact, being an American and having to deal with pro-American Cold War censorship, this is the ONLY documentary I've ever seen on the Russian space program). It only aired once and it's never been released on DVD in the states (and probably never will, thanks to the aforementioned pro-American censorship that's sadly still the norm here). If I hadn't had my Humax and been able to burn it off to a DVD, I would probably never be able to watch it again. I've even made copies of it for many of my family and friends (I would have gladly paid for it, if someone would have only given me the opportunity).

You know, I thought this too. Along with this story, I can't help but think that these are suspiciously timed with the advertisements I'm hearing/seeing for Cloverfield. I wouldn't put it past movie studios to "plant" stuff like this.

Presumably none of these so-called "people at-large" have ever seen the movie "The Fly".

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23060778-13762,00.html not to be confused with: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0134847/

The original "Airplane!" movie (1980) called. It wants its joke back.

I believe you're rather missing the point that folks are trying to make.

This would be nothing more than a moderately interesting footnote if we were talking about specialty positions where real-time health monitoring in situ might make sense, based upon unusual job circumstances.

Unfortunately, that's not what's being discussed.

The article places this in the context of mainstream -- as in everyday -- jobs.

Think "generic hapless office worker spied on by Information Retrieval in Brazil ", not "most inconveniently expired engineer from Runaway Train"...

In terms of everyday jobs, I seriously think it unlikely that anything good would come of this, while I can easily see much that is bad being fairly likely.

I believe you're rather missing the point that folks are trying to make.

This would be nothing more than a moderately interesting footnote if we were talking about specialty positions where real-time health monitoring in situ might make sense, based upon unusual job circumstances.

Unfortunately, that's not what's being discussed.

The article places this in the context of mainstream -- as in everyday -- jobs.

Think "generic hapless office worker spied on by Information Retrieval in Brazil ", not "most inconveniently expired engineer from Runaway Train"...

In terms of everyday jobs, I seriously think it unlikely that anything good would come of this, while I can easily see much that is bad being fairly likely.

"Sometimes, I doubt your commitment to SPARQL Motion! "

With apologies to Donnie Darko ...

Then Summer Glau in a penguin suit shows up and says, "Come with me if you want to live."

After running it over with a car.

And you do, because she just looks so nice.

Actually, that was the best quote from the movie "Armageddon" - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120591/

Let's hope this one doesn't head for the Earth.

Actually if my understanding of the future is correct, these sort of naming conventions will one day be the norm for astronomers (or "Star-Looking Smarty Fags" as they will be known then).

It'll also lead to a pretty bad movie.

Now now, that's patently false. New Zealand has a greater Sheep to Human ratio.. Besides, they even made a movie about it, and quite recently..

Seriously though, a cloned animal with excess telomeres would likely have increased resistance to (some types of) genetic damage, and potentially increased longevity.. I'm guessing that this isn't the norm though.

...were aged eight and 10, very young for dinosaurs, which lived to about 30.

And some people still think Logan's Run is science fiction.

I know what it is... But does Ash?