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you are unfamiliar with the tech underlying recatpcha

why do you think it requests two words?
one word it has classified one it hasn't.
If you input the classified word correctly you pass. The input of the unclassified word is buffered.
Unclassified words that get consistent results are added to the classified word pool and used as validators.

It is a basic ml application whose computing is outsourced to the humans on the Internet who want to post
on canHazMcRib.org and a very elegant solution as well. if you want more info on Luis von Ahn's ventures
start with his ted talk.

I'm an American, but here's my answer to your question: Educate.

You are past the point on which you can still educate. The school system and everything else around (contributing to informal education) is fine tuned to conditioning, not education.

Think: what is the aim of the school? I'd argue: not building an education, but passing some exams.

Educate children. Extend the schoolday to 9-10 hours long (most people work at least 8 hours a day, so a 6-7 hour school day necessitates child care of some sort), allow more time for physical activity, self-study, and hands-on learning.

Sorry, the means you a proposing for "education" are even worse: it is 9-10 hours of brain-washing. One would need to see a revolution in education.

Generosity experiment.

What if the car is in the driveway?

On a related note, for those of you that prefer metaphors over math, I suggest watching this: http://www.ted.com/talks/brian_cox_on_cern_s_supercollider.html

I never understood why this patent was granted - back in 2006 the same gestures were demonstrated (and publicly) by Jeff Han with his FTIR multi-touch display.

http://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_touchscreen.html - take a look from about 2:29 onwards, pinch zoom, scoll etc.

It really doesn't appear that Apple should have been able to patent it, especially if their file date was in 2007 and it looks like the grant date was 2011 (seriously? wtf?).

Still, who knows why it was granted, and if I can find that prior art surely the other big companies who were sued because of it could too so I assume I'm missing something.

Sorry if I am wrong here, but are you not just producing wild theories here? Surely you don't know what Stuxnet intended to do, so how could you rule that it could not have caused a nuclear catastrophe?

There was an analysis by German researchers that he bases his information on.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/how-digital-detectives-deciphered-stuxnet/all/1
http://www.ted.com/talks/ralph_langner_cracking_stuxnet_a_21st_century_cyberweapon.html

Here's Bill Gates' TED presentation on this project from almost 2 years ago:
http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gates.html

Even if half of this design works out as advertised, i think this would be awesome! Pity that the 'western world' wasn't interested in investing in it and trying it out....

http://www.ted.com/talks/yves_rossy_fly_with_the_jetman.html

True, and it's only gotten more precise and capable. The problem isn't the technology, it's the fallible human intelligence behind it. We hit what we're aiming at. The problem is deciding what to aim at.

Bullshit aside, the collateral damage in war has fallen off so dramatically it's almost unbelievable. Public opinion is a big motivator and technology makes it possible. But it'll never go away entirely.

http://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell.html

There seems to be a lot of religious intolerance on Slashdot, I'm not religious myself but respect the right of other to believe what they wish as long as it causes no harm (admittedly debatable).

I have a good doctor, intelligent and always concentrating about what I put into my body and how I treat it before suggesting any drugs (he has never suggested drugs yet!), I don't know if he is Muslim but I would definitely stick with him regardless as he is the best out of the half a dozen doctors I've had.

If these Muslims can pass the exams and understand the necessary sciences and practice good doctorship (!'good medicine' - a chemical for every ail?), then fair enough that they don't wish to see the lecture of a self-proclaimed 'militant atheist' who said "let's all stop being so damned respectful" [of religion] and that is in context.

http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism.html

Reminds me of a TED talk about monkeys: http://www.ted.com/talks/laurie_santos.html?c=135492

Now, the human race has been expanding exponentially at the historic average of 2% per year.

No, the human race - and all other breeding populations bellow any limited threshold - is on a logisic curve. Historically it just looks looks exponential because we have been near the origin. It's also a much scarier curve when you consider the growth period is the 'good times.'

In a natural population the number of breeders explodes until it hit some limit and loss suppresses any more gains. It is a simple consequence of reality. With the ever changing environment that is the natural world, any species able to rapidly expand when one of their limits is removed becomes numerically dominate. Since evolutionary success is simply having more grandkids than the other guy, leveraging these opportunities is built into just about every living thing from bacteria to Redwoods. You breed and spread during the happy times until the limit. Then you replace spreading with horrible churn: for each who is born, someone must die.

The unanswered question is: what limit will keep human population from growing? Very poor economists and armchair sociologists trot out the 'limited space' arguments based on totally unrealistic understanding of not only 3D space and what 'food' is, but also territorial needs of humans and how they can overlap. People who have looked into the matter discovered an amazing thing.

Give education and rights to women and your population grown slams to a standstill.

Why?

It's simple: you have most if not all your children surviving to adulthood and educated, wealthy women women able to tell their man/cleric/priest/culture NO to unprotected sex. There is less successful coercion of women into walking-baby-factories for men by accident or purpose. The world is long past the need for huge families to keep the farm running or fight that war. (Starvation is a logistics and distribution problem.) Also, consider the improved access to medicine available to educated, non-poor mothers. Birth is no longer a lottery in which both the future adult and its mother gamble their lives. There is a lot behind this topic and Google is your friend.

It turns out that humans are more than dumb animals. At least some of us. And by definition what people do is unnatural. Long before starvation or disease limits human growth we do it ourselves. Cut the mechanism behind rapid population growth and it stops. Long before you need government mandates, starvation lotteries, colony ships, O'Neil colonies or Logan's Run our women stand up and conveniently have a headache tonight.

We won't over populate this planet let alone the solar system if we can just do one thing: raise women out of poverty.

It's basic humanity.

(And if that doesn't work in the end, just putting all the women on the ship and forcing the men to stay at home will. Motes we are not.)

I was sent a TED Talk which touches on antibiotic resistance not too long ago. It was a study about how bacteria communicate with each other, and the ways in which you could stop that communication all together. It's incredibly interesting, and may solve the problem of antibiotic resistance all together if something really comes of it.

The talk was almost 3 years ago now. Does anyone know anything about this research?

Bonnie Bassler on how bacteria "talk"

It isn't just the deep connections that these guys have with NASA and elements of the space industry. It is the fact that they have already done several projects for NASA and other federal agencies, as well as some private foundation grants and even some work with for-profit companies. This TED talk shows some of the more impressive things that Bill Stone (one of the major investors in Shackleton Energy) has done and at least one other crazy off-the-wall idea that has a real shot at being built some time in the future.

This is a very legitimate group and of anybody who says they might be able to get to the Moon and make a profit off of what they are doing on the Moon, these guys would be it. The market for propellant from a location near the Moon would certainly be a valuable market, considering that a 1 liter bottle of water currently costs about $20,000 just to get it there with current rockets.

In this case, while I'm sure that they wouldn't mind having NASA/USAF/NRO/ESA/Roscosmos/JAXA as customers, there might be some other potential customers for their product as well. It isn't purely for government contracts. It does take a different attitude about how you go about launching stuff into space, however.

Bill Stone seems to be involved with this, which actually gives it some real vision. Check him out in a TED conference a few years back on just this sort of project. If you don't find his attitude inspiring, something is wrong with you... The relevant portion about the moon starts at 10:52 http://www.ted.com/talks/bill_stone_explores_the_earth_and_space.html

Totally spot on. Why do people believe their government's assertions just because a few POLITICIANS on "opposing" sides repeat some of the same talking points?

How about we use some science to make policy for a change? What does Game Theory say about how we deal with Iran? http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/bruce_bueno_de_mesquita_predicts_iran_s_future.html

Of course, the best answers are not important and neither is science because its lawyers thinking not scientists; the truth is not relevant. The whole mode of thought is to have a political policy (likely set by somebody else) and defend it like a guilty murderer. Win or lose you still profit. Later, you are payed privately to represent some corp (arguably they do that while in office already.)

Marcin Jakubowski has an excellent TED talk on helping this exact issue: Open Source hardware called the Global Village Construction Kit.

Money doesn't work as an incentive for cognitively taxing tasks, it only works for mindless tasks. http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

"How Economic Inequality Harms Societies" (video http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html )

I dunno about 'wealth'. This video talks about income instead. Income *is* more evenly distributed in every developed, western-style economy than it is in the US. The UK seems to be a close second in income inequality.

As this video points out at the very beginning, income differences between nations MAKE NO DIFFERENCE in life expectancy (or any of the other measures of societal well-being used in the man's talk). But WITHIN a country, every income group does a bit worse than the income group just above.

In addition, countries with high inequality do worse (example used in video: child mortality) at all income levels than a country with with lower inequality (given comparable GDP/capita). Yes, the difference is large at the bottom and small at the top, but it is consistent across the whole income gradient.

So, go ahead and sneer that people who want greater income equality are just ungrateful, greedy, lazy, stupid, confused or whatever. But the fight for greater income equality has the data to show that it is a *cause* of negative social outcomes, and the data to show that it hurts the rich too (just not as much as it hurts the poor).

I don't vote for the leader of the world. I do vote for the leader of my country and several representatives for my state in the national legislative body. So I have limited influence on income inequality across the whole world. I support open borders, free trade, reduced agricultural subsidies, and anything else that would help raise the world's poor out of the trap they live in. But you are suggesting that I should let my version of "The American Dream" be better realized in Denmark than in the US (social mobility is highest in Denmark, lowest in US). I don't know what kind of country you want to live in - but daddy's income shouldn't be the most important thing in *your* income. It should be about how hard you work. That happens in more equal societies, not in the US.

Ignorance about how the world works is curable - but now you have no excuse.

Well, according to a old Planet Money episode I recently listened to, innovation and productivity in the financial sector is finding new (and efficient) ways to find capital for new businesses. Or, conversely, finding investment opportunities for existing capital. Banks have historically done this one way: They guarantee depositors a fixed interest rate (attracting small amounts of capital from large numbers of risk averse investors) and give loans, presumably with a mixture of risk profiles. Of course they also have support roles too: processing transactions for businesses for a fee, checking/debit card accounts for consumers. Most of these support roles are not big money makers for banks. (That matters because finding ways to cover costs helps make those checking account "fee-free" - that helps the lower income levels a lot more than it helps rich people's bank accounts.)

Saying "banking isn't an industry - they don't produce anything" is like saying "hair styling isn't an industry - they don't produce anything". Banking could well be a growth industry - it makes no sense to limit bonuses based on that line of reasoning.

You got it totally wrong, and this matters to me because if you say something this silly too many times, people who matter (unlike me or you) may come to believe that the whole idea is stupid. And then they won't implement the idea. The real reason (according to Taleb) to forbid bonuses is because of the asymmetry of knowledge. I've read his book, "The Black Swan"; it was fascinating, you should read it too. If you can grant me that there will *always* be opportunities to hide low-probability large-loss risks in the system, then bonuses give exactly the WRONG incentive. That's true whether or not 'banking' is a growth industry or a support process.

Of course, you might think I've got it wrong - so we can have a polite conversation about our analogies or reasoning or such. I'm assuming you're a swell person who just has a bit of flawed understanding.

Between "The Black Swan" (book) and "How Economic Inequality Harms Societies" (video http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson.html ) I'm thinking this is the most important thing we have to do in our nation.

Watch Mr. Khan's TEDtalk. Effing brilliant:

http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html

I'm with you up until this:

I am tired of being called an elitist for expecting people to think *just a little bit* before they act. Stupid people are harmful, and so they *deserve* to be despised and shamed.

I don't like stupid people. I don't like being around them, I don't like dealing with them - I am not, however, contemptuous of them whereas it seems you are quite close to being so. See around 13 minutes in at this TED talk for why it might be best to remind yourself that stupid people are - most of the time - merely ignorant and probably just need a gentle reminder to think. If you carry your expectations around, ready for most people to disappoint you, they will - try an open mind and constructive comments before you dismiss someone as deserving to be despised. You might just end up happier.

I have recently experienced some modest insight into this incomprehensible (to me and perhaps you) way of thinking (legal = right) by seeing Sandel's lecture on communitarian moral philosophy and recalling a TED talk on the empirical psychological differences between liberal and conservative values.

Of course, it wasn't that I thought of all conservatives as slavering idiots or scheming monsters or anything. You can basically understand and respect their motives by knowing and listening to them; you don't need no fancy book lernin. Conversely, approaching from a different angle doesn't make them any less wrong, when they're wrong. Still, it was interesting and humbling to look at the issue a different (for me) way.

I still don't agree with the communitarian idea that we need a moral explanation for group-oriented choices, or the idea that many people have that adhering to group law is in itself a moral good. I wasn't compelled by any of the examples I saw in Sandel's lecture, of situations where you would allegedly need to choose between a group (communitarian moral) obligation and a liberal moral one. I would still call it immoral to help your friend bury a body, no questions asked, just because they're your friend. However, these ideas do provide another way to look at things from the perspective of my many brothers and sisters who do think that way, either communitarian or conservative.

By way of kudos to Sandel, I had no idea he was a communitarian (even if a moderate one) after watching his course lecture videos. Being more or less ignorant of this subject, I hadn't read about his criticism of Rawls. Maybe you could tell he wasn't totally on board with the libertarians, but he still gave the ideas a fair hearing, it seemed to me (if in my ignorance).

(Terminology alert: if you have trouble distinguishing the word "liberal" in the political context from the term in the philosophical context, please fix that before replying. It's trivial to do so.)

I guess the question is how do you tell the ones that need treatment from the ones that don't before it it too late to treat the ones that do

Histology at the moment. What a trained pathologist can tell from a slide of stained cells is incredible. In the near future, genomic sequencing is what experts seem to be saying. You find a tumor, you get a biopsy, look at it under the microscope and also sequence the DNA of the cancer. Between what the cells look like and the DNA sequence, they'll be able to tell how likely it is to kill you.

There are a number of well-characterized things a cancer cell must do to be really bad, and genomic sequencing will allow a good diagnosis as to what a cancer is doing exactly. If it's just that the cells are growing more than they should, but are otherwise playing by the rules (IE, unlikely to metastasize or start increasing the bloodflow to the tumor, and not in a critical location) keep an eye on it but it may not become a problem ever. If it is expressing several genes that will allow the cells to get into the bloodstream and take root elsewhere, chemotherapy now. Chances are much better that it will spread to critical areas like your lungs or brain and kill you.

There's an interesting talk on TED about using solar power to enable night schools: http://www.ted.com/talks/bunker_roy.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TEDTalks_video+(TEDTalks+Main+(SD)+-+Site)

Mandate all rich people give poor people everything every other generation?

I've already written once today (in partial jest) that there are two ways to obtain a benefit you haven't earned: through social programs and through inheritance--let's kill both.

There's a raging debate going on in the discussion thread at Richard Wilkinson: How economic inequality harms societies

I'm an R programmer IRL. I don't have much formal training in statistics, but when I need a second opinion, my bookshelf is stacked with the highest grade of bullshit detector. In the machine learning sector, that's a high grade indeed. You don't ascend to the top of the Kagglestalk by being full of shit. (I have not yet formed an opinion about Kaggle in general.)

My investigations quickly lead me to The Spirit Level Delusion: Chapter 10

I quickly came to the conclusion that the spousal unit of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have way oversold their analysis as an input to public policy. Nevertheless, it ought to be troubling how readily these slopes tip in an ugly direction. In data mining, most of what you get is suggestive. I find their approach closer to data mining than proper statistics. Human cognition for the most part is closer to data mining than proper statistics, so I'm not saying that suggestive signals are slight or worthless. I'm saying that juicy things you pick up off the floor should not enter mouth without second inspection.

From Snowdon's mad dog supplemental chapter:

It is fantastically implausible to think that Wilkinson and Pickett are not aware of the importance of outliers in statistics.

There's a certain type of thinker who loves to stop thinking at the invocation of a categorical word. Outlier is a word of many meanings in statistics. It's not an automatic red flag to invoke the purity reflex (conservatives are sometimes painted as having more intense purity/disgust pathways). An outlier due to a DRAM memory error is best discarded. When the outlier is a big fat juicy data point, you need to engage your brain. Your signal naturally shows up most intensely at the extremes. If you don't want to find a signal, by all means, terminate outliers with extreme prejudice, as Snowdon imprecates the vagrant bastards.

But if they really wished to "avoid being accused of picking and choosing" they would have used the same official measure throughout.

By page 200 or so, he's wound himself up to where he leaves his brain behind. Too bad, because his brain was useful when he used it. He's gone completely insane on the decision process of prudence: trying your best not to shop for the desired outcome, while also trying to step around contaminated inputs. One of the inputs W&P sensibly step around are self-reported psychiatric states. These are known to be dirtier than Netflix ratings. Snowdon by the end is promoting the merest sign of discretion as a hanging offence. I would also like to know why these small acts of discretion were invoked, but I don't immediately fear the worst. W&P could do much better in the scholarship department.

Snowdon loses it completely on race as a confound. Confounds aren't all that important until you get into causative interpretation, often a necessary step on the road to public policy. I don't think W&P is anywhere close to providing a solid foundation for public policy, so this whole causative rebuke leaves me cold. Attack dogs never weary of citing error, long after there was any point. If he's not an attack dog, why does he act like one?

Since there is no relationship between race and mental health, they cannot find a relationship with inequality. But since there are relationships between race and many o

Hans Rosling got some really interesting statistics on population growth ( http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth.html ) and a number of other issues related to this on TED ( http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling.html ). His basic message is that the world has turned a lot better and that the average child/woman already is decreased to sustainable levels in most countries that previously were poor and suffered from overpopulation. In fact, the division "developed" versus "developing" countries and the accompanying fear of overpopulation is a heritage from how it looked in the 70:s. Personally, I just marvel at the possibillities. Never before have as many people been able to realize their potential as today. If we assume that the birth of a great genious (an Einstein, Mozart...) is of a certain low probability, and that on top of that that this genious would be born under such circumstances that it would survive and have the means to realize its potential, we can assume that we actually have more of those in our current society than ever before. As a side note.... this is also why I find the whole religious "stuff that are old must be true" a very strange point of view - by virtue of better education and more accumulated experience (exteligence), I think that we are more qualified to design a moral system today than some bronze-age herders somewhere in the middle east.

Hans Rosling got some really interesting statistics on population growth ( http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth.html ) and a number of other issues related to this on TED ( http://www.ted.com/speakers/hans_rosling.html ). His basic message is that the world has turned a lot better and that the average child/woman already is decreased to sustainable levels in most countries that previously were poor and suffered from overpopulation. In fact, the division "developed" versus "developing" countries and the accompanying fear of overpopulation is a heritage from how it looked in the 70:s. Personally, I just marvel at the possibillities. Never before have as many people been able to realize their potential as today. If we assume that the birth of a great genious (an Einstein, Mozart...) is of a certain low probability, and that on top of that that this genious would be born under such circumstances that it would survive and have the means to realize its potential, we can assume that we actually have more of those in our current society than ever before. As a side note.... this is also why I find the whole religious "stuff that are old must be true" a very strange point of view - by virtue of better education and more accumulated experience (exteligence), I think that we are more qualified to design a moral system today than some bronze-age herders somewhere in the middle east.

Let's apply your logic a few hundred years ago . . .

- - -
The fundamental question is, do masters "own" their slaves? Do they have a right to control what they have produced?

Sure, the "system" is stilted and unfair. But try buying a new slave. Do you think the owner is going to give you a fair deal? NO WAY! They are going to use every trick and lie in the book to relieve you of as much money as they can, while making you think you're the winner. But just because the dealer is crooked, doesn't give you the right to steal one of their slaves.

Masters are equally crooked. They try to keep as much money as they can for themselves, depriving slaves of what is rightfully theirs. But that does not give people a right to free one of their slaves.

So, if there is indeed such a thing as slavery (as every civilized nation recognizes), the "case" for a free man is just an excuse for freedom.
- - -

As my satirical post points your, your _opinion_ on what is "law" is clouded by you ignorant of the past and future: ALL [Legal] LAW IS RELATIVE and ONLY exists because the MAJORITY agrees. The _only_ reason imaginary property exists is in the first place is because of: a) Greed, b) Control (which is fear).

Who invented copyright? The book _publishers_ because they didn't want competition!

You can't fucking prevent others from copying a number, aka a representation of reality just because you say so, no matter how hard you pretend to. While the current US Laws say "sharing this number is Copyright Violation (NOT "stealing" that you've been brainwashed into thinking) the day will come when society grows up past needing to dictate to others who can share public works.

The crux of the issue is this: Artists and Consumers have two diametrically opposed ideologies of "value."

* The artist wants to get paid for EVERY INSTANCE someone enjoys their work because they want work to be valued, and rewarded for their time, energy, creativity, and incentive to create more.

* The Consumers wants to share an artists work to everyone because they value it.

One is financial, the other intrinsic.

Because of these contradictory ideologies you end up with absurdities ...

Is it illegal to "share" a CD? (Why not? The author didn't get paid and someone else enjoyed/valued their work?)

If no, then why is a _physical_ medium even required? Why is it illegal to share a representation of the music digitally yet not physically??

I'm sorry, but the former model is going, going, gone. I.e. In Canada it is perfectly legal to share music digitally, because at the end of the day there is NO difference HOW the music gets shared. Civilization is built upon the idea of sharing ideas, physical things, and [NOW] digital things.

Music is just the TIP of the iceberg on society growing up and getting over this archaic and idiotic concept of "ownership". In 100 years we'll have 3D printers that can print anything. Trying to claim you own a "pattern" is just as ridiculous as saying you "own" a mathematical formula. Whether it is an algorithm or data, it is absurd to apply the concept of "ownership" to a numeric representation of reality whether it be music, audio, text, models, etc.

I am going to repeat that last phrase: Do you understand the important and ramifications of what we can do in the 21st century?? We can _represent_ reality numerically. Long ago, we rejected the notion that someone can "own" numbers. So stop clinging to the past and projecting the same thing to the physical. As Einstein showed, ALL physical matter is just a frequency of energy. Today we don't have to tech to create any physical object, but tomorrow we will. Sooner or later you will be forced to let go of this concept of copyright.

The fashion industry has already viewed this as a non-issue. Itâ(TM)s the rest of the industries that are stuck in 17th century thinking.
http://www.ted.com/talks/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

Pranav Mistry at MIT Media Lab demonstrated something similar at a TED talk in 2009. His was slung about the neck. He and his advisor, Pattie Maes, called it Sixth Sense.

The wear and tear on the body is such that even if you can increase the lifespan to a theoretical 150 years you wouldnt be very healthy for the last 90 or so years. You also need something that adresses the wear on the body. Our hearts arent made for 150 years of use and we build up various plaques and toxins in our bodies as time goes by. Even if we all lived under controlled and ideal circumstances the last seven decades would be pretty much seven decades of being eighty.

Actually, there's some research that strongly suggests that there's only a finite amount of aging going on. What's happening in aging might not be "the body's self repair process falls behind entropy", as commonly thought. Instead, aging would be "the same tradeoffs which favor reproductive success in youth exact a cost later in life"; after some finite time, you've paid those costs in full and aging stops, leaving only a constant risk of disability and death per year instead of the ever-growing one postulated by the "falling behind on entropy" model. In this view, there are still some specific things that actually do wear out with age because they aren't constantly replaced (tooth decay and cornea clouding / cataracts are the obvious ones), but general health doesn't suffer the same fate.

See New Scientist's The end of ageing: Why life begins at 90 (behind a paywall, sadly), which references a demographic study where annual mortality rates became constant above age 93 (Greenwood and Irwin, Human Biology, 1939), a study confirming the same pattern in fruit fly populations (Carey and Curtsinger, Science vol. 258 p. 457 and p. 461, 1992), and an exploration of a mathematical model of mutation which concluded that a mortality plateau is inevitable, not a mere special case (Rose and Mueller; PNAS vol. 93 pp. 15249-15253, 1996). (Of note: Rose is the author of the New Scientist article, with all the confirmation bias that implies.)

Also, the research into aging suggests there are only a handful systemic problems that actually cause it (accumulation of crosslinked proteins; declining telomerase production causing cells to stop dividing; etc.), and if those systemic problems were addressed we could largely arrest the aging process. Aubrey de Gray's TED talk is pretty much mandatory viewing on that front.

It's worth keeping in mind that if metabolism and entropy inevitably led to cell death after 100 years, then human beings as a species would have already died out: sperm and egg cells are metabolically active cells that contain DNA that's millions of years old, and there's no time machine that allows a pristine copy of the germline DNA to be copied forward from conception to adulthood without at least a childhood's worth of accumulated error. Likewise for our mitochondria, pseudo-cells that they are, with their own mtDNA separate from the DNA of the nucleus, exposed to the entropic ravages of the Krebs cycle firsthand without a nuclear membrane to protect it; our bodies pass these pseudo-cells on from mother to child unchanged, without even giving their mtDNA a de-methylation/re-methylation spring cleaning like mammalian nuclear DNA receives. But they thrive in the germ cell line, generation after generation, even as they suffer and decline in the somatic cell lines. There must be a difference in upkeep, some cost that evolution is willing to pay for the germline but unwilling for the somatic lines, that allows the germline mitochondria to remain healthy and "young" for millions of years.

Absolutely, I was just disagreeing with the notion that environmentalism has to mean a loss for the economy. Take for example recent breakthroughs in the sorting and recycling of plastics. (MBA Polymers is the company which comes to mind due to seeing a recent talk posted at TED.com by one of their head honchos.) This benefits our economy, allowing us to stretch the oil we do have farther.

But that is not to say that it couldn't be done, given enough thrust:

Ares martian rocket glider, as presented by Joel Levine.

Yeah his is better...but I once I've got mine, I realized I didn't give a shit because it still looks good enough. :p

Interesting that you mentioned this. You should check this out:
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy.html

Some think that artificial intelligence seeks to emulate the real intelligence of humans. But most of it is just software, and has little to do with real intelligence.

There are certain problems that AI can solve, but those solutions are not "intelligent" but rather are merely "formulas" programmed by intelligent people (computer scientists).

We get excited when these formulas emulate what a real person might do, and when we can hide the underlying machine, but that is not to say we know how people think or even how we are implemented. We are just getting better at programming.

There are some great advancements in cognitive science, and the more we discover about how the brain works, the less it looks like it could be run by any "code". No intel inside. The brain is an organ that grows and dies, and takes its memories with it. If anything, it programs itself.

That is not to say there haven't been advancements in AI. It too is incredibly useful.

A good place to start:
http://www.ted.com/search?q=brain
http://www.ted.com/search?q=artificial+intelligence ... and wikipedia of course...

Some think that artificial intelligence seeks to emulate the real intelligence of humans. But most of it is just software, and has little to do with real intelligence.

There are certain problems that AI can solve, but those solutions are not "intelligent" but rather are merely "formulas" programmed by intelligent people (computer scientists).

We get excited when these formulas emulate what a real person might do, and when we can hide the underlying machine, but that is not to say we know how people think or even how we are implemented. We are just getting better at programming.

There are some great advancements in cognitive science, and the more we discover about how the brain works, the less it looks like it could be run by any "code". No intel inside. The brain is an organ that grows and dies, and takes its memories with it. If anything, it programs itself.

That is not to say there haven't been advancements in AI. It too is incredibly useful.

A good place to start:
http://www.ted.com/search?q=brain
http://www.ted.com/search?q=artificial+intelligence ... and wikipedia of course...

Junk

Interesting that you just think you know this, even though the statistical rate of psychopaths is 1-4% for men.

Every human being should do themselves a favour and watch Kathryn Shultz's TED lecture on being wrong.

As for /needing/ to be a marginal psychopath to run a company -- this suggests that you really don't know what a psychopath is. A psychopath is a mimic that cheats on the social programming on regular people. Thinking that psychopaths have a place in society is like think that pedophiles have a place in society. It is a dangerous pathology.

Perhaps you need to be a marginal pedophile to be a priest?

When asked in a talk on this, he claimed that they would have fully replicating matter (IE : 'living' inorganic matter) in 2 years. The host who asked the question sounded startled when he said "That would be, er, something amazing, yes" - in other words "Yeah, right!".

On the other hand, the lab's publication list is quite impressive, and full of cool looking polygonal structures : http://www.chem.gla.ac.uk/cronin/publications.php

Nice presentation from Kevin Slavin @ TED: http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html

It was a TED talk by Dan Pink I think. http://blog.ted.com/2009/08/24/the_surprising/

Well put!

If you don't understand what parent and grandparent is talking about, watch this video by Khan of Khan Academy:

http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html

It flies like this: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/a_robot_that_flies_like_a_bird.html

According to this http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/amber_case_we_are_all_cyborgs_now.html we are all cyborgs.

Here's some more explanation from TED and from his own current company..

What about a incorporating a program like this: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html as a supplement?

Yeah.

Sam Harris - Science and Moral Values

Sam Harris never met a straw man he didn't like.

This is basically as opposite of politically correct as I can imagine.

Only in America.

"Don't confused TED talks with actual new ideas. I suppose it is possible to be ignorant enough to learn something from a TED talk, but ... probably unlikely."

Not only are you kind of being a dick - but you're flat wrong. Many speakers come and speak about research they are actively doing (new ideas) and certainly not every speech is some kind of hollow Save the Planet/Children/etc. Go to Ted.com, and click ...Ingenious. Every single one of the talks that come up are about an idea and each of these is very likely to be a new idea to most people that watch them.

"here's a popular fuzzy idea that no one politically correct or socially acceptable could possibly dislike, now let me sharpen my sophistry skills upon it for less than 18 minutes"

What's politically correct or socially acceptable about this talk?: Sam Harris - Science and Moral Values
This is basically as opposite of politically correct as I can imagine. There are many other controversial talks on TED as well, so it's just silly to say this.

I think there are plenty of good ideas -- small, medium, and large -- today. For example, see TED.

You ought to watch this video, from someone who knows far more about language than you ever will. It should change your mind.

http://www.ted.com/talks/erin_mckean_redefines_the_dictionary.html