Hypothetically, suppose we knew for a fact that some sort of seemingly aircraft-like objects were flying around that were not built by human civilization as we now know it, and are also not an unknown phenomena of nature.
All of the following explanations appear improbable in the extreme, but which explanation would you consider to be the *least* improbable?
A. Extraterrestrials (biological or robotic)
B. Time travelers
C. Travelers from an alternate dimension or alternate timeline
D. An ancient advanced civilization that has been hitherto undiscovered (for instance, living deep within the Earth's crust, or deep undersea)
E. A supernatural phenomenon such as ghosts
F. Other (explain)
Personally I think the least improbable answer is D. Not that I think that answer is within the realm of realistic, but at least it requires fewer violations of the physical laws that we know than the other explanations.
> As much as I'd prefer that there were starfaring alien civilization...
Elizondo didn't say they were aliens; he said they were UFOs. I've heard a few Air Force pilots opine on this same topic: they believe there's definitely some strange phenomenon that we don't understand. Not necessarily aliens, but something.
I've been thinking for years that NASA should be "dismantled"...reduce its mission scope to military-related matters and take all the civilian stuff that NASA does now and take that commercial instead.
If the government bought its civilian space needs exclusively from commercial suppliers "off the shelf" that would be a huge boost for commercial space industry and would accelerate development of low-cost-to-orbit technologies.
It's not that a governmental entity like NASA *couldn't* accomplish the same thing, but they've spent the last 35 years proving that they *won't*. It's almost impossible to change the DNA of a government agency. The only alternative is to scale them back so far that they essentially have to re-invent themselves, and use the funds saved to nurture industry alternatives.
(1) When you talk about *what* a systems administrator does, it doesn't sound that hard: installing and configuring software, patching, installing and configuring hardware, researching and comparing potential upgrade options, troubleshooting problems, etc.
What 4th graders probably don't think about is that none of these things by themselves may seem particularly hard at the scale of an individual computer, but when you multiply each of these activities by a gazillion servers, routers, clients, etc., then it has the potential to become a real nightmare. So you have to use tricks & technologies in a company's computing environment that you'd never bother with at home.
E.g., "Ever seen your mom or dad install a Windows update? Remember how nuts that made them? Now imagine doing that across 20,000 desktops in 10 cities, and being given only 3 days to get them all done!"
(2) Probably a lot of your time is spent being a detective, trying to puzzle out why something that oughta be working ain't. Telling stories about some of your successful detective adventures might be entertaining.
All people (including kids) like to be told stories, so the more you can populate your presentation with interesting anecdotes, the better.
And, as one person already wrote, bringing some old or broken hard drive, circuit boards, etc. to pass around the classroom probably couldn't hurt either.
Also, many 4th graders I know think that the *monitor* is the computer. They point at it and say, "That's the computer, isn't it? Why are you fiddling with that other box?" I know that sounds crazy, but that's the way many 9 year olds think. So don't assume any understanding of computers just because they know how to play Spore.
Whenever you write code on future projects, you're often going to start by trying to re-use code from previous projects. So don't just treat the source-code you're writing now as something you know you're going to reuse in the future. Try to think of each useful chunk of code you write as being part of a "package" that includes not only the code itself, but also the associated documentation, the test cases, the performance metrics, use cases, the build files, etc.
You want to write the entire -package- so that it can be re-used on future projects, not just the code itself. Remember that as a developer only a fraction of your time is actually spent writing code: the bulk of your time is spent putting together all that associated "stuff." So make the "stuff" re-usable too.
Some U.S. traffic cameras do something similar already. The camera continually records and discards about a minute's worth of footage...unless it hears the sound of a car crash. If it hears a car crash, it archives the recording on either side of the sound, so that investigators can later watch events leading up to the crash. I've seen the footage...it's amazing stuff. But I wouldn't call it AI.
I've decorated several new offices by going to eBay and finding vintage advertisements from the industry I'm working in. They usually go for about $4 a piece. I take them to a local framing shop and put a nice matte & frame around them...mattes add some color if the ad is black & white. Use all the same frame and it looks like they're part of a set.
Is cheap, looks cool, looks professional, and educates you on the history of your discipline, all at the same time.
You can always tell when a story is based on a NASA press release. If the spacecraft exceeded its mission expectations, it's a "NASA spacecraft." But if it failed, it's a "Lockheed-built spacecraft" (or whichever contractor they decide to blame).
For a change it would be nice to see NASA give kudos to whatever contractor built the successful spacecraft for them.
Whenever I've read biographies of folks who have gone on to become movie makers, the basic answer always seems to be the same: the way to get into the movie business is to start making movies.
Grab your friends, find a camcorder, write a script, download some software, make a movie.
Then make another.
And another.
Keep doing it until you get good at it. It take an incredible amount of time and determination. You spend a lot of money.
Somewhere along the way you become part of the "movie making community." Profit!
Not only that, he wants political action to put broadband in his parent's summer home...WHICH IS LOCATED IN AN FEDERAL ECOLOGICALLY-PROTECTED SEASHORE!
"Dear Senator, please destroy a wildlife habitat and sanctuary so that I can get broadband..."
The point isn't to manipulate *your* judgment. The point is that our adversaries use American media to find out what's going on.
Remember in the first Gulf War, CNN endlessly showed footage of marines practicing beach landings. Saddam was watching, and so assumed we would land on the beach.
Schwarzkopf released that footage to CNN intentionally. He did not plan to land on the beach. Instead he implemented his famous over-land left-hook, catching Saddam completely unaware.
Using domestic media...and now blogs...to misinform one's enemies is a time-honored tradition.
"In the end, it was the Americans who won the race to the moon, nearly 22 years later."
22 years! What?
I guess TFA meant 12 years.
Re:tivoisation
on
GPLv3 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It's like a restaurant chef refusing to tell you what's in your dinner. Sure, it's the chef's recipe...but it's your dinner. You're the one about to put the mystery food into your belly. You have a right to know what's going to go into your stomach. That doesn't mean you intend to steal the chef's recipe, but daggumit...it's your stomach! You have a right to know what's going in'it!
Likewise, my Tivo is my computer. It's running in my house. It's connected to my network. I have a right to know what it's doing. Would you be as forgiving of a builder who wouldn't let you keep a copy of the plans to your house? Would you tolerate a car dealer who's welded your hood shut? It's your house. It's your car. You have a right to know where the plumbing goes. You have a right to look at the engine.
I'm not saying I entirely agree with this philosophy...but I fully understand it's impetus. GPL aside, how do you balance the chef's right to keep his recipe a trade secret, against the diner's right to know what's a'goin' into his own belly? It's a thorny question. Anybody who claims the answer is "obvious" isn't giving due consideration to the counter-arguments. Both sides have a valid point.
In the case of Tivo, the chef is saying, "You won't eat without knowing my recipe? Well, I guess you'll have to go to a different restaurant!" The diner is saying, "But we had a deal...you built your recipe on mine." In this case, I have to side with the diner. We had a deal. Tivoisation is wrong.
I disagree. I think one of the other posters already summed this up quite well: you're basically paying somebody to help you skip some "boring" part of the game. (In this case, grinding.) I would gladly pay somebody $20 if doing so allowed me to skip 40 hours of "boring" Monopoly so that I could play just the 10 hours of "fun" Monopoly.
The flaw here is on the part of the game designers. They shouldn't be designing a game that contains portions so boring that people are actually willing to pay to avoid them, just so that they can play the fun parts.
I've noticed this question several times on this list. Since Sparter doesn't actually play the MMORPG itself, why do people keep thinking that Sparter must abide by the EULA? The EULA is a contract between the game player and the game provider. 3rd parties such as Sparter are under no obligation to abide by the terms & conditions of contract to which they are not a participant.
This question would be like asking why Sparter shouldn't be required to pay my mortgage. My mortgage is a contract between me and my bank; Sparter isn't a party to that contract.
Also, Sparter isn't selling MMORPG gold. The sellers are. Sparter is a "dating service" to connect connect buyers to sellers. The question would more accurately be phrased as, "How do you feel about being in the business of mating-up parties who are willing to break the EULA of an game? Last time I checked, being in the business of matching-up MMORPG cheaters was against the law." Except, of course, it isn't against the law. So this poster's whole premise vanishes under even modest scrutiny, as does the premise of all the other people here who have been posting essentially the same question.
Note that corporate espionage for the purpose of uncovering Trade Secrets is generally illegal in the U.S. That's why companies mark documents as "proprietary," for instance; doing so identifies the document as something that the company considers a trade secret. If you use corporate espionage techniques to obtain such a document (i.e., if the company doesn't exercise due diligence in making sure that such documents aren't publicly disclosed) then relevant Trade Secret laws would apply. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret
I think the point is that in the future one might access YouOS from something other than a conventional PC, and yet still receive a PC-desktop-like experience. For example, you might access YouOS from some lightweight client (like a gaming console, a PSP-like handheld gaming device, a wireless PDA, a smartphone, a future iPod incarnation, etc.) and still obtain the same working environment that you have on your PC.
Admittedly, the client will need blazingly fast processors and network connections, but presumably both of those assumptions will be true eventually. So the point is to experiment now to determine what functionality will need to be built-in to future browsers to deliver the desktop-like experience, even though the only client currently able to run the environment is a PC.
And if something did happen on U.S. soil? In addition to the value of lives lost, what would be the economic damage to the U.S.? What would be the economic impact of even one passenger jetliner downed by terrorists? Accordinging to Wikipedia, the U.S. stock market lost $1.2 trillion in the week following September 11. Maybe a $10B price tag doesn't sound so bad after all? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11,_2001_Te rrorist_Attack#Economic_aftermath
As an aside, charging defense contractors with profiteering is usually silly. That's the business they're in: they make weapons. That's their job.
I predict that eventually one of the unintended consequences of using more autonomous vehicles on the battlefield will be that the U.S. military's response to any hostile force will be viewed as being "disproportionate" and unjust.
In other words, if our "soldiers" are robots and their soldiers are men, then their attacks will simply kill our robots, but our subsequent response will kill men. Adversaries will decry, "How can you go around shooting our people when all we did was shoot at a few of your machines? You bastards!"
I agree. My employer issued me a Blackberry while my personal cellphone was a Treo 650 (The Treo replaced my previous Kyocera smartphone when it died). After a few weeks with the Blackberry, I stopped carrying the Treo entirely.
As a techno-geek, I was originally excited by the Treo's extensive feature-set, as compared to the Blackberry. But the Treo's short battery life made it die often, no matter that I had chargers at home, office, and car. The PalmOS caused the Treo to crash often. And the Treo is very heavy (I tend to carry my cellphones in my pocket). Combine these three factors, and I eventually found that the Blackberry was always within reach, always charged, and always running -- while my Treo was always left behind, uncharged, and frequently locked-up. (I recently "downgraded" from my Treo to a RAZR so once again I'm back to carrying my personal cellphone as well as my work Blackberry. My Year of Treo will forever go down in my personal history as a bad, bad gadget year.)
Final note: the Treo is bad about "staying on a data call" even when no data applications are running (as opposed to my old Kyocera, which was smart enough to hang up when it didn't need data) so Verizon has to sell you a -very- expensive "unlimited minutes" data plan to compensate (or else deal with hordes of very angry customers who get charged monthly for air-time they didn't use).
Slashdot Mirror
Hypothetically, suppose we knew for a fact that some sort of seemingly aircraft-like objects were flying around that were not built by human civilization as we now know it, and are also not an unknown phenomena of nature.
All of the following explanations appear improbable in the extreme, but which explanation would you consider to be the *least* improbable?
A. Extraterrestrials (biological or robotic)
B. Time travelers
C. Travelers from an alternate dimension or alternate timeline
D. An ancient advanced civilization that has been hitherto undiscovered (for instance, living deep within the Earth's crust, or deep undersea)
E. A supernatural phenomenon such as ghosts
F. Other (explain)
Personally I think the least improbable answer is D. Not that I think that answer is within the realm of realistic, but at least it requires fewer violations of the physical laws that we know than the other explanations.
> As much as I'd prefer that there were starfaring alien civilization...
Elizondo didn't say they were aliens; he said they were UFOs. I've heard a few Air Force pilots opine on this same topic: they believe there's definitely some strange phenomenon that we don't understand. Not necessarily aliens, but something.
When a government agency funds something that works, the headline is always, "NASA builds this..." or "DARPA builds that..."
But when a government agency funds something that doesn't work, the headline instead is, "Lockheed mess up this..." or "Boeing messed up that..."
Did DARPA "create" this as the headline says, or did they just fund somebody else to do the research, design and implementation?
http://www.laserfocusworld.com/articles/2012/07/northrop-grumman-demos-850-ghz-integrated-receiver-circuit-aiming-at-terahertz-photonics.html
There doesn't appear to be any sexting icons. How can they expect this to catch on? ch'uh
Wikis are great for this.
I've been thinking for years that NASA should be "dismantled"...reduce its mission scope to military-related matters and take all the civilian stuff that NASA does now and take that commercial instead.
If the government bought its civilian space needs exclusively from commercial suppliers "off the shelf" that would be a huge boost for commercial space industry and would accelerate development of low-cost-to-orbit technologies.
It's not that a governmental entity like NASA *couldn't* accomplish the same thing, but they've spent the last 35 years proving that they *won't*. It's almost impossible to change the DNA of a government agency. The only alternative is to scale them back so far that they essentially have to re-invent themselves, and use the funds saved to nurture industry alternatives.
(1) When you talk about *what* a systems administrator does, it doesn't sound that hard: installing and configuring software, patching, installing and configuring hardware, researching and comparing potential upgrade options, troubleshooting problems, etc.
What 4th graders probably don't think about is that none of these things by themselves may seem particularly hard at the scale of an individual computer, but when you multiply each of these activities by a gazillion servers, routers, clients, etc., then it has the potential to become a real nightmare. So you have to use tricks & technologies in a company's computing environment that you'd never bother with at home.
E.g., "Ever seen your mom or dad install a Windows update? Remember how nuts that made them? Now imagine doing that across 20,000 desktops in 10 cities, and being given only 3 days to get them all done!"
(2) Probably a lot of your time is spent being a detective, trying to puzzle out why something that oughta be working ain't. Telling stories about some of your successful detective adventures might be entertaining.
All people (including kids) like to be told stories, so the more you can populate your presentation with interesting anecdotes, the better.
And, as one person already wrote, bringing some old or broken hard drive, circuit boards, etc. to pass around the classroom probably couldn't hurt either.
Also, many 4th graders I know think that the *monitor* is the computer. They point at it and say, "That's the computer, isn't it? Why are you fiddling with that other box?" I know that sounds crazy, but that's the way many 9 year olds think. So don't assume any understanding of computers just because they know how to play Spore.
Whenever you write code on future projects, you're often going to start by trying to re-use code from previous projects. So don't just treat the source-code you're writing now as something you know you're going to reuse in the future. Try to think of each useful chunk of code you write as being part of a "package" that includes not only the code itself, but also the associated documentation, the test cases, the performance metrics, use cases, the build files, etc.
You want to write the entire -package- so that it can be re-used on future projects, not just the code itself. Remember that as a developer only a fraction of your time is actually spent writing code: the bulk of your time is spent putting together all that associated "stuff." So make the "stuff" re-usable too.
Some U.S. traffic cameras do something similar already. The camera continually records and discards about a minute's worth of footage...unless it hears the sound of a car crash. If it hears a car crash, it archives the recording on either side of the sound, so that investigators can later watch events leading up to the crash. I've seen the footage...it's amazing stuff. But I wouldn't call it AI.
I've decorated several new offices by going to eBay and finding vintage advertisements from the industry I'm working in. They usually go for about $4 a piece. I take them to a local framing shop and put a nice matte & frame around them...mattes add some color if the ad is black & white. Use all the same frame and it looks like they're part of a set.
Is cheap, looks cool, looks professional, and educates you on the history of your discipline, all at the same time.
You can always tell when a story is based on a NASA press release. If the spacecraft exceeded its mission expectations, it's a "NASA spacecraft." But if it failed, it's a "Lockheed-built spacecraft" (or whichever contractor they decide to blame).
For a change it would be nice to see NASA give kudos to whatever contractor built the successful spacecraft for them.
Whenever I've read biographies of folks who have gone on to become movie makers, the basic answer always seems to be the same: the way to get into the movie business is to start making movies.
Grab your friends, find a camcorder, write a script, download some software, make a movie.
Then make another.
And another.
Keep doing it until you get good at it. It take an incredible amount of time and determination. You spend a lot of money.
Somewhere along the way you become part of the "movie making community." Profit!
Not only that, he wants political action to put broadband in his parent's summer home...WHICH IS LOCATED IN AN FEDERAL ECOLOGICALLY-PROTECTED SEASHORE!
"Dear Senator, please destroy a wildlife habitat and sanctuary so that I can get broadband..."
The point isn't to manipulate *your* judgment. The point is that our adversaries use American media to find out what's going on.
Remember in the first Gulf War, CNN endlessly showed footage of marines practicing beach landings. Saddam was watching, and so assumed we would land on the beach.
Schwarzkopf released that footage to CNN intentionally. He did not plan to land on the beach. Instead he implemented his famous over-land left-hook, catching Saddam completely unaware.
Using domestic media...and now blogs...to misinform one's enemies is a time-honored tradition.
"In the end, it was the Americans who won the race to the moon, nearly 22 years later."
22 years! What?
I guess TFA meant 12 years.
Likewise, my Tivo is my computer. It's running in my house. It's connected to my network. I have a right to know what it's doing. Would you be as forgiving of a builder who wouldn't let you keep a copy of the plans to your house? Would you tolerate a car dealer who's welded your hood shut? It's your house. It's your car. You have a right to know where the plumbing goes. You have a right to look at the engine.
I'm not saying I entirely agree with this philosophy...but I fully understand it's impetus. GPL aside, how do you balance the chef's right to keep his recipe a trade secret, against the diner's right to know what's a'goin' into his own belly? It's a thorny question. Anybody who claims the answer is "obvious" isn't giving due consideration to the counter-arguments. Both sides have a valid point.
In the case of Tivo, the chef is saying, "You won't eat without knowing my recipe? Well, I guess you'll have to go to a different restaurant!" The diner is saying, "But we had a deal...you built your recipe on mine." In this case, I have to side with the diner. We had a deal. Tivoisation is wrong.
I disagree. I think one of the other posters already summed this up quite well: you're basically paying somebody to help you skip some "boring" part of the game. (In this case, grinding.) I would gladly pay somebody $20 if doing so allowed me to skip 40 hours of "boring" Monopoly so that I could play just the 10 hours of "fun" Monopoly. The flaw here is on the part of the game designers. They shouldn't be designing a game that contains portions so boring that people are actually willing to pay to avoid them, just so that they can play the fun parts.
I've noticed this question several times on this list. Since Sparter doesn't actually play the MMORPG itself, why do people keep thinking that Sparter must abide by the EULA? The EULA is a contract between the game player and the game provider. 3rd parties such as Sparter are under no obligation to abide by the terms & conditions of contract to which they are not a participant.
This question would be like asking why Sparter shouldn't be required to pay my mortgage. My mortgage is a contract between me and my bank; Sparter isn't a party to that contract.
Also, Sparter isn't selling MMORPG gold. The sellers are. Sparter is a "dating service" to connect connect buyers to sellers. The question would more accurately be phrased as, "How do you feel about being in the business of mating-up parties who are willing to break the EULA of an game? Last time I checked, being in the business of matching-up MMORPG cheaters was against the law." Except, of course, it isn't against the law. So this poster's whole premise vanishes under even modest scrutiny, as does the premise of all the other people here who have been posting essentially the same question.
The universe: a device for turning hydrogen into helium
Note that corporate espionage for the purpose of uncovering Trade Secrets is generally illegal in the U.S. That's why companies mark documents as "proprietary," for instance; doing so identifies the document as something that the company considers a trade secret. If you use corporate espionage techniques to obtain such a document (i.e., if the company doesn't exercise due diligence in making sure that such documents aren't publicly disclosed) then relevant Trade Secret laws would apply.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret
I think the point is that in the future one might access YouOS from something other than a conventional PC, and yet still receive a PC-desktop-like experience. For example, you might access YouOS from some lightweight client (like a gaming console, a PSP-like handheld gaming device, a wireless PDA, a smartphone, a future iPod incarnation, etc.) and still obtain the same working environment that you have on your PC.
Admittedly, the client will need blazingly fast processors and network connections, but presumably both of those assumptions will be true eventually. So the point is to experiment now to determine what functionality will need to be built-in to future browsers to deliver the desktop-like experience, even though the only client currently able to run the environment is a PC.
You've convinced me! I change my mind. We shouldn't spend the money after all. That'll show those terrorists!
And if something did happen on U.S. soil? In addition to the value of lives lost, what would be the economic damage to the U.S.? What would be the economic impact of even one passenger jetliner downed by terrorists? Accordinging to Wikipedia, the U.S. stock market lost $1.2 trillion in the week following September 11. Maybe a $10B price tag doesn't sound so bad after all?e rrorist_Attack#Economic_aftermath
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11,_2001_T
As an aside, charging defense contractors with profiteering is usually silly. That's the business they're in: they make weapons. That's their job.
I predict that eventually one of the unintended consequences of using more autonomous vehicles on the battlefield will be that the U.S. military's response to any hostile force will be viewed as being "disproportionate" and unjust.
In other words, if our "soldiers" are robots and their soldiers are men, then their attacks will simply kill our robots, but our subsequent response will kill men. Adversaries will decry, "How can you go around shooting our people when all we did was shoot at a few of your machines? You bastards!"
I agree. My employer issued me a Blackberry while my personal cellphone was a Treo 650 (The Treo replaced my previous Kyocera smartphone when it died). After a few weeks with the Blackberry, I stopped carrying the Treo entirely.
As a techno-geek, I was originally excited by the Treo's extensive feature-set, as compared to the Blackberry. But the Treo's short battery life made it die often, no matter that I had chargers at home, office, and car. The PalmOS caused the Treo to crash often. And the Treo is very heavy (I tend to carry my cellphones in my pocket). Combine these three factors, and I eventually found that the Blackberry was always within reach, always charged, and always running -- while my Treo was always left behind, uncharged, and frequently locked-up. (I recently "downgraded" from my Treo to a RAZR so once again I'm back to carrying my personal cellphone as well as my work Blackberry. My Year of Treo will forever go down in my personal history as a bad, bad gadget year.)
Final note: the Treo is bad about "staying on a data call" even when no data applications are running (as opposed to my old Kyocera, which was smart enough to hang up when it didn't need data) so Verizon has to sell you a -very- expensive "unlimited minutes" data plan to compensate (or else deal with hordes of very angry customers who get charged monthly for air-time they didn't use).