Although I haven't RTFA, it seems likely that they will be able to, eventually, move from being able to interpret 26 characters to being able to interpret the top 1000 most commonly used words. Then all the words in the person's vocabulary. Then all the most common basic grammatical constructions (e.g. verb conjugations, etc), then sentence fragments, then sentences.
The craniotomy may be needed for a very long time (at least to get the best accuracy/speed), but if the craniotomy procedure became safe/cheap enough, I could definitely see this becoming one of the pioneering mainstream cybernetics - especially if/when it becomes possible to transmit faster than average speaking/typing (the fastest typers may not want it, but they're, by definition, a minority).
You should have it so good! Why in my day we only had one TV show whose humor we would parrot to death in the hopes filling our hovercraft with mod points. Oh, they weren't the funniest jokes in the world, and some folks would argue that the jokes got old real quick (others would deny this), but we were happier then!
Actually your link appears to be about the simulation of a 1.4 km diameter asteroid. Apophis is 0.27 km in diameter. Assuming roughly equivalent densities that would mean a ratio of 2.744 to 0.019683, or 139 to 1, for their respective masses. It seems that more than two degrees of magnitude would demand a new simulation.
Actually, the standard Sci-Fi technique is:
- Send big mining robot.
- Big mining robot passes through exotic magnetic field and develops conscience.
- Big mining robot invades Earth; possibly to mine it.
Don't you think that a big mining robot with a conscience would have more respect for personal property?
Perhaps you weren't paying enough attention. There's a whole bunch of these organizations out there that force pregnant mothers to give up their babies for adoption by making sure they have no other choice, threatening to charge them for their stay unless they do, and various other methods.
While the article does mention aggressive attempts to convince the women to give their children up for adoption, I missed the part in the article where there was a claim that any of the organizations threatened to charge the mother for her stay unless she adopted. Maybe you were thinking of a different article?
Some are quite open in only accepting women who will give their child away. For example, this one: "Any woman is welcome to live at Bethany's House as long as she is considering an adoption plan for her child."
"Considering an adoption plan" does not mean "has chosen adoption". The rep from Bethany claimed that only 25-40% of the women who come to Bethany choose adoption. That's 60-75% that somehow escape being "forced" to give their child up for adoption.
Or this one: "Single-parenting does not fit God's perfect plan for the family".
I have had no experience with this house - which appears to be a small, single location in Ohio.
I'm not exaggerating the amount of money they make on this, either. Private adoptions of this sort have fees in the $15,000-$30,000 range.
Yes, there are private agencies that are successful businesses and make significant profit on each adoption. My experience with the private agencies who are charities is that any amount paid over the costs of setting up the adoption (including expensive, but frequently necessary, attorney fees, as well as medical expenses, etc) is used to help the mothers who choose not to give their child up for adoption, as well as helping less wealthy adoptive parents defray the legal/medical costs.
(The racism is harder to confirm. None of the organizations admit to being racist, but women seeking help have found them suddenly losing all interest when it becomes clear they aren't white. There's not so much demand for black babies, and they aren't nearly as profitable.)
Still no source? Not even some kind of anecdote? If it's "white women with white babies only" for a "fair few" number of these organizations (as you originally claimed) I'd expect at least a couple of anecdotes - from across the thousands of organizations that there are.
There exist no objective criteria to be tested against.
Yet we claim to use just such an objective criteria for determining when life is no longer there (i.e. death). Ceasing of brain function with the inability to resuscitate. In fact our ability to resuscitate is getting better and better, but we still declare death according to brain activity (or whether or not one can claim they're "not quite dead, yet"). Because our brains hold our identity as well as provide the motive for any kind of action that distinguishes us from a plant, it makes sense to focus on it. It seems to me, then, quite reasonable to use independent brain activity as the criteria for assessing the existence of another living human being, until something better comes along. Looking at things just based off of our instinctual responses - almost no one feels sympathy for the appendix, while almost everyone feels sympathy for the weaker of the conjoined twins who dies after the operation to separate them, even when the separation had to take place or they both would have died.
Regarding the parasitic-relationship argument that you didn't put forth but many people have, and answering it allows me to keep my example case - I'm pretty sure it's illegal for the stronger of the conjoined twins to kill the weaker just because he/she wants to. I don't think a parasitic relationship translates to "can have killed at whim" when you're talking about two living human beings.
Here's some perspective from thesetwo sets of statistics from the Guttmacher Institute. To give you the benefit of the doubt, we'll assume that every woman who claimed the reason for having an abortion was because of health risks or concern for the health of the fetus (~2%) had it after 19 weeks, and that the health risks, or health defects were all of the utmost gravity. For the sake of this argument we won't discuss anything before 12 weeks, although it is important to note that at 12 weeks the brain has already divided into 5 regions and has been developing as a cohesive whole for 5 weeks.
Now, there were 1.21 million abortions in the United States in 2005. That means that there were at least 111,320 (9.2% of 1.21 million) fetuses aborted between 12 and 19 weeks of development (more developed than this little guy). That's over 110,000 fetuses who are as able to feel pain as anyone else, and make facial expressions, being aborted every year with various descriptions of (in)convenience being the reason given by the mother.
In comparison, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports the number of fatalities for 2005 (in the U.S.) involving alcohol was 17,590. The fatalities for all other accidents was 25,920. Pediatric cancer killed 2,200 children in 2004. Deaths attributed to HIV/AIDS for children and adults was 25,000 in all of North America in 2008. So the deaths attributed to all these hot-button issues combined is less than the deaths of fetuses.
Regarding the "they'll still do it no matter how strict the law" argument:
This argument only works on the premise that there is nothing wrong with the activity itself. For example, statistics demonstrate that men will still rape women, regardless of how harsh the penalty (even in countries where the penalty is death). Legalized rape means fewer women die, because the rapist will not feel the need to kill the woman to prevent her from reporting him to the police. Which do you want, brassy moral superiority and thousands of women dead, or an unpleasant feeling and those women still alive?
Do you see that just as you believe that rape is an intrinsically unacceptable act, and therefore there can be no justification for it's legal acceptance, so do the anti-abortion believers believe that the abortion of a fetus for the sake of convenience (being seen as murder) is an intrinsically unacceptable act?
Ah, that does possibly look like one of the better ones. There are a fair few Christian organizations that provide a home for pregnant single mothers* on the condition that they give their babies up for adoption to nice Christian married couples. Oh, and these organizations charge the couples tens of thousands of dollars per baby.
* White mothers with white babies only.
I've never met anyone from an organization that follows any of those policies, officially or unofficially, despite the fact that, like with any sufficiently large movement, there are definitely individuals who belong to the major organizations that are racist as well as those looking to make money off of the downtrodden. I'm not saying the kinds of organization you speak of don't exist - but I've never come across one of them, despite having a good amount of experience with dozens of the largest anti-abortion organizations (mostly those based in California, and the larger of the nationwide ones) that try to aid pregnant women who change their mind about having an abortion. Perhaps a reference could be helpful?
I would not consider those organizations necessarily "anti-abortion" groups. To me they sound like support organizations, some of whom could be pro or anti abortion, or not express an official stance in either direction. Many don't want to put forth an official stance as it brings up some heated political issues and risks polarizing their donors and reducing their ability to provide said support. Kudos on providing support to a needy group, btw.
While it's true that there are a lot of organizations that provide support for single mothers while remaining neutral on the right-to-abortion issue a great deal of officially anti-abortion groups/orgs do this activity while remaining vocal on their abortion stance. And whether or not the organization is "officially" anti-abortion does not change the fact that the individuals who make up the organization consider themselves "pro-lifers". Not all activists are militant sign-waving protesters. It's just those ones that get the most publicity because they put themselves in the media spotlight while these quiet activists choose an activity less in-your-face.
The GP was a paraphrased critique by a Catholic Pro-Life Nun about her fellow pro-life activists.
Your parents are the exception not the norm.
Ignorance. Indeed.
Actually, they have hundreds of friends ranging across the entire anti-abortion activist spectrum (including a few who advocate violence against the doctors). While it's true that for almost all of them the top priority is "saving the child", the majority of them are involved in, or at least contribute monetarily to, programs and charities for supporting the mother after the birth - even if the mother chooses to give the child up for adoption. I'm not claiming that the majority of them are as focused on the care of the mother as my parents, but it's only a small percentage that are "only about the baby".
Until you've lived in the culture try not to pretend that you know about it just because you've cherry-picked choice phrases from someone who makes a claim that allows you to cast the opposition in a universally negative light.
I'm asking this seriously. If you took said fetus out of the woman at the 9 week stage, what are the chances it would survive w/o assistance?
How long would a newborn, or even a 6-month-old child survive without assistance?
Plain and simple, if it would kill my wife to have a baby and she got pregnant (and she would otherwise be able to live a semi-normal healthy lifespan), my guess is that I would want to keep my wife alive... however, I would still leave the decision up to her.
Fortunately the strong majority of anti-abortion activists believe in exceptions for the life of the mother as well as rape cases. Additionally, all cases for rape, incest, and health risks to the mother account for only 1% of all of abortions, according the the Alan Guttmacher Institute.
So you say that deciding to end the life of a fetus is immoral. Animals in nature have been practicing infanticide since animals began walking the earth...
Is it moral, or immoral neither is relevant. All things on earth do it, all have done it for thousands of years, animals just do it for different reasons than we do it.
I failed to see any mention in the Wikipedia article that claimed that all animals practice infanticide. So some animals, at some times, practice infanticide. And that is your rationale for claiming that the issue of abortion is not a moral question?! Excuse me for a moment as I ponder that while I rape your mother, and your little sister. Hell, maybe I'll get a chance to give you a good deep-dicking as well.
That's the trouble with all anti-abortion groups: they only care about babies being born, after wards, the mother is on her own - even if it means they starve and are homeless. And many of them have the audacity to call themselves Christian.
Your ignorance of the anti-abortion movement is hilarious. My parents/family have (for 20+ years, now) been very involved in supporting multiple organizations in SoCal whose primary concern is taking care of single mothers who choose not to have an abortion - providing a home for them (often for the first couple years), while also helping them find a job, including providing professional skills training and support for taking college courses, as well as paying for food, baby needs, medical expenses, etc. Here's a link to one of them. The website quality is kinda crappy because they spend all monetary donations on supporting the women. But don't let a google search of "home for unwed mothers", or "home for single mothers", get in the way of your hate.
Slashdot Mirror
In the US we are still in stone age compared to 3rd world countries like Korea when it comes to bandwidth.
That phrase... I don't think it means what you think it means...
So how is this a 'win' exactly?
I think they forgot the asterisk after "wins" in the title:
* true only for sufficiently extreme values of fanboyism
I mean, c'mon, it is Gizmodo.
Second, figure out the peak speed, minimum speed, average speed (Both mean and RMS)...
I always thought RMS and mean were synonymous.
Although I haven't RTFA, it seems likely that they will be able to, eventually, move from being able to interpret 26 characters to being able to interpret the top 1000 most commonly used words. Then all the words in the person's vocabulary. Then all the most common basic grammatical constructions (e.g. verb conjugations, etc), then sentence fragments, then sentences.
The craniotomy may be needed for a very long time (at least to get the best accuracy/speed), but if the craniotomy procedure became safe/cheap enough, I could definitely see this becoming one of the pioneering mainstream cybernetics - especially if/when it becomes possible to transmit faster than average speaking/typing (the fastest typers may not want it, but they're, by definition, a minority).
I can't think 120WPM, but I can sure type it.
Then, at your fastest, you must be typing things that you haven't put any thought into. Thus - your post.
And then they come out to ./, telling us to get off their lawns, rambling on about their onion belt and whatnot.
What really gets my goat is when they start nit-picking about whether or not this site is called Dotslash or Slashdot.
Those of us who descended from the mammalian evolutionary tree, keep our bodies warmer than ambient temperatures.
What about those of us who were brought to life from the primordial marinara soup by the touch of His Noodley Appendage, you insensitive clod!
And that is a perfect Segway into my next point... The one thing I look forward to is the day when my Child knows more about a subject than I do.
I'll put money on that subject being spelling/vocabulary.
Luxury. I code in a brown paper bag in a septic tank.
You're lucky to have a septic tank. You don't wanna know where my brown paper bag is...
I'll be damned if a Congressman who Godwinned the Health Care Bill debate has a lower UID than me!!
Sad the mods don't get a L4D reference.
You should have it so good! Why in my day we only had one TV show whose humor we would parrot to death in the hopes filling our hovercraft with mod points. Oh, they weren't the funniest jokes in the world, and some folks would argue that the jokes got old real quick (others would deny this), but we were happier then!
C'mon man - what this thread really needs is a car analogy.
Sun's inability to shift to commodity processors is like a car.
George, you need to calm down - remember your blood pressure...
Actually your link appears to be about the simulation of a 1.4 km diameter asteroid. Apophis is 0.27 km in diameter. Assuming roughly equivalent densities that would mean a ratio of 2.744 to 0.019683, or 139 to 1, for their respective masses. It seems that more than two degrees of magnitude would demand a new simulation.
Actually, the standard Sci-Fi technique is: - Send big mining robot. - Big mining robot passes through exotic magnetic field and develops conscience. - Big mining robot invades Earth; possibly to mine it.
Don't you think that a big mining robot with a conscience would have more respect for personal property?
Perhaps you weren't paying enough attention. There's a whole bunch of these organizations out there that force pregnant mothers to give up their babies for adoption by making sure they have no other choice, threatening to charge them for their stay unless they do, and various other methods.
While the article does mention aggressive attempts to convince the women to give their children up for adoption, I missed the part in the article where there was a claim that any of the organizations threatened to charge the mother for her stay unless she adopted. Maybe you were thinking of a different article?
Some are quite open in only accepting women who will give their child away. For example, this one: "Any woman is welcome to live at Bethany's House as long as she is considering an adoption plan for her child."
"Considering an adoption plan" does not mean "has chosen adoption". The rep from Bethany claimed that only 25-40% of the women who come to Bethany choose adoption. That's 60-75% that somehow escape being "forced" to give their child up for adoption.
Or this one: "Single-parenting does not fit God's perfect plan for the family".
I have had no experience with this house - which appears to be a small, single location in Ohio.
I'm not exaggerating the amount of money they make on this, either. Private adoptions of this sort have fees in the $15,000-$30,000 range.
Yes, there are private agencies that are successful businesses and make significant profit on each adoption. My experience with the private agencies who are charities is that any amount paid over the costs of setting up the adoption (including expensive, but frequently necessary, attorney fees, as well as medical expenses, etc) is used to help the mothers who choose not to give their child up for adoption, as well as helping less wealthy adoptive parents defray the legal/medical costs.
(The racism is harder to confirm. None of the organizations admit to being racist, but women seeking help have found them suddenly losing all interest when it becomes clear they aren't white. There's not so much demand for black babies, and they aren't nearly as profitable.)
Still no source? Not even some kind of anecdote? If it's "white women with white babies only" for a "fair few" number of these organizations (as you originally claimed) I'd expect at least a couple of anecdotes - from across the thousands of organizations that there are.
There exist no objective criteria to be tested against.
Yet we claim to use just such an objective criteria for determining when life is no longer there (i.e. death). Ceasing of brain function with the inability to resuscitate. In fact our ability to resuscitate is getting better and better, but we still declare death according to brain activity (or whether or not one can claim they're "not quite dead, yet"). Because our brains hold our identity as well as provide the motive for any kind of action that distinguishes us from a plant, it makes sense to focus on it. It seems to me, then, quite reasonable to use independent brain activity as the criteria for assessing the existence of another living human being, until something better comes along. Looking at things just based off of our instinctual responses - almost no one feels sympathy for the appendix, while almost everyone feels sympathy for the weaker of the conjoined twins who dies after the operation to separate them, even when the separation had to take place or they both would have died.
Regarding the parasitic-relationship argument that you didn't put forth but many people have, and answering it allows me to keep my example case - I'm pretty sure it's illegal for the stronger of the conjoined twins to kill the weaker just because he/she wants to. I don't think a parasitic relationship translates to "can have killed at whim" when you're talking about two living human beings.
Here's some perspective from these two sets of statistics from the Guttmacher Institute. To give you the benefit of the doubt, we'll assume that every woman who claimed the reason for having an abortion was because of health risks or concern for the health of the fetus (~2%) had it after 19 weeks, and that the health risks, or health defects were all of the utmost gravity. For the sake of this argument we won't discuss anything before 12 weeks, although it is important to note that at 12 weeks the brain has already divided into 5 regions and has been developing as a cohesive whole for 5 weeks.
Now, there were 1.21 million abortions in the United States in 2005. That means that there were at least 111,320 (9.2% of 1.21 million) fetuses aborted between 12 and 19 weeks of development (more developed than this little guy). That's over 110,000 fetuses who are as able to feel pain as anyone else, and make facial expressions, being aborted every year with various descriptions of (in)convenience being the reason given by the mother.
In comparison, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports the number of fatalities for 2005 (in the U.S.) involving alcohol was 17,590. The fatalities for all other accidents was 25,920. Pediatric cancer killed 2,200 children in 2004. Deaths attributed to HIV/AIDS for children and adults was 25,000 in all of North America in 2008. So the deaths attributed to all these hot-button issues combined is less than the deaths of fetuses.
Regarding the "they'll still do it no matter how strict the law" argument:
This argument only works on the premise that there is nothing wrong with the activity itself. For example, statistics demonstrate that men will still rape women, regardless of how harsh the penalty (even in countries where the penalty is death). Legalized rape means fewer women die, because the rapist will not feel the need to kill the woman to prevent her from reporting him to the police. Which do you want, brassy moral superiority and thousands of women dead, or an unpleasant feeling and those women still alive?
Do you see that just as you believe that rape is an intrinsically unacceptable act, and therefore there can be no justification for it's legal acceptance, so do the anti-abortion believers believe that the abortion of a fetus for the sake of convenience (being seen as murder) is an intrinsically unacceptable act?
Ah, that does possibly look like one of the better ones. There are a fair few Christian organizations that provide a home for pregnant single mothers* on the condition that they give their babies up for adoption to nice Christian married couples. Oh, and these organizations charge the couples tens of thousands of dollars per baby.
* White mothers with white babies only.
I've never met anyone from an organization that follows any of those policies, officially or unofficially, despite the fact that, like with any sufficiently large movement, there are definitely individuals who belong to the major organizations that are racist as well as those looking to make money off of the downtrodden. I'm not saying the kinds of organization you speak of don't exist - but I've never come across one of them, despite having a good amount of experience with dozens of the largest anti-abortion organizations (mostly those based in California, and the larger of the nationwide ones) that try to aid pregnant women who change their mind about having an abortion. Perhaps a reference could be helpful?
I would not consider those organizations necessarily "anti-abortion" groups. To me they sound like support organizations, some of whom could be pro or anti abortion, or not express an official stance in either direction. Many don't want to put forth an official stance as it brings up some heated political issues and risks polarizing their donors and reducing their ability to provide said support. Kudos on providing support to a needy group, btw.
While it's true that there are a lot of organizations that provide support for single mothers while remaining neutral on the right-to-abortion issue a great deal of officially anti-abortion groups/orgs do this activity while remaining vocal on their abortion stance. And whether or not the organization is "officially" anti-abortion does not change the fact that the individuals who make up the organization consider themselves "pro-lifers". Not all activists are militant sign-waving protesters. It's just those ones that get the most publicity because they put themselves in the media spotlight while these quiet activists choose an activity less in-your-face.
The GP was a paraphrased critique by a Catholic Pro-Life Nun about her fellow pro-life activists.
Your parents are the exception not the norm.
Ignorance. Indeed.
Actually, they have hundreds of friends ranging across the entire anti-abortion activist spectrum (including a few who advocate violence against the doctors). While it's true that for almost all of them the top priority is "saving the child", the majority of them are involved in, or at least contribute monetarily to, programs and charities for supporting the mother after the birth - even if the mother chooses to give the child up for adoption. I'm not claiming that the majority of them are as focused on the care of the mother as my parents, but it's only a small percentage that are "only about the baby".
Until you've lived in the culture try not to pretend that you know about it just because you've cherry-picked choice phrases from someone who makes a claim that allows you to cast the opposition in a universally negative light.
I'm asking this seriously. If you took said fetus out of the woman at the 9 week stage, what are the chances it would survive w/o assistance?
How long would a newborn, or even a 6-month-old child survive without assistance?
Plain and simple, if it would kill my wife to have a baby and she got pregnant (and she would otherwise be able to live a semi-normal healthy lifespan), my guess is that I would want to keep my wife alive... however, I would still leave the decision up to her.
Fortunately the strong majority of anti-abortion activists believe in exceptions for the life of the mother as well as rape cases. Additionally, all cases for rape, incest, and health risks to the mother account for only 1% of all of abortions, according the the Alan Guttmacher Institute.
Margaret Sanger, is that you?
So you say that deciding to end the life of a fetus is immoral. Animals in nature have been practicing infanticide since animals began walking the earth... Is it moral, or immoral neither is relevant. All things on earth do it, all have done it for thousands of years, animals just do it for different reasons than we do it.
I failed to see any mention in the Wikipedia article that claimed that all animals practice infanticide. So some animals, at some times, practice infanticide. And that is your rationale for claiming that the issue of abortion is not a moral question?! Excuse me for a moment as I ponder that while I rape your mother, and your little sister. Hell, maybe I'll get a chance to give you a good deep-dicking as well.
That's the trouble with all anti-abortion groups: they only care about babies being born, after wards, the mother is on her own - even if it means they starve and are homeless. And many of them have the audacity to call themselves Christian.
Your ignorance of the anti-abortion movement is hilarious. My parents/family have (for 20+ years, now) been very involved in supporting multiple organizations in SoCal whose primary concern is taking care of single mothers who choose not to have an abortion - providing a home for them (often for the first couple years), while also helping them find a job, including providing professional skills training and support for taking college courses, as well as paying for food, baby needs, medical expenses, etc. Here's a link to one of them. The website quality is kinda crappy because they spend all monetary donations on supporting the women. But don't let a google search of "home for unwed mothers", or "home for single mothers", get in the way of your hate.