My passport is going to end up having loads of visa stamps for other countries, but no re-entry stamps back into the U.S. I wonder if that will be looked at suspiciously by foreign countries.
The issuing country (the USA) can do whatever it wants with its passports. A machine-readable passport can be scanned and the row created about your arrival or departure far more reliably than with a smudged rubber stamp that carries an unidentifiable signature of some official. Those stamps are a dying breed, useful only if the passport is not machine-readable or if the country's borders are not equipped with database terminals.
Your "solution" is actually a pretty bad idea. Almost all customs that I've been through ask you explicitly if you are having anything shipped into the country that you are entering.
I'm not traveling much, but when I was returning from Germany about 10 years ago the customs agent only asked me, as an afterthought, if I bought anything abroad. I had not, and that was all.
Besides, let's assume that you say "yes." What will happen next? Will they refuse you the entry because you shipped a heavy item that you couldn't possibly carry? Will they arrest you for a few days until the shipment arrives and they inspect it? Those are ridiculous scenarios. IMO if you say yes then nothing at all will happen.
Maybe they changed the rules since then. But
this question is like "Are you a member of a terrorist organization?" that you need to answer while you are still on the airplane. No sane person would ever answer "yes". A peaceful person will tell the truth, and a terrorist will lie. The question is there just to accuse the terrorist of lying on an official form once he is caught for something else. You can't throw a book at someone unless the book is thick enough.
If you are unable to lie convincingly, this still may be OK. The border guards may suspect that you aren't truthful, but they will have no factual reason to deny you the entry.
However they may not need facts to kick you out. For that reason you have other options. First, ask a friend to ship those things. His name will be on waybills, and you can honestly and truthfully say that you haven't shipped a thing. You can even ask your friend to ship the item AFTER you cross the border and tell him where you are staying. Then you'd be 100% honest at the border.
Second, you can take your laptop with you. There will be a blank HDD in it, with a fresh install of Ubuntu and a recent visit to CNN.com. They can look at it from every direction but there is nothing suspicious there. Once you cross you can copy your VirtualBox files over the Internet and do your thing. Once done, copy it back and reinstall Ubuntu.
My point is that too many people (and I'm often guilty of that myself) are trusting the government. This is bad for your survival. It is quite antisocial, but if you look at everyone as an adversary (most importantly if you do that toward people of power) then you will live longer and be happier. Paranoia is good for your survival. I wouldn't have said that 20 years ago, but now such conclusion is pretty clear.
The laptop story is just an example. You can be caught in many different dragnets, for fun or profit. You can be stopped on a freeway for exceeding the speed, even if you did not. I know where such things happen and don't ever go there. You can be stopped by CHP hiding behind overpasses and in bushes. I know those places and watch my speed there. Many other possibilities exist that may make your life more difficult. An adversarial approach lets you bypass many of these inconveniences. Criminals practice that approach all the time, necessarily. You don't have to be a criminal; however if you see a police car approaching, don't just hang around. The police doesn't give out cookies; all they give out is arrest records, and the best you can hope for is that they leave you alone. Help them with that.
The secret to staying out of jail is pretty simple - don't do anything, ever.
You are not cynical enough. The real secret to staying out of jail is even simpler - you must become a criminal, act as a criminal and think as a criminal. You don't have to do crimes, though. But your awareness of the police society will keep you safe.
Only starry-eyed innocents let themselves be caught with stuff. A man who is in fear of police would have simply mailed the laptop across the border; the computer, with the HDD encryption key in BIOS, would go with FedEx and and the encrypted HDD, without the key, would be sent with DHL, to a different address. There is no way to recover the data unless you know how to put both pieces together and then enter the password to unlock the key.
Anyways, the brain is mapped to atomic level : for the most part, you would have a map of where every single atom originally was in the brain.
At this scale the Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle will wreak havoc with your measurements. Besides, it is not enough to know where atoms are. You also need to know what those atoms are, and what bonds exist (or do not exist) between those atoms. For example, you have an ideal plane with these atoms:
H H
O O
H H
This can produce two water molecules (H2O) or two Hydrogen molecules (H2) and one oxygen molecule (O2.) Decoding bonds requires statistical observation of electrons because old man Heisenberg is in full control at this level. This means that you need to know details not on atomic level but on subatomic level. Forget about that "tiny arm" - it can't be made of anything because the probe has to be smaller than the probed object. And electrons are quite small. Doing such measurements in parallel, billions of trillions per second, is not exactly easy, given that today's science has to spend a lot of effort on imaging of just one molecule. Since the brain is a 3D object this becomes even more difficult. You need to count protons and neutrons in the nucleus, and then you need to determine the 3D position of electrons to figure out the bonds. The "tiny arm" that you need must be made from protons, perhaps... but be careful near those electrons, lest they jump ship.
This of course is not practical. Not only encoding of that much data is not possible (now or in the far future). It is also largely pointless because to reverse the process (to encode the data into a non-biological replica system) you need to figure out the configuration of biological data and then translate it into a matching configuration of machine data. Even if you can recover all the super-complex organics, with all their folding and such, you still need to know what the hell all that means.
In other words, your machine can at best produce a copy of the tissue. If that brain was dying from old age, the copy will be also dying from old age. This is because you, as a copier, don't understand what you are copying and cannot make small selective changes. In today's terms you need an OCR. But we don't have a decent OCR even for texts that we print ourselves! A recognition engine that starts with positions of electrons and nuclei and produces excitation data for a neural network is hard to imagine. As I understand, Star Trek transporters weren't capable of such a thing; they only could do copying, just as our paper copiers of today do. A machine that can scan a brain and produce the pure mind is pretty much far-fetched.
If you ask me, the easiest way to transfer human mind into a machine is by creating implants. Those implants would grow and eventually become an integral part of the brain. Being neuron-like in all aspects, they will contain a proportional share of your mind - and if they are allowed to grow further they will replace most of your neurons. Once that happens you can read their state, or you can connect them to a larger array of mechanical neurons. Then you can stop the clock of your brain, atomically transfer the mind into the machine, and then you can either resume the clock in the body (and become a copy) or you can discard the body and live as a machine intelligence from now on. Of course since the body's brain is programmable, you can always return into it, or someone else can do it. Or you can make a purely mechanical body - any old man will gladly accept that.
This method eliminates the need to decode chemicals and charges; all you need to know is the state of neurons and the connectivity - and that will be a digital readout, as accurate as neurons themselves. Each artificial neuron knows, or can query, what other artificial neurons it is connected to, and how. This means that the transfer of the mind will be lossless, and it can be done as frequently as desired, without degrading.
What good is tracking IP addresses when every computer on the internet can become a proxy so that it's impossible to know who downloaded what?
You are talking as if MAFIAA cares who downloaded what. All they need is a person that they can extort money from. An IP record would be a sufficient evidence. There was a thread on/. a week ago where people were claiming that they were wrongly accused but settled anyway because they couldn't afford the trial. I also read that an open access point is not a sufficient excuse either. In other words, you need to do your own investigation and show, with proof, who did the deed; otherwise you will be found responsible as the nearest scapegoat. Same happens with red light and speed cameras. Your car -> your ticket. The justice is not only blind, it is also lazy.
a society based on money may need crime to strip people of excess money and keep them thinking about getting to the end of the month
The primary reason for not fighting the crime is that the crime is a necessary boogeyman. The populace needs to be scared into obedience. The government can't openly say that if you don't vote for more taxes we will kill you. However the government can say - and does say - that if you don't vote for more taxes then the police forces will be reduced and if you get killed by a criminal then it's all due to your own actions. Criminals are government's "brownshirts," not a very accurate weapon but perfectly deniable, and well suited for blackmail.
So what extortionary terms should we pay so that the Mr. Dears of the world will give up his life of crime and behave like a civilized human?
If you prefer a quicker way of fixing Mr. Dears' affliction, it would cost you about 5 cents. An even quicker way is about 50 cents per round. Also if you are environmentally friendly then there are very natural materials made from hemp; these are also very effective (zero recidivism) and perfectly reusable to serve needs of many criminals.
Stop crying to me about how "society" is to blame for Mr. Dears decisions. MR. DEARS is to blame for his own decisions.
That is so. However the society is not blameless. The society is guilty of coddling Mr. Dears and his ilk. This means that the society is not willing to fight for its own survival.
Do you think that the human mind is not a physical object that performs computations?
The brain is an electrochemical processor. You can map its interconnects, but a frozen and sliced brain will not tell you what minute charges and what tiny concentration of chemicals were present in each and every cell - assuming that the cell itself is an atomic object with no internal structure, only with a state. (That assumption is likely to be incorrect, but IANABS.)
The actual hardware to do this, if built using today's tech, would probably have to be very, very large, but no one is going to try to simulate entire human minds for another decade or two.
Why, if it only requires throwing hardware at the problem? It's hard to believe that well-financed military labs of largest countries on the planet just look at this project and say "No, we don't want an AI if we have to go out and buy hardware." The value of an AI in war toyz cannot be overestimated. So there must be other problems that prevent those labs from building an AI. Either the complexity of the hardware is impossibly high, or there is lack of knowledge about wiring all that hardware up.
JP Morgan personally did the job of the Fed (with his personal fortune) for a while
Well, he was free to do whatever he wanted with his personal money. The difference is that he couldn't make gold out of thin air. Today's Federal Reserve can do it, and they do it by printing dollars and then buying gold on the market.
Once all the mass in the star system is consumed and converted into more robots, processors, etc more ships are built and sent off like seeds to more stars to continue the process.
It would be a sad story for inhabitants of that star system...
If you can match speed with the planet then you don't really need to land on it. You are already moving as fast as the planet, and in the same direction. The only benefit of bothering to land would be in order to mine it for energy and for shelter.
However what are your chances of finding convenient supplies of fissible or fusible elements on a random piece of rock? These are largely iron - which is the end of the line, not very usable for production of energy. If your rock-hopping trip requires several planets and you can be stuck on any of them for that reason, your chances of successful arrival drop exponentially.
You would be better off not landing at all. First, you will be living in a prebuilt ship that already has everything that you need to survive the trip (such as hibernation facilities.) Second, the ship is steerable at any time (as long as you have the energy.)
Even if you could overcome these effects and could reach speeds 100 times faster than is currently possible, it would take 500 years just to reach the nearest star system.
The humans will be forever locked on Earth unless FTL is possible. Exploration robots can be sent to faraway planets even without FTL, but they will be back many thousands of years after the launch. Humans will not be able or willing to take such a trip; they won't be humans anymore by the time they land.
This is similar to exploration of Americas. People could sail across the Atlantic ocean on Egyptian reed rafts, in theory - and perhaps a few did, but it made no impact on the rest and, if done, inflicted heavy human losses on the way there and back. Americas were not accessible until wind-driven, large ships were built that could do the trip in a reasonable time, with a reasonable chance of success, and that could carry a decent amount of commercial cargo. The same applies to the Moon right now; humans can go there and back, but such a trip is too expensive and too risky, and has very few clear reasons to even bother with.
A screen filling head shot with a 30mm would be pretty impressive!
It would be, indeed, after the rescuers wash your blood off of the mangled camera and extract the Flash card. The picture will look great on your gravestone:-)
Many species of wildlife are dangerous. A rifle can kill the attacking animal or at very least scare it away. Going into forest armed with just a camera is minimally wise. Don't forget that forests in many states have the most dangerous creature of Earth - humans (drug growers.) Then you have bears, mountain lions, wild pigs, wolves...
Slashdot was never about technical excellency. It was a hack from day zero. Today there are tons of CMSes that are infinitely better, that support UNICODE, images - and at the same time provide adequate controls against messing the page up. Basically any blog today is better than Slashdot in purely technical terms. Slashdot is known and popular simply because it is a good site for geeks of all colors.
What, you want the paramilitary assault units that you can find in every police department of size to just sit around and twiddle their thumbs, waiting for the real emergency?
:-)
You are right, it would be stupid and a waste of taxpayer dollars. That's exactly why when ER doctors have a lull they grab hatchets, go out and hack someone. Also glaziers without orders go around and throw bricks into windows. Everyone must be 100% employed, no matter what!
All you need to do is to make the Metro layer optional, with an easy, obvious on/off control. Default to "Off", but switch it to "On" if a Metro application needs to run. Be able to run the Metro UI in a minimizable, resizable, Z-orderable window.
The Start menu UI should be put back, in both "Classical" and "Vista" formats. This UI can be also hidden; I can see the value of doing that in kiosks and other limited-purpose setups.
If Metro is enabled then switching between the two should not result in loss of functionality.
If they need more ideas they should just pay an average, random business in Redmond for the right to "borrow" all their employees for a day, and collect all the opinions about Win8. Majority of non-geeks don't want changes, and geeks don't want to cram changes down other people's throats because the tech support night mare becomes even more nightly and marish.
A choice of Metro mode and desktop mode seems like a nice idea, but why bastardise the desktop mode like that? It just doesn't get.
BG was obsessed with backward compatibility. During his reign Windows was largely kept consistent (starting with 95, which was a huge departure from an earlier Program Manager of Windows 3.x.) Backward compatibility includes not only the API, it also includes the UI. That Program Manager was, IIRC, still available on 95 if you wanted it. It is still available, as matter of fact.
Ballmer, however, apparently decided that supporting existing users and their workflow is not worth it. That's why users got saddled with the Ribbon - a thing that fixes no problems but creates a bunch of new ones. Some call Ribbon "Egyptian Hieroglyphs", I call them "Chicken Scratches" - but however you call them, the Ribbon is a poor replacement for menus. The worst part is that the new UI is mandatory. It's Ballmer's way or highway. Since businesses have no alternative, they had to buy into MS Office 2007 and suffer the pain.
This Windows 8 debacle is just a continuation of that same strategy. Changes are foisted upon the user; changes that the user never asked for; changes that will cause business losses. Why Ballmer is doing it? Because he wants to use the existing user base as a vehicle to push Windows into new markets. In essence, "if Windows is too bad on phones, why don't we make Windows on the desktop just as bad."
Back when the iPad was a new idea, you might be forgiven for seeing this all as some sort of fad.
It's still largely a fad; however it is an affordable fad, and because of that people are buying these things. Earlier tablets were a large investment. Today's tablets are cheaper and better.
I'm not trying to say here that tablets are totally useless. Nearly any item is useful. The question is only about the value/price ratio. Tablets of today are sufficiently useful to justify their cost. But that "sufficiently useful" is not as "universally useful" as a PC is. It's a niche product for mobile consumption of low quality entertainment. Guess what, there is a huge demand just for that.
As technology improves tablets (and tablet-like personal information terminals) will become even more useful. A cell phone with a 1 Gbps unmetered connection and a holographic display and a bunch of remote ("cloud") resources might be perfectly fine for nearly anyone, except perhaps a few scientists. Today we aren't there yet, so tablets give you small screen size, low performance, short battery life, slow network connection, and an UI that is necessarily awful.
The dividing line between desktops and tablets is not in their size and is not in their OS. It simply depends on "is this thing plugged in?" A stationary device is not as much concerned about power and cooling. A laptop has to worry about those things. A tablet is horrified by these things. That's why on one end of the spectrum you have a 8-core desktop with 16 GB of RAM and with a GPU that is more complex than the CPU, and then on the other end you have a small portable device with a minimalistic CPU that runs as slow as possible to save power. Convergence of those two lines is hard to achieve because at all times a scientist wants performance at any cost, and a mobile consumer wants the longest battery life (as long as he can play the latest Hungry Penguins or whatever it is that he is playing.)
For example, people who need to use a device while they are standing on their feet, like health care workers, and law enforcement.
Why would an LEO want to stand next to an arrested, handcuffed person? There are seventeen excellent reasons to not do that.
With regard to healthcare, perhaps tablets are of use to truly mobile personnel in a large hospital. However today's dentists, for example, simply install a PC in every treatment room. The doctor simply walks in and logs in. Large screens are essential for seeing details in X-rays; many of these X-rays today are digitally produced and stored.
I'm just thinking of all the dopeslap moments I'll have when sneaking home late at night and having the lights come on just AFTER I smack my head into a wall.
When that happens please keep your eyes tightly closed; otherwise the sparks may fall onto the carpet and cause fire.
As far as I know, MS never gave the sources of Windows to likes of Packard Bell and Compaq and then told them to go ahead and compile their own Windows as they like and sell the result as Windows.
Windows was always compiled by MS, had the same Windows API and the same UI. Only drivers were hardware-specific... and who haven't had problems with them?
Coding for Windows was doable because you didn't need to test on every PC in existence. Video cards were the hardest nut to crack, and some games did fail on this or that card (I recall something about Far Cry and ATI, for example.) But then the game vendor dealt not with a computer but with a video card - and the number of GPU vendors was still manageable.
Even that was only a concern when low level access to the video hardware is needed. If all you care about is BitBlt then if Windows runs on the box then your software will run as well. DirectX and OpenGL are also convenient abstraction layers that a video card can be tested against.
I would like to see this magical xray cathode tube which can focus all of its output in a single spot/beam/line/whateverthefuck.
Then please see here. That was an article from 1996. Any engineer worth his salt would have checked Google when working on this scanner several years later.
Having been a technician on xray equipment for many years, I can tell you that the tube produces a CONE of gamma energy, and the ONLY way to even make a "collimated" beam, is to use dense plates to BLOCK the scattered radiation from propagating.
This is not correct at all. You are limiting the entire world down to specific hardware that you are working with. That hardware likely was designed decades ago, and any changes would require a complex and costly set of FDA tests and approvals. In the larger world there are mirrors for X rays (for certain incidence angles), and there are now lenses. X ray and gamma ray astronomy depends on these things. I would certainly consider focusing if I need to design such a scanner today.
Besides, your statement is wrong when you debate the "entire output of the X-ray tube." It all depends on where you measure it, and since we have no information on density of X rays anywhere in the system, debating the collimator is not very practical, like saying that a nuclear bomb is safe within 10 meters because this here gizmo reduces the radiation a thousand times. You need to know what the radiation level is before the gizmo.
You need to take into account one simple fact. The TSA scanner depends on scattering of X ray photons. This means that the X ray sensor has to be sensitive enough to detect reflections of the beam from the victim's skin. But X rays easily penetrate skin, so you need a lot of incoming photons to get some that bounce back. This translates into higher beam density. Exact numbers are not known; the tube itself may be dangerous, and its narrow beam may be also dangerous - they don't tell and we don't know.
there are many documented cases of xray equipment malfuction and bad software and/or hardware interlocks failing to prevent overexposure in those cases.
Despite the monkey of the FDA sitting on backs of engineers who designed the thing.
I'm just waiting for one of these to happen on one of these airport scanners.
You will not know it, and even if it was you who got the overexposure they won't tell you. They will just say "step over here, please, for a manual pat-down." No explanations will be forthcoming; a peon has no right to ask for one.
TSA has no duty to tell you anything. Scanner operators are not trained radiologists with diplomas and with their licenses to practice medicine on the line (if not their freedom) if they screw up or if they try to hide the evidence. They are not even trained techs who can tell, if the scanner fails, how exactly it failed and whether any harm was done. They also have every reason to not know any of that, willingly. Ignorance and work instructions are their shield against liability. If an overexposure happens they will keep a poker face and will send the injured passenger away.
For all we know, every scanner that is not in use at an airport may have failed, catastrophically, on someone. That someone was not notified; the scanner operator knows that it will take a long time for the damage to develop - and good luck then associating a malignancy here or there to a specific scanner at a specific airport. TSA will not even allow an investigation; this scanner program is backed by very powerful political interests. TSA already can do to passengers whatever the hell it pleases, and if anyone complains they can have them arrested and fined for financial destruction ($10K is a lot.)
No reasonable engineer would even come close to such a scanner unless there is a sufficient reason to believe that it is safe. Such a reason would have to be pretty extensive, such as design for safety, audits and test reports for everything, periodic calibration, and tests of interlocks. On the design side a safe scanner may have, for example, two independent safety circuits, implemented in different ways (one MCU, one CPLD) and fed from independent sensors. If any of these safety circuits triggers then a fuse inside of a locked, sealed compartment gets blown, the entire scanner turns off, and only a tech with a key and a seal can change the fuse and personally verify that the problem had been fixed. Of course every scanner that I would design would also keep a log, of "black box" style, in an internal EEPROM that can't be erased unless you have a specific crypto key (techs would have those, but not the operators.) Once the EEPROM fills up (or after some preset time elapses) the scanner also shuts off, and a tech must come and perform the periodic inspection and calibration. This is the equipment where a failure endangers safety of people; the system designed by me will enforce the rules.
Slashdot Mirror
My passport is going to end up having loads of visa stamps for other countries, but no re-entry stamps back into the U.S. I wonder if that will be looked at suspiciously by foreign countries.
The issuing country (the USA) can do whatever it wants with its passports. A machine-readable passport can be scanned and the row created about your arrival or departure far more reliably than with a smudged rubber stamp that carries an unidentifiable signature of some official. Those stamps are a dying breed, useful only if the passport is not machine-readable or if the country's borders are not equipped with database terminals.
Your "solution" is actually a pretty bad idea. Almost all customs that I've been through ask you explicitly if you are having anything shipped into the country that you are entering.
I'm not traveling much, but when I was returning from Germany about 10 years ago the customs agent only asked me, as an afterthought, if I bought anything abroad. I had not, and that was all.
Besides, let's assume that you say "yes." What will happen next? Will they refuse you the entry because you shipped a heavy item that you couldn't possibly carry? Will they arrest you for a few days until the shipment arrives and they inspect it? Those are ridiculous scenarios. IMO if you say yes then nothing at all will happen.
Maybe they changed the rules since then. But this question is like "Are you a member of a terrorist organization?" that you need to answer while you are still on the airplane. No sane person would ever answer "yes". A peaceful person will tell the truth, and a terrorist will lie. The question is there just to accuse the terrorist of lying on an official form once he is caught for something else. You can't throw a book at someone unless the book is thick enough.
If you are unable to lie convincingly, this still may be OK. The border guards may suspect that you aren't truthful, but they will have no factual reason to deny you the entry.
However they may not need facts to kick you out. For that reason you have other options. First, ask a friend to ship those things. His name will be on waybills, and you can honestly and truthfully say that you haven't shipped a thing. You can even ask your friend to ship the item AFTER you cross the border and tell him where you are staying. Then you'd be 100% honest at the border.
Second, you can take your laptop with you. There will be a blank HDD in it, with a fresh install of Ubuntu and a recent visit to CNN.com. They can look at it from every direction but there is nothing suspicious there. Once you cross you can copy your VirtualBox files over the Internet and do your thing. Once done, copy it back and reinstall Ubuntu.
My point is that too many people (and I'm often guilty of that myself) are trusting the government. This is bad for your survival. It is quite antisocial, but if you look at everyone as an adversary (most importantly if you do that toward people of power) then you will live longer and be happier. Paranoia is good for your survival. I wouldn't have said that 20 years ago, but now such conclusion is pretty clear.
The laptop story is just an example. You can be caught in many different dragnets, for fun or profit. You can be stopped on a freeway for exceeding the speed, even if you did not. I know where such things happen and don't ever go there. You can be stopped by CHP hiding behind overpasses and in bushes. I know those places and watch my speed there. Many other possibilities exist that may make your life more difficult. An adversarial approach lets you bypass many of these inconveniences. Criminals practice that approach all the time, necessarily. You don't have to be a criminal; however if you see a police car approaching, don't just hang around. The police doesn't give out cookies; all they give out is arrest records, and the best you can hope for is that they leave you alone. Help them with that.
The secret to staying out of jail is pretty simple - don't do anything, ever.
You are not cynical enough. The real secret to staying out of jail is even simpler - you must become a criminal, act as a criminal and think as a criminal. You don't have to do crimes, though. But your awareness of the police society will keep you safe.
Only starry-eyed innocents let themselves be caught with stuff. A man who is in fear of police would have simply mailed the laptop across the border; the computer, with the HDD encryption key in BIOS, would go with FedEx and and the encrypted HDD, without the key, would be sent with DHL, to a different address. There is no way to recover the data unless you know how to put both pieces together and then enter the password to unlock the key.
Anyways, the brain is mapped to atomic level : for the most part, you would have a map of where every single atom originally was in the brain.
At this scale the Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle will wreak havoc with your measurements. Besides, it is not enough to know where atoms are. You also need to know what those atoms are, and what bonds exist (or do not exist) between those atoms. For example, you have an ideal plane with these atoms:
H H
O O
H H
This can produce two water molecules (H2O) or two Hydrogen molecules (H2) and one oxygen molecule (O2.) Decoding bonds requires statistical observation of electrons because old man Heisenberg is in full control at this level. This means that you need to know details not on atomic level but on subatomic level. Forget about that "tiny arm" - it can't be made of anything because the probe has to be smaller than the probed object. And electrons are quite small. Doing such measurements in parallel, billions of trillions per second, is not exactly easy, given that today's science has to spend a lot of effort on imaging of just one molecule. Since the brain is a 3D object this becomes even more difficult. You need to count protons and neutrons in the nucleus, and then you need to determine the 3D position of electrons to figure out the bonds. The "tiny arm" that you need must be made from protons, perhaps... but be careful near those electrons, lest they jump ship.
This of course is not practical. Not only encoding of that much data is not possible (now or in the far future). It is also largely pointless because to reverse the process (to encode the data into a non-biological replica system) you need to figure out the configuration of biological data and then translate it into a matching configuration of machine data. Even if you can recover all the super-complex organics, with all their folding and such, you still need to know what the hell all that means.
In other words, your machine can at best produce a copy of the tissue. If that brain was dying from old age, the copy will be also dying from old age. This is because you, as a copier, don't understand what you are copying and cannot make small selective changes. In today's terms you need an OCR. But we don't have a decent OCR even for texts that we print ourselves! A recognition engine that starts with positions of electrons and nuclei and produces excitation data for a neural network is hard to imagine. As I understand, Star Trek transporters weren't capable of such a thing; they only could do copying, just as our paper copiers of today do. A machine that can scan a brain and produce the pure mind is pretty much far-fetched.
If you ask me, the easiest way to transfer human mind into a machine is by creating implants. Those implants would grow and eventually become an integral part of the brain. Being neuron-like in all aspects, they will contain a proportional share of your mind - and if they are allowed to grow further they will replace most of your neurons. Once that happens you can read their state, or you can connect them to a larger array of mechanical neurons. Then you can stop the clock of your brain, atomically transfer the mind into the machine, and then you can either resume the clock in the body (and become a copy) or you can discard the body and live as a machine intelligence from now on. Of course since the body's brain is programmable, you can always return into it, or someone else can do it. Or you can make a purely mechanical body - any old man will gladly accept that.
This method eliminates the need to decode chemicals and charges; all you need to know is the state of neurons and the connectivity - and that will be a digital readout, as accurate as neurons themselves. Each artificial neuron knows, or can query, what other artificial neurons it is connected to, and how. This means that the transfer of the mind will be lossless, and it can be done as frequently as desired, without degrading.
What good is tracking IP addresses when every computer on the internet can become a proxy so that it's impossible to know who downloaded what?
You are talking as if MAFIAA cares who downloaded what. All they need is a person that they can extort money from. An IP record would be a sufficient evidence. There was a thread on /. a week ago where people were claiming that they were wrongly accused but settled anyway because they couldn't afford the trial. I also read that an open access point is not a sufficient excuse either. In other words, you need to do your own investigation and show, with proof, who did the deed; otherwise you will be found responsible as the nearest scapegoat. Same happens with red light and speed cameras. Your car -> your ticket. The justice is not only blind, it is also lazy.
a society based on money may need crime to strip people of excess money and keep them thinking about getting to the end of the month
The primary reason for not fighting the crime is that the crime is a necessary boogeyman. The populace needs to be scared into obedience. The government can't openly say that if you don't vote for more taxes we will kill you. However the government can say - and does say - that if you don't vote for more taxes then the police forces will be reduced and if you get killed by a criminal then it's all due to your own actions. Criminals are government's "brownshirts," not a very accurate weapon but perfectly deniable, and well suited for blackmail.
So what extortionary terms should we pay so that the Mr. Dears of the world will give up his life of crime and behave like a civilized human?
If you prefer a quicker way of fixing Mr. Dears' affliction, it would cost you about 5 cents. An even quicker way is about 50 cents per round. Also if you are environmentally friendly then there are very natural materials made from hemp; these are also very effective (zero recidivism) and perfectly reusable to serve needs of many criminals.
Stop crying to me about how "society" is to blame for Mr. Dears decisions. MR. DEARS is to blame for his own decisions.
That is so. However the society is not blameless. The society is guilty of coddling Mr. Dears and his ilk. This means that the society is not willing to fight for its own survival.
Do you think that the human mind is not a physical object that performs computations?
The brain is an electrochemical processor. You can map its interconnects, but a frozen and sliced brain will not tell you what minute charges and what tiny concentration of chemicals were present in each and every cell - assuming that the cell itself is an atomic object with no internal structure, only with a state. (That assumption is likely to be incorrect, but IANABS.)
The actual hardware to do this, if built using today's tech, would probably have to be very, very large, but no one is going to try to simulate entire human minds for another decade or two.
Why, if it only requires throwing hardware at the problem? It's hard to believe that well-financed military labs of largest countries on the planet just look at this project and say "No, we don't want an AI if we have to go out and buy hardware." The value of an AI in war toyz cannot be overestimated. So there must be other problems that prevent those labs from building an AI. Either the complexity of the hardware is impossibly high, or there is lack of knowledge about wiring all that hardware up.
JP Morgan personally did the job of the Fed (with his personal fortune) for a while
Well, he was free to do whatever he wanted with his personal money. The difference is that he couldn't make gold out of thin air. Today's Federal Reserve can do it, and they do it by printing dollars and then buying gold on the market.
Once all the mass in the star system is consumed and converted into more robots, processors, etc more ships are built and sent off like seeds to more stars to continue the process.
It would be a sad story for inhabitants of that star system...
Plus the delta-V to land and take off from it.
If you can match speed with the planet then you don't really need to land on it. You are already moving as fast as the planet, and in the same direction. The only benefit of bothering to land would be in order to mine it for energy and for shelter.
However what are your chances of finding convenient supplies of fissible or fusible elements on a random piece of rock? These are largely iron - which is the end of the line, not very usable for production of energy. If your rock-hopping trip requires several planets and you can be stuck on any of them for that reason, your chances of successful arrival drop exponentially.
You would be better off not landing at all. First, you will be living in a prebuilt ship that already has everything that you need to survive the trip (such as hibernation facilities.) Second, the ship is steerable at any time (as long as you have the energy.)
Even if you could overcome these effects and could reach speeds 100 times faster than is currently possible, it would take 500 years just to reach the nearest star system.
The humans will be forever locked on Earth unless FTL is possible. Exploration robots can be sent to faraway planets even without FTL, but they will be back many thousands of years after the launch. Humans will not be able or willing to take such a trip; they won't be humans anymore by the time they land.
This is similar to exploration of Americas. People could sail across the Atlantic ocean on Egyptian reed rafts, in theory - and perhaps a few did, but it made no impact on the rest and, if done, inflicted heavy human losses on the way there and back. Americas were not accessible until wind-driven, large ships were built that could do the trip in a reasonable time, with a reasonable chance of success, and that could carry a decent amount of commercial cargo. The same applies to the Moon right now; humans can go there and back, but such a trip is too expensive and too risky, and has very few clear reasons to even bother with.
A screen filling head shot with a 30mm would be pretty impressive!
It would be, indeed, after the rescuers wash your blood off of the mangled camera and extract the Flash card. The picture will look great on your gravestone :-)
Many species of wildlife are dangerous. A rifle can kill the attacking animal or at very least scare it away. Going into forest armed with just a camera is minimally wise. Don't forget that forests in many states have the most dangerous creature of Earth - humans (drug growers.) Then you have bears, mountain lions, wild pigs, wolves...
Muzzleloaders are not very safe, though (for the operator) and they are a pain to clean.
Slashdot was never about technical excellency. It was a hack from day zero. Today there are tons of CMSes that are infinitely better, that support UNICODE, images - and at the same time provide adequate controls against messing the page up. Basically any blog today is better than Slashdot in purely technical terms. Slashdot is known and popular simply because it is a good site for geeks of all colors.
What, you want the paramilitary assault units that you can find in every police department of size to just sit around and twiddle their thumbs, waiting for the real emergency?
You are right, it would be stupid and a waste of taxpayer dollars. That's exactly why when ER doctors have a lull they grab hatchets, go out and hack someone. Also glaziers without orders go around and throw bricks into windows. Everyone must be 100% employed, no matter what!
All you need to do is to make the Metro layer optional, with an easy, obvious on/off control. Default to "Off", but switch it to "On" if a Metro application needs to run. Be able to run the Metro UI in a minimizable, resizable, Z-orderable window.
The Start menu UI should be put back, in both "Classical" and "Vista" formats. This UI can be also hidden; I can see the value of doing that in kiosks and other limited-purpose setups.
If Metro is enabled then switching between the two should not result in loss of functionality.
If they need more ideas they should just pay an average, random business in Redmond for the right to "borrow" all their employees for a day, and collect all the opinions about Win8. Majority of non-geeks don't want changes, and geeks don't want to cram changes down other people's throats because the tech support night mare becomes even more nightly and marish.
I have two words for you, "Virtual Machines". Desktops are dead.
A smaller object cannot contain a larger object.
A choice of Metro mode and desktop mode seems like a nice idea, but why bastardise the desktop mode like that? It just doesn't get.
BG was obsessed with backward compatibility. During his reign Windows was largely kept consistent (starting with 95, which was a huge departure from an earlier Program Manager of Windows 3.x.) Backward compatibility includes not only the API, it also includes the UI. That Program Manager was, IIRC, still available on 95 if you wanted it. It is still available, as matter of fact.
Ballmer, however, apparently decided that supporting existing users and their workflow is not worth it. That's why users got saddled with the Ribbon - a thing that fixes no problems but creates a bunch of new ones. Some call Ribbon "Egyptian Hieroglyphs", I call them "Chicken Scratches" - but however you call them, the Ribbon is a poor replacement for menus. The worst part is that the new UI is mandatory. It's Ballmer's way or highway. Since businesses have no alternative, they had to buy into MS Office 2007 and suffer the pain.
This Windows 8 debacle is just a continuation of that same strategy. Changes are foisted upon the user; changes that the user never asked for; changes that will cause business losses. Why Ballmer is doing it? Because he wants to use the existing user base as a vehicle to push Windows into new markets. In essence, "if Windows is too bad on phones, why don't we make Windows on the desktop just as bad."
Back when the iPad was a new idea, you might be forgiven for seeing this all as some sort of fad.
It's still largely a fad; however it is an affordable fad, and because of that people are buying these things. Earlier tablets were a large investment. Today's tablets are cheaper and better.
I'm not trying to say here that tablets are totally useless. Nearly any item is useful. The question is only about the value/price ratio. Tablets of today are sufficiently useful to justify their cost. But that "sufficiently useful" is not as "universally useful" as a PC is. It's a niche product for mobile consumption of low quality entertainment. Guess what, there is a huge demand just for that.
As technology improves tablets (and tablet-like personal information terminals) will become even more useful. A cell phone with a 1 Gbps unmetered connection and a holographic display and a bunch of remote ("cloud") resources might be perfectly fine for nearly anyone, except perhaps a few scientists. Today we aren't there yet, so tablets give you small screen size, low performance, short battery life, slow network connection, and an UI that is necessarily awful.
The dividing line between desktops and tablets is not in their size and is not in their OS. It simply depends on "is this thing plugged in?" A stationary device is not as much concerned about power and cooling. A laptop has to worry about those things. A tablet is horrified by these things. That's why on one end of the spectrum you have a 8-core desktop with 16 GB of RAM and with a GPU that is more complex than the CPU, and then on the other end you have a small portable device with a minimalistic CPU that runs as slow as possible to save power. Convergence of those two lines is hard to achieve because at all times a scientist wants performance at any cost, and a mobile consumer wants the longest battery life (as long as he can play the latest Hungry Penguins or whatever it is that he is playing.)
For example, people who need to use a device while they are standing on their feet, like health care workers, and law enforcement.
Why would an LEO want to stand next to an arrested, handcuffed person? There are seventeen excellent reasons to not do that.
With regard to healthcare, perhaps tablets are of use to truly mobile personnel in a large hospital. However today's dentists, for example, simply install a PC in every treatment room. The doctor simply walks in and logs in. Large screens are essential for seeing details in X-rays; many of these X-rays today are digitally produced and stored.
I'm just thinking of all the dopeslap moments I'll have when sneaking home late at night and having the lights come on just AFTER I smack my head into a wall.
When that happens please keep your eyes tightly closed; otherwise the sparks may fall onto the carpet and cause fire.
That didn't stop Windows.
As far as I know, MS never gave the sources of Windows to likes of Packard Bell and Compaq and then told them to go ahead and compile their own Windows as they like and sell the result as Windows.
Windows was always compiled by MS, had the same Windows API and the same UI. Only drivers were hardware-specific ... and who haven't had problems with them?
Coding for Windows was doable because you didn't need to test on every PC in existence. Video cards were the hardest nut to crack, and some games did fail on this or that card (I recall something about Far Cry and ATI, for example.) But then the game vendor dealt not with a computer but with a video card - and the number of GPU vendors was still manageable.
Even that was only a concern when low level access to the video hardware is needed. If all you care about is BitBlt then if Windows runs on the box then your software will run as well. DirectX and OpenGL are also convenient abstraction layers that a video card can be tested against.
I would like to see this magical xray cathode tube which can focus all of its output in a single spot/beam/line/whateverthefuck.
Then please see here. That was an article from 1996. Any engineer worth his salt would have checked Google when working on this scanner several years later.
Having been a technician on xray equipment for many years, I can tell you that the tube produces a CONE of gamma energy, and the ONLY way to even make a "collimated" beam, is to use dense plates to BLOCK the scattered radiation from propagating.
This is not correct at all. You are limiting the entire world down to specific hardware that you are working with. That hardware likely was designed decades ago, and any changes would require a complex and costly set of FDA tests and approvals. In the larger world there are mirrors for X rays (for certain incidence angles), and there are now lenses. X ray and gamma ray astronomy depends on these things. I would certainly consider focusing if I need to design such a scanner today.
Besides, your statement is wrong when you debate the "entire output of the X-ray tube." It all depends on where you measure it, and since we have no information on density of X rays anywhere in the system, debating the collimator is not very practical, like saying that a nuclear bomb is safe within 10 meters because this here gizmo reduces the radiation a thousand times. You need to know what the radiation level is before the gizmo.
You need to take into account one simple fact. The TSA scanner depends on scattering of X ray photons. This means that the X ray sensor has to be sensitive enough to detect reflections of the beam from the victim's skin. But X rays easily penetrate skin, so you need a lot of incoming photons to get some that bounce back. This translates into higher beam density. Exact numbers are not known; the tube itself may be dangerous, and its narrow beam may be also dangerous - they don't tell and we don't know.
there are many documented cases of xray equipment malfuction and bad software and/or hardware interlocks failing to prevent overexposure in those cases.
Despite the monkey of the FDA sitting on backs of engineers who designed the thing.
I'm just waiting for one of these to happen on one of these airport scanners.
You will not know it, and even if it was you who got the overexposure they won't tell you. They will just say "step over here, please, for a manual pat-down." No explanations will be forthcoming; a peon has no right to ask for one.
TSA has no duty to tell you anything. Scanner operators are not trained radiologists with diplomas and with their licenses to practice medicine on the line (if not their freedom) if they screw up or if they try to hide the evidence. They are not even trained techs who can tell, if the scanner fails, how exactly it failed and whether any harm was done. They also have every reason to not know any of that, willingly. Ignorance and work instructions are their shield against liability. If an overexposure happens they will keep a poker face and will send the injured passenger away.
For all we know, every scanner that is not in use at an airport may have failed, catastrophically, on someone. That someone was not notified; the scanner operator knows that it will take a long time for the damage to develop - and good luck then associating a malignancy here or there to a specific scanner at a specific airport. TSA will not even allow an investigation; this scanner program is backed by very powerful political interests. TSA already can do to passengers whatever the hell it pleases, and if anyone complains they can have them arrested and fined for financial destruction ($10K is a lot.)
No reasonable engineer would even come close to such a scanner unless there is a sufficient reason to believe that it is safe. Such a reason would have to be pretty extensive, such as design for safety, audits and test reports for everything, periodic calibration, and tests of interlocks. On the design side a safe scanner may have, for example, two independent safety circuits, implemented in different ways (one MCU, one CPLD) and fed from independent sensors. If any of these safety circuits triggers then a fuse inside of a locked, sealed compartment gets blown, the entire scanner turns off, and only a tech with a key and a seal can change the fuse and personally verify that the problem had been fixed. Of course every scanner that I would design would also keep a log, of "black box" style, in an internal EEPROM that can't be erased unless you have a specific crypto key (techs would have those, but not the operators.) Once the EEPROM fills up (or after some preset time elapses) the scanner also shuts off, and a tech must come and perform the periodic inspection and calibration. This is the equipment where a failure endangers safety of people; the system designed by me will enforce the rules.