Yes, but what would be the point? The soldiers are essentially newborns, at most a few years old, being forced to fight a war that they don't care about and will never live to see the end of even if they win every battle without a casualty. There's no human drama possible because up until the events immediately before Blade Runner the replicants were basically living, thinking machines. Besides, taking the replicants and turning them into the mindless war machines that a big budget sci-fi action movie would require is exactly what Blade Runner isn't about.
Do you really see a slow paced sci-fi noir action/psychological/ethical thriller playing well today? No, hell, it didn't even play well when Blade Runner was made, they barely recouped their cost. No studio in their right minds would green light a true sequel to Blade Runner because it is at best a gamble and more realistically a financial wash. So what are we gonna end up with? I'm guessing a Micheal Bay-ified version, complete with explosions, spaceships, maybe even an all out human on replicant war, with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance.
Now we just need to punish the people who valuated Facebook so high.
Why? I could go out on the street and sell lemonade for $100 a cup. With enough work I could probably find a famous person or two to tell the world that the lemonade is so good it's totally worth it. How is it my fault if there are enough idiots out there for me to make a profit?
It really seems like they just want to kill used game sales, which will kill the game specific retailers, which will leave them beholden to the big-box stores (i.e. Best Buy and the dreaded Walmart) to retail their games.
And here's where you're wrong. You are making the assumption that that they will be beholden to anyone. Obviously they don't want that and obviously they know that killing off the small retailers is effectively giving up power to the big boxes simply by reducing competition. So what are they up to?
The upcoming generation will perform various tricks to push downloadable games so that in 5-10 years they will be able to push out a medialess platform without an uproar in the demographics that matter. What kind of tricks? How about a $15 credit to the online store to relinquish the license you have on a current game? How about pushing episodic content, where only the first episode is available in disk format? How about requiring a credit card for "age verification purposes" on Mature rated games (getting the CC info greatly increases future sales simply by reducing the hassle factor of the first purchase)?
You know all those games that you've picked up on sale or clearance or used for $20 after they've been out a year? Those are going to be a thing of the past.
Look, I am, by no means a gun nut. Even I know that bullets do not explode. The fact that the writer doesn't understand the difference between a bullet and a cartridge makes me doubt how accurate the entire article is.
Ok, first and foremost, we landed on the moon. I'm not arguing that we didn't. I'm not an idiot. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. If John Glenn reads this I kindly ask that he not punch me in the face.
Now. All a retro reflector proves is that we landed something on the moon. Landing 'something' is a lot easier than landing people. The Russians could have very trivially mounted a retro reflector to their lunar rover and we could bounce lasers off them the exact same way you can bounce lasers off the reflectors the Apollo astronauts left behind. There are many good pieces of evidence to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that a manned lunar landing happened; the Lunar Ranging Experiment isn't one of them.
"Should have to be" is not the same as "should be". Saying "I should not have to be concerned about where my savings are" is not the same as saying "I shouldn't be concerned about where my savings are". I should be able to trust my financial adviser, I should also verify that he is doing what he is supposed to do.
However, D-Wave is trying to sell these machines commercially. And Scott expresses worry that there's going to be a serious backlash against quantum computing as a whole when the the D-Wave hype bubble bursts.
No one with the money to afford one of their machines is stupid enough to buy them as anything other than a research machine. Even if someone hadn't come up with a way to match their speed with a classical computer (which has already happened) a 10,000x speed increase on a very narrow problem set at a cost of more than 100,000x just buying the additional hardware (not to mention the cost in learning how to use this new and exotic machine) makes obvious that it is not yet an economical solution for anyone.
Because if it is quantum it's a generation 0 (barely out of prototype) implementation going up against a generation... oh I don't know... 30+ classical computer. If it's not quantum, if it's basically an ASIC chip designed to solve simulated annealing problems (intentionally or not), it's worthless even as research. What they are selling is a research and training system, so that engineers can learn what kinds of problems can be solved on the hardware that will, presumably, get much more powerful going forward.
Look at it this way, the current D-wave machine has 512 qbits and a modern PC can match it's speed. Double the qbits and you end up with a simulation space several million times larger, the 15x faster is going to seem laughable when the problem you are solving is trillions of times larger and the D-Wave solves in constant time while your PC runs an algorithm that's O(n^2). If, if, what D-wave is selling is using quantum affects.
I'll surmise that from a lawyer's point of view, information security is just another "feature" or "service" to take for granted (just like electricity or water).
To be fair, why should the necessarily be wrong? I'm not talking about phishing or viruses or key loggers; I'm talking about whole disk encryption, network security, end to end messaging encryption. These things should be commodities by now, there's no reason every PC sold shouldn't have full disk encryption. There's no reason any business grade networking gear should work without encryption. It should be standard. It's really hard to get security perfect, but somewhere along the line the industry forgot that they can get as close to perfect as possible with relatively little effort.
I suspect it would be more accurate to say that innovation was extremely inconsistent pre-history. I haven't any doubt that many, many things were invented dozens or hundreds of times, only to be lost when the guy died, or his son decided not to carry on the tradition, or some disaster fell that made them abandon specialization. Once you start writing stuff down, in a way that can be shared with others and understood generations later, you don't have everyone starting from scratch every time something goes wrong any more. You start to build the hill that becomes the mound that becomes the mountain that is our present knowledge of the world.
We have gotten much faster and widely distributed news
Speed doesn't matter, quality matters. One has gone up, while the other had gone down. No one reports on how many lives are saved by vaccination because it isn't "news"; it's normal, it's expected, and it is pleasantly boring. Instead, we get headlines "HPV vaccine causes fainting spells" with the pertinent information (50-60 out of several million, no lasting negative effects) is buried 2 pages in. Because it sells. It sells and it makes money and it causes of culture of fear and worry that leads to kids getting sick when they don't have to. And it wouldn't matter if that headline come out 2 years after the events or 2 minutes, it would have the same effect either way.
HPV was/is incredibly common, now the particular strain that the vaccine was targeted for was quite rare, but it so happens that the vaccine also provides protection against most of the other strains as well. And yeah... if I can protect future generations from not only the pain and shame of genital warts (90% of which are caused by one of the strains the vaccine protects against) but also cut the rate of cervical cancer while I'm at it (admittedly the actual target of the vaccine) at the cost of... well statistically the vaccine is as safe as a saline injection so I would argue a cost of essentially 0.
No. Just no. The 'damage' that vaccines do is barely statistically significant, the benefits they provide are so fundamental that there are core aspects of our culture and society that have changed since their introduction. Your argument that vaccines are going to destroy our immune systems or cause the diseases to mutate shows a lack of understanding to how vaccines works; they train the immune system in the exact same way contracting the virulent disease would. Not only does it not weaken the immune system (in fact it strengthens it) it also prevents a large reservoir of the disease from ever building up in the population. Smaller reservoir means that mutations are less likely simply because the numbers are smaller.
Vaccines have saved more lives than the next 5 medical breakthroughs combined with the possible exception of basic sanitation (if you can call that a medical breakthrough). Trying to argue that "The vaccine debate is a religious one on both sides " is ludicrous, like saying the debate between the theories of relativity and the flying spaghetti monster are on equal ground. They're not, one is backed up by a mountain of evidence so large that people forget that the mountain isn't a natural feature of the world. Before vaccines, parents lived in real fear that their children would catch any one of a half dozen diseases that would maim or kill them, today parents spend hours worrying about a syndrome that has a.05% chance of happening to their newborn.
It's not a quantum computer, it's a quantum annealer. It can't run general purpose quantum computer algorithms like Shor's Algorithm but it can find the optimum values for a specific class of problems, the same ones that are sometimes solved with software simulations of quantum annealing appropriately enough. The latest research shows that it outperforms a regular computer by several orders of magnitude on those problems, but it remains to be seen if it performs better than an ASIC chip designed for the task.
You're thinking about it in terms of now. What can you do with Google Glass? Well you can take a picture, get directions, view messages, and do searches hands free. It's not really worth it; too geeky, too expensive, too physically wonky to be worth it.
But what can you do with it 10 years from now? User your imagination a bit and I'm sure you can think of some ideas for always on camera/display combo. And in 10 years the geek, hassle, and cost factors will be way down with slimmer designs. Hell, contact displays aren't impossible. Or if you want depth of field retina projection isn't impossible either.
Another thing to keep in mind, he sees the big picture with his charity work. Most rich donors would have looked at polio and said there's only a few thousand lives to save here, lets spend the money somewhere else where the impact will be bigger. But he looks at it and says we have the chance to wipe the disease off the planet and remove the threat forever. Not to say he's the first person to see things that way by any means. I just mean that most people in his position wouldn't think in those terms.
1) Bribery, in effect if not in the precise definition. Politicians who would have voted against it or who had no defined position received funds in direct or implied exchange for their vote. 2) Politicians who have a stated position received money from companies who benefit from that position. This is still distasteful in that it gives the people in control of the money a disproportionate say in government but doesn't rise to the same level of immorality.
So you'd think it would be relatively easy to do an analysis as to which is which. Unfortunately you also have politicians shopping for donations by taking positions which they think will bring them in.
It may be true in an idealized sense. As in, if we took all the money we're about to put into carbon capture and alternative energy and instead put it into planting millions of acres of trees, we might be able to maintain atmospheric CO2 at current levels... for a while. Until we ran out of space, or had a drought and large scale fires, or until the trees started dying of old age and rotting on the ground. Unless you're gonna cut down the trees and sink them to the bottom of the deepest parts of the ocean... but really, any plan that relies on ongoing expenditure of effort and money is doomed to fail in the long run. Our only realistic plan is to bring the cost of clean energy sources down to the point where the dirty ones aren't economical anymore.
Actually I think this is pretty cool. It's always bothered me how repetitive sounds can get in games, it would be a neat trick if you could model object's for sound the way you model them for graphics. Each door, window, rock, etc, could have a subtly different sound from the one next to it. I'm sure they're not to that point now, but they are spelling out the possibilities.
A) This is for targeting smaller missile (non-balistic). Smaller missiles are... well smaller. They take less heat to damage and cause failures and they have less surface area to spread the heat out over. B) That was 30 years ago. Laser power and tracking has improved just a bit since then. C) This is more about defending against the kind of dumb rockets that Hezbollah fires into Israel every so often as it is about an engagement with a highly funded modern military.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but what would be the point? The soldiers are essentially newborns, at most a few years old, being forced to fight a war that they don't care about and will never live to see the end of even if they win every battle without a casualty. There's no human drama possible because up until the events immediately before Blade Runner the replicants were basically living, thinking machines. Besides, taking the replicants and turning them into the mindless war machines that a big budget sci-fi action movie would require is exactly what Blade Runner isn't about.
Do you really see a slow paced sci-fi noir action/psychological/ethical thriller playing well today? No, hell, it didn't even play well when Blade Runner was made, they barely recouped their cost. No studio in their right minds would green light a true sequel to Blade Runner because it is at best a gamble and more realistically a financial wash. So what are we gonna end up with? I'm guessing a Micheal Bay-ified version, complete with explosions, spaceships, maybe even an all out human on replicant war, with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance.
Now we just need to punish the people who valuated Facebook so high.
Why? I could go out on the street and sell lemonade for $100 a cup. With enough work I could probably find a famous person or two to tell the world that the lemonade is so good it's totally worth it. How is it my fault if there are enough idiots out there for me to make a profit?
It really seems like they just want to kill used game sales, which will kill the game specific retailers, which will leave them beholden to the big-box stores (i.e. Best Buy and the dreaded Walmart) to retail their games.
And here's where you're wrong. You are making the assumption that that they will be beholden to anyone. Obviously they don't want that and obviously they know that killing off the small retailers is effectively giving up power to the big boxes simply by reducing competition. So what are they up to?
The upcoming generation will perform various tricks to push downloadable games so that in 5-10 years they will be able to push out a medialess platform without an uproar in the demographics that matter. What kind of tricks? How about a $15 credit to the online store to relinquish the license you have on a current game? How about pushing episodic content, where only the first episode is available in disk format? How about requiring a credit card for "age verification purposes" on Mature rated games (getting the CC info greatly increases future sales simply by reducing the hassle factor of the first purchase)?
You know all those games that you've picked up on sale or clearance or used for $20 after they've been out a year? Those are going to be a thing of the past.
Look, I am, by no means a gun nut. Even I know that bullets do not explode. The fact that the writer doesn't understand the difference between a bullet and a cartridge makes me doubt how accurate the entire article is.
Ok, first and foremost, we landed on the moon. I'm not arguing that we didn't. I'm not an idiot. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. If John Glenn reads this I kindly ask that he not punch me in the face.
Now. All a retro reflector proves is that we landed something on the moon. Landing 'something' is a lot easier than landing people. The Russians could have very trivially mounted a retro reflector to their lunar rover and we could bounce lasers off them the exact same way you can bounce lasers off the reflectors the Apollo astronauts left behind. There are many good pieces of evidence to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that a manned lunar landing happened; the Lunar Ranging Experiment isn't one of them.
"Should have to be" is not the same as "should be". Saying "I should not have to be concerned about where my savings are" is not the same as saying "I shouldn't be concerned about where my savings are". I should be able to trust my financial adviser, I should also verify that he is doing what he is supposed to do.
We'll replace it with a backup robot and send this one to the front of the line at the robot service center where it will be repaired (by robots).
Just don't ask what happens when the failure rate exceeds the repair rate.
However, D-Wave is trying to sell these machines commercially. And Scott expresses worry that there's going to be a serious backlash against quantum computing as a whole when the the D-Wave hype bubble bursts.
No one with the money to afford one of their machines is stupid enough to buy them as anything other than a research machine. Even if someone hadn't come up with a way to match their speed with a classical computer (which has already happened) a 10,000x speed increase on a very narrow problem set at a cost of more than 100,000x just buying the additional hardware (not to mention the cost in learning how to use this new and exotic machine) makes obvious that it is not yet an economical solution for anyone.
Because if it is quantum it's a generation 0 (barely out of prototype) implementation going up against a generation... oh I don't know... 30+ classical computer. If it's not quantum, if it's basically an ASIC chip designed to solve simulated annealing problems (intentionally or not), it's worthless even as research. What they are selling is a research and training system, so that engineers can learn what kinds of problems can be solved on the hardware that will, presumably, get much more powerful going forward.
Look at it this way, the current D-wave machine has 512 qbits and a modern PC can match it's speed. Double the qbits and you end up with a simulation space several million times larger, the 15x faster is going to seem laughable when the problem you are solving is trillions of times larger and the D-Wave solves in constant time while your PC runs an algorithm that's O(n^2). If, if, what D-wave is selling is using quantum affects.
I'm sure designing a trigger lock that would also prevent the hammer being cocked is beyond all our engineering prowess.
I'll surmise that from a lawyer's point of view, information security is just another "feature" or "service" to take for granted (just like electricity or water).
To be fair, why should the necessarily be wrong? I'm not talking about phishing or viruses or key loggers; I'm talking about whole disk encryption, network security, end to end messaging encryption. These things should be commodities by now, there's no reason every PC sold shouldn't have full disk encryption. There's no reason any business grade networking gear should work without encryption. It should be standard. It's really hard to get security perfect, but somewhere along the line the industry forgot that they can get as close to perfect as possible with relatively little effort.
I suspect it would be more accurate to say that innovation was extremely inconsistent pre-history. I haven't any doubt that many, many things were invented dozens or hundreds of times, only to be lost when the guy died, or his son decided not to carry on the tradition, or some disaster fell that made them abandon specialization. Once you start writing stuff down, in a way that can be shared with others and understood generations later, you don't have everyone starting from scratch every time something goes wrong any more. You start to build the hill that becomes the mound that becomes the mountain that is our present knowledge of the world.
We have gotten much faster and widely distributed news
Speed doesn't matter, quality matters. One has gone up, while the other had gone down. No one reports on how many lives are saved by vaccination because it isn't "news"; it's normal, it's expected, and it is pleasantly boring. Instead, we get headlines "HPV vaccine causes fainting spells" with the pertinent information (50-60 out of several million, no lasting negative effects) is buried 2 pages in. Because it sells. It sells and it makes money and it causes of culture of fear and worry that leads to kids getting sick when they don't have to. And it wouldn't matter if that headline come out 2 years after the events or 2 minutes, it would have the same effect either way.
HPV was/is incredibly common, now the particular strain that the vaccine was targeted for was quite rare, but it so happens that the vaccine also provides protection against most of the other strains as well. And yeah... if I can protect future generations from not only the pain and shame of genital warts (90% of which are caused by one of the strains the vaccine protects against) but also cut the rate of cervical cancer while I'm at it (admittedly the actual target of the vaccine) at the cost of... well statistically the vaccine is as safe as a saline injection so I would argue a cost of essentially 0.
No. Just no. The 'damage' that vaccines do is barely statistically significant, the benefits they provide are so fundamental that there are core aspects of our culture and society that have changed since their introduction. Your argument that vaccines are going to destroy our immune systems or cause the diseases to mutate shows a lack of understanding to how vaccines works; they train the immune system in the exact same way contracting the virulent disease would. Not only does it not weaken the immune system (in fact it strengthens it) it also prevents a large reservoir of the disease from ever building up in the population. Smaller reservoir means that mutations are less likely simply because the numbers are smaller.
Vaccines have saved more lives than the next 5 medical breakthroughs combined with the possible exception of basic sanitation (if you can call that a medical breakthrough). Trying to argue that "The vaccine debate is a religious one on both sides " is ludicrous, like saying the debate between the theories of relativity and the flying spaghetti monster are on equal ground. They're not, one is backed up by a mountain of evidence so large that people forget that the mountain isn't a natural feature of the world. Before vaccines, parents lived in real fear that their children would catch any one of a half dozen diseases that would maim or kill them, today parents spend hours worrying about a syndrome that has a .05% chance of happening to their newborn.
It's not a quantum computer, it's a quantum annealer. It can't run general purpose quantum computer algorithms like Shor's Algorithm but it can find the optimum values for a specific class of problems, the same ones that are sometimes solved with software simulations of quantum annealing appropriately enough. The latest research shows that it outperforms a regular computer by several orders of magnitude on those problems, but it remains to be seen if it performs better than an ASIC chip designed for the task.
You're thinking about it in terms of now. What can you do with Google Glass? Well you can take a picture, get directions, view messages, and do searches hands free. It's not really worth it; too geeky, too expensive, too physically wonky to be worth it.
But what can you do with it 10 years from now? User your imagination a bit and I'm sure you can think of some ideas for always on camera/display combo. And in 10 years the geek, hassle, and cost factors will be way down with slimmer designs. Hell, contact displays aren't impossible. Or if you want depth of field retina projection isn't impossible either.
Another thing to keep in mind, he sees the big picture with his charity work. Most rich donors would have looked at polio and said there's only a few thousand lives to save here, lets spend the money somewhere else where the impact will be bigger. But he looks at it and says we have the chance to wipe the disease off the planet and remove the threat forever. Not to say he's the first person to see things that way by any means. I just mean that most people in his position wouldn't think in those terms.
Yes, there are always two scenarios.
1) Bribery, in effect if not in the precise definition. Politicians who would have voted against it or who had no defined position received funds in direct or implied exchange for their vote.
2) Politicians who have a stated position received money from companies who benefit from that position. This is still distasteful in that it gives the people in control of the money a disproportionate say in government but doesn't rise to the same level of immorality.
So you'd think it would be relatively easy to do an analysis as to which is which. Unfortunately you also have politicians shopping for donations by taking positions which they think will bring them in.
It may be true in an idealized sense. As in, if we took all the money we're about to put into carbon capture and alternative energy and instead put it into planting millions of acres of trees, we might be able to maintain atmospheric CO2 at current levels... for a while. Until we ran out of space, or had a drought and large scale fires, or until the trees started dying of old age and rotting on the ground. Unless you're gonna cut down the trees and sink them to the bottom of the deepest parts of the ocean... but really, any plan that relies on ongoing expenditure of effort and money is doomed to fail in the long run. Our only realistic plan is to bring the cost of clean energy sources down to the point where the dirty ones aren't economical anymore.
simple, yet highly effective, radar cloak
I know they used the word 'invisibility' which implies visual, but they do identify it as being invisible to radar.
A person's religion is what they say it is, there is no other reasonable way of labeling someone with a religion.
Actually I think this is pretty cool. It's always bothered me how repetitive sounds can get in games, it would be a neat trick if you could model object's for sound the way you model them for graphics. Each door, window, rock, etc, could have a subtly different sound from the one next to it. I'm sure they're not to that point now, but they are spelling out the possibilities.
A) This is for targeting smaller missile (non-balistic). Smaller missiles are... well smaller. They take less heat to damage and cause failures and they have less surface area to spread the heat out over.
B) That was 30 years ago. Laser power and tracking has improved just a bit since then.
C) This is more about defending against the kind of dumb rockets that Hezbollah fires into Israel every so often as it is about an engagement with a highly funded modern military.