You can still pay for a repair (I think it's around $100 for most problems). My fat PS3 has had some overheating issues for the past year or so, not enough to melt but enough to cause artifacts player certain games (basically anything by Ubisoft). I would love to send it in for repair before it totally craps out, but I actually do use the backwards compatibility so I can't.
I got an 80 gig SSD for my laptop which is enough for the OS and applications (as long as you don't go too crazy with AAA games). I put the old 500 gig spinning drive into my desktop and made it a network share for data. Got enough fast storage for the things I do and plenty of slow storage over the network. When it comes to putting an SSD into a desktop, I really have to question if its worth it. A couple of 7200 RPM raided will provide nearly the nearly same performance for a much lower cost. The advantages on a laptop are speed without a RAID, better battery life, better reliability when being moved around, and less noise; for the most part those things don't matter with a desktop.
Maybe you should A) Have a talk with your friends about not posting and tagging pictures of you, they're the ones making the data publicly available, not Google. B) Periodically go into facebook and remove tags from pictures you don't want tagged (so it at least doesn't get indexed under your name). If it's something really bad send a message to your friend and have them remove it or make it private.
You can't blame Google for looking at publicly available information. What do you really propose Google does? Offer to let you censor your name? What about other people who share your name and don't want it censored (for example there is a doctor in NC that would be pretty pissed if I asked Google to block my name since it would be costing him patients). Or should Google just not index certain sites? It would take all of about a day for 5 competitors to jump all over that and provide the service that Google is denying. Even if you got all the major search engines to cooperate that doesn't change the fact that you can do the same searches on the individual sites. Nor does it change the fact that a couple of college students could start up a search engine that provides the service.
The data is out there, what Google does is trivial compared to the effort that goes into creating the data in the first place. And I do mean trivial, you can knock out a web indexer in a couple weeks if you really had to. It wouldn't be as good as Google's and it wouldn't be very fast, but that doesn't change the facts of the situation. There is no sense in being angry at Google for indexing data that is freely available, the only people responsible for the data are the ones that make it widely available on the web and increasingly that is the very person that the information is about.
Lying on a job application is considered fraud, it's not worth the potential risks and it's far too common for companies to run a $50 background check on potential employees. The kind of place that wouldn't invite you in because of that little check box (or at least call and ask about it) is going to have plenty of other issues. Now if you have a conviction for something that is related to your job, that might be a different story. Obviously, you don't want someone convicted of securities fraud becoming a stock broker or someone convicted of identity theft in charge of customer billing, but they should at least take the time to ask about the circumstances and hear your side of the story.
All these stories that you hear about Google, and especially Schmidt, aren't anti-privacy stories. In fact, I would argue that they're more along the lines of honest warnings. Most of what he says echos what is common sense the the nerd community:
"If you don't want people to know about something, don't post it online." How many times have we said nearly this exact same thing to our friends and family? I know I have, especially to my younger, less experienced relatives.
"I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time." He's right, society doesn't understand and until people learn to look past minor indiscretions society never will. Until that time, the only way to have a fresh start is to give people a name that doesn't have all the past associated with it. He's not saying, "We're going to post all your data and theirs nothing you can do about it!", he's saying "the data is out there and we need to find ways to deal with it on a personal and on a societal level".
While I agree with you that it is unclear or at least not intuitively obvious, the plain fact is that it has been in use for a long time and is very common. It's not a recent development (Jonathan Swift is known to have used the construction in the early 1700s) nor is it rare (almost 500,000,000 Google results for 'times less than'). For better or worse, language is not tied directly to math, nor is the meaning of a phrase necessarily tied to the meaning of the individual words that make it up.
As has been pointed out in comments above, giving you the prescription could be a very easy and effective way of diagnosing you. If you take the Ritalin and are able to concentrate, you probably have ADD. If you take the Ritalin and can't sit still for ten seconds at a time, you probably don't. The drug affects the ADD brain very differently than it affects the typical brain.
The Pirate Party believes that websites like The Pirate Bay and Wikileaks are legal and should remain up. Since they have the power to act on those beliefs directly (while also trying to change and/or clarify the laws to ensure their legality) they have chosen to do so by hosting the sites in such a way that it is almost impossible for them to be taken down. They are simply standing up for their beliefs in a very public and open way, it doesn't necessarily mean that they support the actually things these sites do. Imagine a police officer doing his duty to protect a KKK member from a violent mob, it hardly means that the police officer supports the KKK.
Life expectancy continues to go up only because infant mortality goes down. Among those who reach adulthood, life expectancy has barely moved in the past 50 years. Among those who reach elderly age (70+) life expectancy has been nearly constant for all of human history.
Well, now I'm just confused what you're getting at. The line you quoted clearly says that he thinks we can simulate the brain (not just the inputs to the brain) in 10 years.
There's much better arguments to be made than this one. After all, it only takes 500k lines of code to make a block buster video game and I don't see any triple A titles driving around in a Prius either. Obviously the 1 million lines of code Kurzweil is referring to would be written for the purpose of simulating a human brain. And when you think about it, any such simulation is going to have to be a neural net, which is largely the same lines of code being run on (in this case) millions if not billions of nodes. What he's actually saying is that 1 million lines of code can simulate a single neuron; it's state, it's interfaces, and it's reactions to stimuli. Put that way it doesn't sound too unreasonable to me. Now, finding the hardware to run that million lines of code on several billion nodes, and the software to manage the connections to form a neural net of comparable complexity to the human brain, that sounds much harder.
Besides, if you read Kurzweil's statement, he's saying we'll reverse engineer the various inputs that can be given to the brain, not the brain it's in entirety.
If this is true, then the whole thing goes from flamebait to troll in my opinion. We might, if we really work on it hard, be able to simulate a housefly's brain in ten years time. The writer of the blog correctly points out that we are a long ways from understanding how the human brain works. But, if Kurzweil was only talking about the inputs to the brain... that's a heck of a lot easier. You have working versions of everything right in front of you, all it really takes is a way to monitor the important nerves, gather data, and analyze that data. Heck, we could probably start working on the pertinent issues today, if we haven't already.
But then, why does the quoted statement talk about the genome and how it relates to brain developement, neither of which have much to do with understanding the inputs to the human brain. In other words, do you have a source of Kurzweil's complete statements so that we can evaluate what he said ourselves?
it looks like P.Z. Myers just decided to take some extra time to point out how imprudent Kurzweil's statements are becoming. Kurzweil will show you tiny pieces of the puzzle that support his wild conclusions and leave you in the dark about the full picture and pieces that directly contradict his statements.
He staked his reputation on a timeline that everyone but him knew was impossible and now he tries to find little pieces of evidence to support the idea that we are still on that timeline. As reality and his predictions diverge further from each other his claims and evidence become weaker, until the day he predicted the singularity would happen passes by and he is forced to revise his proph-... er, prediction. Even assuming his basic premise is correct (an idea which I feel there isn't enough evidence to say either way) it should be obvious by now that his time scales are way, way off, probably by at least an order of magnitude. He'd better serve himself and his causes by admitting his mistake and reevaluating his predictions.
Basically, the claim is that the brain is controlled (or created, or described) in the genome. On some levels that's true, all the information you need to create the brain is in the genome but on other levels it is ludicrous. DNA doesn't say 'put this cell here', 'connect with these neighbors', etc. We're a long way from understanding all the interactions that go into turning a strand of DNA into a working organ, let alone one as complex as the human brain. A more accurate title would have been "Ray Kurzweil Does Not Understand How DNA Translates into Physical Morphology" but then that isn't as catchy.
Now to be fair to Mr Kurzweil, it's entirely possible that he is being taken out of context or perhaps didn't make his thoughts clear. It find it at least plausible that we will be able to accurately simulate the development of an organism from it's DNA, but only by directly simulating it, we wouldn't really understand most of what we would see any better than if we looked at the same interactions in the real thing (though of course if the simulation were accurate enough it would almost definitely provide unique insights). I doubt that we'll be at human brain level by that time, but maybe flatworms or houseflies.
Here is the driver for an entry level multifunction printer. Look under "HP Deskjet Basic Drivers"
Thinking more of business grade devices? Here is the driver for a business grade multifunction printer. Again, look under "HP Officejet Basic Print and Scan Driver"
I'm sorry to say it, but you are empirically wrong.
Eventually there's a theoretical limit, a limit that can't be exceeded without violating the laws of physics, specifically quantum mechanics. Once your transistors get close enough together, the probability of an electron tunneling from one side to the other gets high enough that it isn't possible to tell between your on and off states. We are rapidly approaching that limit even if all the manufacturing issues can be overcome (I believe it's somewhere around 5nm, but I could be wrong).
The difference is that this satellite relies on consumable coolant to operate. When the coolant it brought along is gone, it can no longer gather useful data (internal thermal noise becomes greater than the light they are trying to detect). Nothing they could have done would have changed that fact, there's no other way to keep a satellite at those kinds of temperatures. Even so, if I know NASA they'll find a way to re-appropriate this satellite for another mission and it will remain useful for quite some time.
It's a bad summary no doubt (I haven't read the fine article yet) but it clearly states "This is the first scientific discovery by a distributed computing project".
The military, especially in times of war, doesn't work that way. There are risks and benefits to every action, getting in touch with an informant who may be compromised could easily provide enough of a benefit to be worth the risk, and that's even assuming the people with feet on the ground are aware that their source is compromised. If nothing else, Wikileaks denied the US military the intelligence that those informants could have provided, a consequence which, in an of itself, puts American soldiers are greater risk.
Posting names of informants risks the lives of both the informants and the soldiers who interface with them. It's entirely possible that a squad of US soldiers could show up at their informant's home a month from now to find a nasty little surprise waiting for them. If there is only a single type of information divulged with these leaks that should have been kept secret, the names of people helping the US military has to be it.
Well, count me as a rare option C: Some of this information (names and locations of informants, details of military strategies, etc) should be kept secret while other parts (involvement of the Pakistani military, civilian deaths, etc) never should have been secret.
I'd think the existence of canine and incisor teeth in humans would be enough to convince any reasonable person that were are evolved to be omnivorous.
No, no you can't. Pieces aren't completely independent of each other and it is impossible to flip the orientation of an edge piece without changing the orientation of some other pieces as well. Try what I described above for yourself and see; solve the cube, flip a single edge piece, then try solving it again. You won't be able to without taking the cube apart.
Slashdot Mirror
You can still pay for a repair (I think it's around $100 for most problems). My fat PS3 has had some overheating issues for the past year or so, not enough to melt but enough to cause artifacts player certain games (basically anything by Ubisoft). I would love to send it in for repair before it totally craps out, but I actually do use the backwards compatibility so I can't.
I got an 80 gig SSD for my laptop which is enough for the OS and applications (as long as you don't go too crazy with AAA games). I put the old 500 gig spinning drive into my desktop and made it a network share for data. Got enough fast storage for the things I do and plenty of slow storage over the network. When it comes to putting an SSD into a desktop, I really have to question if its worth it. A couple of 7200 RPM raided will provide nearly the nearly same performance for a much lower cost. The advantages on a laptop are speed without a RAID, better battery life, better reliability when being moved around, and less noise; for the most part those things don't matter with a desktop.
Maybe you should A) Have a talk with your friends about not posting and tagging pictures of you, they're the ones making the data publicly available, not Google. B) Periodically go into facebook and remove tags from pictures you don't want tagged (so it at least doesn't get indexed under your name). If it's something really bad send a message to your friend and have them remove it or make it private.
You can't blame Google for looking at publicly available information. What do you really propose Google does? Offer to let you censor your name? What about other people who share your name and don't want it censored (for example there is a doctor in NC that would be pretty pissed if I asked Google to block my name since it would be costing him patients). Or should Google just not index certain sites? It would take all of about a day for 5 competitors to jump all over that and provide the service that Google is denying. Even if you got all the major search engines to cooperate that doesn't change the fact that you can do the same searches on the individual sites. Nor does it change the fact that a couple of college students could start up a search engine that provides the service.
The data is out there, what Google does is trivial compared to the effort that goes into creating the data in the first place. And I do mean trivial, you can knock out a web indexer in a couple weeks if you really had to. It wouldn't be as good as Google's and it wouldn't be very fast, but that doesn't change the facts of the situation. There is no sense in being angry at Google for indexing data that is freely available, the only people responsible for the data are the ones that make it widely available on the web and increasingly that is the very person that the information is about.
Lying on a job application is considered fraud, it's not worth the potential risks and it's far too common for companies to run a $50 background check on potential employees. The kind of place that wouldn't invite you in because of that little check box (or at least call and ask about it) is going to have plenty of other issues. Now if you have a conviction for something that is related to your job, that might be a different story. Obviously, you don't want someone convicted of securities fraud becoming a stock broker or someone convicted of identity theft in charge of customer billing, but they should at least take the time to ask about the circumstances and hear your side of the story.
All these stories that you hear about Google, and especially Schmidt, aren't anti-privacy stories. In fact, I would argue that they're more along the lines of honest warnings. Most of what he says echos what is common sense the the nerd community:
"If you don't want people to know about something, don't post it online." How many times have we said nearly this exact same thing to our friends and family? I know I have, especially to my younger, less experienced relatives.
"I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time." He's right, society doesn't understand and until people learn to look past minor indiscretions society never will. Until that time, the only way to have a fresh start is to give people a name that doesn't have all the past associated with it. He's not saying, "We're going to post all your data and theirs nothing you can do about it!", he's saying "the data is out there and we need to find ways to deal with it on a personal and on a societal level".
While I agree with you that it is unclear or at least not intuitively obvious, the plain fact is that it has been in use for a long time and is very common. It's not a recent development (Jonathan Swift is known to have used the construction in the early 1700s) nor is it rare (almost 500,000,000 Google results for 'times less than'). For better or worse, language is not tied directly to math, nor is the meaning of a phrase necessarily tied to the meaning of the individual words that make it up.
As has been pointed out in comments above, giving you the prescription could be a very easy and effective way of diagnosing you. If you take the Ritalin and are able to concentrate, you probably have ADD. If you take the Ritalin and can't sit still for ten seconds at a time, you probably don't. The drug affects the ADD brain very differently than it affects the typical brain.
The Pirate Party believes that websites like The Pirate Bay and Wikileaks are legal and should remain up. Since they have the power to act on those beliefs directly (while also trying to change and/or clarify the laws to ensure their legality) they have chosen to do so by hosting the sites in such a way that it is almost impossible for them to be taken down. They are simply standing up for their beliefs in a very public and open way, it doesn't necessarily mean that they support the actually things these sites do. Imagine a police officer doing his duty to protect a KKK member from a violent mob, it hardly means that the police officer supports the KKK.
Life expectancy continues to go up only because infant mortality goes down. Among those who reach adulthood, life expectancy has barely moved in the past 50 years. Among those who reach elderly age (70+) life expectancy has been nearly constant for all of human history.
Well, now I'm just confused what you're getting at. The line you quoted clearly says that he thinks we can simulate the brain (not just the inputs to the brain) in 10 years.
There's much better arguments to be made than this one. After all, it only takes 500k lines of code to make a block buster video game and I don't see any triple A titles driving around in a Prius either. Obviously the 1 million lines of code Kurzweil is referring to would be written for the purpose of simulating a human brain. And when you think about it, any such simulation is going to have to be a neural net, which is largely the same lines of code being run on (in this case) millions if not billions of nodes. What he's actually saying is that 1 million lines of code can simulate a single neuron; it's state, it's interfaces, and it's reactions to stimuli. Put that way it doesn't sound too unreasonable to me. Now, finding the hardware to run that million lines of code on several billion nodes, and the software to manage the connections to form a neural net of comparable complexity to the human brain, that sounds much harder.
Besides, if you read Kurzweil's statement, he's saying we'll reverse engineer the various inputs that can be given to the brain, not the brain it's in entirety.
If this is true, then the whole thing goes from flamebait to troll in my opinion. We might, if we really work on it hard, be able to simulate a housefly's brain in ten years time. The writer of the blog correctly points out that we are a long ways from understanding how the human brain works. But, if Kurzweil was only talking about the inputs to the brain... that's a heck of a lot easier. You have working versions of everything right in front of you, all it really takes is a way to monitor the important nerves, gather data, and analyze that data. Heck, we could probably start working on the pertinent issues today, if we haven't already.
But then, why does the quoted statement talk about the genome and how it relates to brain developement, neither of which have much to do with understanding the inputs to the human brain. In other words, do you have a source of Kurzweil's complete statements so that we can evaluate what he said ourselves?
it looks like P.Z. Myers just decided to take some extra time to point out how imprudent Kurzweil's statements are becoming. Kurzweil will show you tiny pieces of the puzzle that support his wild conclusions and leave you in the dark about the full picture and pieces that directly contradict his statements.
He staked his reputation on a timeline that everyone but him knew was impossible and now he tries to find little pieces of evidence to support the idea that we are still on that timeline. As reality and his predictions diverge further from each other his claims and evidence become weaker, until the day he predicted the singularity would happen passes by and he is forced to revise his proph-... er, prediction. Even assuming his basic premise is correct (an idea which I feel there isn't enough evidence to say either way) it should be obvious by now that his time scales are way, way off, probably by at least an order of magnitude. He'd better serve himself and his causes by admitting his mistake and reevaluating his predictions.
Basically, the claim is that the brain is controlled (or created, or described) in the genome. On some levels that's true, all the information you need to create the brain is in the genome but on other levels it is ludicrous. DNA doesn't say 'put this cell here', 'connect with these neighbors', etc. We're a long way from understanding all the interactions that go into turning a strand of DNA into a working organ, let alone one as complex as the human brain. A more accurate title would have been "Ray Kurzweil Does Not Understand How DNA Translates into Physical Morphology" but then that isn't as catchy.
Now to be fair to Mr Kurzweil, it's entirely possible that he is being taken out of context or perhaps didn't make his thoughts clear. It find it at least plausible that we will be able to accurately simulate the development of an organism from it's DNA, but only by directly simulating it, we wouldn't really understand most of what we would see any better than if we looked at the same interactions in the real thing (though of course if the simulation were accurate enough it would almost definitely provide unique insights). I doubt that we'll be at human brain level by that time, but maybe flatworms or houseflies.
Here is the driver for an entry level multifunction printer. Look under "HP Deskjet Basic Drivers"
Thinking more of business grade devices? Here is the driver for a business grade multifunction printer. Again, look under "HP Officejet Basic Print and Scan Driver"
I'm sorry to say it, but you are empirically wrong.
Eventually there's a theoretical limit, a limit that can't be exceeded without violating the laws of physics, specifically quantum mechanics. Once your transistors get close enough together, the probability of an electron tunneling from one side to the other gets high enough that it isn't possible to tell between your on and off states. We are rapidly approaching that limit even if all the manufacturing issues can be overcome (I believe it's somewhere around 5nm, but I could be wrong).
The difference is that this satellite relies on consumable coolant to operate. When the coolant it brought along is gone, it can no longer gather useful data (internal thermal noise becomes greater than the light they are trying to detect). Nothing they could have done would have changed that fact, there's no other way to keep a satellite at those kinds of temperatures. Even so, if I know NASA they'll find a way to re-appropriate this satellite for another mission and it will remain useful for quite some time.
It's a bad summary no doubt (I haven't read the fine article yet) but it clearly states "This is the first scientific discovery by a distributed computing project".
Judging by Folding@Home's long list of results I'd say they would also dispute the 'first scientific discovery' claim.
The military, especially in times of war, doesn't work that way. There are risks and benefits to every action, getting in touch with an informant who may be compromised could easily provide enough of a benefit to be worth the risk, and that's even assuming the people with feet on the ground are aware that their source is compromised. If nothing else, Wikileaks denied the US military the intelligence that those informants could have provided, a consequence which, in an of itself, puts American soldiers are greater risk.
Posting names of informants risks the lives of both the informants and the soldiers who interface with them. It's entirely possible that a squad of US soldiers could show up at their informant's home a month from now to find a nasty little surprise waiting for them. If there is only a single type of information divulged with these leaks that should have been kept secret, the names of people helping the US military has to be it.
Well, count me as a rare option C: Some of this information (names and locations of informants, details of military strategies, etc) should be kept secret while other parts (involvement of the Pakistani military, civilian deaths, etc) never should have been secret.
I'd think the existence of canine and incisor teeth in humans would be enough to convince any reasonable person that were are evolved to be omnivorous.
No, no you can't. Pieces aren't completely independent of each other and it is impossible to flip the orientation of an edge piece without changing the orientation of some other pieces as well. Try what I described above for yourself and see; solve the cube, flip a single edge piece, then try solving it again. You won't be able to without taking the cube apart.