This isn't putting fruit fly genes in your grapes, this is editing the grape genome with intention rather than depending on blind luck. The other produce at the store you're eating was mutated with radiation, unless you're only eating heirloom varieties.
Though even the heirloom varieties came from something else. Mutations all the way down.
Or we could just not do it. It really is that simple. Of course, let's ask ourselves why we want killer robots. We're pretty much past the stage of "defense". Nukes & MAD make that pointless. And hell, so did globalization. You don't shit in your own backyard and for the same reason we're not going to go off and start blowing each other away. The damage done would outweigh the benefit. There'll be brush fires here and there but big scale wars are a thing of the past, if only because they rich won't let us wreck their stuff anymore.
Oh, I wish. But I surely do not trust leadership. And there is at least one - but no doubt a few more - who are itching to use nucs. Crazy thing is there are a fair number of people who are actively wishing for a world ending conflict.
“The end of times is something that we all expect and hope for and look forward to but most Christians aren't in the business of trying to predict that date. They are working toward that date.
I've heard a lot of this hoo-haw from religious people who are happy to have the world end. Of course, they just want to light the fuse so they can be raptured. What a death cult.
Worse, it'll completely insulate people from the horror that is war -- all except the victims, of course. When you don't even have a drone pilot pushing the button to drop a bomb, who is there to have any sort of conscience
Machines with no conscience, ordered by leaders who possibly have no conscience. A nasty-ass recipe. Coupled with say a country that is staring down it's own defeat. Oh yeah - they will be used. And lest any readers think I want these things - I do not. I just don't see any way they won't be built.
The point to warfare if it doesn't involve humans killing other humans will be the same as the point to warfare involving humans killing other humans: profit. And if there can be a company supplying both sides of a battle that endlessly calls for new "troops" to be built on both sides to keep up with the daily death count, that company would GLADLY build the ever loving hell out of some killbots.
Well, I suppose it will get rid of all that useless cash sitting around the house. 8^)
You're not wrong. Perhaps in first-world countries we'll say 'no' to this, but countries like China or Russia? They won't refrain from it, they'll mass-produce them, and considering the shitty excuse for 'AI' everyone keeps trotting out, they'll all screw up and run rampant as likely as not. Guess we'll have to develop strong EMP weapons against them.
Yes - something will need to be done. I can imagine civilian deaths will be higher than WW2.
Not to take sides, but it was pretty clearly shown at the right of the summary, which is still 'the article', and it even says "Neptune from the VLT and Hubble". A cursory look would have been enough to find it. As I did.
While true it could have been put nicer, you're exaggerating with 'ESP' as well. And in your rebuttal you weren't very nice neither. In the end, he did give you the link for your request, so maybe you should have stayed a bit more polite as well, if you're going to complain about it in the first place.
Dude - I do admit I'm a major asshole. And I also explained that my script blockers kept the image from ever showing up on my screen. Shields down, and I could see the comparison photos. Shields up, and I saw only one image, nothing else.
So yes - the problem was on my end, and major mea culpas all around. Anyhow, I'm suitably chastised, so I'll probably just let it go.
Also the Hubble isn't a flawed instrument. It was a flawed instrument but after the optics were corrected it is very much an instrument that matches the spec that was originally supposed to be built to, and more given how the process of trying to correct the images while waiting for optics produced new breakthroughs in image processing.
I guess you would say that my eyes are as close to perfect as possible because my glasses give me 20/20 plus vision?
It's usless pedantry to say the Hubble isn't a flawed device. It was polished incorrectly, and sadly, I could have determined that fact with a Foucault tester I could make in my garage in 20 minutes. There is another mirror sitting in a warehouse in Rochester, IIRC, that is ground and polished to as close to perfection as could be done.
If that back up mirror had been the one sent to space, the Hubble would have performed on spec with no mirror tricks.
And no one would ever design a telescope with the system they ended up with in Hubble.
That it was fixed is not in doubt. The fix allowed them to get good images while using the flawed mirror. But the mirror has spherical aberration. The fix was an amazing feat.
Certainly not directly. A fair bit of my work has been military oriented. So depends on one's definition.
I imagine the vast majority of all humans to ever live never killed anyone.
You are analyzing this incorrectly. Direct killing is not the main metric. Support of it is. Most females are not terribly interested in making war. Most old men are not interested - the exception being old politicians that seem to look for excuses to send young men off as cannon fodder. Regardless, it isn't the specific numbers of people doing the actual killing - its the acceptance of it, and the fact that there do not seem to be many periods of time when humanity hasnt been engaging in diplomacy by death and destruction.
As an example - there is no evidence that old Uncle Adolph ever personally killed anyone. Some folks don't think he was a very peaceful man who would never harm anyone.
Seems to me that's a pretty broad brush you are painting with and all it does it serve to normalize the behaviour of those that benefit from it.
If I'm normalizing anything, it is the normal state of Humanity that has nothing to do with me espousing or condemning it. I merely observe that there has been almost no time in known human history that the world has been at peace. In a 1968 book, there was a claim that "out of the past 3,421 years, only 268 have been free of war.” that has since been disputed, but not in the direction of more peaceful times.
So if killing others is not a core competency and drive of humans, we are the best example of metastatic and fatal masochism ever.
... while allowing whacked out dietary aids that show obviously photoshopped before and after images of fat and now slender ladies while making outrageous claims might be a better target. Perhaps a shift in priorities would be in order.
I don't know, I kinda like those priorities. I mean, do you even want to imagine what those fat ladies looked like pre-photoshop?
I've always suspected that they take slim women and photoshopped them to look heavy. Easier to do and they don't have to wait for her to lose weight. My favorite one was (SJW trigger alert - I am going to mention physical attributes of a female of the species - y'all have been warned) an absolutely beautiful and fit woman who was slender and well muscled as in a non-steroid enhanced fit woman coming out of a swimming pool in a black bikini. The kind of beautiful that makes men stupid. Then they had her head on a unhealthily obese body. I immediately called Bullshit, as there would be no way that this woman could lose nearly a hundred pounds without a looking like a human version of a Shar-Pei.
These folks have at least figured out that if it isn't humans directly killing other humans, there isn't much point to warfare.
Humans have an innate need to kill other humans. Call some group the "other" and it's off to war. We've done it since we came down from the trees. We've never stopped doing it. We will continue to do it. It will probably be the source of our extinction as our Lizard brain uses our higher thought process and the technology that enables our technology to send us out in a blaze of glory. And a lot of people will celebrate that moment.
I have a friend who used to read Slashdot daily about 10 years ago.
Today he has a flip phone from about the same time period, and almost angrily refuses to change from it and insists he will never ever have a smart phone no matter what. States there is no reason to ever get that and why would he want that when he only wants a phone to be a phone.
He became a grandpa fast.
I call it the Amish complex. Somewhere along the line, the old order Amish decided that 1840 was the cutoff date. After that most everything is bad. Your friend decided that flip phones were the proper end of technology.
The thing about smartphones is that some folks think you get one, and you become a Facebook addict, or walk out in front of cars, or suddenly become a hipster. I certainly don't use mine for that. I use the phone to check my email accounts when I'm away from the house, reference technical material, and a small amount of texting. And tethering a laptop as needed.
And I like it for that. The grandpa thing is strange and interesting. I have friends who are 20 years younger than me who are becoming grandpas, and I'm still a voracious techno-geek. There are modern things I think are dumb, but only because they are dumb for one reason or another - like Internet of Things security problems. My wife is under orders to ship me off to the Arctic for an indigenous family to put me out to freeze to death if I ever turn into an Olde Farte.
If you had read the article link provided in the summary you would have seen the image to the right of the text with the link that Raenex provided (Hint: on the right find "Images" third image down with caption "PR Image eso1824c/Neptune from the VLT and Hubble." Why are you being so snarky when you obviously only read the summary?
I've got a lot of stuff on my browser to keep the bad guys out, so that didn't show up.
It is incorrect to say that the Hubble is currently flawed in any optically significant way.
I suppose that you might say that depending on how you define flawed. I need corrective optics to allow me to see with proper vision. In my estimation, my eyes are flawed, and the lenses I use - no line bifocals and computer glasses make a big difference. Note to Slashdotters - Computer glasses are wonderful. Corrected for the distance from eyes to screen, they are a big help, and surprisingly inexpensive. They aren't reading glasses. Mine focus at ~ 30 inches and are sharp as a tack
"But seriously - if you are going to claim that your earth based adaptive optics system will deliver sharper images than Hubble - show us a comparison."
So , Was that the link in the article? I went again, concerned at my stupidity because I didn't see the very obvious comparison - no, it was not the link. Perhaps I'm supposed to have ESP or something - but the link you gavee me pointing out my stupidity was not in the summary at all.
tl;dr version. You could choose to be anything, but for some reason you chose to be a condescending asshole - twice.
At least now I am quite clear on why you chose to be snarky. It's how you are. Good day, sir.
With any hint of luck, we could get the idiots that think that relabeling a condition changes the condition to jump on this and make room for people who actually could work on changing the condition.
There are some folks in this world who want to spend endless time cleaning up their little corner of the room, endlessly shuffling and re-arranging things in order to make their corner perfect.
While ignoring the mess outside their precious corner.
And there are matters under the jurisdiction of the FDA that are a damn sight more important than making people aware that almond milk is not cow milk. Trying to tidy up that corner while allowing whacked out dietary aids that show obviously photoshopped before and after images of fat and now slender ladies while making outrageous claims might be a better target. Perhaps a shift in priorities would be in order.
Because different groups of people can't work on different things simultaneously?
No, because making pointless rulings is pointless. I wonder how many people are confused by almond milk or coconut milk? After all - where are the tits on almonds? And in old movies Hawaiian ladies work coconut bras - but no, the milk from that coconut wasn't the same thing as the milk from what the coconut was hiding.
And everyone knew it, everyone knows it now, and I would be surprised if anyone will ever confuse it with the liquid expressed from the modified sweat glands of mammals.
Looking at the image of Neptune, all I have to say is Damn - this stuff works! Neptune is a good low contrast test of their adaptive optics system. And I'm going to have a blast today researching out the details of the badly named GALACSI system.
But seriously - if you are going to claim that your earth based adaptive optics system will deliver sharper images than Hubble - show us a comparison.
Its worth noting that Hubble is a flawed instrument in a good location, but the claim has been made, so stand and deliver, ESO!
Funny how people reply to this obvious troll, like if it was a serious claim. Anyway we should keep AC posting as it is useful sometimes (and moderation does work).
Slashdot's moderation system does indeed work. And there is a level slider we can use to cut off anything below a certain level. Cut off anything below 1, and it cleans the neighborhood up right nicely.
That makes matters even worse. You do know that cellphones are hardly a market with a few thousands manufacturers, right? Let's ponder for a moment what happens with the phone market if you subtract Android.
Ah - take it from one of us stupid 'Murricans. Blocking the rest of the world from interfering with your demands is a business opportunity. All you have to do is design and build your own phones with an operating system of your own that blocks all that which harms the EU.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't putting fruit fly genes in your grapes, this is editing the grape genome with intention rather than depending on blind luck. The other produce at the store you're eating was mutated with radiation, unless you're only eating heirloom varieties.
Though even the heirloom varieties came from something else. Mutations all the way down.
That would be a damn fine first step.
Or we could just not do it. It really is that simple. Of course, let's ask ourselves why we want killer robots. We're pretty much past the stage of "defense". Nukes & MAD make that pointless. And hell, so did globalization. You don't shit in your own backyard and for the same reason we're not going to go off and start blowing each other away. The damage done would outweigh the benefit. There'll be brush fires here and there but big scale wars are a thing of the past, if only because they rich won't let us wreck their stuff anymore.
Oh, I wish. But I surely do not trust leadership. And there is at least one - but no doubt a few more - who are itching to use nucs. Crazy thing is there are a fair number of people who are actively wishing for a world ending conflict.
https://www.amazon.com/Have-Ni...
https://www.livescience.com/14...
http://www.signs-of-end-times.... Dr. Thomas B. Slater, Professor of New Testament at Mercer University On end times date:
“The end of times is something that we all expect and hope for and look forward to but most Christians aren't in the business of trying to predict that date. They are working toward that date.
I've heard a lot of this hoo-haw from religious people who are happy to have the world end. Of course, they just want to light the fuse so they can be raptured. What a death cult.
But that is what we are up against.
Oh hell - I'm harshing my mellow.
Worse, it'll completely insulate people from the horror that is war -- all except the victims, of course. When you don't even have a drone pilot pushing the button to drop a bomb, who is there to have any sort of conscience
Machines with no conscience, ordered by leaders who possibly have no conscience. A nasty-ass recipe. Coupled with say a country that is staring down it's own defeat. Oh yeah - they will be used. And lest any readers think I want these things - I do not. I just don't see any way they won't be built.
And used.
The point to warfare if it doesn't involve humans killing other humans will be the same as the point to warfare involving humans killing other humans: profit. And if there can be a company supplying both sides of a battle that endlessly calls for new "troops" to be built on both sides to keep up with the daily death count, that company would GLADLY build the ever loving hell out of some killbots.
Well, I suppose it will get rid of all that useless cash sitting around the house. 8^)
You're not wrong. Perhaps in first-world countries we'll say 'no' to this, but countries like China or Russia? They won't refrain from it, they'll mass-produce them, and considering the shitty excuse for 'AI' everyone keeps trotting out, they'll all screw up and run rampant as likely as not. Guess we'll have to develop strong EMP weapons against them.
Yes - something will need to be done. I can imagine civilian deaths will be higher than WW2.
Not to take sides, but it was pretty clearly shown at the right of the summary, which is still 'the article', and it even says "Neptune from the VLT and Hubble". A cursory look would have been enough to find it. As I did.
While true it could have been put nicer, you're exaggerating with 'ESP' as well. And in your rebuttal you weren't very nice neither. In the end, he did give you the link for your request, so maybe you should have stayed a bit more polite as well, if you're going to complain about it in the first place.
Dude - I do admit I'm a major asshole. And I also explained that my script blockers kept the image from ever showing up on my screen. Shields down, and I could see the comparison photos. Shields up, and I saw only one image, nothing else.
So yes - the problem was on my end, and major mea culpas all around. Anyhow, I'm suitably chastised, so I'll probably just let it go.
Err the comparison is in the article.
Also the Hubble isn't a flawed instrument. It was a flawed instrument but after the optics were corrected it is very much an instrument that matches the spec that was originally supposed to be built to, and more given how the process of trying to correct the images while waiting for optics produced new breakthroughs in image processing.
I guess you would say that my eyes are as close to perfect as possible because my glasses give me 20/20 plus vision?
It's usless pedantry to say the Hubble isn't a flawed device. It was polished incorrectly, and sadly, I could have determined that fact with a Foucault tester I could make in my garage in 20 minutes. There is another mirror sitting in a warehouse in Rochester, IIRC, that is ground and polished to as close to perfection as could be done.
If that back up mirror had been the one sent to space, the Hubble would have performed on spec with no mirror tricks.
And no one would ever design a telescope with the system they ended up with in Hubble.
NASA calls it a flaw: https://www.nasa.gov/content/h...
That it was fixed is not in doubt. The fix allowed them to get good images while using the flawed mirror. But the mirror has spherical aberration. The fix was an amazing feat.
But it was still a kludge - http://cbsnews1.cbsistatic.com...
Have you killed other humans?
Certainly not directly. A fair bit of my work has been military oriented. So depends on one's definition.
I imagine the vast majority of all humans to ever live never killed anyone.
You are analyzing this incorrectly. Direct killing is not the main metric. Support of it is. Most females are not terribly interested in making war. Most old men are not interested - the exception being old politicians that seem to look for excuses to send young men off as cannon fodder. Regardless, it isn't the specific numbers of people doing the actual killing - its the acceptance of it, and the fact that there do not seem to be many periods of time when humanity hasnt been engaging in diplomacy by death and destruction.
As an example - there is no evidence that old Uncle Adolph ever personally killed anyone. Some folks don't think he was a very peaceful man who would never harm anyone.
Seems to me that's a pretty broad brush you are painting with and all it does it serve to normalize the behaviour of those that benefit from it.
If I'm normalizing anything, it is the normal state of Humanity that has nothing to do with me espousing or condemning it. I merely observe that there has been almost no time in known human history that the world has been at peace. In a 1968 book, there was a claim that "out of the past 3,421 years, only 268 have been free of war.” that has since been disputed, but not in the direction of more peaceful times.
So if killing others is not a core competency and drive of humans, we are the best example of metastatic and fatal masochism ever.
... while allowing whacked out dietary aids that show obviously photoshopped before and after images of fat and now slender ladies while making outrageous claims might be a better target. Perhaps a shift in priorities would be in order.
I don't know, I kinda like those priorities. I mean, do you even want to imagine what those fat ladies looked like pre-photoshop?
I've always suspected that they take slim women and photoshopped them to look heavy. Easier to do and they don't have to wait for her to lose weight. My favorite one was (SJW trigger alert - I am going to mention physical attributes of a female of the species - y'all have been warned) an absolutely beautiful and fit woman who was slender and well muscled as in a non-steroid enhanced fit woman coming out of a swimming pool in a black bikini. The kind of beautiful that makes men stupid. Then they had her head on a unhealthily obese body. I immediately called Bullshit, as there would be no way that this woman could lose nearly a hundred pounds without a looking like a human version of a Shar-Pei.
Humans have an innate need to kill other humans. Call some group the "other" and it's off to war. We've done it since we came down from the trees. We've never stopped doing it. We will continue to do it. It will probably be the source of our extinction as our Lizard brain uses our higher thought process and the technology that enables our technology to send us out in a blaze of glory. And a lot of people will celebrate that moment.
It is too late.
I have a friend who used to read Slashdot daily about 10 years ago.
Today he has a flip phone from about the same time period, and almost angrily refuses to change from it and insists he will never ever have a smart phone no matter what. States there is no reason to ever get that and why would he want that when he only wants a phone to be a phone.
He became a grandpa fast.
I call it the Amish complex. Somewhere along the line, the old order Amish decided that 1840 was the cutoff date. After that most everything is bad. Your friend decided that flip phones were the proper end of technology.
The thing about smartphones is that some folks think you get one, and you become a Facebook addict, or walk out in front of cars, or suddenly become a hipster. I certainly don't use mine for that. I use the phone to check my email accounts when I'm away from the house, reference technical material, and a small amount of texting. And tethering a laptop as needed.
And I like it for that. The grandpa thing is strange and interesting. I have friends who are 20 years younger than me who are becoming grandpas, and I'm still a voracious techno-geek. There are modern things I think are dumb, but only because they are dumb for one reason or another - like Internet of Things security problems. My wife is under orders to ship me off to the Arctic for an indigenous family to put me out to freeze to death if I ever turn into an Olde Farte.
If you had read the article link provided in the summary you would have seen the image to the right of the text with the link that Raenex provided (Hint: on the right find "Images" third image down with caption "PR Image eso1824c/Neptune from the VLT and Hubble." Why are you being so snarky when you obviously only read the summary?
I've got a lot of stuff on my browser to keep the bad guys out, so that didn't show up.
The article has a slideshow at the top that is a comparison of hubble images vs this new ground-based telescope.
Ah - that would answer it. I have so many script and ad blockers that the slideshow never presented itself.
It is incorrect to say that the Hubble is currently flawed in any optically significant way.
I suppose that you might say that depending on how you define flawed. I need corrective optics to allow me to see with proper vision. In my estimation, my eyes are flawed, and the lenses I use - no line bifocals and computer glasses make a big difference. Note to Slashdotters - Computer glasses are wonderful. Corrected for the distance from eyes to screen, they are a big help, and surprisingly inexpensive. They aren't reading glasses. Mine focus at ~ 30 inches and are sharp as a tack
http://hubblesite.org/the_tele... Here's the first corrective optics, or COSTAR. Amazing work.
why the snark?
"But seriously - if you are going to claim that your earth based adaptive optics system will deliver sharper images than Hubble - show us a comparison."
So , Was that the link in the article? I went again, concerned at my stupidity because I didn't see the very obvious comparison - no, it was not the link. Perhaps I'm supposed to have ESP or something - but the link you gavee me pointing out my stupidity was not in the summary at all.
tl;dr version. You could choose to be anything, but for some reason you chose to be a condescending asshole - twice. At least now I am quite clear on why you chose to be snarky. It's how you are. Good day, sir.
But seriously - if you are going to claim that your earth based adaptive optics system will deliver sharper images than Hubble - show us a comparison.
Try reading the article:
https://www.eso.org/public/uni...
Thanks for the link - but why the snark?
With any hint of luck, we could get the idiots that think that relabeling a condition changes the condition to jump on this and make room for people who actually could work on changing the condition.
There are some folks in this world who want to spend endless time cleaning up their little corner of the room, endlessly shuffling and re-arranging things in order to make their corner perfect.
While ignoring the mess outside their precious corner.
And there are matters under the jurisdiction of the FDA that are a damn sight more important than making people aware that almond milk is not cow milk. Trying to tidy up that corner while allowing whacked out dietary aids that show obviously photoshopped before and after images of fat and now slender ladies while making outrageous claims might be a better target. Perhaps a shift in priorities would be in order.
Because different groups of people can't work on different things simultaneously?
No, because making pointless rulings is pointless. I wonder how many people are confused by almond milk or coconut milk? After all - where are the tits on almonds? And in old movies Hawaiian ladies work coconut bras - but no, the milk from that coconut wasn't the same thing as the milk from what the coconut was hiding.
And everyone knew it, everyone knows it now, and I would be surprised if anyone will ever confuse it with the liquid expressed from the modified sweat glands of mammals.
Pointless rulings on pointless matters.
But seriously - if you are going to claim that your earth based adaptive optics system will deliver sharper images than Hubble - show us a comparison.
Its worth noting that Hubble is a flawed instrument in a good location, but the claim has been made, so stand and deliver, ESO!
Funny how people reply to this obvious troll, like if it was a serious claim. Anyway we should keep AC posting as it is useful sometimes (and moderation does work).
Slashdot's moderation system does indeed work. And there is a level slider we can use to cut off anything below a certain level. Cut off anything below 1, and it cleans the neighborhood up right nicely.
"Almond Flesh Cocktail"
How about "Modified Sweat Gland Secretion"?
Its about time that Washington addresses the real problems that are harming Americans.
That makes matters even worse. You do know that cellphones are hardly a market with a few thousands manufacturers, right? Let's ponder for a moment what happens with the phone market if you subtract Android.
Ah - take it from one of us stupid 'Murricans. Blocking the rest of the world from interfering with your demands is a business opportunity. All you have to do is design and build your own phones with an operating system of your own that blocks all that which harms the EU.