The whole point of sending robots is that they are cheaper and more expendable to send than humans,
You're doing well so far...
thus they are good for the early scouting missions. But if humans aren't eventually going, what is the freaking point?
The freaking point of exploring space is to learn about the universe, not to allow Captain Kirk to shag green-skinned aliens or let escapist nerds dream of a life of adventure.
Humans like you and me are never going to colonize space. If it ever happens, it will involve massive genetic engineering, and the offspring will likely never bother with going back into a hot, deep gravity well.
Taking DNA samples from all children is probably a better and more just solution than taking it only from some. That way, society as a whole has to face GATTACA-like issues. If you only take it from children that show "suspicious" behavior, you know that this is going to result in mostly minority children being stuck in databases, and it means that mostly those kids will be exposed to the risk of false DNA matches.
It's not clear to me how extending life far beyond the reproductive age is any more adaptive today than it was 50000 years ago. Even healthy folks rarely reproduce past 40, and rarely contribute productively past 70. You may not want to die or grow old, but from the point of view of adaptation, a life span of 70 years may still be optimal.
Cancer is a likely risk. I doubt it's rampant, though; just enough to make it problematic.
There is one ray of hope: some of these genes may have been turned off not because they are harmful, but because they use energy and have been made largely redundant. If you have good eyes and a good brain, for example, you are less prone to injury. Since energy isn't a problem anymore, reenabling these genes may make you both slim and healthy. It's a possibility, but I still wouldn't get my hopes up...
Human life expectancy is quite long by animal standards, so it seems like we probably just don't need this anymore. On the other hand, there are usually tradeoffs with these kinds of mechanisms, and turning it on again may have rather negative side-effects.
The fact of the matter is that multi-threaded programming is a common paradigm which takes advantage of multiple cores just fine.
Multi-threaded programming is cumbersome. There have been better was of doing parallel programming for a long time.
Additionally, many algorithms cannot be parallelized.
Whether algorithms can be parallelized doesn't matter. What matters is whether there are parallel algorithms that solve problems faster than serial algorithms, and in most cases there are.
Even languages like Erlang which bring parallelization right to the front of the language are still stuck running serial operations serially.
They aren't "stuck" doing that, they do that because programmers find it convenient, not because they have to. There are many languages that don't even have a defined order of execution.
it's a hardware design problem.
Actually, it's a programmer education problem: most programmers have no idea what kinds of tools they have available for parallel programming, they have no idea how to use them, and they don't even understand what parallel programming paradigms exist. Like you, for example.
No more worrying if you incremented that semaphore correctly because you're operating at a much higher level.
You only need to "worry" about that if you insist on programming your multi-core machine in low-level C. Better solutions have existed for decades, people just don't use them. How is the BEE3 going to change that?
Yep, but exactly how do you do input validation on something like this.
You put your finger on the problem: you cannot validate this kind of system. That's why the whole paradigm of software validation is wrong and won't work for mission-critical real-world systems.
My bank account is also growing exponentially, at 1% interest. That doesn't make me rich any time soon.
Exppnential growth is a meaningless property since many things grow exponentially, many of them quite slowly. What matters is the growth rate and any upper limits to growth.
You would have thought that whether they want one or not is fairly irrelevant.
Not at all. If they don't "want" a license, it means that either they think the patent is invalid and they intend to fight it, or it means that they are going to work around it.
There are good reasons to reject even a "free" license for a patent.
Have you ever seen a case where a company wanted a license under a patent, but didn't need one?:-)
All the time. Companies want licenses for patents if it is in their business interest to help another company establish the validity of a patent. Apple, for example, wanted a patent for one-click from Amazon even though it is unlikely that they actually needed it.
Overly broad? Possibly, but sounds like it is applicable.
"Overly broad" would not a problem, and this patent isn't "overly broad".
The problem with the patent is obviousness.
If this is allowed to stand, then for any human activity, people could patent doing that activity in virtual reality, and that's simply absurd.
The whole point of virtual reality is that it lets you do real human activities, but permits you to get into situations that you couldn't get into in real life. That includes performing with a band as much as dating a super model.
So, after patenting, for any value of X, "doing X with a computer", "doing X with a client/server system", and "doing X over the web", we are now going to get a flood of patents on "doing X in virtual reality"?
Google isn't sure; it probably could, but it doesn't know the names of most of its users
They ask for your name when you register, so if they can tie your account to an ad, they can tie your name to any ad. Of course, people who sign up may simply not be giving their correct name, but that's not due to any Google privacy policy.
Microsoft says it could use only a person's first name. AOL and Yahoo could use a full name but only on their sites,
That's bullshit. Like Google, they ask the user for their full name and they store it. If they don't use that information for a particular kind of ad, it's a policy decision, not because they "can't".
So, let's get this straight. Merkey is a guy who files lawsuits against people for saying bad things about them. Now he says that he paid Wales to edit the article about him in exchange for money for the foundation. Wales receives the money and supposedly complies. Then Merkey goes public and tells the world that Wikipedia is not trustworthy.
Whether Wales acted improperly is unclear. We don't know whether Merkey's sequence of events is correct. We don't know whether Wales edited the article because of a promise of money or because he really thought that it was unfair.
What we do know is that Merkey is out to hurt Wikipedia and Wales, because if this had merely been about getting positive press, he would simply have shut up after he got what he wanted. So, did Merkey plan this all along? Did Merkey merely make it appear that the donations and the editing were linked?
We don't know whether Wales is guilty, merely naive and stupid, or innocent.
But this looks like Merkey has been out to deliberately hurt Wikipedia, probably because he couldn't get to them any other way.
Or maybe Wikipedia simply is becoming a nuisance to some people and they want to discredit and get rid of it any way they can.
Scandals "erupt" when someone makes enough of a nuisance of themselves so that others dig up the dirt on them. And it's effective because of knee-jerk reactions like yours.
The article is the usual drivel from people who evidently aren't involved in IT hiring.
They are right that there is no shortage of people who consider themselves IT workers. There is also no shortage of people graduating with IT-related degrees either.
There is, however, a big shortage of IT workers that I would even remotely consider hiring. And at the top of the list of deficiencies are the fundamentals: math, writing, presentation, team work, critical thinking, and reading comprehension.
Maybe we just need a strict certification program. My guess is that 80-90% of IT workers today would fail. Then the shortage of skilled IT workers would be pretty obvious to everybody.
A lot of the stuff people write in Wikipedia that gets deleted could be put into annotations or a comments section. Then, inclusionists could, in fact, include a lot more stuff, while the main body of an article still fulfills the purpose that an encyclopedic article should fulfill.
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me of the X-Files:
:-)
NUTT: Not all woman are attracted to overly tall, lanky men such as yourself. You'd be surprised how many women find my size intriguingly alluring.
MULDER: And you'd be surprised how many men do as well.
(I figure this is OK, since he is using his size in his campaign
The whole point of sending robots is that they are cheaper and more expendable to send than humans,
You're doing well so far...
thus they are good for the early scouting missions. But if humans aren't eventually going, what is the freaking point?
The freaking point of exploring space is to learn about the universe, not to allow Captain Kirk to shag green-skinned aliens or let escapist nerds dream of a life of adventure.
Humans like you and me are never going to colonize space. If it ever happens, it will involve massive genetic engineering, and the offspring will likely never bother with going back into a hot, deep gravity well.
Taking DNA samples from all children is probably a better and more just solution than taking it only from some. That way, society as a whole has to face GATTACA-like issues. If you only take it from children that show "suspicious" behavior, you know that this is going to result in mostly minority children being stuck in databases, and it means that mostly those kids will be exposed to the risk of false DNA matches.
It's not clear to me how extending life far beyond the reproductive age is any more adaptive today than it was 50000 years ago. Even healthy folks rarely reproduce past 40, and rarely contribute productively past 70. You may not want to die or grow old, but from the point of view of adaptation, a life span of 70 years may still be optimal.
Cancer is a likely risk. I doubt it's rampant, though; just enough to make it problematic.
There is one ray of hope: some of these genes may have been turned off not because they are harmful, but because they use energy and have been made largely redundant. If you have good eyes and a good brain, for example, you are less prone to injury. Since energy isn't a problem anymore, reenabling these genes may make you both slim and healthy. It's a possibility, but I still wouldn't get my hopes up...
Human life expectancy is quite long by animal standards, so it seems like we probably just don't need this anymore. On the other hand, there are usually tradeoffs with these kinds of mechanisms, and turning it on again may have rather negative side-effects.
Patents don't protect against patent trolls. If you want protection against patent trolls, publishing the idea is simpler and cheaper.
The fact of the matter is that multi-threaded programming is a common paradigm which takes advantage of multiple cores just fine.
Multi-threaded programming is cumbersome. There have been better was of doing parallel programming for a long time.
Additionally, many algorithms cannot be parallelized.
Whether algorithms can be parallelized doesn't matter. What matters is whether there are parallel algorithms that solve problems faster than serial algorithms, and in most cases there are.
Even languages like Erlang which bring parallelization right to the front of the language are still stuck running serial operations serially.
They aren't "stuck" doing that, they do that because programmers find it convenient, not because they have to. There are many languages that don't even have a defined order of execution.
it's a hardware design problem.
Actually, it's a programmer education problem: most programmers have no idea what kinds of tools they have available for parallel programming, they have no idea how to use them, and they don't even understand what parallel programming paradigms exist. Like you, for example.
No more worrying if you incremented that semaphore correctly because you're operating at a much higher level.
You only need to "worry" about that if you insist on programming your multi-core machine in low-level C. Better solutions have existed for decades, people just don't use them. How is the BEE3 going to change that?
Yep, but exactly how do you do input validation on something like this.
You put your finger on the problem: you cannot validate this kind of system. That's why the whole paradigm of software validation is wrong and won't work for mission-critical real-world systems.
My bank account is also growing exponentially, at 1% interest. That doesn't make me rich any time soon.
Exppnential growth is a meaningless property since many things grow exponentially, many of them quite slowly. What matters is the growth rate and any upper limits to growth.
The author is Michio Kaku, one of the inventors of string theory, so he bears a hearing
Yes, as much as he "bears hearing" on string theory.
That patent is no more ridiculous than some of Apple's own patents. Maybe if Apple gets sued like this, they will also work for patent reform.
You would have thought that whether they want one or not is fairly irrelevant.
:-)
Not at all. If they don't "want" a license, it means that either they think the patent is invalid and they intend to fight it, or it means that they are going to work around it.
There are good reasons to reject even a "free" license for a patent.
Have you ever seen a case where a company wanted a license under a patent, but didn't need one?
All the time. Companies want licenses for patents if it is in their business interest to help another company establish the validity of a patent. Apple, for example, wanted a patent for one-click from Amazon even though it is unlikely that they actually needed it.
Overly broad? Possibly, but sounds like it is applicable.
"Overly broad" would not a problem, and this patent isn't "overly broad".
The problem with the patent is obviousness.
If this is allowed to stand, then for any human activity, people could patent doing that activity in virtual reality, and that's simply absurd.
The whole point of virtual reality is that it lets you do real human activities, but permits you to get into situations that you couldn't get into in real life. That includes performing with a band as much as dating a super model.
So, after patenting, for any value of X, "doing X with a computer", "doing X with a client/server system", and "doing X over the web", we are now going to get a flood of patents on "doing X in virtual reality"?
chordal music can be represented in a higher-dimensional space
Just about anything can be represented in a "higher-dimensional space". And chordal music forms a low-dimensional subspace. So what?
If Jimmy Wales takes money to edit an article on Wikipedia, then this goes directly to the heart of Wikipedia.
Not really, since anybody can take money to edit an article on Wikipedia.
Wales' control over Wikipedia content is very limited; his position is mainly as a spokesperson and general policy-setter.
If the allegations are true, it's not a good thing, but it doesn't "directly go to the heart of Wikipedia".
Google isn't sure; it probably could, but it doesn't know the names of most of its users
They ask for your name when you register, so if they can tie your account to an ad, they can tie your name to any ad. Of course, people who sign up may simply not be giving their correct name, but that's not due to any Google privacy policy.
Microsoft says it could use only a person's first name. AOL and Yahoo could use a full name but only on their sites,
That's bullshit. Like Google, they ask the user for their full name and they store it. If they don't use that information for a particular kind of ad, it's a policy decision, not because they "can't".
So, let's get this straight. Merkey is a guy who files lawsuits against people for saying bad things about them. Now he says that he paid Wales to edit the article about him in exchange for money for the foundation. Wales receives the money and supposedly complies. Then Merkey goes public and tells the world that Wikipedia is not trustworthy.
Whether Wales acted improperly is unclear. We don't know whether Merkey's sequence of events is correct. We don't know whether Wales edited the article because of a promise of money or because he really thought that it was unfair.
What we do know is that Merkey is out to hurt Wikipedia and Wales, because if this had merely been about getting positive press, he would simply have shut up after he got what he wanted. So, did Merkey plan this all along? Did Merkey merely make it appear that the donations and the editing were linked?
We don't know whether Wales is guilty, merely naive and stupid, or innocent.
But this looks like Merkey has been out to deliberately hurt Wikipedia, probably because he couldn't get to them any other way.
Or maybe Wikipedia simply is becoming a nuisance to some people and they want to discredit and get rid of it any way they can.
Scandals "erupt" when someone makes enough of a nuisance of themselves so that others dig up the dirt on them. And it's effective because of knee-jerk reactions like yours.
The article is the usual drivel from people who evidently aren't involved in IT hiring.
They are right that there is no shortage of people who consider themselves IT workers. There is also no shortage of people graduating with IT-related degrees either.
There is, however, a big shortage of IT workers that I would even remotely consider hiring. And at the top of the list of deficiencies are the fundamentals: math, writing, presentation, team work, critical thinking, and reading comprehension.
Maybe we just need a strict certification program. My guess is that 80-90% of IT workers today would fail. Then the shortage of skilled IT workers would be pretty obvious to everybody.
A lot of the stuff people write in Wikipedia that gets deleted could be put into annotations or a comments section. Then, inclusionists could, in fact, include a lot more stuff, while the main body of an article still fulfills the purpose that an encyclopedic article should fulfill.
It's just getting interesting.
Looks like someone pitching a startup company has given John Markoff a little too much of that "special" cool-aid again.