I have an idea for a way to do it, a way that doesn't even require us to understand how the brain works. It's a concept I came up with in high school and have been thinking about ever since:
What we need to do is create a physical simulation 'good enough' to model atomic and chemical interactions at a reasonable speed.
With that done, we can scan a frozen cell into a voxel format using the latest micro-MRI techniques, scanned in an atom at a time. We know freezing doesn't kill cells because we unfreeze single cells all the time, such an ovum, sperm, etc.
If we place a voxel representation of that scanned cell into our physics simulation and warm up the cell, the result will be a living cell inside a physics simulation in the computer. At that point, we jolt the cell into replication (a technique being pioneered in cloning research) and grow a virtual human being inside the computer.
When it grows up, we have ourselves a working human brain and body simulated inside the computer atom by atom.
If and when we have that, the revolutions in AI and biology and medicine that follows will be dramatic. This may include biologic immortality eventually, but more than likely will lead to human-machine interface and integration in the long run.
Example: We will be able to perform medical experiments on (simulated) human subjects that would be completely unethical if performed on living human beings. We can, for instance, put 100 simulated biological humans on a complete diet (the control), and put 100 on a diet which lacks the nutrient, say, copper, and see what they die of. My bet: heart disease. These are the kinds of experiments the Nazis did, absolutely unethical if done on living beings, but in simulation, why not. Modern science is still in many ways in the dark because of the ethical problems of such experiments. With this in place, we'll learn a great deal very, very quickly.
FDA takes 7 years to approve a new drug? Screw that, Virtual Human Trials. New drug on the market in six months. Think smoking causes heart disease? Write a program that takes the exact same simulated body and copies it, then makes one of them smoke and one of them not smoke at all while performing the exact same activity otherwise. Result is a true differential. You can even tag every particle that enters the body after the copy takes place and see which molecules have been affected by smoking, etc.
It also means we can stop performing medical experiments on rats and animals and hoping the same drug/treatment works on humans. We can just do the experiment on a simulated human and have true results.
As for AI, we'll be able to delve into a human brain while it's working! To see on a microscopic scale every neuron firing, each chemical interactions, watch proteins folding inside the cells without intruding. It'll be almost exactly like looking into a 3D world as a 4th dimensional being.
The only difficulty is the amount of processing power it takes to simulate the complete physical and energetic interactions of all the atoms that compose the human body. On our best supercomputers right now, we could probably simulate a square millimeter in real time. I could be wrong though, perhaps it's more right now, perhaps it's a foot square. So, we need computers vastly more powerful than what we have right now in order to simulate a body or brain not just in real-time, but faster than real-time.
In the next few decades, because of Moore's law, this amount of processing power will become a reality.
So, the technological singularity is a foregone conclusion at this point. The only difficulty is 'when', and, will we prevent nuclear holocaust before it can arrive and mature.
If we can get those first simulated biological humans running and educate them, the economy will change in a generation, and change in good ways. We'll have grunt workers for the price of electricity. Essentially we'll have digital slaves with the intelligence of a person, and it will actually be ethical (at first?)
Because an emulated brain can be extended in ways that a biological one cannot, and can be copied infinitely without additional materials costs or grow-time.
To elaborate, an emulated brain would mean we would understand the wetware circuits that enable the functions of vision, thinking, consciousness, etc., and those functions can be extended once understood. It's likely that our functions are just larger sets of similar circuits existing in other creatures. Thus, cognition is just a lot more neurons devoted to the task of thinking. It's likely that we can then improve a brain's ability to think and reason by extending those circuits with even more neurons. However, the laws of physics might get in the way of a biological brain doing that.
So, emulating a brain in software or hardware allows us to circumvent the laws of physics that govern biological brains. We have billions of neurons in our brains, sure. But, if you tried to produce a biological brain with trillions of neurons, you run into some severe difficulties. Difficulties that do not exist if you're emulating the system in software, because you can simply change the rules of the game in software, and you don't need to deal with the resource demands of cells.
Similarly, if you grow a brain in software and something goes wrong, you simply restore the last good point in the simulation, figure out what went wrong, fix it, and continue. If something goes wrong in your biological brain's growth, you start over from scratch. Similarly, an emulated brain cannot truly die, a biological one can.
And, when you get a brain that works in emulation or in hardware, we have the infrastructure to put it on millions of computers, using manufacturing methods already in development. But, try to put a biological brain in your computer case, and work out how to get all the various sugars, oxygen, etc., to it that it would need to function in any useful way, and you quickly discover it's not doable.
Beyond all the technical considerations there's the probably more important ethical considerations.
Try to put a biological human brain in your computer and use it, and you'll be labelled in the vein of a Nazi experimenter, and as enslaving a living human being--sans body. But, if you have an emulated brain, you can walk around those challenges. At the least, the question of whether an emulated brain is alive is a question for the next age, and unlikely to block developments in our age.
Plus, you can copy a digital or hardware based brain quite easily, copying a wetware brain proves expensive and difficult. If a piece of software was produced that allowed a person with a computer in some future age to flick a switch and run a program which contained an artificial intelligence in the form of an emulated brain, which was as smart as a living human being, that software could (and probably would) be sent all over the world in no time, with billions of copies made, and it wouldn't cost anyone any more than what they're already paying for internet access and disk space.
As for Kurzweil, he's correct that biologic emulation technology will allow for revolutions in the field of biology. Being able to emulate our living system will allow us to understand it, and by that change and correct it. Soon after that, humans will become more and more machine-like, will grow closer to machines and integrate ourselves with them.
The eventual end is pure digital humanity. Consciousnesses which have left physical form entirely and exist only as intelligences.
Yes, these are some of the topic of my upcoming novel as well:)
Are you really naive enough to believe that someone in business is -only- there to make a profit? Do they cease being human beings with wide-ranging values and mores just because they own a company? So all business owners are monsters to you? You've been brain-washed that badly, eh?
Business owners want to make a profit because you simply must do that to survive in business. It's not 'make a profit, all other things be damned.'
You're also ignorant of the effect of Adam Smith's invisible hand principle. By seeking to make a profit, a business owner is forced to make decisions which are in the best interest of consumers. What forces a politician to make decisions in the best interest of the people?
You call business owners unaccountable? That's ludicrous. If you don't like what a company sells, buy from another one. Unaccountability means nothing in a world where you have choice. Where the current health care system fails is where it has walked away from the free market, away from choice.
We really have to question your judgment when you think a government entity is more effective at anything compared to the free-market when viewed in the light of the history of economics and industry. It's simply not.
Politicians aren't actually in favor of the people. They simply want power and control and to get re-elected. Disagree with that? That's just the converse of your statement that business owners simply want to make a profit. Both business owners and politicians are human beings who care about other human beings, and approach their responsibilities with the same human values--but have very different constraints.
The business owner must make a profit to stay in business. The politician must get re-elected to stay in power.
The business owner can never force you to buy from him. The politician -can- force you to buy from him.
The business owner can never take money out of your wallet at the point of a gun. The politician -can- pass laws which take money out of your wallet against your will.
The business owner can never force you to not buy from others and establish a monopoly. The politician -can- establish legal monopolies and has done so historically, notably with the phone company, and the Post Office. In fact, the post office still has a legal monopoly on letter carrying. It's actually illegal for anyone except government employees who work at the Post Office to put mail into anyone's mailbox.
Now, how does the government racket work? They manipulate voters through immoral transfers of wealth, and we can see that today with the current health care proposal. Obama wants to make the rich pay for the poor's healthcare, thereby giving the poor 'free' healthcare. Thus the government system will be cheaper, not because it's better run, or anything like that, but because transfers of wealth are covering the soon to be massive shortfalls of an organization not being run at a profit. Government monopolies always work by putting existing companies out of business by this shady and immoral tactic.
But a government organization is not inherently better at administrating than a private company. After all, a government org is simply a group of people. And a business org is also a group of people. It's illogical to say that a group of people is a better administrator than a group of people. And when it comes to accountability, nothing is less accountable than a government office to which there is no alternative, such as the DMV. The only difference between a gov org and a biz org is that the gov org has the rule of law, it has the power to force, the ability to legally hold a gun to your head. And you think this somehow makes it a superior administrator of any service? I'd love to see you explain that.
The truth is, a government organization will always be less accountable, less consumer friendly, less responsive to the needs of those it serves because of the way it operates and how it gains power. A government organization cannot go out of business for lack of cus
No, I actually own it, and have read it, and often appreciate when other writers on a topic provide deeper sources. Sowell is one of the great modern economists and an excellent academic source in many debates. And, if you ever truly want to know why socialism can never be more efficient than capitalism, check out his seminal work: "Knowledge and Decisions".
Well, I think you're wrong, obviously~ Time will tell~ But, you're so sure of yourself at the same time, laying out accusations without a shred of support~ It's amazing really~:P
I can't believe no one has mentioned Ray Kurzweil. He and Vernor Vinge are the proponents of the Technological Singularity, perhaps the most technologically important upcoming development that mankind will ever witness--and forever be changed by.
You think the development of the microchip or the cellphone changed people's lives, what happens when we begin integrating both into our brains. The Singularity is the true beginning of the next stage of evolution.
You have to understand the long term plans here. The US wants to have space stations that are wholly our own. While the ISS was fun for practicing what it took to run a space station, we've largely learned those lessons now.
One forecaster thinks the US will have manned 'Battlestar' class space stationsfby 2050, protected by constellations of support satellites designed to provide military support and surveillance of the entire world from space using three constellation clusters strategically placed in orbit.
For that to work, the ISS eventually needs to be disposed of. So, look at this not so much as a waste of taxpayer money so much as a time-frame for the next development in space.
How about an alcohol bladder/membrane surrounding hot parts and cool parts providing a heat exchange. Alcohol is an incredible heat conductor, cheap, and plays nicely with plastic. Even plastic won't melt if there's a liquid medium in contact.
Common misconception here. All that study could possible have achieved would be selecting out a rare recessive gene--effectively selecting out the dominant version. The change you speak of is actually loss of genetic data, forcing the organism to rely on lesser backup genes for offspring.
It's the same mechanism that produced the pug, the chihuahua, the pomeranian, and almost every other dog species, etc. This isn't evolution at all, but the mislabelled 'micro-evolution'. It's not natural selection at all, it's intelligent selection.
"I assume that depends on the level of immunity it provides. Are we talking Flu Vaccine or Small Pox vaccine level of protection?"
First of all, even the Smallpox vaccine only lasts for about 5 years before you need a booster shot. Your immune system forgets. Just about everyone in the world would get Smallpox today if it got out. We don't vaccinate for smallpox anymore (foolishly perhaps) because the virus no longer exists in the wild.
"It was pretty much what I was thinking. Vaccine for a highly mutating virus. Good for how long? A day? What we should wait for before rejoicing is whether the vaccine is still working a year from now."
Secondly, deeper insights into virology would allay your fear here. There are parts of a virus that mutate rapidly and parts that basically cannot mutate at all, or at least mutate very slowly. This is like the difference between changing clothes everyday and leaving your heart at home. A true and effective vaccine targets the parts of the virus that mutate very slowly.
There are some seven people in the world genetically immune to HIV. I wonder how much we could learn from their DNA.
Antitrust laws are nothing more than a pure power-grab by the government, allowing the Gov to threaten endless lawsuits on any large company any time they want. It is rife with circular reasoning and has no definable test. Worse, many companies prosecuted under the law do not even have monopolies in their industry. And worse still, the companies that -do- have monopolies have them because the government gave them to them! Examples include the old phone system (AT&T), many utilities, and the Post Office. The idea of 'natural monopoly' is totally false. And our current President is trying to create a new government monopoly on Health Care. It's despicable. What we need is to end the monopoly on government power.
Because of the way the law on antitrust has evolved, any business situation imaginable can make you subject to antitrust persecution *cough*...err, prosecution.
If a business increases prices, then clearly it's because they've already driven out their competitors and are now taking advantage of that fact to milk the consumer.
If prices remain the same, then that's evidence of collusion, and thus comes prosecution for milking the consumer.
And if prices fall, then clearly that's predatory pricing designed to drive a competitor out of business entirely, and makes them subject to prosecution yet again.
So, if a company raises their prices, drops their prices, or leaves them the same, they can be prosecuted for monopolistic practices. How can anyone win? It's been said that if the Department of Justice had enough men, they could arrest every businessman in America for monopolistic practices.
But, even worse than all that, the premise of the law, that monopoly is always bad, or even objectively possible, is totally wrong from an economic point of view--underscoring the fact that the law is nothing more than a tool of a repressive government to use against companies whenever they want. Why did Microsoft get hit with the monopoly stick? Because they made Internet Explorer free and thus put Netscape out of business? Not really. That didn't hurt the consumer at all. The real reason is that Netscape hired political muscle on Capitol Hill, made the right connections, donated to the right people, and lobbied for political favors. And Microsoft, naively, ignored Washington.
Here's what the experts have to say:
-( from: http://wiki.lawguru.com/index.php/Antitrust ) Monopolistic firms are in a privileged position to reap economic benefits by restricting output and raising prices, without fear of competition. However, Thomas Woods asserts that the industries most frequently accused of holding a monopolistic position in the late nineteenth century were neither restricting output nor raising prices.
The Results of "Predatory Pricing": Commodity Prices from 1880-1890 Steel 58% Zinc 20% Sugar 22%
During the 1880s output of monopolistic industries grew seven times faster than the overall economy, while prices in these industries were generally falling--even faster than the 7% rate of decline that occurred in the economy as a whole. Template:Ref
Free market economist Milton Friedman states that he initially agreed with the underlying principles of antitrust laws (breaking up monopolies and oligopolies and promoting more competition), but came to the conclusion that they do more harm than good and that therefore they should not exist. Template:Ref
Critics also argue that the empirical evidence shows that "predatory pricing" does not work in practice, and is better defeated by a truly free market than by anti-trust laws (see Criticism of the theory of predatory pricing).
Thomas Sowell argues that even if a superior business drives out a competitor, it doesn't follow that competition has ended:
"In short, the financial demise of a competitor is not the same as getting rid of competition. The courts have long paid lip serv
The first rule of getting funding: Create a new name for something
It's not a border 'fence', it's a 'migration denial system':P Fences cost nickels and dimes, but 'migration denial systems' cost -billions-.
We have the same problem in the AI industry. 'AI' is always something in the future, something unobtainable, and actual intelligence systems in use end up being called something else entirely. People used to say if you could make a system that beats humans in chess that would be 'AI', but we have that and it's clearly not. But the reason is that our assumption of what it would take to beat a human at chess was wrong in the first place.
When true (humanoid soldier-replacement) battlefield robots come along, they won't be called mere 'robots', and they certainly won't be 'terminators'; they'll be something like 'Autonomous Infantry Units' or some clever acronym that spells out 'R.O.B.O.T.', perhaps "R-O-ving B-attlefield aut-O-nomous... T-erminator?'...Okay, I just had to slip 'Terminator' in there somewhere:P Couldn't think of a T-word.
I dunno, the military regularly comes up with some pretty clever acronyms from projects and products--one begins to think they must have paid consultants who managed to leverage a lifetime of crossword-puzzle experience into a military career making up these things, sitting around a desk somewhere staring at some name and cramming relevant adjective/noun combos at it.
The continued focus on robotic and autonomous systems is part and symptom of a larger demographic shift happening worldwide, and increasing in scale: declining population and its effects (not to mention the political cost of soldier's lives being lost).
Overpopulation is a non-issue. All population growth will halt and decline in the future and begin to shrink in time, bringing new problems to societies and demanding new solutions. I think the best way to answer that challenge is to solve the Artificial Intelligence problem in the next 20 years and use machine-intelligence equal to our own to address labor shortages before populations decline so much that it puts massive hurt on our economies. This will make things like menial labor and grunt-work possible for robots to do for us (until they're sophisticated enough to do more important thinking jobs). Then soldiers also can be augmented by robot groups, making defense less costly in human lives.
This inevitably trickles down into society. We will have robotic maids and caretakers whom can actually hold a human-like conversation and understand you, as well as automatically check your vitals and alert emergency services (will be desperately needed when the baby boomers retire en masse in about 2020). We will have police officers backed up by a host of eyes-on robots and support systems (and possibly impenetrable exoskeletons, woo!). We'll have cars that can drive those no longer capable of driving safely, cook their food, clean up their houses, etc. Japan is on the forefront of these robotic technologies, and may even be ahead of us in some areas. Japan is very culturally friendly to the concept, first of all. They would love nothing more than to have robotic pets and workers. And they're also facing a worse demographic shift in population than we are (also true for other 1st world countries compared to America, eg: much of Europe).
For that reason, I applaud this work. Who knows what future applications are possible. One day there may be NAV's kept in reserve in neighborhoods across America, like bird-houses for tiny robtos--only seconds away when someone dials 911. Emergency services will have eyes on-scene almost instantly. This will also improve police-work and crime-prevention.
And, yes, my scifi novel incorporating some of these ideas (and much more) is in fact currently in the works:)
Isn't the matter in our bodies composed of atoms, which themselves are composed of light which is actually moving at the speed of light (just in a closed loop we call 'matter')?
I once read a theory of momentum, that it was caused by the energy/matter in your body 'grinding' against the speed of light when you move, since it's already moving at the speed of light and has to adjust for even the slightest speed change. It resists, because it can never exceed the speed of light. So it absorbs converts movement into additional stored energy while never violating the speed of light. Thus you get momentum and mass only when you change speeds, and no change at a particular speed--just like an object floating in space.
Part of the problem is the doctrine that if something isn't actively and legally pursued and protected, you've given up your rights on it. This is what causes companies to send 'cease & desist' orders to fan websites and the like. That's what causes companies to sue the Girl-scouts.
The idea behind preventing public performance, and the like, is to prevent profiting from a public performance. There's no way that ASCAP can prove that someone's profiting from a cellphone ring-tone going off. They may be able to extract cash from clothing stores that play tunes while people shop, but this one is definitely going too far.
Well, I like opening links, but I just can't bring myself to actually read some of them:P Usually I hang on the right end of the tabs, and try to close/read more than I can open in a day. But, for the past few days I got stuck in the middle somewhere, somehow, opening and closing tabs, surrounded by an ocean of sites. Rather than surfing, I was lost at sea.
And, when I see a tab/site that I know I should read but can't bring myself to, I can't possibly close it. Thus, they accumulate. I can't remember the last time my tab bar was empty:P Except when FF would crash and lose all of them. But that hasn't happened in a long time, thankfully, I hate that! I do try to read some, but it's likely a few weeks worth of reading material by now:P
I live in tabs hell. I have... uncountable numbers of tabs open right now--over 9,000, probabaly. My Firefox memory usage can easily push 1400mb. When that happens I kill it and reload, and the memory resets at around 400-600mb.
Seeing this graph, I can only imagine what Chrome would do to me.
Nah, I don't think so. Three reasons it won't happen:
1. Only a subset of the installed base is going to play games on the system. Quoting the 40 million figure is misleading--how much of that base actually wants to play games when the primary reason for the purchase has nothing to do with gaming? Who knows. And that's a problem. The true game-playing installed base could be as little as 1 million for all we know.
2. Only a subset of that subset will want to play the kind of games they have to pay real money for. DS games are $20-$40 while Iphone games have hovered at $5. Most people will be perfectly happy with $2 clones of bejewled, poker and solitaire.
3. Publishers would much rather sell higher priced games to an installed base who bought the system to buy games. When Ubisoft released 'Prince of Persia' for the Ipod recently, they released at a price of $10, no doubt because Apple forced them to. On the DS, they released it for $40. This was okay with them because they're just testing the waters and the game was already made, already profitable purely on the DS. And Ipod owners still complained that the game was so much, showing that they put far less value on gaming than the average DS player. The dirty truth is that if the Ipod were Ubisoft's only platform, the game would never have been made. It's not profitable at $10. You may as well revert to bejeweled clones. It would be a sad day if the Ipod did triumph in the handheld market and rich games with storyline and some depth never again get made.
Everyone keeps thinking there has to be some other hook on top of gaming that will inevitably knock Nintendo out the top spot. The truth is, only taking on Nintendo directly with pure gaming hardware has a chance.
You create the N-Gage and try to mate a gaming system and a phone and you lose. You create something like the PSP and try to mate video, music, media and gaming and you lose (perhaps not as spectacularly, but the PSP has lost). And here it is again, you try to create a phone or a PDA-thing (ipod touch) and then add gaming on top and you're just not focused enough to do it. Let's see Apple get some balls and release an actual gaming device that is primarily sold for gaming first, and only secondarily can do other things. My prediction: they won't do that.
Furthermore, I don't think anything without two screens can beat the DS at this point, and neither Sony nor Apple are offering that. Do you really wanna buy your kid a PSP or IPod Touch that has virtually no screen-protection mechanism, and can easily be dropped and broken? What's more, Nintendo is the king of software--that's no small secret to their success. Is Apple going to create a games division and kidnap Shigeru Miyamoto? Don't think so.
So, I'll believe it when I see it happen. Till then, I remain skeptical. The perennial talk of beating Nintendo at their own game, so far is exactly like all the talk of beating Google at search, and ain't one company come close yet.
You know, that article that came out a little while ago showing that the results of the three search engines, Google, Bing, Wolfram-Alpha, all had very similar results makes me think that if I were trying to launch a new search engine I'd want it to be at least as good as Google's. So, why not simply setup a bot to input the most common search terms into google and copy the results into your own search engine database. At least that way you can catch up really quickly.
Of course, I'm not dumb enough to try to set up my own search engine:P I don't think Google has anything to worry about. As a search engine 'brand' they are golden and will continue to be until artificial intelligence takes over the function of search in service to their human masters:P
I would be rather surprised if there weren't an infinite number of primes, just based on the idea of what a prime is and how it's found. It's a sliver of a number, the falls between the divisable boundaries. And the larger the number get, it would seem, the more rare primes should become, this has certainly proven to be true. Hmm, that does seem to imply they would get more rare with time, since the more numbers you have as you increase the count, the more possible factors that exist. But still, that should only increase the period between existing prime.
Somewhere in there is a proof waiting to be discovered:P
Well, they may be unsolved problems, but again, they look like they have no relevance to anything, no application, other than being unanswered questions. But, like so many things, knowledge is valuable for its own sake, and who knows what revolution may result from what is now just a mathematical curiosity. Stealth-flight technology was originally harvested from a little known paper on radar written by an obscure Russian scientist. Kind of ironic that we were the ones to develop it. What you're really talking about is finding a proof for why there could or could not be any odd perfect numbers, and a proof for whether there are infinite perfect numbers or not. Typically, proofs like this that elude us lead into new forms, new paradigms of mathematics--which themselves result in great leaps forward in other areas once those proofs have been realized. That is certainly a story that has been repeated time and time again, most notably with calculus which is virtually the foundation of the modern world.
Even the concept of 'perfect numbers' is not familiar to me. Off to the Wiki!:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_number "In mathematics, a perfect number is defined as a positive integer which is the sum of its proper positive divisors, that is, the sum of the positive divisors excluding the number itself. Equivalently, a perfect number is a number that is half the sum of all of its positive divisors (including itself), or (n) = 2n.
The first perfect number is 6, because 1, 2, and 3 are its proper positive divisors, and 1 + 2 + 3 = 6. Equivalently, the number 6 is equal to half the sum of all its positive divisors: ( 1 + 2 + 3 + 6 ) / 2 = 6.
The next perfect number is 28 = 1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14. This is followed by the perfect numbers 496 and 8128 (sequence A000396 in OEIS).
These first four perfect numbers were the only ones known to early Greek mathematics."
I honestly forget why I'm supposed to care about Mersenne primes. Like, I read something about them awhile back, it was somewhat interesting... and then--yeah. So:
A Mersenne prime is a Mersenne number that is prime. As of June 2009[ref], only 47 Mersenne primes are known; the largest known prime number (243,112,609 1) is a Mersenne prime, and in modern times, the largest known prime has almost always been a Mersenne prime.[1] Like several previously-discovered Mersenne primes, it was discovered by a distributed computing project on the Internet, known as the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS). It was the first known prime number with more than 10 million base-10 digits.
For those who can't even remember what a prime is, it's a number that can only be divided (evenly) by 1 and itself. Here's a list of the first primes: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97
The Mersenne primes are the largest known primes.
Prime numbers have applications in electronic security and encryption breaking. I'm not sure what other purpose there is to knowing them, other than knowing them. The Mersenne in particular seem to be merely mathematical curiosities right now.
Essentially, they invented a crappy form of money-laundering. It's actually fairly inventive and will become a larger problem with the expansion of small-time produced media.
No doubt this is occurring on a smaller scale already. These guys got caught not really by Itunes but by the stolen credit cards. If the source of the money were not stolen, there would be no effective way to detect this. It's like 21st century pork-belly future!
Slashdot Mirror
I have an idea for a way to do it, a way that doesn't even require us to understand how the brain works. It's a concept I came up with in high school and have been thinking about ever since:
What we need to do is create a physical simulation 'good enough' to model atomic and chemical interactions at a reasonable speed.
With that done, we can scan a frozen cell into a voxel format using the latest micro-MRI techniques, scanned in an atom at a time. We know freezing doesn't kill cells because we unfreeze single cells all the time, such an ovum, sperm, etc.
If we place a voxel representation of that scanned cell into our physics simulation and warm up the cell, the result will be a living cell inside a physics simulation in the computer. At that point, we jolt the cell into replication (a technique being pioneered in cloning research) and grow a virtual human being inside the computer.
When it grows up, we have ourselves a working human brain and body simulated inside the computer atom by atom.
If and when we have that, the revolutions in AI and biology and medicine that follows will be dramatic. This may include biologic immortality eventually, but more than likely will lead to human-machine interface and integration in the long run.
Example: We will be able to perform medical experiments on (simulated) human subjects that would be completely unethical if performed on living human beings. We can, for instance, put 100 simulated biological humans on a complete diet (the control), and put 100 on a diet which lacks the nutrient, say, copper, and see what they die of. My bet: heart disease. These are the kinds of experiments the Nazis did, absolutely unethical if done on living beings, but in simulation, why not. Modern science is still in many ways in the dark because of the ethical problems of such experiments. With this in place, we'll learn a great deal very, very quickly.
FDA takes 7 years to approve a new drug? Screw that, Virtual Human Trials. New drug on the market in six months.
Think smoking causes heart disease? Write a program that takes the exact same simulated body and copies it, then makes one of them smoke and one of them not smoke at all while performing the exact same activity otherwise. Result is a true differential. You can even tag every particle that enters the body after the copy takes place and see which molecules have been affected by smoking, etc.
It also means we can stop performing medical experiments on rats and animals and hoping the same drug/treatment works on humans. We can just do the experiment on a simulated human and have true results.
As for AI, we'll be able to delve into a human brain while it's working! To see on a microscopic scale every neuron firing, each chemical interactions, watch proteins folding inside the cells without intruding. It'll be almost exactly like looking into a 3D world as a 4th dimensional being.
The only difficulty is the amount of processing power it takes to simulate the complete physical and energetic interactions of all the atoms that compose the human body. On our best supercomputers right now, we could probably simulate a square millimeter in real time. I could be wrong though, perhaps it's more right now, perhaps it's a foot square. So, we need computers vastly more powerful than what we have right now in order to simulate a body or brain not just in real-time, but faster than real-time.
In the next few decades, because of Moore's law, this amount of processing power will become a reality.
So, the technological singularity is a foregone conclusion at this point. The only difficulty is 'when', and, will we prevent nuclear holocaust before it can arrive and mature.
If we can get those first simulated biological humans running and educate them, the economy will change in a generation, and change in good ways. We'll have grunt workers for the price of electricity. Essentially we'll have digital slaves with the intelligence of a person, and it will actually be ethical (at first?)
Because an emulated brain can be extended in ways that a biological one cannot, and can be copied infinitely without additional materials costs or grow-time.
To elaborate, an emulated brain would mean we would understand the wetware circuits that enable the functions of vision, thinking, consciousness, etc., and those functions can be extended once understood. It's likely that our functions are just larger sets of similar circuits existing in other creatures. Thus, cognition is just a lot more neurons devoted to the task of thinking. It's likely that we can then improve a brain's ability to think and reason by extending those circuits with even more neurons. However, the laws of physics might get in the way of a biological brain doing that.
So, emulating a brain in software or hardware allows us to circumvent the laws of physics that govern biological brains. We have billions of neurons in our brains, sure. But, if you tried to produce a biological brain with trillions of neurons, you run into some severe difficulties. Difficulties that do not exist if you're emulating the system in software, because you can simply change the rules of the game in software, and you don't need to deal with the resource demands of cells.
Similarly, if you grow a brain in software and something goes wrong, you simply restore the last good point in the simulation, figure out what went wrong, fix it, and continue. If something goes wrong in your biological brain's growth, you start over from scratch. Similarly, an emulated brain cannot truly die, a biological one can.
And, when you get a brain that works in emulation or in hardware, we have the infrastructure to put it on millions of computers, using manufacturing methods already in development. But, try to put a biological brain in your computer case, and work out how to get all the various sugars, oxygen, etc., to it that it would need to function in any useful way, and you quickly discover it's not doable.
Beyond all the technical considerations there's the probably more important ethical considerations.
Try to put a biological human brain in your computer and use it, and you'll be labelled in the vein of a Nazi experimenter, and as enslaving a living human being--sans body. But, if you have an emulated brain, you can walk around those challenges. At the least, the question of whether an emulated brain is alive is a question for the next age, and unlikely to block developments in our age.
Plus, you can copy a digital or hardware based brain quite easily, copying a wetware brain proves expensive and difficult. If a piece of software was produced that allowed a person with a computer in some future age to flick a switch and run a program which contained an artificial intelligence in the form of an emulated brain, which was as smart as a living human being, that software could (and probably would) be sent all over the world in no time, with billions of copies made, and it wouldn't cost anyone any more than what they're already paying for internet access and disk space.
As for Kurzweil, he's correct that biologic emulation technology will allow for revolutions in the field of biology. Being able to emulate our living system will allow us to understand it, and by that change and correct it. Soon after that, humans will become more and more machine-like, will grow closer to machines and integrate ourselves with them.
The eventual end is pure digital humanity. Consciousnesses which have left physical form entirely and exist only as intelligences.
Yes, these are some of the topic of my upcoming novel as well :)
Are you really naive enough to believe that someone in business is -only- there to make a profit? Do they cease being human beings with wide-ranging values and mores just because they own a company? So all business owners are monsters to you? You've been brain-washed that badly, eh?
Business owners want to make a profit because you simply must do that to survive in business. It's not 'make a profit, all other things be damned.'
You're also ignorant of the effect of Adam Smith's invisible hand principle. By seeking to make a profit, a business owner is forced to make decisions which are in the best interest of consumers. What forces a politician to make decisions in the best interest of the people?
You call business owners unaccountable? That's ludicrous. If you don't like what a company sells, buy from another one. Unaccountability means nothing in a world where you have choice. Where the current health care system fails is where it has walked away from the free market, away from choice.
We really have to question your judgment when you think a government entity is more effective at anything compared to the free-market when viewed in the light of the history of economics and industry. It's simply not.
Politicians aren't actually in favor of the people. They simply want power and control and to get re-elected. Disagree with that? That's just the converse of your statement that business owners simply want to make a profit. Both business owners and politicians are human beings who care about other human beings, and approach their responsibilities with the same human values--but have very different constraints.
The business owner must make a profit to stay in business. The politician must get re-elected to stay in power.
The business owner can never force you to buy from him. The politician -can- force you to buy from him.
The business owner can never take money out of your wallet at the point of a gun. The politician -can- pass laws which take money out of your wallet against your will.
The business owner can never force you to not buy from others and establish a monopoly. The politician -can- establish legal monopolies and has done so historically, notably with the phone company, and the Post Office. In fact, the post office still has a legal monopoly on letter carrying. It's actually illegal for anyone except government employees who work at the Post Office to put mail into anyone's mailbox.
Now, how does the government racket work? They manipulate voters through immoral transfers of wealth, and we can see that today with the current health care proposal. Obama wants to make the rich pay for the poor's healthcare, thereby giving the poor 'free' healthcare. Thus the government system will be cheaper, not because it's better run, or anything like that, but because transfers of wealth are covering the soon to be massive shortfalls of an organization not being run at a profit. Government monopolies always work by putting existing companies out of business by this shady and immoral tactic.
But a government organization is not inherently better at administrating than a private company. After all, a government org is simply a group of people. And a business org is also a group of people. It's illogical to say that a group of people is a better administrator than a group of people. And when it comes to accountability, nothing is less accountable than a government office to which there is no alternative, such as the DMV. The only difference between a gov org and a biz org is that the gov org has the rule of law, it has the power to force, the ability to legally hold a gun to your head. And you think this somehow makes it a superior administrator of any service? I'd love to see you explain that.
The truth is, a government organization will always be less accountable, less consumer friendly, less responsive to the needs of those it serves because of the way it operates and how it gains power. A government organization cannot go out of business for lack of cus
No, I actually own it, and have read it, and often appreciate when other writers on a topic provide deeper sources. Sowell is one of the great modern economists and an excellent academic source in many debates. And, if you ever truly want to know why socialism can never be more efficient than capitalism, check out his seminal work: "Knowledge and Decisions".
Well, I think you're wrong, obviously~ Time will tell~ But, you're so sure of yourself at the same time, laying out accusations without a shred of support~ It's amazing really~ :P
I can't believe no one has mentioned Ray Kurzweil. He and Vernor Vinge are the proponents of the Technological Singularity, perhaps the most technologically important upcoming development that mankind will ever witness--and forever be changed by.
You think the development of the microchip or the cellphone changed people's lives, what happens when we begin integrating both into our brains. The Singularity is the true beginning of the next stage of evolution.
You have to understand the long term plans here. The US wants to have space stations that are wholly our own. While the ISS was fun for practicing what it took to run a space station, we've largely learned those lessons now.
One forecaster thinks the US will have manned 'Battlestar' class space stationsfby 2050, protected by constellations of support satellites designed to provide military support and surveillance of the entire world from space using three constellation clusters strategically placed in orbit.
For that to work, the ISS eventually needs to be disposed of. So, look at this not so much as a waste of taxpayer money so much as a time-frame for the next development in space.
How about an alcohol bladder/membrane surrounding hot parts and cool parts providing a heat exchange. Alcohol is an incredible heat conductor, cheap, and plays nicely with plastic. Even plastic won't melt if there's a liquid medium in contact.
Here's an example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuMl2Stgq8o&feature=related
Common misconception here. All that study could possible have achieved would be selecting out a rare recessive gene--effectively selecting out the dominant version. The change you speak of is actually loss of genetic data, forcing the organism to rely on lesser backup genes for offspring.
It's the same mechanism that produced the pug, the chihuahua, the pomeranian, and almost every other dog species, etc. This isn't evolution at all, but the mislabelled 'micro-evolution'. It's not natural selection at all, it's intelligent selection.
Carrot Juice is Murder:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmK0bZl4ILM
Who would've guessed a compiler would become the first program to achieve sentience ;P
It will surely, er, program our programs to kill us.
"I assume that depends on the level of immunity it provides. Are we talking Flu Vaccine or Small Pox vaccine level of protection?"
First of all, even the Smallpox vaccine only lasts for about 5 years before you need a booster shot. Your immune system forgets. Just about everyone in the world would get Smallpox today if it got out. We don't vaccinate for smallpox anymore (foolishly perhaps) because the virus no longer exists in the wild.
"It was pretty much what I was thinking. Vaccine for a highly mutating virus. Good for how long? A day?
What we should wait for before rejoicing is whether the vaccine is still working a year from now."
Secondly, deeper insights into virology would allay your fear here. There are parts of a virus that mutate rapidly and parts that basically cannot mutate at all, or at least mutate very slowly. This is like the difference between changing clothes everyday and leaving your heart at home. A true and effective vaccine targets the parts of the virus that mutate very slowly.
There are some seven people in the world genetically immune to HIV. I wonder how much we could learn from their DNA.
Antitrust laws are nothing more than a pure power-grab by the government, allowing the Gov to threaten endless lawsuits on any large company any time they want. It is rife with circular reasoning and has no definable test. Worse, many companies prosecuted under the law do not even have monopolies in their industry. And worse still, the companies that -do- have monopolies have them because the government gave them to them! Examples include the old phone system (AT&T), many utilities, and the Post Office. The idea of 'natural monopoly' is totally false. And our current President is trying to create a new government monopoly on Health Care. It's despicable. What we need is to end the monopoly on government power.
Because of the way the law on antitrust has evolved, any business situation imaginable can make you subject to antitrust persecution *cough* ...err, prosecution.
If a business increases prices, then clearly it's because they've already driven out their competitors and are now taking advantage of that fact to milk the consumer.
If prices remain the same, then that's evidence of collusion, and thus comes prosecution for milking the consumer.
And if prices fall, then clearly that's predatory pricing designed to drive a competitor out of business entirely, and makes them subject to prosecution yet again.
So, if a company raises their prices, drops their prices, or leaves them the same, they can be prosecuted for monopolistic practices. How can anyone win? It's been said that if the Department of Justice had enough men, they could arrest every businessman in America for monopolistic practices.
But, even worse than all that, the premise of the law, that monopoly is always bad, or even objectively possible, is totally wrong from an economic point of view--underscoring the fact that the law is nothing more than a tool of a repressive government to use against companies whenever they want. Why did Microsoft get hit with the monopoly stick? Because they made Internet Explorer free and thus put Netscape out of business? Not really. That didn't hurt the consumer at all. The real reason is that Netscape hired political muscle on Capitol Hill, made the right connections, donated to the right people, and lobbied for political favors. And Microsoft, naively, ignored Washington.
Here's what the experts have to say:
-( from: http://wiki.lawguru.com/index.php/Antitrust )
Monopolistic firms are in a privileged position to reap economic benefits by restricting output and raising prices, without fear of competition. However, Thomas Woods asserts that the industries most frequently accused of holding a monopolistic position in the late nineteenth century were neither restricting output nor raising prices.
The Results of "Predatory Pricing": Commodity Prices from 1880-1890
Steel 58%
Zinc 20%
Sugar 22%
During the 1880s output of monopolistic industries grew seven times faster than the overall economy, while prices in these industries were generally falling--even faster than the 7% rate of decline that occurred in the economy as a whole. Template:Ref
Free market economist Milton Friedman states that he initially agreed with the underlying principles of antitrust laws (breaking up monopolies and oligopolies and promoting more competition), but came to the conclusion that they do more harm than good and that therefore they should not exist. Template:Ref
Critics also argue that the empirical evidence shows that "predatory pricing" does not work in practice, and is better defeated by a truly free market than by anti-trust laws (see Criticism of the theory of predatory pricing).
Thomas Sowell argues that even if a superior business drives out a competitor, it doesn't follow that competition has ended:
"In short, the financial demise of a competitor is not the same as getting rid of competition. The courts have long paid lip serv
The first rule of getting funding: Create a new name for something
It's not a border 'fence', it's a 'migration denial system' :P Fences cost nickels and dimes, but 'migration denial systems' cost -billions-.
We have the same problem in the AI industry. 'AI' is always something in the future, something unobtainable, and actual intelligence systems in use end up being called something else entirely. People used to say if you could make a system that beats humans in chess that would be 'AI', but we have that and it's clearly not. But the reason is that our assumption of what it would take to beat a human at chess was wrong in the first place.
When true (humanoid soldier-replacement) battlefield robots come along, they won't be called mere 'robots', and they certainly won't be 'terminators'; they'll be something like 'Autonomous Infantry Units' or some clever acronym that spells out 'R.O.B.O.T.', perhaps "R-O-ving B-attlefield aut-O-nomous... T-erminator?' ...Okay, I just had to slip 'Terminator' in there somewhere :P Couldn't think of a T-word.
I dunno, the military regularly comes up with some pretty clever acronyms from projects and products--one begins to think they must have paid consultants who managed to leverage a lifetime of crossword-puzzle experience into a military career making up these things, sitting around a desk somewhere staring at some name and cramming relevant adjective/noun combos at it.
The continued focus on robotic and autonomous systems is part and symptom of a larger demographic shift happening worldwide, and increasing in scale: declining population and its effects (not to mention the political cost of soldier's lives being lost).
Overpopulation is a non-issue. All population growth will halt and decline in the future and begin to shrink in time, bringing new problems to societies and demanding new solutions. I think the best way to answer that challenge is to solve the Artificial Intelligence problem in the next 20 years and use machine-intelligence equal to our own to address labor shortages before populations decline so much that it puts massive hurt on our economies. This will make things like menial labor and grunt-work possible for robots to do for us (until they're sophisticated enough to do more important thinking jobs). Then soldiers also can be augmented by robot groups, making defense less costly in human lives.
This inevitably trickles down into society. We will have robotic maids and caretakers whom can actually hold a human-like conversation and understand you, as well as automatically check your vitals and alert emergency services (will be desperately needed when the baby boomers retire en masse in about 2020). We will have police officers backed up by a host of eyes-on robots and support systems (and possibly impenetrable exoskeletons, woo!). We'll have cars that can drive those no longer capable of driving safely, cook their food, clean up their houses, etc. Japan is on the forefront of these robotic technologies, and may even be ahead of us in some areas. Japan is very culturally friendly to the concept, first of all. They would love nothing more than to have robotic pets and workers. And they're also facing a worse demographic shift in population than we are (also true for other 1st world countries compared to America, eg: much of Europe).
For that reason, I applaud this work. Who knows what future applications are possible. One day there may be NAV's kept in reserve in neighborhoods across America, like bird-houses for tiny robtos--only seconds away when someone dials 911. Emergency services will have eyes on-scene almost instantly. This will also improve police-work and crime-prevention.
And, yes, my scifi novel incorporating some of these ideas (and much more) is in fact currently in the works :)
Isn't the matter in our bodies composed of atoms, which themselves are composed of light which is actually moving at the speed of light (just in a closed loop we call 'matter')?
I once read a theory of momentum, that it was caused by the energy/matter in your body 'grinding' against the speed of light when you move, since it's already moving at the speed of light and has to adjust for even the slightest speed change. It resists, because it can never exceed the speed of light. So it absorbs converts movement into additional stored energy while never violating the speed of light. Thus you get momentum and mass only when you change speeds, and no change at a particular speed--just like an object floating in space.
Soon to be renounced by leftist groups as 'child slavery', of course :P
Part of the problem is the doctrine that if something isn't actively and legally pursued and protected, you've given up your rights on it. This is what causes companies to send 'cease & desist' orders to fan websites and the like. That's what causes companies to sue the Girl-scouts.
The idea behind preventing public performance, and the like, is to prevent profiting from a public performance. There's no way that ASCAP can prove that someone's profiting from a cellphone ring-tone going off. They may be able to extract cash from clothing stores that play tunes while people shop, but this one is definitely going too far.
Well, I like opening links, but I just can't bring myself to actually read some of them :P Usually I hang on the right end of the tabs, and try to close/read more than I can open in a day. But, for the past few days I got stuck in the middle somewhere, somehow, opening and closing tabs, surrounded by an ocean of sites. Rather than surfing, I was lost at sea.
And, when I see a tab/site that I know I should read but can't bring myself to, I can't possibly close it. Thus, they accumulate. I can't remember the last time my tab bar was empty :P Except when FF would crash and lose all of them. But that hasn't happened in a long time, thankfully, I hate that! I do try to read some, but it's likely a few weeks worth of reading material by now :P
I live in tabs hell. I have... uncountable numbers of tabs open right now--over 9,000, probabaly. My Firefox memory usage can easily push 1400mb. When that happens I kill it and reload, and the memory resets at around 400-600mb.
Seeing this graph, I can only imagine what Chrome would do to me.
Nah, I don't think so. Three reasons it won't happen:
1. Only a subset of the installed base is going to play games on the system. Quoting the 40 million figure is misleading--how much of that base actually wants to play games when the primary reason for the purchase has nothing to do with gaming? Who knows. And that's a problem. The true game-playing installed base could be as little as 1 million for all we know.
2. Only a subset of that subset will want to play the kind of games they have to pay real money for. DS games are $20-$40 while Iphone games have hovered at $5. Most people will be perfectly happy with $2 clones of bejewled, poker and solitaire.
3. Publishers would much rather sell higher priced games to an installed base who bought the system to buy games. When Ubisoft released 'Prince of Persia' for the Ipod recently, they released at a price of $10, no doubt because Apple forced them to. On the DS, they released it for $40. This was okay with them because they're just testing the waters and the game was already made, already profitable purely on the DS. And Ipod owners still complained that the game was so much, showing that they put far less value on gaming than the average DS player. The dirty truth is that if the Ipod were Ubisoft's only platform, the game would never have been made. It's not profitable at $10. You may as well revert to bejeweled clones. It would be a sad day if the Ipod did triumph in the handheld market and rich games with storyline and some depth never again get made.
Everyone keeps thinking there has to be some other hook on top of gaming that will inevitably knock Nintendo out the top spot. The truth is, only taking on Nintendo directly with pure gaming hardware has a chance.
You create the N-Gage and try to mate a gaming system and a phone and you lose. You create something like the PSP and try to mate video, music, media and gaming and you lose (perhaps not as spectacularly, but the PSP has lost). And here it is again, you try to create a phone or a PDA-thing (ipod touch) and then add gaming on top and you're just not focused enough to do it. Let's see Apple get some balls and release an actual gaming device that is primarily sold for gaming first, and only secondarily can do other things. My prediction: they won't do that.
Furthermore, I don't think anything without two screens can beat the DS at this point, and neither Sony nor Apple are offering that. Do you really wanna buy your kid a PSP or IPod Touch that has virtually no screen-protection mechanism, and can easily be dropped and broken? What's more, Nintendo is the king of software--that's no small secret to their success. Is Apple going to create a games division and kidnap Shigeru Miyamoto? Don't think so.
So, I'll believe it when I see it happen. Till then, I remain skeptical. The perennial talk of beating Nintendo at their own game, so far is exactly like all the talk of beating Google at search, and ain't one company come close yet.
You know, that article that came out a little while ago showing that the results of the three search engines, Google, Bing, Wolfram-Alpha, all had very similar results makes me think that if I were trying to launch a new search engine I'd want it to be at least as good as Google's. So, why not simply setup a bot to input the most common search terms into google and copy the results into your own search engine database. At least that way you can catch up really quickly.
Of course, I'm not dumb enough to try to set up my own search engine :P I don't think Google has anything to worry about. As a search engine 'brand' they are golden and will continue to be until artificial intelligence takes over the function of search in service to their human masters :P
I would be rather surprised if there weren't an infinite number of primes, just based on the idea of what a prime is and how it's found. It's a sliver of a number, the falls between the divisable boundaries. And the larger the number get, it would seem, the more rare primes should become, this has certainly proven to be true. Hmm, that does seem to imply they would get more rare with time, since the more numbers you have as you increase the count, the more possible factors that exist. But still, that should only increase the period between existing prime.
Somewhere in there is a proof waiting to be discovered :P
Well, they may be unsolved problems, but again, they look like they have no relevance to anything, no application, other than being unanswered questions. But, like so many things, knowledge is valuable for its own sake, and who knows what revolution may result from what is now just a mathematical curiosity. Stealth-flight technology was originally harvested from a little known paper on radar written by an obscure Russian scientist. Kind of ironic that we were the ones to develop it. What you're really talking about is finding a proof for why there could or could not be any odd perfect numbers, and a proof for whether there are infinite perfect numbers or not. Typically, proofs like this that elude us lead into new forms, new paradigms of mathematics--which themselves result in great leaps forward in other areas once those proofs have been realized. That is certainly a story that has been repeated time and time again, most notably with calculus which is virtually the foundation of the modern world.
Even the concept of 'perfect numbers' is not familiar to me. Off to the Wiki!:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_number
"In mathematics, a perfect number is defined as a positive integer which is the sum of its proper positive divisors, that is, the sum of the positive divisors excluding the number itself. Equivalently, a perfect number is a number that is half the sum of all of its positive divisors (including itself), or (n) = 2n.
The first perfect number is 6, because 1, 2, and 3 are its proper positive divisors, and 1 + 2 + 3 = 6. Equivalently, the number 6 is equal to half the sum of all its positive divisors: ( 1 + 2 + 3 + 6 ) / 2 = 6.
The next perfect number is 28 = 1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14. This is followed by the perfect numbers 496 and 8128 (sequence A000396 in OEIS).
These first four perfect numbers were the only ones known to early Greek mathematics."
I honestly forget why I'm supposed to care about Mersenne primes. Like, I read something about them awhile back, it was somewhat interesting... and then--yeah. So:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne_prime
In mathematics, a Mersenne number is a positive integer that is one less than a power of two.
A Mersenne prime is a Mersenne number that is prime. As of June 2009[ref], only 47 Mersenne primes are known; the largest known prime number (243,112,609 1) is a Mersenne prime, and in modern times, the largest known prime has almost always been a Mersenne prime.[1] Like several previously-discovered Mersenne primes, it was discovered by a distributed computing project on the Internet, known as the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS). It was the first known prime number with more than 10 million base-10 digits.
For those who can't even remember what a prime is, it's a number that can only be divided (evenly) by 1 and itself. Here's a list of the first primes: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97
The Mersenne primes are the largest known primes.
Prime numbers have applications in electronic security and encryption breaking. I'm not sure what other purpose there is to knowing them, other than knowing them. The Mersenne in particular seem to be merely mathematical curiosities right now.
I was much more excited by the discovery that the the Fibonnacci sequence is contained within the 1/89 calculation.
http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~rminer/1over89/
Essentially, they invented a crappy form of money-laundering. It's actually fairly inventive and will become a larger problem with the expansion of small-time produced media.
No doubt this is occurring on a smaller scale already. These guys got caught not really by Itunes but by the stolen credit cards. If the source of the money were not stolen, there would be no effective way to detect this. It's like 21st century pork-belly future!