A quantum mechanics hypothesis for the brain has been put forward, but pretty much nobody in the neuroscience community takes it seriously. There's pretty much no reason to believe it.
Our vast storage capacity is more easily accounted for by the fact that there are lots of nerve cells in the brain. (Also, we forget more things than we remember, so the capacity is nowhere near infinite.)
And machines will always be better adapted to survive biological weapons.
Well, unless you count those rat-neurons-driving-robots, that is. But if you count those, humans won't be as superior in surviving EMP, either.
Good for Blizzard. I've wished for a while that Gmail would implement an optional OTP system - every now and then you need to access your e-mail from a netcafe or otherwise insecure location, and I really wouldn't want anybody to get access to my mail account.
Well, to me, this glorious new world would be the end of humanity as we know it. If such a vision comes to pass, it certainly would spell the end of human life. Once again, I don't want to be there if such a vision should ever come to pass.
He doesn't really provide any reasons for why he thinks AI will be impossible - aside for saying that an uploaded mind would need a world to live in, and then he immeaditly afterwards admits that Kurzweil has taken this into account with virtual worlds. That's pretty much the only objection with any substance that he provides, all the rest is talk about how he doesn't like Kurzweil's vision on emotional grounds.
You may disagree with Kurzweil's estimates, but at least he provides technical arguments for why he believes as he does.
The court's decision is pretty confusing, really. It doesn't explictly state whether simply breaking CSS is illegal or not. However, considering that it's now illegal to distribute any unlicensed method for breaking CSS, it effectively means the same as banning the actual act of breaking. After all, if it's illegal for anyone to make you a decrypter - or even tell you how to make your own - then the end result is the same as if the breaking would have been banned. Actually it's worse, since if only the actual act was banned, you could still distribute the software for the act without penalty.
All of this assuming that there existed some way of actually enforcing the stupid law, of course. Which there isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
A quantum mechanics hypothesis for the brain has been put forward, but pretty much nobody in the neuroscience community takes it seriously. There's pretty much no reason to believe it. Our vast storage capacity is more easily accounted for by the fact that there are lots of nerve cells in the brain. (Also, we forget more things than we remember, so the capacity is nowhere near infinite.)
The study they're summarizing in the article seems to be this one: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/1164685
And machines will always be better adapted to survive biological weapons. Well, unless you count those rat-neurons-driving-robots, that is. But if you count those, humans won't be as superior in surviving EMP, either.
The people who for some reason or the other need to run Vista, and would like to fix some bugs they keep running into, perhaps?
Good for Blizzard. I've wished for a while that Gmail would implement an optional OTP system - every now and then you need to access your e-mail from a netcafe or otherwise insecure location, and I really wouldn't want anybody to get access to my mail account.
All of this assuming that there existed some way of actually enforcing the stupid law, of course. Which there isn't.