from some of the stories I've heard of American schools some of the teachers and administrators are worse for marginalising the lonely and weird kids than the traditional bullies now.
Also if I lived next to a school and their active blocking killed my phone reception could I take a case against them?
You might be surprised at how par AI has progressed. Some of the expert systems out there are remarkable. In the realm of games there are programs which can learn to play games by playing thousands or even millions of rounds against themselves learning each time what approaches work.
At the same time there are limitations but rarely the limitations that people would expect, right now AI's cannot do strategy. They can do knowledge, they can do creativity(in a sense) and they can certainly do brute force calculation but not strategy. If you're familiar with the game Go - it's almost pure strategy and as such getting a machine to play go well has been a great challenge.
Yes, this could have a side effect: Any company which uses torrents to push updates out to machines on their network or even companies which use P2P apps as part of their buisness model will be locked out of government contracts.
Say the US army wanted to contract blizzard to make their next recruitment game, then would they be locked out unless they stopped seeding their updates from their own servers?
The monitor is a big magnet but tends to not put out too much of a field. I doubt that's it, we all used CRT's at some point and didn't have such a problem. I have however seem cases where an older female relative kept having computer problems- corrupt files etc- and we couldn't figure it out till we dropped over one day and saw that she had pictures drawn by the grandkids stuck up on the side of the tower. She just didn't realise that magnets and computers do not get on and whenever it was broken and we were coming over she'd clear all the junk from around it to make things easier for us.
Even myself I've had an experience where my old CRT monitor was going weird, the image would gradually distort on one side of the screen. The fool I am I finally realised that the box of junk beside it had a load of toy magnets in it and they were too close to the screen.
If he's got it on a surface that can become magnetic- iron table etc then it might be
And the reason that water pipe seems to be leaking is almost certainly just natural wear and tear, the building has had water leaks in the past, I mean we shouldn't even stop hitting it with that hammer, it's not like we're making any kind of differ-FWOOOOSH!
Check. Look for those cute little magnetic wristbands that some people have taken to wearing. Take a compass and see if there's any strong fields around his computer.
Interesting... On the down side one of the big food crops in africa - cassava doesn't react too well to elevated CO2 levels. It produces more cyanide in it's leaves. This is slowly killing/maiming the millions of poor people for whom it is the staple food source. Sure nobody actually gives a rats ass because it's poor people but it is a fairly straightforward example of our CO2 output killing people.
It was in a browser based game so it was just an alteration of an earlier tool for sending to a group(the game had no capacity for sending to a list so if you wanted to send a message to 20 people it was annoying so we made a small system to submit messages to users from our guilds site. It was then a natural progression to add a system to alter each message as it was sent to people and log the "markers" in a database.) I'm not guild leadership so I don't know exactly how well it worked. At the time an extremely smug opposing guild leader liked to post up quotes from our boards and confidential guild info(hence this system), I do know the quotes stopped shortly afterwards.
Funny thing- When my guild was having problems with a spy in the guild we did something similar to the OP. We wrote an app which would imbed invisible characters or spelling mistakes into messages so that is a message was leaked we could trace it to the offender.
well if you want to make it entirely from carbon nanotubes or some such then it might work but I'm betting would cost a fortune. Flywheels made of regular materials are ok for some things. To be used as large UPS's but for a city? forget about it.
One day if we ever have the kind of nanotech people dream about allowing machines which build machines which build machines which build whatever you want then turning the sand of the sahara and a few other big deserts into solar panels will be the way to go but not really yet.
The problem is what when you start to get up to useful energy densities you also run into the problem that even if you make your flywheel out of solid steel or whatever your favourite strong material is you have to spin them so fast they tear apart. Think about a hundred ton steel flywheel spinning fast enough to store energy to run a factory overnight. Now think about the kind of damage that could be done when this thing gets old, develops crack and then one day explodes releasing all that energy at once.
I have to agree, while AI has made remarkable progress in the last few years, even so far as drones which can make decisions on the ethics of an action(like taking into account that there is a hospital beside that tank or that enemy units are in an area marked as a graveyard on the drones map) drones still lack a certain amount of human judgement. And as you say, a high tech foe is going to be in a better position to fight drones.
covering the sahara is great for about 4 hours out of the 24 during which the world needs energy. Any plan for the rest of the time. While the sun is over the pacific things could get interesting.
The fun starts when whatever country controls the solar fields in one region builds a few nuke plants for it's own use then holds the rest of the world over a barrel for access to the solar power.
I already contribute to the production of games which I want to see developed more.
I've donated 20 to this: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/ so far and when the next release comes out in a few months I plan to donate more.
Sure it has a learning curve like a brick wall and it isn't much to look at at first but it has depth like a mid ocean trench.
It's the only game which allows me to build glass towers from which to dump magma on enemy hordes(fortress mode) and also exercise my psychopathic desires to kill everyone in a village except one child(adventure mode) who is left sleeping amongst the blood, bones and scattered limbs of his parents, friends and family dog.
I then come back again(fortress mode), build a wall around the home of the emotionally scarred survivor and drop angry skeletal goats in to force him to fight.
Yes I'm a bad person.
Oh I forgot, once the wolves finished him off I made a totem out of his skull and a bag out of his skin.
Slashdot Mirror
freenet
Your wife is a shyster and a con artist.
from some of the stories I've heard of American schools some of the teachers and administrators are worse for marginalising the lonely and weird kids than the traditional bullies now.
Also if I lived next to a school and their active blocking killed my phone reception could I take a case against them?
You might be surprised at how par AI has progressed.
Some of the expert systems out there are remarkable.
In the realm of games there are programs which can learn to play games by playing thousands or even millions of rounds against themselves learning each time what approaches work.
At the same time there are limitations but rarely the limitations that people would expect, right now AI's cannot do strategy.
They can do knowledge, they can do creativity(in a sense) and they can certainly do brute force calculation but not strategy.
If you're familiar with the game Go - it's almost pure strategy and as such getting a machine to play go well has been a great challenge.
Yes, this could have a side effect:
Any company which uses torrents to push updates out to machines on their network or even companies which use P2P apps as part of their buisness model will be locked out of government contracts.
Say the US army wanted to contract blizzard to make their next recruitment game, then would they be locked out unless they stopped seeding their updates from their own servers?
On release day? I'd say it takes a few days normally, even a week or 2 sometimes.
but ya.
There is no unbreakable copy protection.
The monitor is a big magnet but tends to not put out too much of a field. I doubt that's it, we all used CRT's at some point and didn't have such a problem.
I have however seem cases where an older female relative kept having computer problems- corrupt files etc- and we couldn't figure it out till we dropped over one day and saw that she had pictures drawn by the grandkids stuck up on the side of the tower. She just didn't realise that magnets and computers do not get on and whenever it was broken and we were coming over she'd clear all the junk from around it to make things easier for us.
Even myself I've had an experience where my old CRT monitor was going weird, the image would gradually distort on one side of the screen. The fool I am I finally realised that the box of junk beside it had a load of toy magnets in it and they were too close to the screen.
If he's got it on a surface that can become magnetic- iron table etc then it might be
And the reason that water pipe seems to be leaking is almost certainly just natural wear and tear, the building has had water leaks in the past, I mean we shouldn't even stop hitting it with that hammer, it's not like we're making any kind of differ-FWOOOOSH!
Check for fridge magnets.
No. Really.
Check.
Look for those cute little magnetic wristbands that some people have taken to wearing. Take a compass and see if there's any strong fields around his computer.
I've run into this before....
Interesting...
On the down side one of the big food crops in africa - cassava doesn't react too well to elevated CO2 levels.
It produces more cyanide in it's leaves.
This is slowly killing/maiming the millions of poor people for whom it is the staple food source.
Sure nobody actually gives a rats ass because it's poor people but it is a fairly straightforward example of our CO2 output killing people.
Not all that amazing- as long as the user sending messages was logged in it's just a matter of submitting a few POSTs.
It was in a browser based game so it was just an alteration of an earlier tool for sending to a group(the game had no capacity for sending to a list so if you wanted to send a message to 20 people it was annoying so we made a small system to submit messages to users from our guilds site. It was then a natural progression to add a system to alter each message as it was sent to people and log the "markers" in a database.)
I'm not guild leadership so I don't know exactly how well it worked.
At the time an extremely smug opposing guild leader liked to post up quotes from our boards and confidential guild info(hence this system), I do know the quotes stopped shortly afterwards.
Funny thing- When my guild was having problems with a spy in the guild we did something similar to the OP.
We wrote an app which would imbed invisible characters or spelling mistakes into messages so that is a message was leaked we could trace it to the offender.
well if you want to make it entirely from carbon nanotubes or some such then it might work but I'm betting would cost a fortune.
Flywheels made of regular materials are ok for some things. To be used as large UPS's but for a city? forget about it.
One day if we ever have the kind of nanotech people dream about allowing machines which build machines which build machines which build whatever you want then turning the sand of the sahara and a few other big deserts into solar panels will be the way to go but not really yet.
The problem is what when you start to get up to useful energy densities you also run into the problem that even if you make your flywheel out of solid steel or whatever your favourite strong material is you have to spin them so fast they tear apart.
Think about a hundred ton steel flywheel spinning fast enough to store energy to run a factory overnight.
Now think about the kind of damage that could be done when this thing gets old, develops crack and then one day explodes releasing all that energy at once.
I have to agree, while AI has made remarkable progress in the last few years, even so far as drones which can make decisions on the ethics of an action(like taking into account that there is a hospital beside that tank or that enemy units are in an area marked as a graveyard on the drones map) drones still lack a certain amount of human judgement.
And as you say, a high tech foe is going to be in a better position to fight drones.
If it was any other plane I'd agree with you but these things barely get into the air before breaking down.
next to that "5000 times human needs" crap it's like lighting a match in the middle of a firestorm.
covering the sahara is great for about 4 hours out of the 24 during which the world needs energy.
Any plan for the rest of the time.
While the sun is over the pacific things could get interesting.
The fun starts when whatever country controls the solar fields in one region builds a few nuke plants for it's own use then holds the rest of the world over a barrel for access to the solar power.
My favorite is orbital power stations too but re the sahara:
ever wonder what sand-blasting does to a solar pannel?
so you're saying that there will be less push for fusion et all if nuclear does too well?
Fun but impractical.
It just isn't energy dense enough.
I already contribute to the production of games which I want to see developed more.
I've donated 20 to this: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/ so far and when the next release comes out in a few months I plan to donate more.
Sure it has a learning curve like a brick wall and it isn't much to look at at first but it has depth like a mid ocean trench.
It's the only game which allows me to build glass towers from which to dump magma on enemy hordes(fortress mode) and also exercise my psychopathic desires to kill everyone in a village except one child(adventure mode) who is left sleeping amongst the blood, bones and scattered limbs of his parents, friends and family dog.
I then come back again(fortress mode), build a wall around the home of the emotionally scarred survivor and drop angry skeletal goats in to force him to fight.
Yes I'm a bad person.
Oh I forgot, once the wolves finished him off I made a totem out of his skull and a bag out of his skin.
This game is worse than manhunt in some ways....