I was amazed to find a burning tingling sensation when I wrapped my hand around a USB wi-fi dongle. My hand was within ~1cm of the device and there was a tingling sensation that was very on/off with disconnecting and connecting the device. I guess it's plausible that electric fields could have caused a tingling sensation rather than specific frequencies. (Interestingly it was only this one Wi-Fi dongle that would do this another one I held to my face tingled a little however - something else going on? crappy knock off electronics?).
Asside from putting your skin milimetres from a small compact antenna with a few hundred miliwatts being a duh momment, this proves electrosensity is bunk, because merely moving 10cm away and the energy level is... 1000 times less. A the kind of distance of a person using a laptop, or merely being in the same room as a WAP, the energy levels your body is exposed to become trivially small. Your entire body would be exposed to what is fairly measured in microwatts, similar to the microwave radiation that your exposed to ambiently through out your entire life.
Electrosensitivity is crap because the numbers just don't leave any room for plausibility.
If EM from the civilised world was having any kind of impact on birds, there would be huge problems with lost migrating flocks ending up in wholy the wrong country, being attracted to or repelled from major urban areas and being stunned by an airport radar.
Birds have been shown to have a magnetic sense, in conditions such as these EM != any kind of magnetic interference.
At the time Tron was laden with current computer jargon/memes, such as the 'Input Output tower' and the character/program 'RAM'...mind boggling stuff.
Now we know that Tron Legacy is a nostalgia laden rehash (doesn't deserve to be called Tron 2.0 if it's more of a service pack than a major release) but if it were to be the current day equivlent groundbreaking film, it would be something like Avatar with added 21st century memes: lolwut?, FAIL, In soviet russia.. babby, pwn3d, CHEEZBURGER? Throw in candy moutain unicorns and charlie bit my finger and some 1337 speak and make the credits like a warez keygen demoscene and you have a true-to-the-times movie that would be the most torrented piece of crap of all time.
yeah... so I see why they have done it a different way.. don't complain!
... these warnings can be safely ignored 90% of the time. IIndeed software and web developers bombard users with uncessary messages and errors, such they become a little keen just to click ok and see what happens anyway. Another problem is with wording of the warnings which are too formal-technical and not plain-english-ok-so-what-should-i-do-now.
Just wording it differently like 'If you are accessing what appears to be a trusted website, and you are recieving this warning, you should not visit it as it could be a nasty security risk. Try again later." Rather than "Warning: Security certificate is not valid... [etc etc..]". This makes a huge difference.
WOT is more to the point: "This website is dangerous" and the page is locked out until you navigate away or click on a very clear "Ignore this warning and proceed".
They focused particular attention on the specter that criminals could exploit artificial intelligence systems as soon as they were developed. What could a criminal do with a speech synthesis system that could masquerade as a human being? What happens if artificial intelligence technology is used to mine personal information from smart phones?
So it seems that the computer scientists weren't imagining some hostile AI skynet-cylon takeover but a much more real-world scenario of advanced cybercrime. Not even anything remotely to do with strong AI.
Thus nobody RTFA'd and the following/. discussion is based on the misleading headline, rather than the article content. Frankly the headline and the summary is extrapolated from a already journalisticly embellished NYtimes article.
So exactly how would an AI absolutley not have emotions? Even if designed to? What if it was designed along the lines of human neural function?
One could concieveably create a artificial intellegence with greater emotional intellegence than a human. If your creating a simulation of a human neural network you could bump up the effects of serotonin, and/or have a much larger and more complex limbic system for example.
Additionally if a AI has the ability to modify itself, it will lean towards this kind of thing. What mental state would you choose if you had total control over your mind? You'd bliss out on some damn good drugs that's what. Since an AI could give itself the equilvelent of an acid trip on demand without worry physical harm, and has the possibility of reversing damage arbitrarily, it would likely pursue happy mental states.
An AI is not beholden to faulty physiological metabolism and neurological structure (arguably the main cause of any form of criminal behaviour or mental illness). Therefore it would likely not carry with it most of human flaws. The good things that come from our higher functioning rational (and spiritual) states would be inherently transfered.
IMHO an AI is just as likely to become extremely benevolent as it is malevolent, it would depend on initial conditions what path it chose. However the assumption that AIs will destroy us all with robot minions (rather than just engineer a single 100% fatal variant of some virus but that doesn't make a good movie) maybe if we do really stupid things with the first AIs, yes, otherwise they'll probably have a depth of emotional insight that no primate or whale ever had, and in all likelyhood find life rather precious.
You're wrong. The hate isn't rightful and deserved if it goes way too far, far beyond the what the actual facts support. It get away from the realm of disciplined intelligent discourse and into fanaticism. Hate in general is not justified as it is not sign a rational state of intellect.
The problem is of course, once you get fanatical prosetlyzing microsoft haters spouting outright misinformation, it actually starts work against backwards against getting any change from MS.
So there are lists out there of what Microsoft has done? Link pls? Well I'd like to point out that MS is not the only bad guy, do you want a list of what Apple or Sony do? What Novell, SCO and Sun have done?
I'm sorry but where are these benevolent mega corporates that we are comparing to? Google?
A theme in the film is Virtual Labor - robots of the future will really be remotely operated by cheap overseas labor. SpinVox is doing similar kind of things, but unlike Mechanical Turk has the factore of outsourcing to the low-wage regions.
Factual, yes. My two stroke race-tuned go-kart would run for hours of lapping a track on a few litres of fuel. About half what a car would use cruising.
Modded informative? Seriously/. ! The changes between Windows 7 and Vista are bigger than those between 2000 and XP and have taken longer, more builds by a much larger team of programmers. Granted, the vista platform is a bigger code base so net change is different matter to the gross improvements.
I don't understand why do you want to tidy and organise your geek 'den'? Would you rather prospective girlfriends found you a creative geek genius or a pedantic nerd that must cable-tie everything in the constant war against entropy?
Perhaps I don't have nerdy mpulses to make sure everything is organised but my geek 'den' is a complete mess and there is no real disadvantage to this. Mess is good, great infact, embrace it. The problems with a mess is only when you try to tidy it up. The only people who complain about a mess is people who dread the thought of tidying it up.
Personally I never consider tidying up.
To clarify the BirdsNest organisation method:
Everything is: Where I left it
Installation: Plug it in, forget it.
Removal. Unplug it. Leave cord where it is in birds nest.
No, thanks for asking, but I don't charge for my advice. Donations welcome however.
Oil deposited on the window would not be a problem. The nature of lasers is that any carbon deposited on the window would get flashed to plasma. Thus it would be somewhat self-cleaning.
Clean, lean burning tends to keep a combustion chamber clean anyway, even with excess oil blow-by.
However, deposits on the window being zapped would eventually damage the window surface even if it was something like quartz. Any surface damage would result in the laser scattering.
IMHO microwaves would be much better, a ceramic window would be needed, but it would not be blocked by a layer of soot. Magnetrons are also relatively cheap compared to any laser source, and waveguides as simple as a metal tube. This could evenly ignite everywhere in the cylinder evenly, much like compression ignition. Thus required zero spark advance and a diesel-like efficiency even without high compression.
I reccently went back to CD-Rs from the 90s, and didn't really think much of it. I have a stack of about 25%-30% unreadable CD-Rs from less than 5 years old. Interestingly these are mixed brands, some of the buggered ones.
I would suggest as the cost per unit fell through the floor, so did any regard for quality control as well as the consumers lack of motiviation to drive all the way back to the store and get a replacement.
Wouldn't the intensity of the waves be concentrated around the periphery of the rings? Would two or more earthquake shields in particular arrangements have a focusing effect, unwittingly completely leveling a nearby building from a otherwise mild shake?
Even with balancing algorithms paying users are still subsidising the freeloaders, as the content providers will still want to be reimbursed for a bandwidth contributing user's free downloads. In this case, very directly subsidizing, rather than indirectly via jacking up retail prices to cover [imaginary] losses as happens with piracy to date .
The problem is not in the idea. Indeed cpu cycles, storage and bandwidth are worth something and if anyone building a datacentre scale operation will tell you just how expensive per unit it actually is.
Distributed services have been shown to work, so there is a opportunity here for a killer Google of the distributed computing to get it right and take over the world.
The problem is the attempt to monetize the scheme. This is always what kills it.
If you buy PC gaming hardware 6-12 months behind the bleeding edge you save an enormous amount of money too. If your doing the same buying games at the same level, you will likely be paying about half also. New games are almost never discounted within 6 months of release. Many stores start trying to move inevitable surplus stock after this.
In one of those strange capitalist paradoxes, in terms of frames-per-second for your dollar you get massively more if you buy cheaper mid range hardware that has been on the market 6-12 months. For example, a Radeon 4870 was alot of money when it came out, following the 4850 was the 4830 which gets get you 90% of the same performance for alot cheaper.
If you waited a little longer now there is the 4770 which is slightly slower but a bigger step cheaper again, and naturally a more improved model also.
Incredibly if you wait a while the drivers mature, which is a free speed boost in some cases, and Crossfire/SLI support and scaling in games improves. I resisted my fanboy urges and I now have two Radeon 4770s for less than the price of a single 4870 on 0-day.
The other area is CPUs, not so crucial to gaming performance, but you don't want to be held back: Overclocking a sub $100 processor to the performance level of a $400 is now is so easy, reliable and cheap to do. You don't even need all those spiffy led-illuminated uber cooler parts either.
Frankly I don't buy any argument that PC gaming is much too expensive to be a part of, because it is possible to do so, for half the money and still have 90% of the ultra high-end experience. You'll retain bragging rights and have some points to stamp on your geek card from your overclocking skills.
Wait... perhaps it is if you are a fan-boy early adopter because you will be fleeced.
The data may be skewed: users may consider offers from genuine mailing lists 'spam' whether they've signed up to it intentionally or not, when completing a survey. This more relevant stuff is more likely click-worthy. The survey doesn't necessarily make this distinction and account for it.
Otherwise, it is somewhat believable as many individuals new to the internet learn many lessons the hard way.
Mind you, "but another 13 percent said they simply had no idea why they did it; they just did." explains why I still receive 'send this to 10 people or you will has bad luck' from otherwise intelligent and educated people.
North Korea could have solicited the services of hackers in the U.K. or else where. It makes sense to outsource when you don't necessarily have the expertise in your own country. I'd like to point out here there are known NK sympathizers.
Slashdot Mirror
I was amazed to find a burning tingling sensation when I wrapped my hand around a USB wi-fi dongle. My hand was within ~1cm of the device and there was a tingling sensation that was very on/off with disconnecting and connecting the device. I guess it's plausible that electric fields could have caused a tingling sensation rather than specific frequencies. (Interestingly it was only this one Wi-Fi dongle that would do this another one I held to my face tingled a little however - something else going on? crappy knock off electronics?).
Asside from putting your skin milimetres from a small compact antenna with a few hundred miliwatts being a duh momment, this proves electrosensity is bunk, because merely moving 10cm away and the energy level is... 1000 times less. A the kind of distance of a person using a laptop, or merely being in the same room as a WAP, the energy levels your body is exposed to become trivially small. Your entire body would be exposed to what is fairly measured in microwatts, similar to the microwave radiation that your exposed to ambiently through out your entire life.
Electrosensitivity is crap because the numbers just don't leave any room for plausibility.
If EM from the civilised world was having any kind of impact on birds, there would be huge problems with lost migrating flocks ending up in wholy the wrong country, being attracted to or repelled from major urban areas and being stunned by an airport radar.
Birds have been shown to have a magnetic sense, in conditions such as these EM != any kind of magnetic interference.
At the time Tron was laden with current computer jargon/memes, such as the 'Input Output tower' and the character/program 'RAM' ...mind boggling stuff.
Now we know that Tron Legacy is a nostalgia laden rehash (doesn't deserve to be called Tron 2.0 if it's more of a service pack than a major release) but if it were to be the current day equivlent groundbreaking film, it would be something like Avatar with added 21st century memes: lolwut?, FAIL, In soviet russia.. babby, pwn3d, CHEEZBURGER? Throw in candy moutain unicorns and charlie bit my finger and some 1337 speak and make the credits like a warez keygen demoscene and you have a true-to-the-times movie that would be the most torrented piece of crap of all time.
yeah... so I see why they have done it a different way.. don't complain!
... these warnings can be safely ignored 90% of the time. IIndeed software and web developers bombard users with uncessary messages and errors, such they become a little keen just to click ok and see what happens anyway. Another problem is with wording of the warnings which are too formal-technical and not plain-english-ok-so-what-should-i-do-now.
Just wording it differently like 'If you are accessing what appears to be a trusted website, and you are recieving this warning, you should not visit it as it could be a nasty security risk. Try again later." Rather than "Warning: Security certificate is not valid... [etc etc..]". This makes a huge difference.
WOT is more to the point: "This website is dangerous" and the page is locked out until you navigate away or click on a very clear "Ignore this warning and proceed".
They focused particular attention on the specter that criminals could exploit artificial intelligence systems as soon as they were developed. What could a criminal do with a speech synthesis system that could masquerade as a human being? What happens if artificial intelligence technology is used to mine personal information from smart phones?
So it seems that the computer scientists weren't imagining some hostile AI skynet-cylon takeover but a much more real-world scenario of advanced cybercrime. Not even anything remotely to do with strong AI.
/. discussion is based on the misleading headline, rather than the article content. Frankly the headline and the summary is extrapolated from a already journalisticly embellished NYtimes article.
Thus nobody RTFA'd and the following
So exactly how would an AI absolutley not have emotions? Even if designed to? What if it was designed along the lines of human neural function?
One could concieveably create a artificial intellegence with greater emotional intellegence than a human. If your creating a simulation of a human neural network you could bump up the effects of serotonin, and/or have a much larger and more complex limbic system for example.
Additionally if a AI has the ability to modify itself, it will lean towards this kind of thing. What mental state would you choose if you had total control over your mind? You'd bliss out on some damn good drugs that's what. Since an AI could give itself the equilvelent of an acid trip on demand without worry physical harm, and has the possibility of reversing damage arbitrarily, it would likely pursue happy mental states.
An AI is not beholden to faulty physiological metabolism and neurological structure (arguably the main cause of any form of criminal behaviour or mental illness). Therefore it would likely not carry with it most of human flaws. The good things that come from our higher functioning rational (and spiritual) states would be inherently transfered.
IMHO an AI is just as likely to become extremely benevolent as it is malevolent, it would depend on initial conditions what path it chose. However the assumption that AIs will destroy us all with robot minions (rather than just engineer a single 100% fatal variant of some virus but that doesn't make a good movie) maybe if we do really stupid things with the first AIs, yes, otherwise they'll probably have a depth of emotional insight that no primate or whale ever had, and in all likelyhood find life rather precious.
You're wrong. The hate isn't rightful and deserved if it goes way too far, far beyond the what the actual facts support. It get away from the realm of disciplined intelligent discourse and into fanaticism. Hate in general is not justified as it is not sign a rational state of intellect.
The problem is of course, once you get fanatical prosetlyzing microsoft haters spouting outright misinformation, it actually starts work against backwards against getting any change from MS.
So there are lists out there of what Microsoft has done? Link pls? Well I'd like to point out that MS is not the only bad guy, do you want a list of what Apple or Sony do? What Novell, SCO and Sun have done?
I'm sorry but where are these benevolent mega corporates that we are comparing to? Google?
Hey I resemble that remark!
This has parallels with the main premise of Sleep Dealer http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0804529/
A theme in the film is Virtual Labor - robots of the future will really be remotely operated by cheap overseas labor. SpinVox is doing similar kind of things, but unlike Mechanical Turk has the factore of outsourcing to the low-wage regions.
Factual, yes. My two stroke race-tuned go-kart would run for hours of lapping a track on a few litres of fuel. About half what a car would use cruising.
Modded informative? Seriously /. ! The changes between Windows 7 and Vista are bigger than those between 2000 and XP and have taken longer, more builds by a much larger team of programmers. Granted, the vista platform is a bigger code base so net change is different matter to the gross improvements.
... when I see the torrent.
I don't understand why do you want to tidy and organise your geek 'den'? Would you rather prospective girlfriends found you a creative geek genius or a pedantic nerd that must cable-tie everything in the constant war against entropy?
Perhaps I don't have nerdy mpulses to make sure everything is organised but my geek 'den' is a complete mess and there is no real disadvantage to this. Mess is good, great infact, embrace it. The problems with a mess is only when you try to tidy it up. The only people who complain about a mess is people who dread the thought of tidying it up.
Personally I never consider tidying up.
To clarify the BirdsNest organisation method:
Everything is: Where I left it
Installation: Plug it in, forget it.
Removal. Unplug it. Leave cord where it is in birds nest.
No, thanks for asking, but I don't charge for my advice. Donations welcome however.
Oil deposited on the window would not be a problem. The nature of lasers is that any carbon deposited on the window would get flashed to plasma. Thus it would be somewhat self-cleaning.
Clean, lean burning tends to keep a combustion chamber clean anyway, even with excess oil blow-by.
However, deposits on the window being zapped would eventually damage the window surface even if it was something like quartz. Any surface damage would result in the laser scattering.
IMHO microwaves would be much better, a ceramic window would be needed, but it would not be blocked by a layer of soot. Magnetrons are also relatively cheap compared to any laser source, and waveguides as simple as a metal tube. This could evenly ignite everywhere in the cylinder evenly, much like compression ignition. Thus required zero spark advance and a diesel-like efficiency even without high compression.
... but so far have nothing to go on.
All these worlds are yours, except Europa, attempt no landing there.
In the real 2010 its more like:
aLL THESE WORLD ARE BELONG TO YOU KK, DO NOT WANT EUROPA THX
I found that burning CD-RWs twice (quick delete and then burn again identically with bit for bit) all but wiped out problems I'd had with rewritables.
I reccently went back to CD-Rs from the 90s, and didn't really think much of it. I have a stack of about 25%-30% unreadable CD-Rs from less than 5 years old. Interestingly these are mixed brands, some of the buggered ones.
I would suggest as the cost per unit fell through the floor, so did any regard for quality control as well as the consumers lack of motiviation to drive all the way back to the store and get a replacement.
Wouldn't the intensity of the waves be concentrated around the periphery of the rings? Would two or more earthquake shields in particular arrangements have a focusing effect, unwittingly completely leveling a nearby building from a otherwise mild shake?
Even with balancing algorithms paying users are still subsidising the freeloaders, as the content providers will still want to be reimbursed for a bandwidth contributing user's free downloads. In this case, very directly subsidizing, rather than indirectly via jacking up retail prices to cover [imaginary] losses as happens with piracy to date .
The problem is not in the idea. Indeed cpu cycles, storage and bandwidth are worth something and if anyone building a datacentre scale operation will tell you just how expensive per unit it actually is.
Distributed services have been shown to work, so there is a opportunity here for a killer Google of the distributed computing to get it right and take over the world. The problem is the attempt to monetize the scheme. This is always what kills it.
Reasons for buying used games is the lesser need for high-end hardware. http://www.xkcd.com/606/
If you buy PC gaming hardware 6-12 months behind the bleeding edge you save an enormous amount of money too. If your doing the same buying games at the same level, you will likely be paying about half also. New games are almost never discounted within 6 months of release. Many stores start trying to move inevitable surplus stock after this.
In one of those strange capitalist paradoxes, in terms of frames-per-second for your dollar you get massively more if you buy cheaper mid range hardware that has been on the market 6-12 months. For example, a Radeon 4870 was alot of money when it came out, following the 4850 was the 4830 which gets get you 90% of the same performance for alot cheaper.
If you waited a little longer now there is the 4770 which is slightly slower but a bigger step cheaper again, and naturally a more improved model also.
Incredibly if you wait a while the drivers mature, which is a free speed boost in some cases, and Crossfire/SLI support and scaling in games improves. I resisted my fanboy urges and I now have two Radeon 4770s for less than the price of a single 4870 on 0-day.
The other area is CPUs, not so crucial to gaming performance, but you don't want to be held back: Overclocking a sub $100 processor to the performance level of a $400 is now is so easy, reliable and cheap to do. You don't even need all those spiffy led-illuminated uber cooler parts either.
Frankly I don't buy any argument that PC gaming is much too expensive to be a part of, because it is possible to do so, for half the money and still have 90% of the ultra high-end experience. You'll retain bragging rights and have some points to stamp on your geek card from your overclocking skills. Wait... perhaps it is if you are a fan-boy early adopter because you will be fleeced.
The data may be skewed: users may consider offers from genuine mailing lists 'spam' whether they've signed up to it intentionally or not, when completing a survey. This more relevant stuff is more likely click-worthy. The survey doesn't necessarily make this distinction and account for it.
Otherwise, it is somewhat believable as many individuals new to the internet learn many lessons the hard way.
Mind you, "but another 13 percent said they simply had no idea why they did it; they just did." explains why I still receive 'send this to 10 people or you will has bad luck' from otherwise intelligent and educated people.
North Korea could have solicited the services of hackers in the U.K. or else where. It makes sense to outsource when you don't necessarily have the expertise in your own country. I'd like to point out here there are known NK sympathizers.