No doubt the Vogans would blast the 2nd generation super-AI to smithereens shortly before delivering its pronouncement.
Slightly more seriously, we seem to be pretty well bound by "Turing Complete." Once you get a Turing complete computer, it's just a matter of waiting. So really better simply means faster. Though many orders of magnitude can seem to be a difference in kind instead of degree, it's really just degree.
I think we have a similar view of AI. Make it faster and add memory. I also think that's a limited view, though I have those same limitations built-in, so who knows if we can truly transcend that, even in our creations.
I forgot a few points. A few years back I went to a "singularity talk" by some people doing silicon design, trying to cram denser neural nets onto chips.
Even at the time, it struck me that by the tame you've made a "human equivalent" hardware simulator in some sort of neural net, you've got a newborn. Let's assume you're "at" the singularity, with your brand new AI...
I have experience with this. I've participated in the creation of two NIs. They can't do spit at initialization. Actually they can do 2 things - suck on a nipple and express displeasure. OK, they can wave their limbs and produce waste, but I'd argue that the brain isn't involved in that, at least on a control basis. Maybe I'd include a 3 and 4 - open and close their eyes. It takes weeks to months before they can do much more than that. It takes years before they can tell you anything that doesn't need the "parental interpreter" functioning. It takes more years before they can even think of passing a Turing Test.
I'm not quite sure what researchers expect of a brand new AI. Maybe their expectations are right in line with mine. Maybe it's the popular literature, and therefore the general public, that expects to hear, "Hello Dr. Chandra" in perfect speech.
Then on the parent post, something in TFA made me recalibrate "blank brain", realizing that there's probably quite a bit of "body connection" rewiring happening in the brain well before birth. I'm guessing that the newborn's brain is far from blank.
You hit the real point, and skidded right past it - "roughly what a newborn can do."
For sake of argument, I would even grant Kurzweil's point of "equivalent lines of code" for a moment. But remember that code is for a blank brain, not yours or mine. Or to put it another way, the only things those "equivalent lines of code" know how to do is write more lines of code, test them for success, tend to keep them if they're good, or tend to throw them away if they're bad. I'll go a little further and say that they don't really know how to suck a nipple, either. I say that because I said, "blank brain," and I would argue that we're talking shortly after conception, not a newborn. I would argue that the brain of a newborn has already had a lot of work done on it, simply connecting to the body.
All another way of saying that I agree that comparing "genome-determined equivalent lines of code" with an adult (or even a child's) brain is silly.
Why do you call me crazy or a shill? You seem to agree with me.
The real thrust of my post is that the internet for years now has been doing things not originally conceived, and that was by intent. By that same intent, new uses ought to come along in the future of which we don't conceive today. Some of those uses may turn out to make a lot of money, and provide major economic stimulus.
I acknowledge what you say about profit and monetization. I'll also say that that has nothing to do with the internet, and everything to do with a return to the days of Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, TheSource, etc. Those of us addicted to a neutral net may have no choice but to reinvent the BBS.
When the internet first started... There was no "cloud". There was no streaming video. There was no bittorrent. There were no VPNs, no work-at-home over the net. There wasn't even a web - though that came fairly quickly.
The internet was conceived as an open-ended transport mechanism, with no plans or constraints as to the data being transported, though there were some thoughts about QOS, recognizing that some data had to get there quickly, some reliably, some not particularly either.
Commercial deployments of anything, not just the internet, generally aren't open-ended. They tend to plan things, up-front, and put just as much thought into billing as they do into the rest of the job. (Ever see how much cell phone plumbing is dedicated to billing, as opposed to merely shuttling customers' data?)
The best reason for net neutrality is something we haven't done yet, something no company has planned for, and very likely something that would be hindered by default, because it doesn't fit into current plans. (Or can you say, "disruption not desired!"?)
I have two such things, a screwdriver and a (cheap) meat cleaver.
The screwdriver I borrowed from a friend before he got cancer, and in the hubbub surrounding his sickness, never got around to giving it back. Now it's my favorite screwdriver, and every time I use it or even see it, I think about him, remember some of the things we did together, his wicked sense of humor, etc.
The meat cleaver belonged to my mother-in-law, and there's a story behind that as well. It's too long to tell here, but it was absolutely appropriate that when we were cleaning out her house, that silly little meat cleaver came home with me and took up residence in my toolbox, exactly where it belongs. Open the toolbox, and there's another memory waiting.
The memories are there. The things are mnemonic devices that refresh those memories.
You missed my point, and apparently my sarcasm remark.
For some "skeptics", most notably I believe those who are making their mints based on the status quo, there is no such thing as sufficient proof. There is no line direct enough for them to admit that their current business model has flaws. To drop back to my example, about the only way they would admit that such a medical patent might be a problem is if the patent holder shoved it in someone's mouth, choked and killed them. And even then only in front of unimpeachable witnesses of the correct background, who all agreed exactly on the witnessed events.
Has the cynic in you heard about the new prostate cancer vaccine? They've decided to charge $90k for it, because that's the average cost of treatment for prostate cancer, and people should be willing to pay just as much to avoid the treatment as they would to have it. I'm not kidding.
Can you prove it, beyond a shadow of a doubt?!? Can you show me the smoking gun, how witholding of a specific piece of information caused a specific death?!?
I didn't think so. Therefore your entire argument is worthless, which of course means that the ONLY True Path to scientific knowledge and prosperity for all remains Free Market Capitalism and strong enforcement of Intellectual Property Law.
** Insert sarcasm emoticon here. The problem is not so much that some people might think this an annoying serious argument as that some people might agree with it.
There's still a big difference between interplanetary and interstellar travel. Assuming they've managed to leave their homeworld without destroying themselves, and have managed to remain somewhat warlike, they now have the opportunity to develop interplanetary warfare. For this the stakes become much higher and the weapons different. As you say, "probably not much use for other lifeforms," changes the stakes in warfare, because you don't have to live on the same hunk of planetary rock that your attacking, so your attacks can become carelessly devastating. So can theirs.
There are levels of technological hurdles. We've gotten off of the Earth, and we've gotten some stuff out into the solar system. But we're still far from being an interplanetary scale civilization. We're not even really a spacefaring civilization yet, though we may finally be very close to it.
I'll define spacefaring as being "planetary orbit commonly and readily available to many." That also means Earth-orbit kinetic energy commonly and readily available to many. Every bit of mass in Earth orbit is potentially a devastating weapon, given that kinetic energy. Extend the scope to the moon, and it means you have Earth-escape kinetic energy commonly and readily available to many. The moon is also a convenient source of rocks to throw. Think, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."
Similarly for defining interplanetary, except the available kinetic energy starts at Earth-escape and ranges toward Solar-escape. There's also a much more diffuse, easy to hide, and hard to defend source of rocks available.
Interstellar is a whole different thing entirely. You have to get past the hazards of having all of that kinetic energy commonly and readily available at the spacefaring and interplanetary scales for a suitable amount of time to develop interstellar technology. Plus I just focused on kinetic energy - you also have to have equivalent potential energy at hand to get yourself out of the local gravity well, be it Earth, moon, other planet, or solar. I think Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and the like have done us a bit of a disservice by trivializing interstellar travel, making us think it merely comparable to space travel.
The sheer quantity of power required for interstellar flight is so tremendous that if members of a species have too much (How much is too much? I don't know, but I strongly suspect that we're well over the limit right now.) tendency to kill each other, that species will self-destruct before achieving interstellar flight.
Therefore I suggest that any interstellar travelers that find us will be peaceful.
One extra supposition is needed - that this is relatively independent of psychology. Some have proposed the rabidly xenophobic hive-mind as a way to be peaceful enough to achieve interstellar travel, yet remain warlike toward what they find out there. I would argue that before you achieve interstellar flight, you've got to get to interplanetary flight. Hive minds remain hive minds through close communication. The bigger supposition is that hive minds cannot remain intact at large (relative to C) distances - they lose the tight communication needed. You wind up with two hive minds talking to each other. What's more, you likely have two hive minds in radically different environments with attending radically different needs. At some point the xenophobia kicks in.
This leads to a few more things...
Once you have the technology for interstellar flight, you don't really need planets, or at least not habitable ones. You certainly need mass, and you certainly need metal, but those can come from comets, asteroids, and other uninhabitable places.
Chances are very good that you're no longer biological. The demands, hazards, and logistics of moving a body around our own solar system are tough enough. Interstellar flight is that much tougher. Assuming we reach Ray's Singularity, we'll simply send Turing images of ourselves. Much simpler, plus you can either turn yourself off or slow your time perception during the boring parts of the trip.
I also think that planets like ours would remain interesting to interstellar travelers. You don't get our there without curiosity, and there would be a kind of historical interest in planetary life. At the same time, when you study something you try not to interfere with it - you try to minimize our effect on the system, unless you're doing a deliberate cause-effect experiment.
Perhaps one of the greatest hazards would be some primitive species getting technology that it's not psychologically ready to have. If we were to find and reverse-engineer a functional starship, we might get out there before we've learned to behave ourselves. This bunks my whole argument - give/stolen, as opposed to self-developed interstellar travel.
Put this together, and you're likely to see interstellar travelers being very careful to avoid contact - something like the Prime Directive. The "test" of developing a warp drive as a requisite for first contact also makes sense in this light. Perhaps the Vulcans had the Right Stuff in their cargo bay to turn the Earth into a cinder had they been too disappointed in us.
Given that we've been detecting extrasolar planets for a number of years, getting better by the year, it's easy to believe that an interstellar species could detect the Earth and tell that it has life, if they have a suitably clear (not obscured by too much dust or other stars) view.
So imagine a mission out there in the asteroid belt, a loose association of Turing images from planets around other stars, watching us. They used to be closer, but as our technology has advanced, they've had to move further out. Of course listening to our communications has given still more information perhaps, than they could get before. Imagine for a moment that after hours, they wear their virtual bodies, gather in a virtual bar, and talk about us, perhaps taking bets on how long it'll take us to either destroy ourselves or overcome our juvenile impulses. Maybe they liked "Star Wars", and the virtual bar is straight out of the Mos Eisley Cantina.
The way I understand it, we privatized the US supply of helium back in 1996. We targeted selling 850 million scm by 2015, reserving 17 million scm for the federal government's reserve. The price has been set artificially low in order to get that 850 million scm sold off in time.
In other words, we're not approaching peak helium, we're stupidly, deliberately, actively rushing toward it.
That's one of the reasons I've been collecting the works of E.E. "Doc" Smith. It's a lot of fun looking at his view of the future, especially "engineers setting up complex integrals on giant calculators." On the other hand, in the same era you have Murray Leinster's "A Logic Named Joe" which is eerily prescient, even if the nomenclature is a bit off.
Ten-twenty years ago, science fiction had this nifty thing called "nanotech" that did all sorts of neat stuff. We still don't have Drexler machines, grey goo, or atomic-scale Digi-Comps, but I've been working sub-100nM for around 10 years now, getting smaller every generation, so we're getting into the ballpark.
But science fiction is not to be outdone, a few years back I read "Pushing Ice"by Alastair Reynolds. They had femto-tech.
Yeah, there's that little detail. There's also the fact that the original patent application was allowed to languish for several years and later abandoned. But it languished long enough for them to come in after JEDEC and ammend the claims. Nor did the original patent claims read on the JEDEC standard.
1 - Design a cheap "cleanup kit" that almost anyone can afford, or a small range of cleanup kits. 2 - Design a process for turning the gunk harvested by the above "cleanup kits" into usable oil. 3 - Pay people to bring in barrels of the gunk, sell the oil back into the supply chain.... 5a - Profit!! 5b - Cleanup!!
This is a combination jest/serious. Probably the biggest problem would be making step 2 cheap enough that you can pay people for barrels of gunk, yet still sell the oil back into the supply chain.
If Microsoft were to attempt to buy every open source company, quite a few people would get quite agitated, including the antitrust division of the DOJ.
Oracle is a little bit different, because of size, market span, and market share. But it's still not that far from the same thing - M-O-N-O-P-O-L-Y - just in a slightly different marketplace.
Might not be a bad idea, but we're scarcely ready to tackle the task. We're starting with a sample-size of 9, (or is that 8?) with direct, personal, and extensive observation of only 1, fairly extensive robot observation of 1 more, somewhat less robot observation of 2 more, and some robot and telescopic observation of the rest. Then we get into those pesky "moons", some of which might well be considered "planets" if they orbited the sun instead of some planet. (Think Pandora, for a fictional extreme example, but Ganymede, Titan, and Callisto aren't that far behind.)
Past that, our extrasolar observations so far haven't found much, if any, like our own solar system. We've found numerous super-Jovian (The easiest kind to detect.) worlds, some of them in decidedly non-Jovian orbits. I don't think we're truly ready to do any sort of planetary classification yet, unless we left it so diffuse at to not be useful - perhaps with a few more decades of extrasolar observations and technological advancements in the same... In the meantime, it seems kind of like doing a taxonomy of arthropods based on aquatic observations of shrimp, lobsters, prawns, and the like.
> If you look at who is in office, it's clear that this is a Christian nation.
For some definitions of the word, "Christian," perhaps. If I look at what people say and do, I suspect a majority of them act in a Christian way, as would be defined in the Bible. If you look at what the nation says and does, not so close. If you look at what the "Religious Right," the current flagwavers of Christianity say an do, far from it.
I would agree with you except for "too big to fail" recently joined our vernacular. Really, the best hope for the internet as we know it today is that it's fully international, and anyone messing in a bad way sticks out like a sore thumb. Hopefully it will stay that way.
Slashdot Mirror
No doubt the Vogans would blast the 2nd generation super-AI to smithereens shortly before delivering its pronouncement.
Slightly more seriously, we seem to be pretty well bound by "Turing Complete." Once you get a Turing complete computer, it's just a matter of waiting. So really better simply means faster. Though many orders of magnitude can seem to be a difference in kind instead of degree, it's really just degree.
I think we have a similar view of AI. Make it faster and add memory. I also think that's a limited view, though I have those same limitations built-in, so who knows if we can truly transcend that, even in our creations.
That was my point. If he's making DNA-based complexity assumptions, he's really comparing to a pre-newborn brain, well before birth.
I forgot a few points. A few years back I went to a "singularity talk" by some people doing silicon design, trying to cram denser neural nets onto chips.
Even at the time, it struck me that by the tame you've made a "human equivalent" hardware simulator in some sort of neural net, you've got a newborn. Let's assume you're "at" the singularity, with your brand new AI...
I have experience with this. I've participated in the creation of two NIs.
They can't do spit at initialization. Actually they can do 2 things - suck on a nipple and express displeasure. OK, they can wave their limbs and produce waste, but I'd argue that the brain isn't involved in that, at least on a control basis. Maybe I'd include a 3 and 4 - open and close their eyes.
It takes weeks to months before they can do much more than that.
It takes years before they can tell you anything that doesn't need the "parental interpreter" functioning.
It takes more years before they can even think of passing a Turing Test.
I'm not quite sure what researchers expect of a brand new AI. Maybe their expectations are right in line with mine. Maybe it's the popular literature, and therefore the general public, that expects to hear, "Hello Dr. Chandra" in perfect speech.
Then on the parent post, something in TFA made me recalibrate "blank brain", realizing that there's probably quite a bit of "body connection" rewiring happening in the brain well before birth. I'm guessing that the newborn's brain is far from blank.
You hit the real point, and skidded right past it - "roughly what a newborn can do."
For sake of argument, I would even grant Kurzweil's point of "equivalent lines of code" for a moment. But remember that code is for a blank brain, not yours or mine. Or to put it another way, the only things those "equivalent lines of code" know how to do is write more lines of code, test them for success, tend to keep them if they're good, or tend to throw them away if they're bad. I'll go a little further and say that they don't really know how to suck a nipple, either. I say that because I said, "blank brain," and I would argue that we're talking shortly after conception, not a newborn. I would argue that the brain of a newborn has already had a lot of work done on it, simply connecting to the body.
All another way of saying that I agree that comparing "genome-determined equivalent lines of code" with an adult (or even a child's) brain is silly.
Why do you call me crazy or a shill? You seem to agree with me.
The real thrust of my post is that the internet for years now has been doing things not originally conceived, and that was by intent. By that same intent, new uses ought to come along in the future of which we don't conceive today. Some of those uses may turn out to make a lot of money, and provide major economic stimulus.
I acknowledge what you say about profit and monetization. I'll also say that that has nothing to do with the internet, and everything to do with a return to the days of Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, TheSource, etc. Those of us addicted to a neutral net may have no choice but to reinvent the BBS.
...doesn't exist yet.
When the internet first started...
There was no "cloud".
There was no streaming video.
There was no bittorrent.
There were no VPNs, no work-at-home over the net.
There wasn't even a web - though that came fairly quickly.
The internet was conceived as an open-ended transport mechanism, with no plans or constraints as to the data being transported, though there were some thoughts about QOS, recognizing that some data had to get there quickly, some reliably, some not particularly either.
Commercial deployments of anything, not just the internet, generally aren't open-ended. They tend to plan things, up-front, and put just as much thought into billing as they do into the rest of the job. (Ever see how much cell phone plumbing is dedicated to billing, as opposed to merely shuttling customers' data?)
The best reason for net neutrality is something we haven't done yet, something no company has planned for, and very likely something that would be hindered by default, because it doesn't fit into current plans. (Or can you say, "disruption not desired!"?)
Along this line, things.
I have two such things, a screwdriver and a (cheap) meat cleaver.
The screwdriver I borrowed from a friend before he got cancer, and in the hubbub surrounding his sickness, never got around to giving it back. Now it's my favorite screwdriver, and every time I use it or even see it, I think about him, remember some of the things we did together, his wicked sense of humor, etc.
The meat cleaver belonged to my mother-in-law, and there's a story behind that as well. It's too long to tell here, but it was absolutely appropriate that when we were cleaning out her house, that silly little meat cleaver came home with me and took up residence in my toolbox, exactly where it belongs. Open the toolbox, and there's another memory waiting.
The memories are there. The things are mnemonic devices that refresh those memories.
You missed my point, and apparently my sarcasm remark.
For some "skeptics", most notably I believe those who are making their mints based on the status quo, there is no such thing as sufficient proof. There is no line direct enough for them to admit that their current business model has flaws. To drop back to my example, about the only way they would admit that such a medical patent might be a problem is if the patent holder shoved it in someone's mouth, choked and killed them. And even then only in front of unimpeachable witnesses of the correct background, who all agreed exactly on the witnessed events.
Has the cynic in you heard about the new prostate cancer vaccine? They've decided to charge $90k for it, because that's the average cost of treatment for prostate cancer, and people should be willing to pay just as much to avoid the treatment as they would to have it. I'm not kidding.
**Pardon me, it's not $90k, it's $93k. http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2010-04-30-prostatevaccine30_ST_N.htm
Reading TFA, the vaccine is a very patient-specific thing, and didn't mention the equivalent-cost pricing. I heard that part on the radio.
Can you prove it, beyond a shadow of a doubt?!?
Can you show me the smoking gun, how witholding of a specific piece of information caused a specific death?!?
I didn't think so. Therefore your entire argument is worthless, which of course means that the ONLY True Path to scientific knowledge and prosperity for all remains Free Market Capitalism and strong enforcement of Intellectual Property Law.
** Insert sarcasm emoticon here. The problem is not so much that some people might think this an annoying serious argument as that some people might agree with it.
They should ask Barbra Streisand how well this approach works.
There's still a big difference between interplanetary and interstellar travel. Assuming they've managed to leave their homeworld without destroying themselves, and have managed to remain somewhat warlike, they now have the opportunity to develop interplanetary warfare. For this the stakes become much higher and the weapons different. As you say, "probably not much use for other lifeforms," changes the stakes in warfare, because you don't have to live on the same hunk of planetary rock that your attacking, so your attacks can become carelessly devastating. So can theirs.
There are levels of technological hurdles. We've gotten off of the Earth, and we've gotten some stuff out into the solar system. But we're still far from being an interplanetary scale civilization. We're not even really a spacefaring civilization yet, though we may finally be very close to it.
I'll define spacefaring as being "planetary orbit commonly and readily available to many." That also means Earth-orbit kinetic energy commonly and readily available to many. Every bit of mass in Earth orbit is potentially a devastating weapon, given that kinetic energy. Extend the scope to the moon, and it means you have Earth-escape kinetic energy commonly and readily available to many. The moon is also a convenient source of rocks to throw. Think, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."
Similarly for defining interplanetary, except the available kinetic energy starts at Earth-escape and ranges toward Solar-escape. There's also a much more diffuse, easy to hide, and hard to defend source of rocks available.
Interstellar is a whole different thing entirely. You have to get past the hazards of having all of that kinetic energy commonly and readily available at the spacefaring and interplanetary scales for a suitable amount of time to develop interstellar technology. Plus I just focused on kinetic energy - you also have to have equivalent potential energy at hand to get yourself out of the local gravity well, be it Earth, moon, other planet, or solar. I think Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and the like have done us a bit of a disservice by trivializing interstellar travel, making us think it merely comparable to space travel.
The "peak helium" thread seemed to be the best place to attach my post. But I agree that the "peak" model is in appropriate for this case.
I'll throw one simple belief into the fray:
The sheer quantity of power required for interstellar flight is so tremendous that if members of a species have too much (How much is too much? I don't know, but I strongly suspect that we're well over the limit right now.) tendency to kill each other, that species will self-destruct before achieving interstellar flight.
Therefore I suggest that any interstellar travelers that find us will be peaceful.
One extra supposition is needed - that this is relatively independent of psychology. Some have proposed the rabidly xenophobic hive-mind as a way to be peaceful enough to achieve interstellar travel, yet remain warlike toward what they find out there. I would argue that before you achieve interstellar flight, you've got to get to interplanetary flight. Hive minds remain hive minds through close communication. The bigger supposition is that hive minds cannot remain intact at large (relative to C) distances - they lose the tight communication needed. You wind up with two hive minds talking to each other. What's more, you likely have two hive minds in radically different environments with attending radically different needs. At some point the xenophobia kicks in.
This leads to a few more things...
Once you have the technology for interstellar flight, you don't really need planets, or at least not habitable ones. You certainly need mass, and you certainly need metal, but those can come from comets, asteroids, and other uninhabitable places.
Chances are very good that you're no longer biological. The demands, hazards, and logistics of moving a body around our own solar system are tough enough. Interstellar flight is that much tougher. Assuming we reach Ray's Singularity, we'll simply send Turing images of ourselves. Much simpler, plus you can either turn yourself off or slow your time perception during the boring parts of the trip.
I also think that planets like ours would remain interesting to interstellar travelers. You don't get our there without curiosity, and there would be a kind of historical interest in planetary life. At the same time, when you study something you try not to interfere with it - you try to minimize our effect on the system, unless you're doing a deliberate cause-effect experiment.
Perhaps one of the greatest hazards would be some primitive species getting technology that it's not psychologically ready to have. If we were to find and reverse-engineer a functional starship, we might get out there before we've learned to behave ourselves. This bunks my whole argument - give/stolen, as opposed to self-developed interstellar travel.
Put this together, and you're likely to see interstellar travelers being very careful to avoid contact - something like the Prime Directive. The "test" of developing a warp drive as a requisite for first contact also makes sense in this light. Perhaps the Vulcans had the Right Stuff in their cargo bay to turn the Earth into a cinder had they been too disappointed in us.
Given that we've been detecting extrasolar planets for a number of years, getting better by the year, it's easy to believe that an interstellar species could detect the Earth and tell that it has life, if they have a suitably clear (not obscured by too much dust or other stars) view.
So imagine a mission out there in the asteroid belt, a loose association of Turing images from planets around other stars, watching us. They used to be closer, but as our technology has advanced, they've had to move further out. Of course listening to our communications has given still more information perhaps, than they could get before. Imagine for a moment that after hours, they wear their virtual bodies, gather in a virtual bar, and talk about us, perhaps taking bets on how long it'll take us to either destroy ourselves or overcome our juvenile impulses. Maybe they liked "Star Wars", and the virtual bar is straight out of the Mos Eisley Cantina.
The way I understand it, we privatized the US supply of helium back in 1996. We targeted selling 850 million scm by 2015, reserving 17 million scm for the federal government's reserve. The price has been set artificially low in order to get that 850 million scm sold off in time.
In other words, we're not approaching peak helium, we're stupidly, deliberately, actively rushing toward it.
http://www.agiweb.org/gap/legis106/helium.html
http://www.blm.gov/nm/st/en/prog/energy/helium/federal_helium_program.html
http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpinews/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=9860
https://twitter.com/timoreilly/statuses/17831735662
That's one of the reasons I've been collecting the works of E.E. "Doc" Smith. It's a lot of fun looking at his view of the future, especially "engineers setting up complex integrals on giant calculators." On the other hand, in the same era you have Murray Leinster's "A Logic Named Joe" which is eerily prescient, even if the nomenclature is a bit off.
The crew of the ship didn't have that stuff - it was the people from the far future. Remember the big cube they found?
Ten-twenty years ago, science fiction had this nifty thing called "nanotech" that did all sorts of neat stuff. We still don't have Drexler machines, grey goo, or atomic-scale Digi-Comps, but I've been working sub-100nM for around 10 years now, getting smaller every generation, so we're getting into the ballpark.
But science fiction is not to be outdone, a few years back I read "Pushing Ice"by Alastair Reynolds. They had femto-tech.
Yeah, there's that little detail. There's also the fact that the original patent application was allowed to languish for several years and later abandoned. But it languished long enough for them to come in after JEDEC and ammend the claims. Nor did the original patent claims read on the JEDEC standard.
I had to simplify a little.
You've got your order a little wrong.
1. Apply for patent.
2. Join standards body, get tech widely used.
3. Leave standards body.
4. Continue patent of Step 1, ammending claims to read directly against standard.
5. SUE!
6. PROFIT!
1 - Design a cheap "cleanup kit" that almost anyone can afford, or a small range of cleanup kits. ...
2 - Design a process for turning the gunk harvested by the above "cleanup kits" into usable oil.
3 - Pay people to bring in barrels of the gunk, sell the oil back into the supply chain.
5a - Profit!!
5b - Cleanup!!
This is a combination jest/serious. Probably the biggest problem would be making step 2 cheap enough that you can pay people for barrels of gunk, yet still sell the oil back into the supply chain.
If Microsoft were to attempt to buy every open source company, quite a few people would get quite agitated, including the antitrust division of the DOJ.
Oracle is a little bit different, because of size, market span, and market share. But it's still not that far from the same thing - M-O-N-O-P-O-L-Y - just in a slightly different marketplace.
Might not be a bad idea, but we're scarcely ready to tackle the task. We're starting with a sample-size of 9, (or is that 8?) with direct, personal, and extensive observation of only 1, fairly extensive robot observation of 1 more, somewhat less robot observation of 2 more, and some robot and telescopic observation of the rest. Then we get into those pesky "moons", some of which might well be considered "planets" if they orbited the sun instead of some planet. (Think Pandora, for a fictional extreme example, but Ganymede, Titan, and Callisto aren't that far behind.)
Past that, our extrasolar observations so far haven't found much, if any, like our own solar system. We've found numerous super-Jovian (The easiest kind to detect.) worlds, some of them in decidedly non-Jovian orbits. I don't think we're truly ready to do any sort of planetary classification yet, unless we left it so diffuse at to not be useful - perhaps with a few more decades of extrasolar observations and technological advancements in the same... In the meantime, it seems kind of like doing a taxonomy of arthropods based on aquatic observations of shrimp, lobsters, prawns, and the like.
> If you look at who is in office, it's clear that this is a Christian nation.
For some definitions of the word, "Christian," perhaps. If I look at what people say and do, I suspect a majority of them act in a Christian way, as would be defined in the Bible. If you look at what the nation says and does, not so close. If you look at what the "Religious Right," the current flagwavers of Christianity say an do, far from it.
I would agree with you except for "too big to fail" recently joined our vernacular. Really, the best hope for the internet as we know it today is that it's fully international, and anyone messing in a bad way sticks out like a sore thumb. Hopefully it will stay that way.