I realize that this is a lost cause and all; but why would you endorse a 16:10(at least it's not bloody 16:9...) rather than a 4:3 for a laptop? For a tablet, sure, where you can change the orientation and turn your sprawling rectangle into a nice, readable, page-width reading surface; but a laptop, where the keyboard keeps you from doing that?
Because standardized aspect ratios are generally a good thing (I would actually rather do the 16:9, but 16:10 is close enough). In addition, because I don't have dual monitors on my laptop, I like to be able to put two windows side-by-side, each taking up half the screen. Also, wider screens means wider laptop, which means wider keyboard.
I understand your complaint, and for the desktop, I like the ability to turn my monitor to portrait orientation. That said, there are a good many reasons for having widescreen laptops.
Why do you assume that? If anything a rational person would better understand the concept of the greater good than an empathically driven person.
It's not about understanding the concept, it's about subscribing to it.
For example, you can rationally understand that cooperation from individuals can lead to increased success of the species. However, rationally, why is the survival of the species important to you? Why is anything that happens after you are dead important to you? You're not going to be there to see it, or to experience it, or to suffer from the consequences. The only thing you have to tell you that it would be bad to selfishly care only about your own well-being at the expense of others is by putting yourself in their shoes. In other words, empathy.
Rational analysis will lead to better outcomes than emotionally driven behavior. So if you want good things to happen to the most people, which most empathetic people would, then you should eschew empathy and be as rational as possible.
Except that, without empathy, you don't want good things to happen to the most people. You'd only care about the good things happening to you.
I'm sure if you tried you could squeeze "fuck" in there a few more times.
Hell, it's not even challenging. He could have gone, "Except the fucking plane fucking flew first in fucking North fucking Carolina. Fuck yourself you fucking fuck. Fuck!"
People aren't more hyped because console gaming just isn't that interesting anymore. In our house we have a Wii and a PS3. My kids have iPod touches, my wife has an iPad. Lots of video games are played in my house - all of them on the handheld devices.
Wow. I am different than other people...
I own a smartphone. Would love to have a few games on it for those times when I'm in a wait room for the dentist or something. Can't find a single that doesn't drive me nuts, except for solitaire. Touchscreens suck as a game interface, at least I think so.
The single best interface for games is a keybaord in mouse. Failing that, a joypad or joystick will do. But a touchscreen??? I honestly assumed nobody who actually played video games made the transition until I saw your post. I thought the entire market was composed of people who didn't play video games until smartphones became popular.
Why do they even need credit card numbers to process tax returns? I am not American, so maybe I'm missing something in how you handle things, but seriously, why?
They don't need them, and I've never given them mine. You may, however, elect to pay your taxes with a credit card.
Evolution is basically a local optimization algorithm. You are right about that it will start running under the conditions you list. But even with these condition met, complex organisms do not necessary evolve. You will only get more complex organisms, if that complexity is beneficial in that environment. It is quite easy to imagine environments where less complex organisms are fitter than complex ones.
Evolution does not imply more complex organisms. It's entirely possible for complex organisms to evolve into simpler ones that are fitter to their environment.
There's essentially nothing wrong with your post, but I think you assume that the GP meant that evolution into complex life forms is inevitable, when all he really meant to say is that given mutation, selection, and replication, species will evolve into something fitter to their environment, whether that's by increased complexity of decreased complexity.
I don't have mod points today, so I just thought I'd tell you your post is definitely within the top 5 or so most intelligent posts I've ever seen on slashdot. It was extremely well thought-out, informative, and respectful.
It's extremely impressive to see someone pull that off at a religious debate. Thank you.
Be careful how hard you push the idea that these inalienable rights don't come from a creator. Because if you succeed in that declaration, then your inalienable rights may just start to be viewed as just some minor suggestions. Rights that have their basis just in mortal reason can always be bent to whatever a person or persons feel is appropriate.
What's wrong with that?
There will always be people who feel they can oppress others for their own gains. The only way to prevent that from happening is if our society bands together to stop them. The solution to that particular problem is to design a government in which the people are (if they so choose) a part of it. A government where no one person has the power to make extreme changes, and which has enough inertia to make it difficult and slow to make extreme changes even if a large number of people want that change.
Without the above qualities, it doesn't matter if you think your morals come from a higher power or from us mortals. The leader of a newly formed oppressive regime doesn't really care whether he needs to lie to you that his actions are in the name of God or lie saying that his actions are in the name of a better quality of life. He doesn't care if he needs to tell you that the enemy is guided by the devil or that the enemy wants to destroy your way of life.
Anytime I've ever seen that qualifier used by anyone about anything, it was always eventually ignored for the sake of convenience. Once you have the ability, it's too darn difficult to avoid the temptation to use it.
There is a difference between being "big brother" and using technology to enhance your parenting.
Absolutely. Your kids, your responsibility, I'm going to stay out of it if you decide to chip them. That said, your family is a mini-society, and a lot of the consequences you see with a big brother society, you might see in families with over-protective parents. Depending on the child, they may become overly reliant on their parents and be unable to handle their own lives independently, they may rebel against what they see as totalitarian control and start doing things simply for the sake of disobeying their parents wishes, or they may turn out just fine. There's no list of dos and don'ts that work for every parent and every child. Parenting is hard.
Speaking from experience (I have one love child that I know of in my long distant past:), once you start trading bodily fluids as an early teenager, ain't no amount of sex education videos showing single-parenthood or the horrible results of various STDs going to stop you from that sinusoidal rhythm & inevitable culmination very shortly thereafter!;)
Yep. That's why the free distribution of condoms, which gets such a strong reaction from certain parents who think it "encourages" their kid to have sex, is a good idea. Once the sinusoidal rhythm is about to start, they're not as likely to run to a drugstore, but if they have a condom right there...
There's an inherent fallacy in your argument - you've made the assumption that teaching kids how & where to buy & use condoms/contraception & exercise safe sex is easier than just getting them to say no. Or that they'll listen to one more than the other. Just sayin...;)
Well, I didn't make the assumption, but yes, I didn't link to the data. There's hard data that shows that abstinence only education does not lower the teen pregnancy rates, but safe-sex education along with free distribution of condoms does. I'll let you google for that, because I'm lazy:)
When you think about it, it's not that surprising. Horny kids want to have sex, but don't want kids of their own. We're providing them with a way to avoid the consequences without having to give up the sex.
So register as an Independent, then they'll pay attention to you. Vote for some crackpot third party candidate and you don't exist.
I live in South Carolina. If I don't want Romney to be President, voting for Obama doesn't really mean my vote count. He's not winning this state.
Not that I like Obama anyway. Voting for a third-party candidate here actually makes more of a difference, as it gives that third party uptick the GP was talking about.
I'll let Richard Feynman explain, considering he was able to explain anything better than I possibly could:
You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!
The anthropic principle is the observation that the question, "what are the odds the universe would have this particular state" after it already has that state is irrelevant. The odds for any particular lottery number are extremely low, which is why you can't win. However, that doesn't mean some number won't come up every week. And given enough people playing, people win all the time. It doesn't mean you'd win, but if the universe had different constants, maybe some other type of life very, very different from ours would have won out and would be arguing that an universe like ours couldn't possibly support any life.
I once proposed here that not having sex is a pretty good way to stay clear of HIV and was immediately bashed as a religious zealot.
I'm not religious and I have no problem with that sentence as stated, although in a different context I'd probably assume it's a joke, due to impracticality of asking people not to have sex. What was the context? Were you promoting teaching abstinence instead of teaching safe sex?
The reason that abstinence is labelled as the strategy proposed by religious fanatics is because it doesn't work. It's not that being abstinent won't make you safe from STDs, it's that teaching abstinence doesn't actually make teens abstinent.
I'm perfectly fine with teaching kids to wait until they're ready, just so long as you also teach them to have safe sex once they decide to stop waiting.
This, and increase your braking distance. Riding up the guy in front's chuff in ice is asking for a big hike in your insurance premiums.
Where I live, snow can sometimes happen, but we don't get it every year. As a result, people have no idea how to drive in it. Well, 12 years ago I was in college and it started snowing right as I left class (so they didn't cancel it, like they usually do at any sign of white stuff). So I got to my car to head home and everybody was trying to get home as quickly as possible. I'm not going to say I'm a great driver or anything, but I knew enough to keep an increased distance between me and the car in front while on the interstate. Well, impatient drivers don't like that, and traffic is already moving at 20 mph. So this guy in a truck with his friends honk their horn at me while trying to thread his way to the lane next to me, gets on the other lane, flicks me off while passing me (for probably a full minute, it's not like his lane was moving that much faster), cuts back in front of me and proceeds to immediately hit the brakes and slide into the rear of the car in front.
If it weren't for the inconvenience of the poor guy who got hit as well as everybody else who now has to deal with the increased traffic caused by the accident, I'd call it justice. I have to admit to laughing when it happened, especially as I passed him. Lesson of the day: don't be an impatient douchebag, you'll get home quicker if you drive smart.
And yet no one was under the presumption that the iPhone would run OS X software.
That is certainly not true. I personally new two people who asked me how to put their OS X apps on their iPhone when it came out, who trotted out the "but it runs OS X" when I explained that they couldn't.
Honestly, I'm not going to say that this was a big deal, I think my anecdote was probably unusual. However, mac users aren't mac users because of legacy application support. Windows users' only reason for not switching to something else is legacy application support. Who was the last person you talked to that said they liked Windows?
Seriously,.NET 2.0 came out in 2005. What's changed between 2005 and 2012 that makes you unable to learn something a bit new? Even.NET 1.0 which (aside from similarities to Java) was basically a new platform is only about a decade old, yet you apparently managed to learn it. If you're asking whether you can learn a new platform, rather than just learning it, then you might be to old...
Yeah. I saw the question and thought, "so take 3 or 4 weekends to write a few programs and catch up? What's the problem?"
Based on our observations of our very specific corner of the universe, over what amounts to an insignificant speck of time, viewing through a limited scope of technology that has been built in a hierarchical fashion upon possibly flawed assumptions about our reality. We've only been at this whole science thing, relative to modern physics, for a couple hundred years. It's presumptuous beyond reason to presume that we have a firm and unwavering grasp of the nature of energy that even fifty-thousand years of testing will not budge. To assert such is to sound like a flat-Earther.
To be clear: it is entirely possible that we know everything there is to know about the nature of energy to the extent that our assumptions herein are effectively true, and all of our observations to date support that, but it is absurd to assume, given the historical record of science in general, that further refinements will not be made over a period of time orders of magnitude greater than we've even had this cute thing called "civilization" -- never mind "science".
If you want to tell me that a sufficiently advanced civilization has faster than light drives and is capable of time-travel, I'm going to tell you, "that's highly unlikely, but possible." But no civilization absolutely anywhere regardless of how wondrous their science is has beaten the Carnot cycle. It's not arrogance or presumption. It's simple evidence. And to deny evidence is what a flat-Earther does.
You can pull the whole, "we couldn't possibly have connected enough evidence card", but that's the equivalent of religion. Sure, I might not be able to prove your particular religion is wrong. But considering there's no evidence for it, to assume otherwise isn't scientific. Once I have evidence to the contrary, I'll change my mind on anything, but the evidence needs to come first.
Energy can't be used for work, only energy difference can. If they didn't radiate away the captured sunlight they would overheat very quickly.
For us, this is true. For a civilization with the 50k years of scientific and engineering experience necessary to realistically embark on such a lofty project as a Dyson Sphere, probably not.
Incorrect. It doesn't matter how advanced a civilization gets, they're not breaking the laws of physics. And this is one of those laws of physics that we are 100% sure we are correct. There is no way around thermodynamics, we are not wrong about it.
Or people holding off for Windows 8? Or are general consumers are aware that 8 is coming soon?
If they were, they'd be buying it now, while they can still get Windows 7.
The upcoming release of Windows 8 isn't something to look forward to, it's something to fear. Especially for a software developer like I am, because I know I can't skip it, at least not at work. I've got to test on it.
Reaction time to a specific, anticipated event, you're likely right. But there's one crucial element to navigation that humans can do that computers currently can't - make arbitrary, seemingly illogical decisions in the heat of the moment. Take GP's hypothetical about the cliffside road - most humans, thanks to self-preservation instinct, will choose to rear-end the other car rather than drive off the ledge; what would a computer that is programmed to "avoid contact with other cars at all costs" do in that situation? Hyperbole aside, there's no way of knowing until we put one in that real world situation.
Yes. Humans would never drive off a cliff, thanks to this self-preservation instinct. A self-driving car, on the other hand, could make such mistakes, because the engineers would never think of a scenario slashdotters come up with 5 seconds after seeing a story about self-driving cars. They would certainly never put their algorithms to the test. If it compiles, ship it. Right?
Relevant quote from the last link:
So confident is Volvo in this safety mechanism, it says that if the lead vehicle were to drive off a cliff, the next vehicle could stop before reaching the edge.
The question is not is it better than some hypothetical human driver, but is it better than the drivers we have right now.
No, the question is: is it better than me?
If not, I don't want it driving my car.
It is.
You're not that great of a driver. Being human prevents you from being a better driver. You only have eyes in front of you, and you need to turn your head and look around, pay attention to mirrors, each time taking your attention away from where you are going for a fraction of a second. The computer can pay attention to 360 degree sensors 100% of the time. Once you detect the need to take immediate action, you need to move your leg to hit the brakes. For the computer controlling the car, the brakes are accessible immediately upon determining they need to be used.
At peak performance, a well rested and attentive driver will still not be as good as a well programmed machine. You can argue the machine isn't well programmed, but they're already better than the average driver, and every single mistake that results in a crash would result in a software update to every other self-driving car that is now guaranteed to not make the same mistake. So they'll become better than the best driver in no time once they are in common usage.
Slashdot Mirror
Because standardized aspect ratios are generally a good thing.
Why? Other than watching videos, aspect aspect ratio should never be worried about when designing software or content.
For one it makes for cheaper screens, if the fabs are just creating them the same across all devices.
I realize that this is a lost cause and all; but why would you endorse a 16:10(at least it's not bloody 16:9...) rather than a 4:3 for a laptop? For a tablet, sure, where you can change the orientation and turn your sprawling rectangle into a nice, readable, page-width reading surface; but a laptop, where the keyboard keeps you from doing that?
Because standardized aspect ratios are generally a good thing (I would actually rather do the 16:9, but 16:10 is close enough). In addition, because I don't have dual monitors on my laptop, I like to be able to put two windows side-by-side, each taking up half the screen. Also, wider screens means wider laptop, which means wider keyboard.
I understand your complaint, and for the desktop, I like the ability to turn my monitor to portrait orientation. That said, there are a good many reasons for having widescreen laptops.
Why do you assume that? If anything a rational person would better understand the concept of the greater good than an empathically driven person.
It's not about understanding the concept, it's about subscribing to it.
For example, you can rationally understand that cooperation from individuals can lead to increased success of the species. However, rationally, why is the survival of the species important to you? Why is anything that happens after you are dead important to you? You're not going to be there to see it, or to experience it, or to suffer from the consequences. The only thing you have to tell you that it would be bad to selfishly care only about your own well-being at the expense of others is by putting yourself in their shoes. In other words, empathy.
Rational analysis will lead to better outcomes than emotionally driven behavior. So if you want good things to happen to the most people, which most empathetic people would, then you should eschew empathy and be as rational as possible.
Except that, without empathy, you don't want good things to happen to the most people. You'd only care about the good things happening to you.
I'm sure if you tried you could squeeze "fuck" in there a few more times.
Hell, it's not even challenging. He could have gone, "Except the fucking plane fucking flew first in fucking North fucking Carolina. Fuck yourself you fucking fuck. Fuck!"
People aren't more hyped because console gaming just isn't that interesting anymore. In our house we have a Wii and a PS3. My kids have iPod touches, my wife has an iPad. Lots of video games are played in my house - all of them on the handheld devices.
Wow. I am different than other people...
I own a smartphone. Would love to have a few games on it for those times when I'm in a wait room for the dentist or something. Can't find a single that doesn't drive me nuts, except for solitaire. Touchscreens suck as a game interface, at least I think so.
The single best interface for games is a keybaord in mouse. Failing that, a joypad or joystick will do. But a touchscreen??? I honestly assumed nobody who actually played video games made the transition until I saw your post. I thought the entire market was composed of people who didn't play video games until smartphones became popular.
Why do they even need credit card numbers to process tax returns? I am not American, so maybe I'm missing something in how you handle things, but seriously, why?
They don't need them, and I've never given them mine. You may, however, elect to pay your taxes with a credit card.
Evolution is basically a local optimization algorithm. You are right about that it will start running under the conditions you list. But even with these condition met, complex organisms do not necessary evolve. You will only get more complex organisms, if that complexity is beneficial in that environment. It is quite easy to imagine environments where less complex organisms are fitter than complex ones.
Evolution does not imply more complex organisms. It's entirely possible for complex organisms to evolve into simpler ones that are fitter to their environment.
There's essentially nothing wrong with your post, but I think you assume that the GP meant that evolution into complex life forms is inevitable, when all he really meant to say is that given mutation, selection, and replication, species will evolve into something fitter to their environment, whether that's by increased complexity of decreased complexity.
I don't have mod points today, so I just thought I'd tell you your post is definitely within the top 5 or so most intelligent posts I've ever seen on slashdot. It was extremely well thought-out, informative, and respectful.
It's extremely impressive to see someone pull that off at a religious debate. Thank you.
Seriously? Why the fuck do i need to meet up with others like i'm in some fucking religion?
That is no more strange or related to religion than joining a book club is. You meet to discuss points of view you find interesting.
Be careful how hard you push the idea that these inalienable rights don't come from a creator. Because if you succeed in that declaration, then your inalienable rights may just start to be viewed as just some minor suggestions. Rights that have their basis just in mortal reason can always be bent to whatever a person or persons feel is appropriate.
What's wrong with that?
There will always be people who feel they can oppress others for their own gains. The only way to prevent that from happening is if our society bands together to stop them. The solution to that particular problem is to design a government in which the people are (if they so choose) a part of it. A government where no one person has the power to make extreme changes, and which has enough inertia to make it difficult and slow to make extreme changes even if a large number of people want that change.
Without the above qualities, it doesn't matter if you think your morals come from a higher power or from us mortals. The leader of a newly formed oppressive regime doesn't really care whether he needs to lie to you that his actions are in the name of God or lie saying that his actions are in the name of a better quality of life. He doesn't care if he needs to tell you that the enemy is guided by the devil or that the enemy wants to destroy your way of life.
I would only use it in...
Anytime I've ever seen that qualifier used by anyone about anything, it was always eventually ignored for the sake of convenience. Once you have the ability, it's too darn difficult to avoid the temptation to use it.
There is a difference between being "big brother" and using technology to enhance your parenting.
Absolutely. Your kids, your responsibility, I'm going to stay out of it if you decide to chip them. That said, your family is a mini-society, and a lot of the consequences you see with a big brother society, you might see in families with over-protective parents. Depending on the child, they may become overly reliant on their parents and be unable to handle their own lives independently, they may rebel against what they see as totalitarian control and start doing things simply for the sake of disobeying their parents wishes, or they may turn out just fine. There's no list of dos and don'ts that work for every parent and every child. Parenting is hard.
Speaking from experience (I have one love child that I know of in my long distant past :), once you start trading bodily fluids as an early teenager, ain't no amount of sex education videos showing single-parenthood or the horrible results of various STDs going to stop you from that sinusoidal rhythm & inevitable culmination very shortly thereafter! ;)
Yep. That's why the free distribution of condoms, which gets such a strong reaction from certain parents who think it "encourages" their kid to have sex, is a good idea. Once the sinusoidal rhythm is about to start, they're not as likely to run to a drugstore, but if they have a condom right there...
There's an inherent fallacy in your argument - you've made the assumption that teaching kids how & where to buy & use condoms/contraception & exercise safe sex is easier than just getting them to say no. Or that they'll listen to one more than the other. Just sayin... ;)
Well, I didn't make the assumption, but yes, I didn't link to the data. There's hard data that shows that abstinence only education does not lower the teen pregnancy rates, but safe-sex education along with free distribution of condoms does. I'll let you google for that, because I'm lazy :)
When you think about it, it's not that surprising. Horny kids want to have sex, but don't want kids of their own. We're providing them with a way to avoid the consequences without having to give up the sex.
So register as an Independent, then they'll pay attention to you. Vote for some crackpot third party candidate and you don't exist.
I live in South Carolina. If I don't want Romney to be President, voting for Obama doesn't really mean my vote count. He's not winning this state.
Not that I like Obama anyway. Voting for a third-party candidate here actually makes more of a difference, as it gives that third party uptick the GP was talking about.
So how do you define the Anthropic Principle?
I'll let Richard Feynman explain, considering he was able to explain anything better than I possibly could:
You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!
The anthropic principle is the observation that the question, "what are the odds the universe would have this particular state" after it already has that state is irrelevant. The odds for any particular lottery number are extremely low, which is why you can't win. However, that doesn't mean some number won't come up every week. And given enough people playing, people win all the time. It doesn't mean you'd win, but if the universe had different constants, maybe some other type of life very, very different from ours would have won out and would be arguing that an universe like ours couldn't possibly support any life.
I once proposed here that not having sex is a pretty good way to stay clear of HIV and was immediately bashed as a religious zealot.
I'm not religious and I have no problem with that sentence as stated, although in a different context I'd probably assume it's a joke, due to impracticality of asking people not to have sex. What was the context? Were you promoting teaching abstinence instead of teaching safe sex?
The reason that abstinence is labelled as the strategy proposed by religious fanatics is because it doesn't work. It's not that being abstinent won't make you safe from STDs, it's that teaching abstinence doesn't actually make teens abstinent.
I'm perfectly fine with teaching kids to wait until they're ready, just so long as you also teach them to have safe sex once they decide to stop waiting.
This, and increase your braking distance. Riding up the guy in front's chuff in ice is asking for a big hike in your insurance premiums.
Where I live, snow can sometimes happen, but we don't get it every year. As a result, people have no idea how to drive in it. Well, 12 years ago I was in college and it started snowing right as I left class (so they didn't cancel it, like they usually do at any sign of white stuff). So I got to my car to head home and everybody was trying to get home as quickly as possible. I'm not going to say I'm a great driver or anything, but I knew enough to keep an increased distance between me and the car in front while on the interstate. Well, impatient drivers don't like that, and traffic is already moving at 20 mph. So this guy in a truck with his friends honk their horn at me while trying to thread his way to the lane next to me, gets on the other lane, flicks me off while passing me (for probably a full minute, it's not like his lane was moving that much faster), cuts back in front of me and proceeds to immediately hit the brakes and slide into the rear of the car in front.
If it weren't for the inconvenience of the poor guy who got hit as well as everybody else who now has to deal with the increased traffic caused by the accident, I'd call it justice. I have to admit to laughing when it happened, especially as I passed him. Lesson of the day: don't be an impatient douchebag, you'll get home quicker if you drive smart.
And yet no one was under the presumption that the iPhone would run OS X software.
That is certainly not true. I personally new two people who asked me how to put their OS X apps on their iPhone when it came out, who trotted out the "but it runs OS X" when I explained that they couldn't.
Honestly, I'm not going to say that this was a big deal, I think my anecdote was probably unusual. However, mac users aren't mac users because of legacy application support. Windows users' only reason for not switching to something else is legacy application support. Who was the last person you talked to that said they liked Windows?
Seriously, .NET 2.0 came out in 2005. What's changed between 2005 and 2012 that makes you unable to learn something a bit new? Even .NET 1.0 which (aside from similarities to Java) was basically a new platform is only about a decade old, yet you apparently managed to learn it. If you're asking whether you can learn a new platform, rather than just learning it, then you might be to old...
Yeah. I saw the question and thought, "so take 3 or 4 weekends to write a few programs and catch up? What's the problem?"
Based on our observations of our very specific corner of the universe, over what amounts to an insignificant speck of time, viewing through a limited scope of technology that has been built in a hierarchical fashion upon possibly flawed assumptions about our reality. We've only been at this whole science thing, relative to modern physics, for a couple hundred years. It's presumptuous beyond reason to presume that we have a firm and unwavering grasp of the nature of energy that even fifty-thousand years of testing will not budge. To assert such is to sound like a flat-Earther.
To be clear: it is entirely possible that we know everything there is to know about the nature of energy to the extent that our assumptions herein are effectively true, and all of our observations to date support that, but it is absurd to assume, given the historical record of science in general, that further refinements will not be made over a period of time orders of magnitude greater than we've even had this cute thing called "civilization" -- never mind "science".
If you want to tell me that a sufficiently advanced civilization has faster than light drives and is capable of time-travel, I'm going to tell you, "that's highly unlikely, but possible." But no civilization absolutely anywhere regardless of how wondrous their science is has beaten the Carnot cycle. It's not arrogance or presumption. It's simple evidence. And to deny evidence is what a flat-Earther does.
You can pull the whole, "we couldn't possibly have connected enough evidence card", but that's the equivalent of religion. Sure, I might not be able to prove your particular religion is wrong. But considering there's no evidence for it, to assume otherwise isn't scientific. Once I have evidence to the contrary, I'll change my mind on anything, but the evidence needs to come first.
Energy can't be used for work, only energy difference can. If they didn't radiate away the captured sunlight they would overheat very quickly.
For us, this is true. For a civilization with the 50k years of scientific and engineering experience necessary to realistically embark on such a lofty project as a Dyson Sphere, probably not.
Incorrect. It doesn't matter how advanced a civilization gets, they're not breaking the laws of physics. And this is one of those laws of physics that we are 100% sure we are correct. There is no way around thermodynamics, we are not wrong about it.
Or people holding off for Windows 8? Or are general consumers are aware that 8 is coming soon?
If they were, they'd be buying it now, while they can still get Windows 7.
The upcoming release of Windows 8 isn't something to look forward to, it's something to fear. Especially for a software developer like I am, because I know I can't skip it, at least not at work. I've got to test on it.
Reaction time to a specific, anticipated event, you're likely right. But there's one crucial element to navigation that humans can do that computers currently can't - make arbitrary, seemingly illogical decisions in the heat of the moment. Take GP's hypothetical about the cliffside road - most humans, thanks to self-preservation instinct, will choose to rear-end the other car rather than drive off the ledge; what would a computer that is programmed to "avoid contact with other cars at all costs" do in that situation? Hyperbole aside, there's no way of knowing until we put one in that real world situation.
Yes. Humans would never drive off a cliff, thanks to this self-preservation instinct. A self-driving car, on the other hand, could make such mistakes, because the engineers would never think of a scenario slashdotters come up with 5 seconds after seeing a story about self-driving cars. They would certainly never put their algorithms to the test. If it compiles, ship it. Right?
Relevant quote from the last link:
So confident is Volvo in this safety mechanism, it says that if the lead vehicle were to drive off a cliff, the next vehicle could stop before reaching the edge.
The question is not is it better than some hypothetical human driver, but is it better than the drivers we have right now.
No, the question is: is it better than me?
If not, I don't want it driving my car.
It is.
You're not that great of a driver. Being human prevents you from being a better driver. You only have eyes in front of you, and you need to turn your head and look around, pay attention to mirrors, each time taking your attention away from where you are going for a fraction of a second. The computer can pay attention to 360 degree sensors 100% of the time. Once you detect the need to take immediate action, you need to move your leg to hit the brakes. For the computer controlling the car, the brakes are accessible immediately upon determining they need to be used.
At peak performance, a well rested and attentive driver will still not be as good as a well programmed machine. You can argue the machine isn't well programmed, but they're already better than the average driver, and every single mistake that results in a crash would result in a software update to every other self-driving car that is now guaranteed to not make the same mistake. So they'll become better than the best driver in no time once they are in common usage.