I see alot of people talking about nuclear waste and how to handle it. Wouldn't it be possible to use some of that to build RTGs or something similar? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator) Those materials are releasing energy, if we could put it to use, then this "waste" would become a useful asset.
And about geothermal energy becoming our main source of energy someday. It all sounds nice, but, wouldn't it be a bit risky if we used geothermal energy for almost 100% of our energy needs? I'm not a geologist, but it seems to me like this could accelerate the cooling of the earth's core... And if it ever became solid, our planet could be without a magnetic field. Of course, we're talking about very long term consequences, but it would suck to have the earth lose its atmosphere to space as Mars did... Especially if we never even manage to leave the solar system. Of course, if this possibility is millions of years away, then I suppose it could be acceptable to use geothermal energy until we can find something better (I'm hoping we'll have managed fusion, 1000 years from now).
>> First is the limited range; nobody more than around 150 light years away would be able to detect intelligent life on earth.
I have to agree with that one. It seems somewhat futile given the extremely low odds of detection. Furthermore, it seems hard to imagine we could really have meaningful exchanges with a civilization hundreds of lightyears away. That being said, if we ever did discover evidence of alien intelligence elsewhere in the universe, it would change alot of things here on earth. It would give a huge morale boost to many science fields, for one.
>> they may turn out to be hostile
Someone else said that "there is no reason to assume they wouldn't be hostile. I would say there is. Whenever I see the Klingon on Star Trek act in violent and barbaric ways, I wonder if it really is realistic to assume such a society could ever compete with a more "peaceful" one like the federation, on the technological level. If your society is full of violent individuals, places "being a strong warrior" above everything else, and you can get randomly killed at any time, I think that slows down scientific progress alot. In my opinion, individuals need to be "peaceful" enough for society to be rather stable in order for science to progress. Furthermore, a scientifically advanced society would probably realize that there is not much point in simply eradicating other life forms "for fun".
>> and they may discover that we are tasty, or good speceship fuel, etc.
I wouldn't worry too much about that either. If they actually are capable of getting here, it means they can get to any other nearby star. They probably have already mastered things like nuclear fusion, in which case, you know, hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. Energy itself, in this universe, is abundant. THE resource we have that is worth something is the earth itself, but it's only worth something to aliens, in my opinion, if they are biologically similar to us (breathe oxygen, similar temperature tolerances, etc.). Again, however, I would argue that if they have the capability of getting here, they are probably not "starved" in terms of energy. They would probably be capable of building themselves a new planet next to ours.
>> They may be intelligent enough that we don't even appear sentient to them. I'm not sure I want us to find intelligent extraterrestrials.
I find that idea rather ridiculous. We are sentient. Do you think there is something such as being "supersentient"?
The problem is that there isn't much market for transporting humans to space. Even if they could do it at a third of the cost NASA can manage, it would still be too expensive for everyone but the richest of the richest. Practically, the only people with the interest and the budget right now are government agencies.
Beyond that, the rockets used to launch people into space are usually not the same as those used for satellite launches, limiting the usability of that equipment for other purposes.
If I'm not mistaken, batteries generate less heat when you pull out less current. A battery made up of very many cells should dissipate less heat per unit area than a more compact one.
Many people bring forward this idea. I think it stems from the fact that "traditional" AI (which has only really been around for 60 years or so) has not yet yielded a "sentient" computer. People feel that this somehow means traditional AI, and even our whole computational model can't yield sentience. They attribute intelligence to the fabric rather than the logic it implements. I think these people fail to realize that whatever computation biological brains implement, we could simulate it on traditional computers, *if we even knew what is being computed*. The problem is that, so far, beyond the first layers of our visual system, and some very simple systems, we know not much about the way the brain is connected. However, from what's been discovered in neuroscience, it seems pretty clear that the early layers of the visual cortex perform simple convolutional operation that do not involve quantum physics, or fancy shmancy things we couldn't do *more efficiently* with silicon.
The human brain is very complex, but given enough time, we very well might get to understand what makes us sentient and be able to replicate it in a computer. My personal opinion is that the brain is full of specialized hardware that has evolved over a very long time, and helps us to specific tasks (eg: facial recognition, hand-eye coordination, obstacle avoidance, language decoding), with a very powerful abstraction logic built on top (the stuff that "makes us sentient"). This abstraction logic is possibly very complex, and perhaps too difficult for us to conceive of at this time. If we are to learn anything from the rest of the brain, most of this logic probably focuses on transforming perceptual information into a form that makes it easy to reason with. On top of this, we probably again have specialized mechanisms, to do things like deduce causal relationships and generate hypotheses or semi-random associations of concepts (creativity).
The reason the "traditional AI" camp hasn't succeeded at making sentient machines are multiple, but I would sum them up as follows:
1) They have mostly given up. You probably can't get funding for claiming you'll come up with HAL9000, you'll sound like a wacko. Current AI research focuses simple learning problems (i.e.: supervised learning, reinforcement learning).
2) The approaches tried in the past focused purely on formal logic, which, as we now know, works badly in open-ended environments. For it to work well, the properties of the environment have to be simple, restricted and well-defined.
3) Supervised learning, unsupervised learning, etc., will not yield sentience. These approaches, which may actually exist in the brain, are good at solving problems of limited scope only. Our brains are not big wads of neurons performing a single computation. They are much more intricate and integrate many specialized components.
The "right" approach to AI is probably an overall approach, integrating many existing techniques into one system. Perhaps an "engineering" approach to AI would work better. Focus on constructing it and then refining it, as opposed to developing an overall theory of how it will work first and trying to reduce it to its simplest component. We already have computer systems that do speech synthesis, speech recognition, facial recognition, depth perception, 3D model reconstruction, etc. We also have unsupervised learning, supervised learning, reinforcement learning, fuzzy logic, knowledge bases, automatic theorem provers, etc. It should be possible to build a non-completely stupid AI, if one combined all these techniques in the appropriate way. How to connect them, however, is probably where the true AI problem resides.
>> Intel is going to have to come out with a GPU that's better than a 4 year old nvidia gpu first.
Not to flame or anything, but the GeForce 6800 GT was released in 2004. I owned one for some time, and it could comfortably play Half-Life 2/Left 4 Dead at 1920x1200 with 2xAA. I also owned a laptop with a GeForce 7600 Go (2006 videocard) which did O.K. in Prey, a rather demanding video game at the time. Can any Intel GPU even manage to play those games comfortably at 1280x800? My girlfriend owns a recent Sony Vaio laptop with a GMA chip, and it's not really good enough to play WoW.
I've heard that the game was pretty far along when they switched to the Unreal engine. It's true that Unreal was a much better engine than Quake II... But, there have been many open source projects demonstrating that those game engines can pretty easily be upgraded. They could have saved themselves license money and avoided re-making all their assets by going that route instead.
I myself used to run an indie game project. We were making our own game engine, and at the time, I was a pretty naive programmer. I liked to implement everything myself (reinventing the wheel). I was also never satisfied with the quality of what we had made, and so we restarted the engine development twice. This lead to other members of the team losing motivation, and the game never got completed. I think it's pretty easy to not be satisfied with what you have, but the lesson I took from this project is "refactor/reuse, don't recreate". Refactoring programming code can seem tedious, but in the end, it's always faster than starting completely from scratch, and you avoid losing what you already have.
If it's one of those "let the programmer sort out memory access and cache management" kind of architecture, that will make developping any kind of software for it much harder than traditional SMP, and it kind of defeats the point of having x86 cores in the first place. Just look at the cell processor in the PS3... Lots of games don't use it, simply because it's hard to program.
There is at least one reason why this might work better than a regular police sketch. People's memories are bad, but I believe people have an easier time looking at something and identifying it than recalling specific details about that something on demand. Case in point: you may not be able to exactly remember the melody or the lyrics of a song you head only once, but if that song is played, you will be able to tell you heard it before, and it seems likely that you would be able to tell if the melody wasn't the same as before. If you had to pick between a few altered versions of that same song and the original song, you could probably tell which one you listened to before. It's similar for faces. We think we remember people's faces well because if we see someone we've met before, we can recognize them. However, if you met someone only once, and tried to draw their face the next day, you would probably have a hard time recalling what they looked like.
Still, you can get fairly decent video quality at 720p on youtube nowadays, with connections that aren't so fast (mine is limited to 8mbps download). On a cellphone, you probably can't realistically get very fast speeds just yet (500 kbps?) but the screen is also much smaller. As connections get faster, approaches like this become more feasible.
Another way to see this is that Nvidia just wants to expand its marketshare. They are likely hoping that with something like this, they could sell expensive server equipment (to game companies) for you to play online games on, with the rendering being done remotely. This would make it possible for people to play 3D games that are very CPU/GPU expensives on any platform that can stream and render the video fast enough. Imagine playing WoW on your iPhone... They might just be able to sell this.
The good thing is that this kind of data will help us develop tests to predict the occurrence of many diseases, and perhaps understand their causes better.
The bad is that private insurance companies are likely to eventually *require* you to get a DNA sample, and possibly reject you if they determine your genes predispose you to old-age diseases.
Where it gets ugly, is that this will be yet another tool that could allow screening of unborn fetuses, and potentially selective abortions. I'm not personally against this. We're overpopulated anyways, but some people clearly don't like that idea.
You know the way Robocop's gun was contained in its leg, and the holster would come out when needed... I think he means something like that, but holding something other than a gun. Something like a retractable roboboner... Just be careful to avoid bending over to pick stuff up when those machines come around!
I honestly think the main reason flying cars won't happen (for a while at least) is that VTOLs are much less fuel efficient than cars. As for safety, I think we would simply need an automated driving system... This could actually be much easier to setup for flying vehicles than ground vehicles. Simply need an accurate GPS system, and some communication with a central computer which knows all the "air corridors" for your area and does traffic management.
This doesn't have much to do with computer science and more to do with computer engineering. Being a computer scientist myself, I'm perfectly happy with a kilobyte being defined as 1000 bytes, while still using the word "kilobyte" when speaking of "approximately 1000 bytes". The reason powers of two are so common in computing is because it has been easier to build computer systems around them. It makes for "cleaner" and more "natural" engineering, when you're working with binary systems.
However, while RAM chips most often have capacities in powers of 2, because of the way addressing is done, this is not true of mechanical hard drives... It just seems strange to try to redefine SI prefixes because they have come to be incorrectly used in the field. Hard drive manufacturers are using them properly, because it makes sense in their domain (their drive capacities are not linked to powers of two). On that note, I'm pretty sure most SSD makers use 1 KB = 1024 bytes, because it's more convenient for them.
I agree. I don't see what RF wireless would solve. It would probably consume more power, have less bandwidth, be more vulnerable to interference, etc. Optical interconnects, on the other hand, offer potentially immense amounts of bandwidth, produce no heat (outside of the light emitters), allow a longer distance between chips, are invulnerable to rf interference, etc. Last I heard, Intel is actually pouring money into researching this kind of technology, trying to find ways to build laser diodes into the fabric of chips.
Well, how do you define PI using a finite amount of information, exactly? You can write a program that will compute it and store that program using finite storage... But as far as we know, you will need an infinite amount of time to compute it, and the actual ratio will take an infinite number of bits to be stored.
Well, I'm not a mathematician, but it seems to me that's precisely why there isn't a repetitive pattern in the numerical representation. If there was, that would mean the ratio can be exactly defined by a finite amount of information. It seems to me that asking for a finite decimal represensation of pi is similar to asking someone to exactly represent a circle out of line segments (or to exactly define a circle using a finite set of points). The circumference of the circle is the sum of the length of line segments delineating the circle. The problem is that you need infinitely many of them to exactly define the circle.
Nowadays, something like LLVM could be built into the kernel to handle all the JIT code generation. That would make it more portable and easier to debug. Having written a JIT compiler using LLVM myself, I can tell you it's not that difficult. Anyone that understands assembly well can do it, in fact, you don't even need to know all the details. If the OS was going to generate snippets of code to jump to certain points in a program, the bugs would probably get ironed out pretty quickly.
I assume the gasoline doesn't keep well because tanks are metal, and there is some sort of chemical reaction happening, or perhaps some metal is getting dissolved into it. In that case, wouldn't the problem be fixed by keeping the gasoline in a plastic container in your trunk? That way you still get to use it as a reserve in emergency scenarios, and it hopefully wouldn't go bad.
On my desktop, I use a wired "razer copperhead" gaming mouse because I occasionally play FPS games and enjoy the higher accuracy and the number presence of side buttons. The mouse is very comfortable for daily use because it's light and slides well on my desk. I think the mouse I use is very good for its technical qualities.I'll say I've never tried modern wireless mice. The ones I tried were the older, bulky models, with all the problems that could come with wireless (lost signal, frequent battery replacement, etc.). I do agree with other posters, however, that even if you could guarantee that a modern wireless mouse did not have any of those issues, it would not be an incentive to change.
My mouse just works. It does everything I want and it does it well... And well, it *never ever* needs any kind of charging or battery replacement. For me to want a wireless mouse, it would have to somehow provide an advantage over this one. I suspect laptop users get more benefit from wireless mice than me, because in their case, the wire and the plugging/unplugging is an actual concern... Me, I just love my big desk. To each their own.
Wish I had mod points right now. This is very true. Simply using containers in C++ eliminates 95%+ of all memory management you would otherwise need to worry about. You can actually write complete, real-world C++ programs without ever calling new or delete.
I personally don't use boost, but I've heard that it also offers manager pointers that delete objects for you (and do so better than auto_ptr). This can eliminate the need to keep track of allocation/deallocation completely in many programs.
Myself, I'm programming a JIT compiler in C++ right now. I use Boehm's garbage collector to manage all language objects (the language is garbage collected). I use containers extensively for most of my other memory management needs.
I recently had to upgrade from a 2 year old 500W power supply because it didn't have enough (6 pin?) power cables for my GeForce 9800GTX. I was honestly disappointed, but went ahead and bought a new one. I now have a 700W power supply from rocketfish, and I think that's quite insane.
In the end, I think graphics card manufacturers might just go back to external power bricks. Either that, or people will get tired of ever-increasing power and cooling requirements... I think that console manufacturers, for one, would not be so happy with the idea of having to design a console that can supply 400W+ to a GPU. This might pressure GPU manufacturers into limiting the power requirements of their future chips.
The project was started somewhere after the completion of the Duke Nukem 3D game (1996-1997). That game was pretty successful, and so 3D Realms looked like it might be worth investing in. I'm guessing Take Two didn't invest all that money in 2009.
Furthermore, 3D Realms released some rather credible video trailers for the game, once in 1998, and again in 2001:
There is obvious value in having some control over people's internet experience. Having people's homepage default to MSN, for example, allows Microsoft to expose users to Microsoft's view of the internet. Their own search engine, their own news sources, their own social network, etc. There is advertising money to be made from this, but I believe Microsoft is also realizing that the internet is becoming worth alot more than it used to be In my opinion, this is simply Microsoft trying to turn itself into a company that provides services, a bit like Google.
The PC market used to be, in the early 80s, about selling hardware. But hardware became cheap and widely available, so the market moved into the software world (Microsoft makes more money than PC makers). However, operating systems are bringing less and less truely novel features with each release, which makes it easier for competitors like Linux and Mac OS... Software will eventually be cheap and commodized like hardware. At that point, the software market will be much less profitable than it is now. Offering services seems like a better option, because those are harder to commodize.
I would think they're pretty serious about this. Google pours alot of R&D money into improving its search engine. In their mind, I believe this represents another step closer to one day having a search engine that can truely understand questions asked by users, which really, is the ultimate goal for any search engine.
It seems obvious that for them to publicize this now is a response to Wolfram Alpha, but clearly, Google wants to keep is technological edge over the competition. Now, what will be interesting to see is how much people care about these new search options, and whether or not someone buys Wolfram Alpha.
Slashdot Mirror
I see alot of people talking about nuclear waste and how to handle it. Wouldn't it be possible to use some of that to build RTGs or something similar? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator) Those materials are releasing energy, if we could put it to use, then this "waste" would become a useful asset.
And about geothermal energy becoming our main source of energy someday. It all sounds nice, but, wouldn't it be a bit risky if we used geothermal energy for almost 100% of our energy needs? I'm not a geologist, but it seems to me like this could accelerate the cooling of the earth's core... And if it ever became solid, our planet could be without a magnetic field. Of course, we're talking about very long term consequences, but it would suck to have the earth lose its atmosphere to space as Mars did... Especially if we never even manage to leave the solar system. Of course, if this possibility is millions of years away, then I suppose it could be acceptable to use geothermal energy until we can find something better (I'm hoping we'll have managed fusion, 1000 years from now).
>> First is the limited range; nobody more than around 150 light years away would be able to detect intelligent life on earth.
I have to agree with that one. It seems somewhat futile given the extremely low odds of detection. Furthermore, it seems hard to imagine we could really have meaningful exchanges with a civilization hundreds of lightyears away. That being said, if we ever did discover evidence of alien intelligence elsewhere in the universe, it would change alot of things here on earth. It would give a huge morale boost to many science fields, for one.
>> they may turn out to be hostile
Someone else said that "there is no reason to assume they wouldn't be hostile. I would say there is. Whenever I see the Klingon on Star Trek act in violent and barbaric ways, I wonder if it really is realistic to assume such a society could ever compete with a more "peaceful" one like the federation, on the technological level. If your society is full of violent individuals, places "being a strong warrior" above everything else, and you can get randomly killed at any time, I think that slows down scientific progress alot. In my opinion, individuals need to be "peaceful" enough for society to be rather stable in order for science to progress. Furthermore, a scientifically advanced society would probably realize that there is not much point in simply eradicating other life forms "for fun".
>> and they may discover that we are tasty, or good speceship fuel, etc.
I wouldn't worry too much about that either. If they actually are capable of getting here, it means they can get to any other nearby star. They probably have already mastered things like nuclear fusion, in which case, you know, hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. Energy itself, in this universe, is abundant. THE resource we have that is worth something is the earth itself, but it's only worth something to aliens, in my opinion, if they are biologically similar to us (breathe oxygen, similar temperature tolerances, etc.). Again, however, I would argue that if they have the capability of getting here, they are probably not "starved" in terms of energy. They would probably be capable of building themselves a new planet next to ours.
>> They may be intelligent enough that we don't even appear sentient to them. I'm not sure I want us to find intelligent extraterrestrials.
I find that idea rather ridiculous. We are sentient. Do you think there is something such as being "supersentient"?
The problem is that there isn't much market for transporting humans to space. Even if they could do it at a third of the cost NASA can manage, it would still be too expensive for everyone but the richest of the richest. Practically, the only people with the interest and the budget right now are government agencies.
Beyond that, the rockets used to launch people into space are usually not the same as those used for satellite launches, limiting the usability of that equipment for other purposes.
If I'm not mistaken, batteries generate less heat when you pull out less current. A battery made up of very many cells should dissipate less heat per unit area than a more compact one.
Many people bring forward this idea. I think it stems from the fact that "traditional" AI (which has only really been around for 60 years or so) has not yet yielded a "sentient" computer. People feel that this somehow means traditional AI, and even our whole computational model can't yield sentience. They attribute intelligence to the fabric rather than the logic it implements. I think these people fail to realize that whatever computation biological brains implement, we could simulate it on traditional computers, *if we even knew what is being computed*. The problem is that, so far, beyond the first layers of our visual system, and some very simple systems, we know not much about the way the brain is connected. However, from what's been discovered in neuroscience, it seems pretty clear that the early layers of the visual cortex perform simple convolutional operation that do not involve quantum physics, or fancy shmancy things we couldn't do *more efficiently* with silicon.
The human brain is very complex, but given enough time, we very well might get to understand what makes us sentient and be able to replicate it in a computer. My personal opinion is that the brain is full of specialized hardware that has evolved over a very long time, and helps us to specific tasks (eg: facial recognition, hand-eye coordination, obstacle avoidance, language decoding), with a very powerful abstraction logic built on top (the stuff that "makes us sentient"). This abstraction logic is possibly very complex, and perhaps too difficult for us to conceive of at this time. If we are to learn anything from the rest of the brain, most of this logic probably focuses on transforming perceptual information into a form that makes it easy to reason with. On top of this, we probably again have specialized mechanisms, to do things like deduce causal relationships and generate hypotheses or semi-random associations of concepts (creativity).
The reason the "traditional AI" camp hasn't succeeded at making sentient machines are multiple, but I would sum them up as follows:
1) They have mostly given up. You probably can't get funding for claiming you'll come up with HAL9000, you'll sound like a wacko. Current AI research focuses simple learning problems (i.e.: supervised learning, reinforcement learning).
2) The approaches tried in the past focused purely on formal logic, which, as we now know, works badly in open-ended environments. For it to work well, the properties of the environment have to be simple, restricted and well-defined.
3) Supervised learning, unsupervised learning, etc., will not yield sentience. These approaches, which may actually exist in the brain, are good at solving problems of limited scope only. Our brains are not big wads of neurons performing a single computation. They are much more intricate and integrate many specialized components.
The "right" approach to AI is probably an overall approach, integrating many existing techniques into one system. Perhaps an "engineering" approach to AI would work better. Focus on constructing it and then refining it, as opposed to developing an overall theory of how it will work first and trying to reduce it to its simplest component. We already have computer systems that do speech synthesis, speech recognition, facial recognition, depth perception, 3D model reconstruction, etc. We also have unsupervised learning, supervised learning, reinforcement learning, fuzzy logic, knowledge bases, automatic theorem provers, etc. It should be possible to build a non-completely stupid AI, if one combined all these techniques in the appropriate way. How to connect them, however, is probably where the true AI problem resides.
>> Intel is going to have to come out with a GPU that's better than a 4 year old nvidia gpu first.
Not to flame or anything, but the GeForce 6800 GT was released in 2004. I owned one for some time, and it could comfortably play Half-Life 2/Left 4 Dead at 1920x1200 with 2xAA. I also owned a laptop with a GeForce 7600 Go (2006 videocard) which did O.K. in Prey, a rather demanding video game at the time. Can any Intel GPU even manage to play those games comfortably at 1280x800? My girlfriend owns a recent Sony Vaio laptop with a GMA chip, and it's not really good enough to play WoW.
I've heard that the game was pretty far along when they switched to the Unreal engine. It's true that Unreal was a much better engine than Quake II... But, there have been many open source projects demonstrating that those game engines can pretty easily be upgraded. They could have saved themselves license money and avoided re-making all their assets by going that route instead.
I myself used to run an indie game project. We were making our own game engine, and at the time, I was a pretty naive programmer. I liked to implement everything myself (reinventing the wheel). I was also never satisfied with the quality of what we had made, and so we restarted the engine development twice. This lead to other members of the team losing motivation, and the game never got completed. I think it's pretty easy to not be satisfied with what you have, but the lesson I took from this project is "refactor/reuse, don't recreate". Refactoring programming code can seem tedious, but in the end, it's always faster than starting completely from scratch, and you avoid losing what you already have.
If it's one of those "let the programmer sort out memory access and cache management" kind of architecture, that will make developping any kind of software for it much harder than traditional SMP, and it kind of defeats the point of having x86 cores in the first place. Just look at the cell processor in the PS3... Lots of games don't use it, simply because it's hard to program.
There is at least one reason why this might work better than a regular police sketch. People's memories are bad, but I believe people have an easier time looking at something and identifying it than recalling specific details about that something on demand. Case in point: you may not be able to exactly remember the melody or the lyrics of a song you head only once, but if that song is played, you will be able to tell you heard it before, and it seems likely that you would be able to tell if the melody wasn't the same as before. If you had to pick between a few altered versions of that same song and the original song, you could probably tell which one you listened to before. It's similar for faces. We think we remember people's faces well because if we see someone we've met before, we can recognize them. However, if you met someone only once, and tried to draw their face the next day, you would probably have a hard time recalling what they looked like.
Still, you can get fairly decent video quality at 720p on youtube nowadays, with connections that aren't so fast (mine is limited to 8mbps download). On a cellphone, you probably can't realistically get very fast speeds just yet (500 kbps?) but the screen is also much smaller. As connections get faster, approaches like this become more feasible.
Another way to see this is that Nvidia just wants to expand its marketshare. They are likely hoping that with something like this, they could sell expensive server equipment (to game companies) for you to play online games on, with the rendering being done remotely. This would make it possible for people to play 3D games that are very CPU/GPU expensives on any platform that can stream and render the video fast enough. Imagine playing WoW on your iPhone... They might just be able to sell this.
The good thing is that this kind of data will help us develop tests to predict the occurrence of many diseases, and perhaps understand their causes better.
The bad is that private insurance companies are likely to eventually *require* you to get a DNA sample, and possibly reject you if they determine your genes predispose you to old-age diseases.
Where it gets ugly, is that this will be yet another tool that could allow screening of unborn fetuses, and potentially selective abortions. I'm not personally against this. We're overpopulated anyways, but some people clearly don't like that idea.
You know the way Robocop's gun was contained in its leg, and the holster would come out when needed... I think he means something like that, but holding something other than a gun. Something like a retractable roboboner... Just be careful to avoid bending over to pick stuff up when those machines come around!
I honestly think the main reason flying cars won't happen (for a while at least) is that VTOLs are much less fuel efficient than cars. As for safety, I think we would simply need an automated driving system... This could actually be much easier to setup for flying vehicles than ground vehicles. Simply need an accurate GPS system, and some communication with a central computer which knows all the "air corridors" for your area and does traffic management.
This doesn't have much to do with computer science and more to do with computer engineering. Being a computer scientist myself, I'm perfectly happy with a kilobyte being defined as 1000 bytes, while still using the word "kilobyte" when speaking of "approximately 1000 bytes". The reason powers of two are so common in computing is because it has been easier to build computer systems around them. It makes for "cleaner" and more "natural" engineering, when you're working with binary systems.
However, while RAM chips most often have capacities in powers of 2, because of the way addressing is done, this is not true of mechanical hard drives... It just seems strange to try to redefine SI prefixes because they have come to be incorrectly used in the field. Hard drive manufacturers are using them properly, because it makes sense in their domain (their drive capacities are not linked to powers of two). On that note, I'm pretty sure most SSD makers use 1 KB = 1024 bytes, because it's more convenient for them.
I agree. I don't see what RF wireless would solve. It would probably consume more power, have less bandwidth, be more vulnerable to interference, etc. Optical interconnects, on the other hand, offer potentially immense amounts of bandwidth, produce no heat (outside of the light emitters), allow a longer distance between chips, are invulnerable to rf interference, etc. Last I heard, Intel is actually pouring money into researching this kind of technology, trying to find ways to build laser diodes into the fabric of chips.
Well, how do you define PI using a finite amount of information, exactly? You can write a program that will compute it and store that program using finite storage... But as far as we know, you will need an infinite amount of time to compute it, and the actual ratio will take an infinite number of bits to be stored.
Well, I'm not a mathematician, but it seems to me that's precisely why there isn't a repetitive pattern in the numerical representation. If there was, that would mean the ratio can be exactly defined by a finite amount of information. It seems to me that asking for a finite decimal represensation of pi is similar to asking someone to exactly represent a circle out of line segments (or to exactly define a circle using a finite set of points). The circumference of the circle is the sum of the length of line segments delineating the circle. The problem is that you need infinitely many of them to exactly define the circle.
Nowadays, something like LLVM could be built into the kernel to handle all the JIT code generation. That would make it more portable and easier to debug. Having written a JIT compiler using LLVM myself, I can tell you it's not that difficult. Anyone that understands assembly well can do it, in fact, you don't even need to know all the details. If the OS was going to generate snippets of code to jump to certain points in a program, the bugs would probably get ironed out pretty quickly.
I assume the gasoline doesn't keep well because tanks are metal, and there is some sort of chemical reaction happening, or perhaps some metal is getting dissolved into it. In that case, wouldn't the problem be fixed by keeping the gasoline in a plastic container in your trunk? That way you still get to use it as a reserve in emergency scenarios, and it hopefully wouldn't go bad.
On my desktop, I use a wired "razer copperhead" gaming mouse because I occasionally play FPS games and enjoy the higher accuracy and the number presence of side buttons. The mouse is very comfortable for daily use because it's light and slides well on my desk. I think the mouse I use is very good for its technical qualities.I'll say I've never tried modern wireless mice. The ones I tried were the older, bulky models, with all the problems that could come with wireless (lost signal, frequent battery replacement, etc.). I do agree with other posters, however, that even if you could guarantee that a modern wireless mouse did not have any of those issues, it would not be an incentive to change.
My mouse just works. It does everything I want and it does it well... And well, it *never ever* needs any kind of charging or battery replacement. For me to want a wireless mouse, it would have to somehow provide an advantage over this one. I suspect laptop users get more benefit from wireless mice than me, because in their case, the wire and the plugging/unplugging is an actual concern... Me, I just love my big desk. To each their own.
Wish I had mod points right now. This is very true. Simply using containers in C++ eliminates 95%+ of all memory management you would otherwise need to worry about. You can actually write complete, real-world C++ programs without ever calling new or delete.
I personally don't use boost, but I've heard that it also offers manager pointers that delete objects for you (and do so better than auto_ptr). This can eliminate the need to keep track of allocation/deallocation completely in many programs.
Myself, I'm programming a JIT compiler in C++ right now. I use Boehm's garbage collector to manage all language objects (the language is garbage collected). I use containers extensively for most of my other memory management needs.
Back in the day, just before 3DFX went down, the Voodoo5 graphics card had its own power brick: http://regmedia.co.uk/2006/08/10/3dfx_voodoo5_6k_2.jpg
I recently had to upgrade from a 2 year old 500W power supply because it didn't have enough (6 pin?) power cables for my GeForce 9800GTX. I was honestly disappointed, but went ahead and bought a new one. I now have a 700W power supply from rocketfish, and I think that's quite insane.
In the end, I think graphics card manufacturers might just go back to external power bricks. Either that, or people will get tired of ever-increasing power and cooling requirements... I think that console manufacturers, for one, would not be so happy with the idea of having to design a console that can supply 400W+ to a GPU. This might pressure GPU manufacturers into limiting the power requirements of their future chips.
The project was started somewhere after the completion of the Duke Nukem 3D game (1996-1997). That game was pretty successful, and so 3D Realms looked like it might be worth investing in. I'm guessing Take Two didn't invest all that money in 2009.
Furthermore, 3D Realms released some rather credible video trailers for the game, once in 1998, and again in 2001:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88F0J70ZkeM (1998)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKcxL4PmXfA (2001)
So clearly, even going as far as 2002, you could still believe 3D Realms was going to release *something* eventually...
There is obvious value in having some control over people's internet experience. Having people's homepage default to MSN, for example, allows Microsoft to expose users to Microsoft's view of the internet. Their own search engine, their own news sources, their own social network, etc. There is advertising money to be made from this, but I believe Microsoft is also realizing that the internet is becoming worth alot more than it used to be In my opinion, this is simply Microsoft trying to turn itself into a company that provides services, a bit like Google.
The PC market used to be, in the early 80s, about selling hardware. But hardware became cheap and widely available, so the market moved into the software world (Microsoft makes more money than PC makers). However, operating systems are bringing less and less truely novel features with each release, which makes it easier for competitors like Linux and Mac OS... Software will eventually be cheap and commodized like hardware. At that point, the software market will be much less profitable than it is now. Offering services seems like a better option, because those are harder to commodize.
I would think they're pretty serious about this. Google pours alot of R&D money into improving its search engine. In their mind, I believe this represents another step closer to one day having a search engine that can truely understand questions asked by users, which really, is the ultimate goal for any search engine.
It seems obvious that for them to publicize this now is a response to Wolfram Alpha, but clearly, Google wants to keep is technological edge over the competition. Now, what will be interesting to see is how much people care about these new search options, and whether or not someone buys Wolfram Alpha.