And instead of C3PO style protocol droids, we have cell phones with translator apps, or just a browser to point to Google translation. Again, because it makes no frikken sense to actually build a dedicated humanoid frame for just one application, when an app on a general purpose gadget will do the same thing.
Sure you wouldn't build a droid just to do translation, but what if the droid already existed? Cell phones weren't built to be translators either, but they already existed and someone added translation capabilities to them. You can bet shortly after robotic humanoids are perfected people will add things like translation to them.
After all, if you already have a droid to do your housework, it would make sense for it to translate as well - it wouldn't make any "frikken sense" to build a dedicated pocket-sized device to perform translation when your droid follows you everywhere already...
If you paid a few hundred dollars for a Linux license across a few thousand machines then I am sure the person taking your money would gladly provide you with patches for your 12 year old Debian machines, just like Microsoft does with XP.
I'm sure this will work. I was recently on a short (two hour) domestic flight, and it had satellite pay TV on board. For the first 10 minutes of the flight you could watch all channels for free, but then a message came up saying you had to swipe your credit card and pay $5 to keep watching for the rest of your flight, otherwise it would cut out.
I thought "Pfft, nobody is going to pay $5 for a couple of hours worth of crummy TV" but to my surprise nearly the entire plane started swiping credit cards! I've never heard so many cards being swiped at the same time before. I couldn't believe people would not only pay money for such poor TV, but they would do so for barely two hours of it!
As I tend not to waste money, I had planned ahead and went back to the book I had with me. But the point is, giving people a taste and making them pay for the rest really does work. See also 'shareware'.
Assuming 1000kg, wouldn't 100,000 tons then be 100 gigagrams? I've often wondered why we so readily apply an SI prefix to bits and bytes but almost never to things like grams and metres, apart from only 'kilo'.
Agree completely. I too have a Q6600 but with 8GB RAM and still Firefox slows down within a couple of days (version 11 here, the Aurora test version.) I couldn't use Chrome (the interface was too spartan) but the way the Firefox UI is going it probably won't be long until they're indistinguishable, then I will switch.
To be fair, I think some addons can cause this problem, and I know the session-saver struggles with the number of tabs I tend to have open. Annoyingly the back button is always pretty responsive, but I would much rather have a slow back button and a fast rest of the browser. And definitely you hit the nail on the head re separate processes for each tab. Having one slow tab take down the whole browser is *really* annoying under Firefox.
Shame Mozilla insist on copying all the useless UI features from Chrome, instead of the actual features like this that would make a big difference to the overall quality of the browser.
As Ray Kurzweil has pointed out, if Moore's law holds for another 30 years, a machine intelligence a billion times more powerful than all of humanity can emerge. [...]
What would such a thing need us for?
This argument always irks me. There are a lot of things in this world humans have no use for, but that doesn't mean we actively seek out and destroy them just because. If machine intelligence did arise I think it's far more likely it would eventually just ignore us and go about its business without us.
Of course humans have a tendency to pamper certain animals - cats and dogs mostly - although there is no "need" to do so. This means all we have to do is make sure we design robots that find humans irresistably cute and cuddly and then we've got it made.
Definitely agree with that. An 'adviser' salesperson is much easier to work with. I had to buy a new photocopier recently and went back to the same salesperson as the last time precisely because he wasn't pushy when all the others were. Interestingly enough he didn't always work in sales, he started out as a repair tech...
Given that I already run Linux on non-x86 architectures I've long awaited for an alternative CPU to use in my desktop PC. x86 has a lot of baggage from the need to be backwards compatible with an architecture developed in the 1980s, so scrapping all that and reusing the transistors for something more performance oriented would be fine with me.
Replacing the firmware in a phone isn't going to make an antenna melt or crack the screen. If a hardware component fails that can't be due to a programming error, they shouldn't be able to get out of it by saying "the phone was unlocked".
And it was only the other day that Gigabyte released a firmware update (in the form of new BIOS code) which stopped some of their motherboards going up in smoke.
As much as I support firmware modders still being covered by the warranty, the fact is that if the firmware is controlling voltage regulators or other similar devices there really is a potential for replacement firmware to cause physical damage.
I don't understand your point - the metric system doesn't stop you from making something 1/4 the length of something else...
Of course when you're comparing measurements I find metric much easier. I've always wondered how Americans can remember whether 37/93rds of an inch is larger or smaller than 14/57ths of an inch, but for me comparing 623 millimetres to 1.01cm (1010 millimetres) not only makes the comparison easy, but I get an intuitive feel that one is a little over a third larger than the other.
But then I guess the difference here isn't metric vs imperial, it's more that imperial seems to prefer fractions, whereas metric favours a decimal number. You never write 1/2cm, always 0.5cm or 500mm.
Plus, by almost entirely funding their competitor (and making them reliant on that funding), it will be very easy to make them go away if they should ever become a problem.
I couldn't agree more. I tried Chrome, and it's not for me. Nothing against it (well the fact that it only scrolls up and down at 1fps under Linux makes it kind of unusable) but the classic Firefox UI let me quickly see and access everything that is important to me. Now that stupid status bar and all the other Chrome imitations in Firefox drove me to try out Chrome and Opera, but unfortunately neither of them suit (Chrome for the too-lean UI, and Opera because it's not open source - yes that's important enough to be a dealbreaker for me.)
So the reason why I'm so frustrated at Mozilla for screwing up Firefox is because there *aren't* any other browsers that are as good as Firefox used to be. If it was a simple matter of just switching browsers (as it seems to be for many) there wouldn't be a problem, but for those of us who can't find a better alternative we're kind of stuck with new-Firefox.
Has anyone organised some kind of petition to present to Mozilla to try to persuade them to put things back the way they were?
I'm not sure how it works in other countries, but in Australia you generally don't buy a phone. You buy a plan from a telco, and the plan comes with a free phone. So a stolen phone means the owner will sign up for a new plan and get a new phone, which you, the telco, have to pay for. So as a telco, if you can keep someone on the same plan with the same phone for as long as possible, you save money.
Hence reducing theft means Aussie telcos can spend less on buying phones from Apple or whoever.
Unless you're an IT shop I suspect many employees never fully learn how to use the OS anyway - ask anyone who works in tech support. And of course if you're in an industry where it's more important to limit what your employees can do (e.g. no downloaded apps, no USB flash drives, etc.) then running Linux is a much easier way to achieve it.
But what happens if I release a GPL'd library, and your company uses it in their product? Once they have split and distributed the source + binary to the spinoff company, this means a program using my GPL'd library has been distributed. Does that mean I, as the library author, am also entitled to a copy of your source?
Actually/PAE does nothing in Windows XP, primarily to avoid issues with drivers that don't support PAE, as you need special PAE-aware drivers for all devices in your system.
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And instead of C3PO style protocol droids, we have cell phones with translator apps, or just a browser to point to Google translation. Again, because it makes no frikken sense to actually build a dedicated humanoid frame for just one application, when an app on a general purpose gadget will do the same thing.
Sure you wouldn't build a droid just to do translation, but what if the droid already existed? Cell phones weren't built to be translators either, but they already existed and someone added translation capabilities to them. You can bet shortly after robotic humanoids are perfected people will add things like translation to them.
After all, if you already have a droid to do your housework, it would make sense for it to translate as well - it wouldn't make any "frikken sense" to build a dedicated pocket-sized device to perform translation when your droid follows you everywhere already...
If you paid a few hundred dollars for a Linux license across a few thousand machines then I am sure the person taking your money would gladly provide you with patches for your 12 year old Debian machines, just like Microsoft does with XP.
I'm sure this will work. I was recently on a short (two hour) domestic flight, and it had satellite pay TV on board. For the first 10 minutes of the flight you could watch all channels for free, but then a message came up saying you had to swipe your credit card and pay $5 to keep watching for the rest of your flight, otherwise it would cut out.
I thought "Pfft, nobody is going to pay $5 for a couple of hours worth of crummy TV" but to my surprise nearly the entire plane started swiping credit cards! I've never heard so many cards being swiped at the same time before. I couldn't believe people would not only pay money for such poor TV, but they would do so for barely two hours of it!
As I tend not to waste money, I had planned ahead and went back to the book I had with me. But the point is, giving people a taste and making them pay for the rest really does work. See also 'shareware'.
Assuming 1000kg, wouldn't 100,000 tons then be 100 gigagrams? I've often wondered why we so readily apply an SI prefix to bits and bytes but almost never to things like grams and metres, apart from only 'kilo'.
Agree completely. I too have a Q6600 but with 8GB RAM and still Firefox slows down within a couple of days (version 11 here, the Aurora test version.) I couldn't use Chrome (the interface was too spartan) but the way the Firefox UI is going it probably won't be long until they're indistinguishable, then I will switch.
To be fair, I think some addons can cause this problem, and I know the session-saver struggles with the number of tabs I tend to have open. Annoyingly the back button is always pretty responsive, but I would much rather have a slow back button and a fast rest of the browser. And definitely you hit the nail on the head re separate processes for each tab. Having one slow tab take down the whole browser is *really* annoying under Firefox.
Shame Mozilla insist on copying all the useless UI features from Chrome, instead of the actual features like this that would make a big difference to the overall quality of the browser.
As Ray Kurzweil has pointed out, if Moore's law holds for another 30 years, a machine intelligence a billion times more powerful than all of humanity can emerge.
[...]
What would such a thing need us for?
This argument always irks me. There are a lot of things in this world humans have no use for, but that doesn't mean we actively seek out and destroy them just because. If machine intelligence did arise I think it's far more likely it would eventually just ignore us and go about its business without us.
Of course humans have a tendency to pamper certain animals - cats and dogs mostly - although there is no "need" to do so. This means all we have to do is make sure we design robots that find humans irresistably cute and cuddly and then we've got it made.
Definitely agree with that. An 'adviser' salesperson is much easier to work with. I had to buy a new photocopier recently and went back to the same salesperson as the last time precisely because he wasn't pushy when all the others were. Interestingly enough he didn't always work in sales, he started out as a repair tech...
Given that I already run Linux on non-x86 architectures I've long awaited for an alternative CPU to use in my desktop PC. x86 has a lot of baggage from the need to be backwards compatible with an architecture developed in the 1980s, so scrapping all that and reusing the transistors for something more performance oriented would be fine with me.
as for switches, I can update ios on every switch in 60 seconds. not a hard thing to do.
But how do you know the update was actually applied, and it wasn't rogue firmware falsely telling you it succeeded?
Replacing the firmware in a phone isn't going to make an antenna melt or crack the screen. If a hardware component fails that can't be due to a programming error, they shouldn't be able to get out of it by saying "the phone was unlocked".
And it was only the other day that Gigabyte released a firmware update (in the form of new BIOS code) which stopped some of their motherboards going up in smoke.
As much as I support firmware modders still being covered by the warranty, the fact is that if the firmware is controlling voltage regulators or other similar devices there really is a potential for replacement firmware to cause physical damage.
Ha wow, well I blame trying to think in inches for that one ;-)
I don't understand your point - the metric system doesn't stop you from making something 1/4 the length of something else...
Of course when you're comparing measurements I find metric much easier. I've always wondered how Americans can remember whether 37/93rds of an inch is larger or smaller than 14/57ths of an inch, but for me comparing 623 millimetres to 1.01cm (1010 millimetres) not only makes the comparison easy, but I get an intuitive feel that one is a little over a third larger than the other.
But then I guess the difference here isn't metric vs imperial, it's more that imperial seems to prefer fractions, whereas metric favours a decimal number. You never write 1/2cm, always 0.5cm or 500mm.
Plus, by almost entirely funding their competitor (and making them reliant on that funding), it will be very easy to make them go away if they should ever become a problem.
I couldn't agree more. I tried Chrome, and it's not for me. Nothing against it (well the fact that it only scrolls up and down at 1fps under Linux makes it kind of unusable) but the classic Firefox UI let me quickly see and access everything that is important to me. Now that stupid status bar and all the other Chrome imitations in Firefox drove me to try out Chrome and Opera, but unfortunately neither of them suit (Chrome for the too-lean UI, and Opera because it's not open source - yes that's important enough to be a dealbreaker for me.)
So the reason why I'm so frustrated at Mozilla for screwing up Firefox is because there *aren't* any other browsers that are as good as Firefox used to be. If it was a simple matter of just switching browsers (as it seems to be for many) there wouldn't be a problem, but for those of us who can't find a better alternative we're kind of stuck with new-Firefox.
Has anyone organised some kind of petition to present to Mozilla to try to persuade them to put things back the way they were?
I'm not sure how it works in other countries, but in Australia you generally don't buy a phone. You buy a plan from a telco, and the plan comes with a free phone. So a stolen phone means the owner will sign up for a new plan and get a new phone, which you, the telco, have to pay for. So as a telco, if you can keep someone on the same plan with the same phone for as long as possible, you save money.
Hence reducing theft means Aussie telcos can spend less on buying phones from Apple or whoever.
Passively cooled, mini-system, emulation. Pick two.
Unless you're an IT shop I suspect many employees never fully learn how to use the OS anyway - ask anyone who works in tech support. And of course if you're in an industry where it's more important to limit what your employees can do (e.g. no downloaded apps, no USB flash drives, etc.) then running Linux is a much easier way to achieve it.
But what happens if I release a GPL'd library, and your company uses it in their product? Once they have split and distributed the source + binary to the spinoff company, this means a program using my GPL'd library has been distributed. Does that mean I, as the library author, am also entitled to a copy of your source?
So wire up a 3V transformer to the battery socket...
Well I have exactly 120 tabs open at the moment, and FF3 is using 1.6GB RAM. I really should start using bookmarks again...
Actually /PAE does nothing in Windows XP, primarily to avoid issues with drivers that don't support PAE, as you need special PAE-aware drivers for all devices in your system.