Come on! He has written a book about "A Universal Theory" of something and has one of those funny web pages with a many-colors, many-fonts and many-panels flavor. That's enough!
I can't wait to see all the iPhone 5 owners shaking their phones to power them all the while gripping them with two fingers to keep a decent reception. This is exactly how I envisioned the future.
This thing seems to be in the middle of a military base and is operated by a human through an open microphone, not by a machine. So it means that the current government knows about it and keeps using it for the same or other purpose for which it was designed.
World overpopulation is a temporary problem. Nearly every indigineous Western population is experiencing population decline, and many western populations have been seeing this for 100 years or so. The richer people get, the better educated people get, the less they have children. The number one best way to decrease population growth currently is to make sure people have more money, and make sure they're decently educated.
It is true only to some extent. It seems that the birth rate in the Western world, after decreasing throughout the 20th century, is now stabilizing at around 2.1 child per woman (except in Japan). There was a The Economist article some months ago about it but I cannot find it anymore. It is true however that the transition from emerging to industrialized is accompanied in all countries by a better education and a decrease of the birth rate. Iran is going through that transition right now.
And I should add (as a frequent traveler) that there is an enormous advantage that modern trains have over cars, comfort! You don't need to focus on anything while in the train, unlike while driving in heavy traffic. So you can really enjoy browsing the web on your iPad (just kidding).
I guess a good start would be to start connecting only the big cities together, like for instance having a SF-LA-San Diego line and a East Coast line and some connection between the two. And add car rental and taxi stands at each stop to compensate for the lack of local public transport at the moment. After all high-speed trains in Japan or Europe do not stop at every other city. There is about half a billion people in Europe and not so many large cities (by international standards) and we still manage to have a good number of fast train connections.
I've never read anything hinting that the way to simulate a human brain would be to simulate how the molecules in the brain behave. [...] From the number on neurons in the human brain, considering how many interconnections there are and how fast the neurons can fire, I think a machine with one million processing cores at 1 GHz would have approximately the same data handling capacity as a human brain. The rest is software. Neural network software is pretty much routine stuff, the tricky part is learning what are the interconnections between the neurons.
Neurons constitute about half of the brain. About the rest we know pretty much nothing at all (when compared to neurons). What we know at least is that this "rest" plays a role in several aspects of information processing, learning and in all major diseases of the CNS and that it cannot be reduced to spiking neuron models. If it was possible to model the brain as a relatively simple neural network we would have done it 15 years ago and our inability to do so has a lot to do with modeling the behavior of a little number of molecules. I am not an expert programmer but I know enough to say that the complexity of the brain is way beyond what any human being has ever designed.
I agree with you. I had a similar swing of personality around 17-18. Until then I was very shy but when I moved to the university, I started to change quite significantly. Also I do not believe that I have the same personality than 3-4 years ago. I think that their sample is probably too small and I don't believe that teachers' rankings are such a good starting point (granted, you use the data you can get). My teachers were often utterly wrong about the kids around me and in particular about me. And I still play video games.
Yes, I am aware that "most" Italians I know might represent a very biased sample and yes I am aware that they might be ashamed of admitting they vote(d) for Berlusconi. Now that I think of it, why the hell would they be? Wait...
I am a bit puzzled because most Italians I know abhor Berlusconi. Still he was elected and re-elected and it seems that only him manages to stay in power for more than a few months. How come there is no real opposition in position to win elections and reform the country?
You can extend that advice also to all the politicians who are currently pushing for "control-the-Internet" laws; all those saying, e.g. that Excel comes with a firewall (France).
There is, direct democracy with no majority party so that they all have to be reasonable and come to a consensus. This being said I would tend to agree with you, the king/queen does provide some guarantees but it does not seem to work so well in all countries. You can just look over the border for an example of that.
There is a very simple solution to all these royal issues, it is called guillotine. It should be used once in a while to remind the powers in place to behave.
Slashdot Mirror
I learned about them right here on /. The service was good, I bought an old decent strategy game for 10$.
Come on! He has written a book about "A Universal Theory" of something and has one of those funny web pages with a many-colors, many-fonts and many-panels flavor. That's enough!
It seems that the Swedish provider also plays host to Wikileaks. How timely!
I can't wait to see all the iPhone 5 owners shaking their phones to power them all the while gripping them with two fingers to keep a decent reception. This is exactly how I envisioned the future.
This thing seems to be in the middle of a military base and is operated by a human through an open microphone, not by a machine. So it means that the current government knows about it and keeps using it for the same or other purpose for which it was designed.
First ants, then mice http://www.economist.com/node/16271339?story_id=16271339, next stop your neighbours!
Most of the zombie fiction is just a different approach to RPG-style problem solving
Do you mean RPG-style like in ruchnoy protivotankoviy granatomyot or RPG-7? It's a good option but you can't really run while carrying it.
World overpopulation is a temporary problem. Nearly every indigineous Western population is experiencing population decline, and many western populations have been seeing this for 100 years or so. The richer people get, the better educated people get, the less they have children. The number one best way to decrease population growth currently is to make sure people have more money, and make sure they're decently educated.
It is true only to some extent. It seems that the birth rate in the Western world, after decreasing throughout the 20th century, is now stabilizing at around 2.1 child per woman (except in Japan). There was a The Economist article some months ago about it but I cannot find it anymore. It is true however that the transition from emerging to industrialized is accompanied in all countries by a better education and a decrease of the birth rate. Iran is going through that transition right now.
I wish I could mod you up +1 Funny.
Personally I only use The Onion as a reliable source of information.
It seems that there is no lower bound in politics.
And I should add (as a frequent traveler) that there is an enormous advantage that modern trains have over cars, comfort! You don't need to focus on anything while in the train, unlike while driving in heavy traffic. So you can really enjoy browsing the web on your iPad (just kidding).
I guess a good start would be to start connecting only the big cities together, like for instance having a SF-LA-San Diego line and a East Coast line and some connection between the two. And add car rental and taxi stands at each stop to compensate for the lack of local public transport at the moment. After all high-speed trains in Japan or Europe do not stop at every other city. There is about half a billion people in Europe and not so many large cities (by international standards) and we still manage to have a good number of fast train connections.
Stay here, other planets are populated by evolving robots!
I've never read anything hinting that the way to simulate a human brain would be to simulate how the molecules in the brain behave. [...] From the number on neurons in the human brain, considering how many interconnections there are and how fast the neurons can fire, I think a machine with one million processing cores at 1 GHz would have approximately the same data handling capacity as a human brain. The rest is software. Neural network software is pretty much routine stuff, the tricky part is learning what are the interconnections between the neurons.
Neurons constitute about half of the brain. About the rest we know pretty much nothing at all (when compared to neurons). What we know at least is that this "rest" plays a role in several aspects of information processing, learning and in all major diseases of the CNS and that it cannot be reduced to spiking neuron models. If it was possible to model the brain as a relatively simple neural network we would have done it 15 years ago and our inability to do so has a lot to do with modeling the behavior of a little number of molecules. I am not an expert programmer but I know enough to say that the complexity of the brain is way beyond what any human being has ever designed.
I agree with you. I had a similar swing of personality around 17-18. Until then I was very shy but when I moved to the university, I started to change quite significantly. Also I do not believe that I have the same personality than 3-4 years ago. I think that their sample is probably too small and I don't believe that teachers' rankings are such a good starting point (granted, you use the data you can get). My teachers were often utterly wrong about the kids around me and in particular about me. And I still play video games.
From the summary: "They examined four personality attributes - talkativeness (called verbal fluency)".
I don't seem to remember that I was talking much at birth so at least in that regard I changed.
Yes, I am aware that "most" Italians I know might represent a very biased sample and yes I am aware that they might be ashamed of admitting they vote(d) for Berlusconi. Now that I think of it, why the hell would they be? Wait...
Is there any chance that this will change in the near future? Another question is how long can Berlusconi stay in power?
I am a bit puzzled because most Italians I know abhor Berlusconi. Still he was elected and re-elected and it seems that only him manages to stay in power for more than a few months. How come there is no real opposition in position to win elections and reform the country?
You can extend that advice also to all the politicians who are currently pushing for "control-the-Internet" laws; all those saying, e.g. that Excel comes with a firewall (France).
There is, direct democracy with no majority party so that they all have to be reasonable and come to a consensus. This being said I would tend to agree with you, the king/queen does provide some guarantees but it does not seem to work so well in all countries. You can just look over the border for an example of that.
There is a very simple solution to all these royal issues, it is called guillotine. It should be used once in a while to remind the powers in place to behave.
But I guess it will be long before the UK closes web sites on the ground that they are defamatory to the royal family.
A friend on mine was once saying that his grandma had the habit of storing all of her documents in the trash bin because it is easy to access.