Well, theoretically, a couple pieces of LEO junk could hit each other in just the right way so as to speed one out to 23k miles, where it might hit something. But I think the odds against that are rather staggering.
My favorite example of random anti-entropy is the one where all the air in a room evacuates itself out a window for no reason other than the motion of the molecules happened to line up that way. But as you said, it is just stupidly unlikely to happen.
That being said, I for one am perfectly willing to give this guy a chance to prove his gadget. But giving funky numbers (3 100W light bulbs * 2 hours = 4500W?) to a reporter isn't gonna cut it.
Cute. The USPTO would probably wonder what was so funny about it, though.
With any luck, they'll just patent the process of filtering the stem cells out (or of creating them, if they can figure out what is is they did) and be very generous with the licensing.
See, as a diabetic (Type I), growing a replacement pancreas from my own DNA won't help me. The replacement would be just as broken and useless as the one currently propping up my liver
I know nothing about diabetes, so I have to ask. If you were to grow a new pancreas from these cells, it would have the same flaw as the one you've got right now; bummer. But, this one is brand new and is not yet a part of your body. Is there anything that can be done with it in this state to try and repair it?
And as someone else mentioned, they went the first 11 years of their life without requiring insulin injections. Is there a clock on the thing so that it waits a while before deciding to stop working? In which case, would it be feasible to get a new pancreas every decade or so?
Once they differentiate, barring mutations as mentioned above, their lifespan is limited
There was a show on Discovery Health about regrowing limbs a few days ago. The example they gave was a Salamander; if it loses a limb the cells on the wound revert to an earlier form, look around and start duplicating and rebuilding the limb. Is this basically what you would do with a human? Smear stem cells on the stub and they'll regrow as the lost body part?
the US is imposing sanctions against the Ukrane for not having the same law
That's actually a better approach than the usual one taken these days. France had no legal standing in demanding Yahoo edit auctions worldwide so that they conformed with French law, nor did the MPAA with Johansen or the US with Dmitri or a dozen other examples. The business with Ukraine is more like "We don't like your laws so we're not going to trade with you until you change them". It's not particularly nice, but it's not as bad as "We don't like your laws so you'd better change them or we'll start arresting your citizens as terrorists".
It's not just knowing the language. I could learn it, yes, but I'd have no actual working experience in it. It is utterly ridiculous how many jobs I have applied to that turned me down because they want someone with, say, 2 years work experience and I only have a paltry 12 months.
As a Georgia Tech grad who has been quite unable to find a programming job, I think you place a little too much faith in the HR department of many companies. An awful lot of them couldn't care less how quickly I can learn a new language; if I don't know it now I'm of no use to them.
I would think these students would receive a bonus for efficiency in reusing existing code/i>
We do. But not until we take CS 2130, the class taken right after these two, where we are specifically told to use other people's code when possible, just so long as we label it as such.
Tell me about it. When I took the OO programming course I generally spent 2 or 3 times as long writing the reports and whatnot as I did actually writing code.
No kidding. I had to read that twice before I believed I had actually seen that in the article. "Our software may not be secure, but you'll sleep well at night knowing that our first rate Assurance Team is hard at work."
Re:THE "SINGULARITY" IS PURE SCIENCE FICTION
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True Names
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· Score: 2
there's no evidence that they will start some sort of ever-accelerating self-improvement process
Of course there's no evidence, it hasn't happened (yet). You could just as easily say there's no evidence that research into manipulating human genetics will ever prove useful. Or the space industry will ever be anything beyond a few shuttles and satellites. Or fusion power will ever be anything more than a toy for scientists with grants. We haven't done it yet, but that doesn't mean we rule it out forever. All we can do is look at what we've managed so far and what we think we can do tomorrow and judge how likely a certain technology is.
No one has ever offered any shred of proof of the Singularity scenario
The singularity is an extrapolation from current trends. When Moore's Law was first put forth, the extrapolations from it probably seemed downright stupid. "Billion calculations per second processors in every home? Absurd!" Yet even that level has been surpassed and shows no signs of slowing down. If a true AI is not possible or if we never develop mind-machine interfaces (the two most promising agents for it), then it might indeed be unlikely. We'll probably get something useful out of the genetic aspect of intelligence (spare me the histrionics about the complexity of the genome), but I'm not sure how far you could run with it.
But given some of the advances in combining silicon and wetware, it's not unreasonable to think that something will come of it. From that assumption, you can extrapolate and speculate. We think, and again, it's not an unreasonable assumption, that one of the biggest bonuses of this kind of tech would be ability to improve intelligence. This accelerates the extrapolations and eventually you get abilities and intelligences that are so far beyond anything we can imagine today they make no sense.
For the record, I'm rather offended by you telling me that I naturally 'hunger' for the supernatural and that science is just another opiate for the masses. Neither is true and you can stop touting it as fact.
He has some stuff (in a book called _Imaginary Magnitude_)
Really? Cool. Got any more info on that book (or was it a short story?); Amazon and a couple other such sites don't list it.
When my computer starts manufacturing robots with which to take over the world, I'll simply turn it off./i>
If your computer is smart enough to dominate the planet it'll be smart enough to get around a simple-minded tactic like pulling the plug.
Re:"The Rapture for atheists"
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True Names
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· Score: 2
Various technological revolutions have come and gone, and we humans are pretty much the same as we always were
Exactly. "No matter where we go, there we are." Intellectually speaking, human hardware today is pretty much the same as it was a hundred or a thousand years ago.
The Singularity is what happens when the driving force behind progress, that is, intelligence itself, learns how to improve itself at the exponential rate we've seen in computers. A true AI could do it, very likely so could humans augmented with ordinary 'dumb' computers. This new creature would change not only the world around it but itself as well. A faster processor doesn't just mean it can play Quake with twice the framerate, it can literally think faster, and then it can design the next processor even sooner, etc, etc.
How long would it take for something like that to become completely incomprehensible to anything that existed before it? That is the Singularity. It is the point where simple extrapolation of what a self-improving intelligence will be capable of makes no sense anymore. The only way to understand it, to know what's on the other side, is to go through it.
Hmmm, actually I did read it. Apparently the two sentences given over the vehicles were right next to a very spiffy screenshot and my eyes kind of wandered, then picked up the text after the relevant sections.
Yes, so did we. It's called a pulsedrive, and do explain why it's crazy. There's no shock wave in space, just radiant energy. You can build the ship so that the acceleration is absorbed by the crew module at a controlled pace. It gives enormous speeds and efficiencies compared to chemical rockets. Yes, there's an EMP, so you don't use it too close to Earth.
I don't have a problem with NASA using old computers. Programming extremely good code is hard enough without having to redo it every time there's a new chip. They don't need the latest processors anyway.
My problem is that NASA doomed the space industry in this country by trying to be the only ones in it. A bigger budget would be great but I say kill off all their projects except for developing cheaper launch technologies. Get us up there, we'll do the rest.
It's like NASA's trying to build the computer, the operating system, and all the applications for it. It all works great, but it's usefulness is so limited we might as well not have it. They should just make the hardware and let everyone else make it useful.
Tell your congressman that there is an absolute shitload of money (what would you give for a week in space?) to be made in space and with NASA in charge of it nobody'll see a dime. Maybe some other country'll get there, which is great, but economically and militarily speaking it is very bad to be on the bottom of the gravity well with no way up.
You know, there's a power source in between chemical rockets and total annihilation. Nuclear pulsedrives are an extremely simple, perfectly workable means of propulsion with efficiencies far in advance of any rocket. The Orion design is decades old. Just don't use them too close to a planet with unshielded electronics.
There's other types of nuclear propulsion systems, but this is the simplest.
I'm wondering what the 'Anything Nuclear = Bad' crowd would think about antimatter. Too deep for them to comprehend, much less complain about?
Isn't there some computing axiom somewhere that states that an emulator is never as fast as the original unless the emulator is using substantially better hardware?
Sure. A computer that works on the same principles as what it is you're trying to emulate will take just as much space to do the emulation. But remember, we really don't have to get that good. I'd think that 0.1 mm would be about the maximum 'granularity' needed. Furthermore, there's sub-molecular computing devices on the horizon. And as someone pointed out, the universe runs a very high framerate (10^43 fps, or thereabouts), one much higher than we need to run a realistic emulation.
Dunno, I've seen both ends of the spectrum. My own cat is very docile in the bath; I can put him in the tub and he'll stay ther. He's still got some claws but he never uses them in the tub. Another cat I've tried to bathe was completely uncontrollable. I ended up having to toss her into a shower stall and just point the shower head at her since she'd have torn me to shreds if I was anywhere nearby.
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Well, theoretically, a couple pieces of LEO junk could hit each other in just the right way so as to speed one out to 23k miles, where it might hit something. But I think the odds against that are rather staggering.
That being said, I for one am perfectly willing to give this guy a chance to prove his gadget. But giving funky numbers (3 100W light bulbs * 2 hours = 4500W?) to a reporter isn't gonna cut it.
With any luck, they'll just patent the process of filtering the stem cells out (or of creating them, if they can figure out what is is they did) and be very generous with the licensing.
I know nothing about diabetes, so I have to ask. If you were to grow a new pancreas from these cells, it would have the same flaw as the one you've got right now; bummer. But, this one is brand new and is not yet a part of your body. Is there anything that can be done with it in this state to try and repair it?
And as someone else mentioned, they went the first 11 years of their life without requiring insulin injections. Is there a clock on the thing so that it waits a while before deciding to stop working? In which case, would it be feasible to get a new pancreas every decade or so?
There was a show on Discovery Health about regrowing limbs a few days ago. The example they gave was a Salamander; if it loses a limb the cells on the wound revert to an earlier form, look around and start duplicating and rebuilding the limb. Is this basically what you would do with a human? Smear stem cells on the stub and they'll regrow as the lost body part?
That's actually a better approach than the usual one taken these days. France had no legal standing in demanding Yahoo edit auctions worldwide so that they conformed with French law, nor did the MPAA with Johansen or the US with Dmitri or a dozen other examples. The business with Ukraine is more like "We don't like your laws so we're not going to trade with you until you change them". It's not particularly nice, but it's not as bad as "We don't like your laws so you'd better change them or we'll start arresting your citizens as terrorists".
If you don't heat them, they don't melt? How is that strange?
It's not just knowing the language. I could learn it, yes, but I'd have no actual working experience in it. It is utterly ridiculous how many jobs I have applied to that turned me down because they want someone with, say, 2 years work experience and I only have a paltry 12 months.
Tell me about it. The OS Design class I took at GaTech had a male-female ratio of 59 to 1.
As a Georgia Tech grad who has been quite unable to find a programming job, I think you place a little too much faith in the HR department of many companies. An awful lot of them couldn't care less how quickly I can learn a new language; if I don't know it now I'm of no use to them.
We do. But not until we take CS 2130, the class taken right after these two, where we are specifically told to use other people's code when possible, just so long as we label it as such.
Tell me about it. When I took the OO programming course I generally spent 2 or 3 times as long writing the reports and whatnot as I did actually writing code.
Well I've always known Greenlee was nuts, this more or less proves it. Son of a bitch couldn't teach a class to save his life.
No kidding. I had to read that twice before I believed I had actually seen that in the article. "Our software may not be secure, but you'll sleep well at night knowing that our first rate Assurance Team is hard at work."
Of course there's no evidence, it hasn't happened (yet). You could just as easily say there's no evidence that research into manipulating human genetics will ever prove useful. Or the space industry will ever be anything beyond a few shuttles and satellites. Or fusion power will ever be anything more than a toy for scientists with grants. We haven't done it yet, but that doesn't mean we rule it out forever. All we can do is look at what we've managed so far and what we think we can do tomorrow and judge how likely a certain technology is.
No one has ever offered any shred of proof of the Singularity scenario
The singularity is an extrapolation from current trends. When Moore's Law was first put forth, the extrapolations from it probably seemed downright stupid. "Billion calculations per second processors in every home? Absurd!" Yet even that level has been surpassed and shows no signs of slowing down. If a true AI is not possible or if we never develop mind-machine interfaces (the two most promising agents for it), then it might indeed be unlikely. We'll probably get something useful out of the genetic aspect of intelligence (spare me the histrionics about the complexity of the genome), but I'm not sure how far you could run with it.
But given some of the advances in combining silicon and wetware, it's not unreasonable to think that something will come of it. From that assumption, you can extrapolate and speculate. We think, and again, it's not an unreasonable assumption, that one of the biggest bonuses of this kind of tech would be ability to improve intelligence. This accelerates the extrapolations and eventually you get abilities and intelligences that are so far beyond anything we can imagine today they make no sense.
For the record, I'm rather offended by you telling me that I naturally 'hunger' for the supernatural and that science is just another opiate for the masses. Neither is true and you can stop touting it as fact.
He has some stuff (in a book called _Imaginary Magnitude_)
Really? Cool. Got any more info on that book (or was it a short story?); Amazon and a couple other such sites don't list it.
If your computer is smart enough to dominate the planet it'll be smart enough to get around a simple-minded tactic like pulling the plug.
Exactly. "No matter where we go, there we are." Intellectually speaking, human hardware today is pretty much the same as it was a hundred or a thousand years ago.
The Singularity is what happens when the driving force behind progress, that is, intelligence itself, learns how to improve itself at the exponential rate we've seen in computers. A true AI could do it, very likely so could humans augmented with ordinary 'dumb' computers. This new creature would change not only the world around it but itself as well. A faster processor doesn't just mean it can play Quake with twice the framerate, it can literally think faster, and then it can design the next processor even sooner, etc, etc.
How long would it take for something like that to become completely incomprehensible to anything that existed before it? That is the Singularity. It is the point where simple extrapolation of what a self-improving intelligence will be capable of makes no sense anymore. The only way to understand it, to know what's on the other side, is to go through it.
I suppose playing Carmageddon on this thing while driving whould be a Bad Thing?
Hmmm, actually I did read it. Apparently the two sentences given over the vehicles were right next to a very spiffy screenshot and my eyes kind of wandered, then picked up the text after the relevant sections.
Yes, so did we. It's called a pulsedrive, and do explain why it's crazy. There's no shock wave in space, just radiant energy. You can build the ship so that the acceleration is absorbed by the crew module at a controlled pace. It gives enormous speeds and efficiencies compared to chemical rockets. Yes, there's an EMP, so you don't use it too close to Earth.
My problem is that NASA doomed the space industry in this country by trying to be the only ones in it. A bigger budget would be great but I say kill off all their projects except for developing cheaper launch technologies. Get us up there, we'll do the rest.
It's like NASA's trying to build the computer, the operating system, and all the applications for it. It all works great, but it's usefulness is so limited we might as well not have it. They should just make the hardware and let everyone else make it useful.
Tell your congressman that there is an absolute shitload of money (what would you give for a week in space?) to be made in space and with NASA in charge of it nobody'll see a dime. Maybe some other country'll get there, which is great, but economically and militarily speaking it is very bad to be on the bottom of the gravity well with no way up.
There's other types of nuclear propulsion systems, but this is the simplest.
I'm wondering what the 'Anything Nuclear = Bad' crowd would think about antimatter. Too deep for them to comprehend, much less complain about?
Sure. A computer that works on the same principles as what it is you're trying to emulate will take just as much space to do the emulation. But remember, we really don't have to get that good. I'd think that 0.1 mm would be about the maximum 'granularity' needed. Furthermore, there's sub-molecular computing devices on the horizon. And as someone pointed out, the universe runs a very high framerate (10^43 fps, or thereabouts), one much higher than we need to run a realistic emulation.
Dunno, I've seen both ends of the spectrum. My own cat is very docile in the bath; I can put him in the tub and he'll stay ther. He's still got some claws but he never uses them in the tub. Another cat I've tried to bathe was completely uncontrollable. I ended up having to toss her into a shower stall and just point the shower head at her since she'd have torn me to shreds if I was anywhere nearby.
One of the screenshots shows various angles of a vehicle of some kind. Will those be included as well, a la Tribes and Halo?