Size of Texas: 261,914 sq miles (land) = 7.30174326 × 10^12 square feet Population of the world: 6,515,511,450 people Area / people = 1120.67077 sq ft/person Family/group of 4 = 4482.7 sq ft
You know if you stack those houses you could possibly get them into an area much smaller than Texas.
These women have children by the bushels for numerous reasons, but one of the most striking is a concept called numeracy. They don't have it. It is the concept of how many children one has, e.g. only child, 2, 3 then stopping. When you ask a woman is sub-saharran Africa how many children she wants she will reply with something like - "as many as god gives me" or "I don't know what you mean, as many as will come".
What most studies find about lowering birthrates in the thirdworld is an insanely simple answer: empower women. When women become empowered they begin to feel they can control their environment and by extension their reproduction.
What does empowering women have to do with changing their cultural outlook? You just said the women were choosing to have as many childern as possible. We tend to think of an "empowered" woman as one with equal education, job oppurinties, and rights as males. But what if after all those things, they still choose to have as many childern as possible because that is their culture?
My wife and I have 2 kids. We'd have had 3 or maybe 4 if we had the money to support them. I don't understand how those 3rd world women think. I could understand having 2-3 children and stopping, but 5-6 children or worse 9-10 children? I could perhaps support 2 more kids with some difficulty. More than that and I don't know how my wife and I could manage. I couldn't envision my wife having 5-6 children and not being able to properly support any of them.
Are we really willing to put people in jail indefinitely? It was proposed here in the UK that "psycopathic" criminals who were judged a permanent danger could be subject to open-ended detention. This met widespread opposition from people who, I assume, feel that jail sentences should fit the crime (ie, they believe in just and proportionate punishment, rather than simply the necessary evil of reformative incarceration).
As another Slashdotter once put it, imagine if someone was in jail for sharing MP3s online. Should they stay there until they can convince the parole board that they're sorry and won't do it again, even if that takes years? I would say that the punishment for copyright infringement should be proportionate to the harm it causes. Those who make illegal copies should only be punished as much as their crime deserves to be punished. Under a purely penetentiary regime, the whole question of punishment and how much a person deserves to be punished is irrelevant.
Reforming criminals is a vital part of the justice system, but I wouldn't like a society where it was the only part. I don't believe in insanely heavy penalties for file sharing. Likewise I would be angered if a murderer got off with a light sentence on the grounds that he was unlikely to do it again.
I believe that you almost answered the comment that I'm about to post. I was think those in UK remember reading in history class about debtors prisons and indentured servants that were used to colonize both the US and Australia. Not to mention political prisoners that the government or those in power in the government don't like.
This analogy isn't good. Think of Bill Gates being in power some where in government or just controlling the government though the shadows. Now there is a law that outlaws Linux. Those that work on Linux now get jailed either for some number of years, or until they've been brainwashed what they have done is wrong and they will not do it again. I hope that bad analogy atleast gets people thinking along the lines that I want.
Back on topic the use of hibernation on criminals would probably only be as possible volunters for testing. Since the biggest problems with prisons and criminals is how to make them pay for themselves and actually contribute something to society rather than continuing to harm it I doubt freezing them will be a solution until the energy and hardware becomes extremely cheap, and at that point we have hopefully figured out, solved or reduced the problem of criminality by other means.
Well, if we were in the game Alpha Centauri and being the amoral techogolists that we are, we'd just experiment on the criminals for several reasons. 1. It would make future criminals really want to stay out of the Experiments as they are now called. 2. Now any crime with over X jail time has a chance of bearing the death penalty where X could be any time unit. 3. It reduces the prison population. 4. A few useful bits of information may be found out. 5. It would be a great place to get useful organs. Actually, I think that I've read some Niven books where every crime had the death penalty just so the government could take the organs and give them to useful members of society. I think that they had tech to overcome organ rejection and a few others that we haven't developed yet though. I think that it was supposed to have started with a blood shortage and someone thought hey lets use those criminal's blood because they won't need it any more.
Actually, as a parent I can think of a few times where a few hours of peace could be a really good thing. Now the question is do I administer it to me or the child...
Most definitely the kids. I'd love summer vacations. We could just put the kids in storage for the summer and it would just be me and my wife until August when we'd have to wake them and send them to school again.
Maybe it would be easier if we developed year round public boarding schools.
By supporting GIMP MS would admit that open source software can be made to the same standard as proprietary software and that their TCO arguments are bullshit.
What if they forked it and released a new verison of MS Paint as well? Their forked verison would be stripped down to less than current MS Paint standards and take longer to start than Photoshop.
Then in Adobe's nightmares: The new longhorn MS paint would have every current and annouced feature of GIMP and Photoshop CS. The new longhorn MS movie maker will have almost every feature of Adobe Premiere. MS would have a print-to-pdf and MS pdf reader included as well that includes all of the full verison of acrobats features.
They would all be given away for free with Long Horn.
I mean, it's probably more likely that some law got passed in the past few years that's forcing companies to highlight all these incidents of compromised data, but it seems pretty spooky that we just recently hear about all these stories.
Ah, this type of stuff has been going on forever. The only new thing about it though is now people out side of company IT departments know that the data was misplaced/lost/stolen and it is reported in major newspapers now. I like having this information in the news. In the long run, it will do more good than harm.
Much like a day-care centre where you drop your kids off with adults you believe are there to ensure your children won't come to any harm; AOL advertised this service as being a place where your kids could safely chat on the internet.
Um, she was 17. Damn, I hope that you don't drop your 17 year old off at a day care because you don't trust their judgement. I would define kids as those under 13. Teenagers between 13-17 will seek out every subject their parents define as out of bounds and try and test the limits. I'd think that this is the age group most likly to drink, smoke, and have causal sexual encounters. Of cours e they are minors, so we do the logical thing and lock them up as best we can until their 18. Then they are magically responsible for themselves, and will know not to smoke, and have causal sex. They won't try to drink until they are 21 when they are magically more responsible.
I don't know. Maybe, if I went through several months of police training that are required for new recruits, I could. They require 30 hours of college with a "C" average. They are excellent policemen. I consider any job that requires 30 hours of college that the employee should know the basics of word, using excel to do simple charts, building a poster with their choice of word processor, scanning in an image and putting it into a poster, burning a CD/DVD, and using correct spelling and grammar in offical written documents. This is my personal opinion that I consider these skills that every high school grad should know.
I don't mind older patrolmen that rarely use computers asking questions needing help that I expect. I pull hairs out when the "computer savy" bosses in administration can't do a simple tasks in word or excel that I've shown them 10 times how to do. Actually, I am impressed with the amount of computer savyness of the average patrolman. I am disappointed in their managers though. I guess that's the same every where.;)
Why is everyone suddenly against online phone books and phone, name, address search engines? I thought it was an excellent idea for places like smartpages and whitepages to comeinto being. You usually need a last name and either a city or zip code now. Due to all the privacy folks, its getting to where its near impossible to find this info for some people. I don't mind having my info listed, I just wish that it was correct. Every time that I look up my family info either my wife's name is misspelled or its an old address. I have a co-worker that I'd say he doesn't believe in the white pages of phone books at all. Sometimes that's how I believe/. behaves as well. I don't really care about the yellow pages until I need to use some service that I've never used before. I use the white pages to look up friends & families phone numbers that's what it's there for.
You'd be surprised to learn that the computer usage scenario of the "real person" I described above is actually that of a "Power User". The typical person can barely turn the computer on, much less open Outlook Express without help from one of these Power Users. So, in fact, this test is useful as a step in the process of weeding out non-computer oriented hires.
It's worse than that some places. I have a BS in Computer Science. I work for my local police department as the computer guy. Anything computer related is sent to me. On my list to do today is assist our public relation's guy with making a recuiting poster. About once a month, I usually get a request for burning a CD of a power point presenation that is 400 Kb. One of my bosses has a Camcorder that burns to DVD. He doesn't have a DVD-Rom and wonders why his discs don't work in his computer, but will in mine. I get to make copies of all his home movies.
Actually, almost all our patrol folks use webmail and 3 custom apps. We have 1 generic login that they all should know how to use to log to several computers that should stay logged on to the network. They just open IE and the only site that they can hit is webmail. That's the easy part. I'm thankful that we've almost phased out 98. They have a habit of clicking cancel at the login prompt and wondering why they can't use network resources.
I consider a power user here one that can burn their own CDs without help and knows where their files are on the computer or server.
We're basically doomed unless we have some kind of science-fiction technology.
Shields. We need to develop planetary shield tech for several reasons. 1. Stop incoming asteriods. 2: Stop incoming energy waves other than sun light or reflected moon light. 3. To give us a plantery bonus when those aliens come to bomb the planet. It may also stop those pesky alien abductions.
The last thing we need is another colony that works the same as Earth, it'd be a little self-defeating after awhile.
Unless we are able to raise "perfect" people in a closed environment, any colony of humans will be just the same as on Earth except for location.
We won't have real colonies until we have real crime in space. Humans won't ever eliminate the need to steal from each other or kill each other. I'd guess the first things that we'd steal in space are asteriods and information. I'd think that would be a killing issue as will.
No more so than cars, truck, aluminum, steel, or coffee is. All of which is used by the military around the world, for good or evil.
You forgot my favorite one, paper products. Example: toilet paper. The evil government of your choice most likely uses toilet paper or standard office paper. You should find out who supplies them and try to boycott them. (That's humor more than anything. You'd be surprised were your toilet paper, tissue paper, and office paper come from. Hint: made in the USA.)
Three major obstacles with this approach (which has been tried BTW):
* Logical problems with proofs for correctness. For example, it has been proven that no program can prove itself correct.
In short: while it might seem elegant to prove the prover, then have everything else proved by this prover, this approach has little value in practice.
You'd have to prove all sorts of other factors correct, including the operating system and hardware your program is running on. This leads to another set of interesting problems, including that "correct hardware" is useful only as a theoretical concept. What's a "correct computer" if there's a small probability that bits will spontaneously flip in memory, for example?
What's the difference between a human trying to prove a concept and a computer? Do I have to prove that I'm a "correct" human before I'm allowed to prove a math theorm? If so, I'm sorry we have to separate out math by folks that didn't proof themselves to be correct humans in a correct human biologic systems.
Well at least in regards to math, I stongly doubt that this will ever be the case. Mathematics is developed over decades and centuries. With a few notable exceptions, it doesn't just fall out of the sky in textbook form. Most areas of math started out as a giagantic mess (ex; calculus, linear algebra, even geometry), and it has taken the work of countless researchers, authors, and teachers to distill and refine it.
You just gave me this vision: a supercomputer in a solar powered blimp doing math research running a few nontrivial programs. 1 it uploads all the "new" discoveries made. 2. it tries to simplify math and teaching of math to humans. 3. Once a year it generates a text book following the same basic pattern: Front of book stuff. Table of contents, introduction,.5-1.5 of teaching or proofing a concept then.5-1.5 pages of problems. It also solves all the problems, puts about a third of them in the back of the book and all the rest for the problem solving edition of the book. It does that until the book grows to about 800 pages total. It instantly copy rights it all, and puts all up on its own website, and then sends it to its usual publisher. Then it uses handy dandy print on demand tech that we have now to print out about 30 copies of the text book... Then comes the hard part... It flies around the globe, parachuting the book to its biggest academic rivals.
When math books fall from the sky, it will a very bad time to be a math professor.
Re:They're still working on artificial stupidity..
on
The Baby Bootstrap?
·
· Score: 1
Anyone doing conventional research would have undoubtedly consigned the hapless computer to the scrap heap. But for Boran, the Akron I's response represented a startling breakthrough in a little-known field: artificial stupidity. Boran is the head of NASA, the National Artificial Stupidity Association ("Not to be confused with those space people," he is quick to point out), a loosely-knit band of computer-school dropouts currently occupying an abandoned fraternity house at the University of New Mexico.
And the really sad part, due to the Peter Principle, their AI gets to manage the smarter more knowledgeable AIs.
I think it's funnier how everyone is freaking out because of the April Fools jokes.
That's because you are used to getting tech news at places other than slashdot. I've gotten to depend on/. on by in tech news. Do you have any idea how annoy April 1 is here? If I had another site that I got good tech news from, I wouldn't even bother checking here for the whole week of April 1. Tomorrow, we get the dups. I really need to find a better tech news source.
If all of us inside the conspiracy have been keeping the secret from you this long, why would we suddenly tell you the deep, dark truth now? Because you asked nicely?
Nah, cause it's 4/1 and we could all tell him something slightly different one of which could be the truth, but how would he know which is the truth on 4/1?
What data do my wife and I have left that the government would care about?
Shhh... the a YRO submission, you aren't allowed to be rational here.;)
My point is simple though. The government is already tracking every important event in my life already. The only major event left that the government doesn't track is first instance of having sexual relations.
Let's see the government doesn't care about: what I buy at Wal-mart unless its guns, cigs. or beer, they don't care how I and my wife behave in the bedroom (the government really doesn't care what same sex couples do in the bed as long as they are quietly invisible), they don't care about the videos and video games that my wife and I watch, but they are being forced by groups to restict what my kids are allowed to watch. The government generally doesn't care what my wife and I eat although there are health groups that want the government to play around with the nutritional values of my food before I'm allowed to buy it.
You know now that I think about it, I'd like the government to track what recipes everyone uses. Our weekly menu would be something like pasta, pasta, hamburger helper, burger king, pizza, hamburger helper, and then another pasta.
If my wife goes somewhere for the weekend, I eat taquitos.
You are worried about others transmitting on your bandwidth? Well don't worry there is a federal agency just for this. It's called the FCC. I'm sure that your company is paying a very large amount to license the spectrum that you want to prevent others from transmitting on. Well, just identify others that are transmitting on your licensed spectrum and the FCC will go out and if they don't stop transmitting on your licensed spectrum space they will be fined $10,000.
You are licensing spectrum from the FCC to be protected aren't you? If not, you must be using public spectrum space such as 802.11a/b/g. I hate to tell you this, but you can't stop others from transmitting. Well, you could try, but then the FCC would come after you.
There is more personalized data about each and every student floating around hundreds and even thousands of institutions that nobody has any control over any of it.
You know, although I don't trust the Federal Government that much, I wouldn't mind one agency having default ownership of all this data and be responsible for locking down the data sharing and keeping students privacy being intact.
I always find it funny that people are upset at the federal government for tracking information about them. Hey, when I was born I got a birth cert. and a social sec. card., when I went to college I had to fill out FAFSA forms, when I got married I had to get a marriage cert. and it changes my tax status for some strange reason, when my two kids were born we had to get them birth cert. and SS cards. To attend public schools, we had to provide copies of shot records.
We filled out the census. I and my wife have driver's license.
We have a mortage on our house. We pay taxes to the IRS.
If my wife and I decided to separate, that would be registered come tax time at a min.
When my wife, one of my kids, or I die, their will be a death cert.
What data do my wife and I have left that the government would care about?
Slashdot Mirror
Size of Texas: 261,914 sq miles (land) = 7.30174326 × 10^12 square feet
Population of the world: 6,515,511,450 people
Area / people = 1120.67077 sq ft/person
Family/group of 4 = 4482.7 sq ft
You know if you stack those houses you could possibly get them into an area much smaller than Texas.
These women have children by the bushels for numerous reasons, but one of the most striking is a concept called numeracy. They don't have it. It is the concept of how many children one has, e.g. only child, 2, 3 then stopping. When you ask a woman is sub-saharran Africa how many children she wants she will reply with something like - "as many as god gives me" or "I don't know what you mean, as many as will come".
What most studies find about lowering birthrates in the thirdworld is an insanely simple answer: empower women. When women become empowered they begin to feel they can control their environment and by extension their reproduction.
What does empowering women have to do with changing their cultural outlook? You just said the women were choosing to have as many childern as possible. We tend to think of an "empowered" woman as one with equal education, job oppurinties, and rights as males. But what if after all those things, they still choose to have as many childern as possible because that is their culture?
My wife and I have 2 kids. We'd have had 3 or maybe 4 if we had the money to support them. I don't understand how those 3rd world women think. I could understand having 2-3 children and stopping, but 5-6 children or worse 9-10 children? I could perhaps support 2 more kids with some difficulty. More than that and I don't know how my wife and I could manage. I couldn't envision my wife having 5-6 children and not being able to properly support any of them.
Are we really willing to put people in jail indefinitely? It was proposed here in the UK that "psycopathic" criminals who were judged a permanent danger could be subject to open-ended detention. This met widespread opposition from people who, I assume, feel that jail sentences should fit the crime (ie, they believe in just and proportionate punishment, rather than simply the necessary evil of reformative incarceration).
As another Slashdotter once put it, imagine if someone was in jail for sharing MP3s online. Should they stay there until they can convince the parole board that they're sorry and won't do it again, even if that takes years? I would say that the punishment for copyright infringement should be proportionate to the harm it causes. Those who make illegal copies should only be punished as much as their crime deserves to be punished. Under a purely penetentiary regime, the whole question of punishment and how much a person deserves to be punished is irrelevant.
Reforming criminals is a vital part of the justice system, but I wouldn't like a society where it was the only part. I don't believe in insanely heavy penalties for file sharing. Likewise I would be angered if a murderer got off with a light sentence on the grounds that he was unlikely to do it again.
I believe that you almost answered the comment that I'm about to post. I was think those in UK remember reading in history class about debtors prisons and indentured servants that were used to colonize both the US and Australia. Not to mention political prisoners that the government or those in power in the government don't like.
This analogy isn't good. Think of Bill Gates being in power some where in government or just controlling the government though the shadows. Now there is a law that outlaws Linux. Those that work on Linux now get jailed either for some number of years, or until they've been brainwashed what they have done is wrong and they will not do it again. I hope that bad analogy atleast gets people thinking along the lines that I want.
Back on topic the use of hibernation on criminals would probably only be as possible volunters for testing. Since the biggest problems with prisons and criminals is how to make them pay for themselves and actually contribute something to society rather than continuing to harm it I doubt freezing them will be a solution until the energy and hardware becomes extremely cheap, and at that point we have hopefully figured out, solved or reduced the problem of criminality by other means.
Well, if we were in the game Alpha Centauri and being the amoral techogolists that we are, we'd just experiment on the criminals for several reasons. 1. It would make future criminals really want to stay out of the Experiments as they are now called. 2. Now any crime with over X jail time has a chance of bearing the death penalty where X could be any time unit. 3. It reduces the prison population. 4. A few useful bits of information may be found out. 5. It would be a great place to get useful organs. Actually, I think that I've read some Niven books where every crime had the death penalty just so the government could take the organs and give them to useful members of society. I think that they had tech to overcome organ rejection and a few others that we haven't developed yet though. I think that it was supposed to have started with a blood shortage and someone thought hey lets use those criminal's blood because they won't need it any more.
Actually, as a parent I can think of a few times where a few hours of peace could be a really good thing. Now the question is do I administer it to me or the child...
Most definitely the kids. I'd love summer vacations. We could just put the kids in storage for the summer and it would just be me and my wife until August when we'd have to wake them and send them to school again.
Maybe it would be easier if we developed year round public boarding schools.
By supporting GIMP MS would admit that open source software can be made to the same standard as proprietary software and that their TCO arguments are bullshit.
What if they forked it and released a new verison of MS Paint as well? Their forked verison would be stripped down to less than current MS Paint standards and take longer to start than Photoshop.
Then in Adobe's nightmares:
The new longhorn MS paint would have every current and annouced feature of GIMP and Photoshop CS. The new longhorn MS movie maker will have almost every feature of Adobe Premiere. MS would have a print-to-pdf and MS pdf reader included as well that includes all of the full verison of acrobats features.
They would all be given away for free with Long Horn.
I mean, it's probably more likely that some law got passed in the past few years that's forcing companies to highlight all these incidents of compromised data, but it seems pretty spooky that we just recently hear about all these stories.
Ah, this type of stuff has been going on forever. The only new thing about it though is now people out side of company IT departments know that the data was misplaced/lost/stolen and it is reported in major newspapers now. I like having this information in the news. In the long run, it will do more good than harm.
Don't tell me - they are going to remotely deploy WinXP Service Pack 2 on the enemy's network?
Masterful...
Yeah, they've even got a techique of deploying it onto any flavor unix/linux/bsd. It's their version of an atomic bomb.
Much like a day-care centre where you drop your kids off with adults you believe are there to ensure your children won't come to any harm; AOL advertised this service as being a place where your kids could safely chat on the internet.
Um, she was 17. Damn, I hope that you don't drop your 17 year old off at a day care because you don't trust their judgement. I would define kids as those under 13. Teenagers between 13-17 will seek out every subject their parents define as out of bounds and try and test the limits. I'd think that this is the age group most likly to drink, smoke, and have causal sexual encounters. Of cours e they are minors, so we do the logical thing and lock them up as best we can until their 18. Then they are magically responsible for themselves, and will know not to smoke, and have causal sex. They won't try to drink until they are 21 when they are magically more responsible.
They are policemen. Can you do their job?
;)
I don't know. Maybe, if I went through several months of police training that are required for new recruits, I could. They require 30 hours of college with a "C" average. They are excellent policemen. I consider any job that requires 30 hours of college that the employee should know the basics of word, using excel to do simple charts, building a poster with their choice of word processor, scanning in an image and putting it into a poster, burning a CD/DVD, and using correct spelling and grammar in offical written documents. This is my personal opinion that I consider these skills that every high school grad should know.
I don't mind older patrolmen that rarely use computers asking questions needing help that I expect. I pull hairs out when the "computer savy" bosses in administration can't do a simple tasks in word or excel that I've shown them 10 times how to do. Actually, I am impressed with the amount of computer savyness of the average patrolman. I am disappointed in their managers though. I guess that's the same every where.
Why is everyone suddenly against online phone books and phone, name, address search engines? I thought it was an excellent idea for places like smartpages and whitepages to comeinto being. You usually need a last name and either a city or zip code now. Due to all the privacy folks, its getting to where its near impossible to find this info for some people. I don't mind having my info listed, I just wish that it was correct. Every time that I look up my family info either my wife's name is misspelled or its an old address. I have a co-worker that I'd say he doesn't believe in the white pages of phone books at all. Sometimes that's how I believe /. behaves as well. I don't really care about the yellow pages until I need to use some service that I've never used before. I use the white pages to look up friends & families phone numbers that's what it's there for.
"I'ts a company full of lawyers- good luck".
That just means that it takes a bigger stick than an most individuals can employee.
You'd be surprised to learn that the computer usage scenario of the "real person" I described above is actually that of a "Power User". The typical person can barely turn the computer on, much less open Outlook Express without help from one of these Power Users. So, in fact, this test is useful as a step in the process of weeding out non-computer oriented hires.
It's worse than that some places. I have a BS in Computer Science. I work for my local police department as the computer guy. Anything computer related is sent to me. On my list to do today is assist our public relation's guy with making a recuiting poster. About once a month, I usually get a request for burning a CD of a power point presenation that is 400 Kb. One of my bosses has a Camcorder that burns to DVD. He doesn't have a DVD-Rom and wonders why his discs don't work in his computer, but will in mine. I get to make copies of all his home movies.
Actually, almost all our patrol folks use webmail and 3 custom apps. We have 1 generic login that they all should know how to use to log to several computers that should stay logged on to the network. They just open IE and the only site that they can hit is webmail. That's the easy part. I'm thankful that we've almost phased out 98. They have a habit of clicking cancel at the login prompt and wondering why they can't use network resources.
I consider a power user here one that can burn their own CDs without help and knows where their files are on the computer or server.
We're basically doomed unless we have some kind of science-fiction technology.
Shields. We need to develop planetary shield tech for several reasons. 1. Stop incoming asteriods. 2: Stop incoming energy waves other than sun light or reflected moon light. 3. To give us a plantery bonus when those aliens come to bomb the planet. It may also stop those pesky alien abductions.
The last thing we need is another colony that works the same as Earth, it'd be a little self-defeating after awhile.
Unless we are able to raise "perfect" people in a closed environment, any colony of humans will be just the same as on Earth except for location.
We won't have real colonies until we have real crime in space. Humans won't ever eliminate the need to steal from each other or kill each other. I'd guess the first things that we'd steal in space are asteriods and information. I'd think that would be a killing issue as will.
No more so than cars, truck, aluminum, steel, or coffee is. All of which is used by the military around the world, for good or evil.
You forgot my favorite one, paper products. Example: toilet paper. The evil government of your choice most likely uses toilet paper or standard office paper. You should find out who supplies them and try to boycott them. (That's humor more than anything. You'd be surprised were your toilet paper, tissue paper, and office paper come from. Hint: made in the USA.)
Three major obstacles with this approach (which has been tried BTW):
* Logical problems with proofs for correctness. For example, it has been proven that no program can prove itself correct.
In short: while it might seem elegant to prove the prover, then have everything else proved by this prover, this approach has little value in practice.
You'd have to prove all sorts of other factors correct, including the operating system and hardware your program is running on. This leads to another set of interesting problems, including that "correct hardware" is useful only as a theoretical concept. What's a "correct computer" if there's a small probability that bits will spontaneously flip in memory, for example?
What's the difference between a human trying to prove a concept and a computer? Do I have to prove that I'm a "correct" human before I'm allowed to prove a math theorm? If so, I'm sorry we have to separate out math by folks that didn't proof themselves to be correct humans in a correct human biologic systems.
Well at least in regards to math, I stongly doubt that this will ever be the case. Mathematics is developed over decades and centuries. With a few notable exceptions, it doesn't just fall out of the sky in textbook form. Most areas of math started out as a giagantic mess (ex; calculus, linear algebra, even geometry), and it has taken the work of countless researchers, authors, and teachers to distill and refine it.
.5-1.5 of teaching or proofing a concept then .5-1.5 pages of problems. It also solves all the problems, puts about a third of them in the back of the book and all the rest for the problem solving edition of the book. It does that until the book grows to about 800 pages total. It instantly copy rights it all, and puts all up on its own website, and then sends it to its usual publisher.
You just gave me this vision: a supercomputer in a solar powered blimp doing math research running a few nontrivial programs. 1 it uploads all the "new" discoveries made. 2. it tries to simplify math and teaching of math to humans.
3. Once a year it generates a text book following the same basic pattern: Front of book stuff. Table of contents, introduction,
Then it uses handy dandy print on demand tech that we have now to print out about 30 copies of the text book... Then comes the hard part... It flies around the globe, parachuting the book to its biggest academic rivals.
When math books fall from the sky, it will a very bad time to be a math professor.
Anyone doing conventional research would
have undoubtedly consigned the hapless
computer to the scrap heap. But for Boran,
the Akron I's response represented a
startling breakthrough in a little-known
field: artificial stupidity.
Boran is the head of NASA, the National
Artificial Stupidity Association ("Not to
be confused with those space people,"
he is quick to point out), a loosely-knit
band of computer-school dropouts currently
occupying an abandoned fraternity house
at the University of New Mexico.
And the really sad part, due to the Peter Principle, their AI gets to manage the smarter more knowledgeable AIs.
I think it's funnier how everyone is freaking out because of the April Fools jokes.
/. on by in tech news. Do you have any idea how annoy April 1 is here? If I had another site that I got good tech news from, I wouldn't even bother checking here for the whole week of April 1. Tomorrow, we get the dups. I really need to find a better tech news source.
That's because you are used to getting tech news at places other than slashdot. I've gotten to depend on
If all of us inside the conspiracy have been keeping the secret from you this long, why would we suddenly tell you the deep, dark truth now? Because you asked nicely?
Nah, cause it's 4/1 and we could all tell him something slightly different one of which could be the truth, but how would he know which is the truth on 4/1?
Pick up cartrige
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF (inhale)
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF (inhale)
Pick up Nintendo
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF (inhale)
FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF (inhale)
Repeat until disired results are accomplished.
I've found it helps alot more if you exhale. Inhaling like that just makes you cough and hack up dust.
What data do my wife and I have left that the government would care about?
Shhh... the a YRO submission, you aren't allowed to be rational here.;)
My point is simple though. The government is already tracking every important event in my life already. The only major event left that the government doesn't track is first instance of having sexual relations.
Let's see the government doesn't care about: what I buy at Wal-mart unless its guns, cigs. or beer, they don't care how I and my wife behave in the bedroom (the government really doesn't care what same sex couples do in the bed as long as they are quietly invisible), they don't care about the videos and video games that my wife and I watch, but they are being forced by groups to restict what my kids are allowed to watch. The government generally doesn't care what my wife and I eat although there are health groups that want the government to play around with the nutritional values of my food before I'm allowed to buy it.
You know now that I think about it, I'd like the government to track what recipes everyone uses. Our weekly menu would be something like pasta, pasta, hamburger helper, burger king, pizza, hamburger helper, and then another pasta.
If my wife goes somewhere for the weekend, I eat taquitos.
How do the big boys protect their signals?
You are worried about others transmitting on your bandwidth? Well don't worry there is a federal agency just for this. It's called the FCC. I'm sure that your company is paying a very large amount to license the spectrum that you want to prevent others from transmitting on. Well, just identify others that are transmitting on your licensed spectrum and the FCC will go out and if they don't stop transmitting on your licensed spectrum space they will be fined $10,000.
You are licensing spectrum from the FCC to be protected aren't you? If not, you must be using public spectrum space such as 802.11a/b/g. I hate to tell you this, but you can't stop others from transmitting. Well, you could try, but then the FCC would come after you.
There is more personalized data about each and every student floating around hundreds and even thousands of institutions that nobody has any control over any of it.
You know, although I don't trust the Federal Government that much, I wouldn't mind one agency having default ownership of all this data and be responsible for locking down the data sharing and keeping students privacy being intact.
I always find it funny that people are upset at the federal government for tracking information about them. Hey, when I was born I got a birth cert. and a social sec. card., when I went to college I had to fill out FAFSA forms, when I got married I had to get a marriage cert. and it changes my tax status for some strange reason, when my two kids were born we had to get them birth cert. and SS cards. To attend public schools, we had to provide copies of shot records.
We filled out the census.
I and my wife have driver's license.
We have a mortage on our house. We pay taxes to the IRS.
If my wife and I decided to separate, that would be registered come tax time at a min.
When my wife, one of my kids, or I die, their will be a death cert.
What data do my wife and I have left that the government would care about?