I agree. One can find ways to alter messages for the same key, but thats a heavyweight cpu attack.
So, the rest of it still stands. If someday "certified" email gets an easier path into an inbox, jump on that pipe via:
1 - Pay, build or steal a verification authority. 2 - Pump out 1000's of email under false senders (from same server), signed adequately. 3 - Auto-approve all remote calls to authenticate such msgs from forwarding servers.
After a certain number, go back to 1. Build a library of servers, harvesting from new techniques while old ones are blacklisted.
The above strategy already exists; the servers are just botnet zombies.
The first few redacted pages are the names and histories of the people involved. This is privacy, and nothing new.
The other pages are management chains used on the project and are part of KPMG's/Smartronix value-added business techniques, and it's their option to not reveal those practices.
I'm not too concerned. Wait until the site opens up.
Email is already used to deliver messages that have lower immediacy expectations than IM or Cellular. Authentication may slow down delivery even further, but this usage pattern is putting email behind-the-times on the technology ladder.
Right now it's still good for mixed-media and longer messages, but mostly its a holdover from an earlier era. Eventually, users will simply a document and then share it with a target audience, not actually clone content to inboxes.
I don't mind the death of email. "Offline" reading is redundant given content capture techniques, and the messages are vastly wasteful in their design (copied threads).
Either the authentication traffic kills us, or the spammers clone any sort of component embedded in email to lend credibility. If you can fake an email as spam, you can fake a stamp.
If Centmail stamps are auto-verified, then either an API must authenticate the key and authorize the action - which is a lot of traffic - at a single server/authority, or we disperse it. With dispersal, possibly for abuse goes up, and then we have new keys arriving which means more traffic. We of course can't use keys per mail, but perhaps per-sender. This is still a huge number of keys to be managed.
Filters work as a form of decentralized authentication, where the proper "key" is passing the filter, which is slowly morphing from user feedback. This seems to me to degrade over time, as the filters cannot change quick enough, still weighing-in prior exclusions while accepting new ones. There's a fair amount of noise to ignore while people mark email they don't like as SPAM and similarities are extracted.
Blacklists and Whitelists are just filters with a central authority, but open to more abuse and too coarse-grained to remove much, as spammers hop or spoof origins quickly.
Overall, I don't feel like bolt-on public systems can categorize the messages other than how we're doing it today. If we had a re-do on email, it might involve some encryption for senders, certificate stamps, and a trust level of pathways and a distributed authorization system with feedback to violators. But we're a long ways off from that.
They don't need to. They already provide a platform (iPod/iPhone) that is the marketplace for content. They don't need to compete for "eReaders" because there are already dozens of them available on the Apple store.
While his style is well-known, there is possibly still something more to ask of him that would tie the movies together outside of any simple plotline.
If he could be commissioned for something new, using some of the erotic or torture pieces as a haunting/dream-like "infection" plot device, he might be able to really breath some new visual life into the series.
Giger was given ample room to express himself in the original, but sadly was not credited as much as he should have been for the derivative works of the monsters. This could be a great way to welcome him back, although I've read that he can be a bit eccentric to work with (The Ghost Train ordeal).
Before I answer the question, remember that this happens anyway, whether or not the system permits it.
Now: If their church (or whatever other marriage-issuing authority they chose) permitted it, yes. This would, however, be completely meaningless as the person forcibly married could simply choose to ignore the marriage if they desired.
And if this daughter was a minor? Remember, there is a case that was tried against a church that did just this, and they lost.
The same way they are for cohabiting partners at the moment. Quite simple, really.
Except we'd fill the courts with claims to ownership or liens that would only have heresay as evidence. I'd rather not wait behind that docket. A state may explicitly declare how ownership works within marriage (CA's 50% law) or it may not, but it overwhelmingly simplifies things from the onset.
Yes. Probably along the lines of failure to pay court-arranged child support. The marriage may also (at the option of the couple at the time of the marriage) have included a contract to share possessions in some fashion, at which point he may also be in violation of that contract, and could be ordered to comply and (like this lawyer) imprisoned if he refused to comply with the court's order.
So now you're slowly edging back into a optional contractual definition that most people would take anyway (when viewed as insurance toward the other party fulfilling obligations such as taxes, childcare, property). The state formalizes this contract and adds a few other things (hospital visitation, rights of survivorship, credit responsibilities) and they called it "Marriage".
Overall, think of the meta-level: Two people would be able to disagree on the fact if they were even married, ever. Either side (yes/no) could be abused:
- Yes : Stalker ex-boyfriend claims he's married to starlet. Were they? Must we really have a case to decide this?
- No : Family abandonment by 1 party in the relationship after X years. "We were never really married, I have owe them nothing" Sorry, no "contract" no crime? Do you really want a society built around that much welfare?
The state attempts to keep a formal switch in place (and the ceremonial aspect to it) called Marriage so that all these messy details are at least somewhat filtered through a point: It's when 2 witnesses, an officiant, a notary, and a country records clerk all interact with 2 people to ensure they "enter freely and willingly" into a loving bond that has certain rights and obligations. It's not perfect, but it's better than a lot of other options.
And romantically, who wants to have a giant meandering semantic discussion instead of following social custom? Marriage is really fun when two people are in love, so why spoil it?
Except you ignore the true ways marriage is used/abused and instead make up some wacky questions.
Marriage changes certain rights a person has, and allows legal claims that arose because of abuse, not the other way around:
- Would we allow families to marry off their daughter to older men in return for payment? - How would monetary issues, property ownership, health care coverage, duties of care for minors, and land transfers be regulated? Would a couple participate in both, but would we need the proof of identity in each transaction? - If a crafty husband walks out on his family and 4 kids, leaving nothing for them, would any crime have been committed?
Overall, if the government didn't have a single record of which 2 people were married, many of the crimes we prosecute now would get mired down in claims without more than testimonial evidence. It doesn't seem like it would simplify anything, to me.
Well, to expand on the above... IF you really want to build that passion, then guided learning is best. You'll not waste time on the wrong things, and you'll learn quickly if an unbearable amount of work - even to make something as stimulating as a game - is your type of thing.
New people are necessary in all careers all the time, except you may have to compete viciously. If you want to make a game, this is much different from wanting to make a living (in games).
Think of game design and game programming as different. Think of game programming and programming as similar. Think of math and programming as similar. Think of design and art as similar.
Do you have a passion for art? Do you sketch, draw, model characters, sets, stories? Can you write a compelling narrative?
Do you have a passion for programming? Do you tinker with visual environments, from 2D to 3D on any platform at all?
If you don't - you should begin. You should fill your time with this - all of it. The only time you shouldn't be swimming in this is when you're tasked with homework or job work. That's the level of competition in these arenas. Start immediately, and remember that your progress needs to quite fast. You're not going to become a game programmer (or much of any kind) by stealing a few hours after the kids go to bed each week. Instead, live & breathe it. Showering and all the rest is up to you, but various circles will give you credibility if you wear the stains of devotion on your shirt.
However, not far from my house is a technology recycling warehouse. For some labor or a donation, you can pick up essentially free parts and build a machine of your liking. People use it for all kinds of projects, from PCs to hybrid microcontroller projects.
Most of the new technology replaces something, pushing it into the used stream, then finally the waste stream. However, even outdated technology has uses. It's basically free and sits in a many of the nonprofit offices around me.
Ok, so let's suppose life, in some primitive form, maybe even up to the level of crustaceans are found in these oceans. The first-non-Earth life, and quite exciting, sure.
I'm unsure how this challenges the religious life-origin stories around the world. Any one wants to take a stab at predicting the reactions from the traditional Earth-centric worldviews?
"Over unity devices would be truly revolutionary; they would completely overturn whole fields of science. That is good reason to be very skeptical and dismissive of them."
Its also a good reason to pay attention to them.
Therein lies the crux of these disagreements: Challenges to established models of the world are interesting, but not really difficult to examine. In fact, they are trivial: "You are capturing inducted power from a motor? More than what you put in? Let me show you the formula our current model uses. OK, what formula(e) are you supposing is wrong, that your machine is taking advantage of?" Beyond this amount of discussion, over-unity or bad science ideas are simply not worth the time. There are lots of people with feeble grasps of a topic that see magic in the details they don't understand. Research shouldn't continuously re-teach them that they're wrong via experiment. It should simply point at published literature that they should study. Who wants to teach a class about "ether" beyond the historical anecdote? Let's get to a model that works!
If the details of why a "free energy" machine doesn't work are difficult to understand... then it warrants research...people learn a lot figuring out why they do not work.
But that learning is usually because they skipped the elementary science of examining the current models we have, and what changes they think they're seeing. Mostly, it comes down to mistaking a unit, incorrect measurements, or not understanding the nuances of the machine they've devised.
I think through all of this, you are trying to agree, but I'm stressing: The math/models we have for the world is able to describe almost all but the slightest high/low energy edge cases. Yes, there are some amazing new discovering still to come: better superconductors, nano-scale machinery, artificial biological constructions, photovoltaic advances, battery advances, etc. I cannot predict all the areas of course.
But through all of "whatever is to come", the models we use for these realms won't be completely "rewritten" - they will be altered perhaps, to account for the edge cases that get discovered. For the high percentage of the science applied, our current models work well: They are repeatable, predictable and testable. Even Newton's laws are still used to teach the rough-grained effects of motion, etc.
No claim of any sort is going to suddenly "wipe out" and upend this body of work. I have to continue to stress: the gaps in science are not that our models are wrong (whatever that means) but that they mimic observable behavior, and thus can make predictions on scenarios we've not seen directly (think about astrophysics). As we continuous refine them, no machine is going to appear that suddenly "destroys" these models. This would imply all the existing devices using the same models would work differently. If one proposes that they observe an edge-case, perhaps a mystery's clue will be demonstrated, but science looks into those strange areas all the time, and we've learned a lot already - and it put into the models - to explain we we've observed. So far: No laws of thermodynamics broken.
Your examples prove my point. Quantum effects in use in the real world are the result of anomalies detected in the formulas, then a alternative formula proposed/debated, and then experiments formed that would demonstrate the concept after done on paper. Quantum theories are not new, and the General Theory has long punched holes at the micro-level of Newton - a clarification, really. But those variances are small enough that we didn't have technology to take advantage of them until lately. Now we do, cool enough.
There are tons of other ideas that don't make it off the paper. Anti-gravity, invisibility, fusion, induction concepts all have formulaic details that *might* allow for less-common effects. Except, only rarely does the math add up. If there's any doubt, an experiment is formed, but that consumes resources and labs aren't running on this "free energy". One cannot skip the gedanken, it simply saves tons of precious resources. Who wants to re-build the alternative "free energy" machine yet again to prove it doesn't work. Just do the math. The math works because you're using it every day.
You can be sure that there's not a lot of continuous, direct testing of the laws of thermodynamics. In fact, those laws are put into the planning of almost every experiment going on, without being re-tested. That's my point here - this company thinks it's seeing a statistical anomaly or edge-case in the laws of thermodynamics, but if they would put their hypothesis into the existing equations that already define energy's conversions in tons of working models (from power grids down to semiconductors), they'd be able to state "ah! our anomaly shows up as behavior here, here and here" and have reason to continue.
But it they don't state this. In fact, like all false science, they claim voodoo and the ability to create a scenario unique to the world. Perhaps even this is true, it has happened. (And been false before. Ahem, "cold" fusion). Even so, it'd be much easier to believe if they simply published details. But nope. We have to have this silly jury - and no surprise - the results of "nothing to see here" telephoned back to the real world.
I think we agree, but to me "open mind" means seeing how someone's hypothesis works in the existing world first. If you know the math they are challenging, you can simply ask - "OK, what formulas are you expecting to be different? Under what circumstances?" Then, you look at similar scenarios in the existing world and check. Nope, your formula doesn't match observation, try again.
Science has explained a lot. "Know" is a semantic problem, not a practical one. I'm excited that the future may hold wondrous discoveries, but they won't suddenly revise physics - they'll just add clarity.
Except when the laws you're testing are already being constantly tested, by motors, wires, chargers, etc - continuously around you. I'll admit, the subtle effects of magnetic fields are indeed interesting and strange in the details, but at SOME point one has to rely on the 1000's of prior experiments. Plus, there's a lot of machinery working because of the laws of physics, around us every day. "Current" laws of physics wouldn't change, but perhaps a very specialized edge case (usually at extremes of energy) may arise. This company is nowhere near this level of sophistication. Instead, it's just the same smoke and mirrors.
Would you rather test gravity, magnetic induction, inertia, conservation of energy and a slew of other physical concepts each day?
The place for experiment is where the math behind the observations is doubted, or leaves an anomaly. If there are solid formulas born from prior experiments, one simply can do the experiment "on paper" using the new scenario and deduce what will happen.
Then, if you're still interested, you can compare to a real-world experiment - that's real science.
Except that we're not. Seriously off-topic, but inflation isn't unpredictable. Right now, the double-digit unemployment and positive savings rate we have suggests people are hording their cash, not shopping with abandon.
As soon as any of the indicators go up (these are pretty reliable predictors of activity), the FED simply filters the money out of the banks, rates go up for daily business paper and money is more scarce.
It's been managed this way for 3 decades, and fairly stable since 1983. Check for yourself.
Not sure what you mean. Mod points are partially decided by the viewing account. Singularity is not just one thing, from one group. It's a series of things, and yes - what I'm describing is just a part of it. How would I know what it encompasses? How would you?
I can agree to all of what you said. The value of "information" is really, only in its use. But that's where innovation comes along and connects the dots. Most of the "innovation" we read about is just a mashup (GPS + Phone = neato map of phone pics). Some good uses right now are letting humans navigate their day-to-day adventures with nary a plan. Example: wanna bake bread? never tried it, just google a recipe from the store, pick up ingredients and follow along. Ding, passable bread ready. Repeat for almost anything.
TV is a wasteland of commercials, hypnotizing us to buy junk while TV shows interrupt them.
Web 2.0 is just a new skin on the existing information. It's not adding any value.
What we'll need is some automated sieve that builds a machine-ready semantic web from the general world. Probably a human-size effort like wikipedia, etc. From there, we've lowered the bar for machines to actually identify context in the info (so "apple" means just one thing instead of a mess, like a search engine). We end up somewhere above Wolfram's Alpha but still just a smarter search engine.
We'll have to find a way to put a feedback loop on a semantic web, and then let it synthesize concepts on its own, including the research to confirm what's just stored as facts. This is nontrivial and might encompass all of our current knowledge of computing machinery, but I think its possible.
From there, we get a big accurate model of the real world, and yet, still nothing new. Maybe if we can make AI smart enough, it can justify its existence for us, instead of us just stating "because its cool"
For a long time, the information on the web was put there magically by the techocracy that architected it. For non-tech users, getting their information online has been through ever-easier methods of publishing. Web-logging, aka blogging, was just another step in this phase.
The motivation for providing content varies, but psychologists would say that part of it is in the feeling of belonging with peers you identify with. From forum posts, Wikipedia editing, Amazon reviews, posting youtube vids of kittens in sinks, etc - there's a clic for everyone. These are new-found "friends" that people interact with by simply making something appear online.
There's also a compelling push to do what the longstanding "professional" journalism has done for years. So, there's a group that pushes to create look-alike content that fills a niche, but do it online and for free (except for ads). We get "independent" media outlets, political commentary, diy comedy routines, and websites covering local issues. Quality and regularity varies.
All of these things are good - it pushes the body of human knowledge and interaction into a universal format. The transmission (physical wires) and delivery styles might leave something to be desired, but it's in a fairly searchable format as uncontextual text (that context part is still a challenge, all you search engines out there).
I look forward to the slow spread of not just content, but the focus on a universal context system that gets us a more semantic web. Also, we might also get live connections directly to 1 or more senses in real time, someday. Putting these together and you pretty much get an augmented reality stream, completely customizable, so that you won't have to remember so much as be able to process the extra info fast enough. That'll probably hit an upper limit on our brainpower, but we always seem willing to try (driving while using phone and more). After that, jumping over the senses to just filling artificial neurons with the info, accessible by our natural ones, will be the challenge.
Exciting times, this Information Age, still in its infancy.
This isn't about just Linux/software. The essence of the argument is: If MS's market uses MS's search engine the most, and results are popularity or search-popularity weighted, then MS's own engine will look somewhat conceited.
I'm merely suggesting they weigh their search statistics according to a flat distribution, instead of a normal distribution based on their own captured user groups.
This is probably relevant only in the auto-complete section, which changes faster than the general search index. Just try a few bing vs. google auto-complete searches and notice the differences:
"windows 7" on bing
windows 7
windows 7.0
windows 7.1
windows 7.5
windows 7 download [it's likely that bing users are already windows 7 users and are looking for more detail by searching on a sub-version]
"windows 7" on google
windows 7 beta
windows 7 download
windows 7 release date
windows 7 review [google users are more of a general audience and examining windows 7 as a non-user]
This issue isn't huge, but it will affect the approachability of Bing, IMO.
This bias, built from MS's search seeing the world as highly MS-leaning from simply their own adherents using their products more, is somewhat self-defeating.
For popularity-driven ranks, the wider the audience and usage, the better the full audience will be able to make use of the statistics it employs. If MS's employees, contractors, proponents, vendors, etc are the primary users for the tool before a general web world, the stats will be be slanted towards MS's offerings, as you allude.
I would expect for a release as important as this to the MS portfolio, I would expect them to reset the statistics after the initial rollout, or even sub-sample the IP's, selecting for diversity, for the stats to fight bias. Without this, I can only wait until another set of "MS is just pushing more MS" posts across the blogosphere.
Then again, perhaps a healthy dose of bing-bombing (aka google-bombing) the site will re-skew it to those who fight such battles.
Scaling up the infrastructure, the issues (like animal-borne diseases and excrement in the streets) are completely different (from, say, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and petroleum products in the waste stream).
Also, idle-time maintenance of automotive tech is much lower than animal-based systems.
Efficiency competed within both realms for many years. Animals lost for many reasons, most of them fairly.
5. Nobody would know. Although determining if an ad-focused object is in the loaded dom, no many sites check. And why would they, this is more development effort.
There's no real way to tell how many firefox users are employing adblock. But at most it's around 23%
HMD's are so retro-chic. Don't you know that all the cool research is now tapping the brain's retina layer to augment/alter vision?
These days, I'm waiting for the hat/camera/socket that allow for text overlay, enhanced-spectrum cameras, and novel perspectives to our existing firmware.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. One can find ways to alter messages for the same key, but thats a heavyweight cpu attack.
So, the rest of it still stands. If someday "certified" email gets an easier path into an inbox, jump on that pipe via:
1 - Pay, build or steal a verification authority.
2 - Pump out 1000's of email under false senders (from same server), signed adequately.
3 - Auto-approve all remote calls to authenticate such msgs from forwarding servers.
After a certain number, go back to 1. Build a library of servers, harvesting from
new techniques while old ones are blacklisted.
The above strategy already exists; the servers are just botnet zombies.
The first few redacted pages are the names and histories of the people involved. This is privacy, and nothing new.
The other pages are management chains used on the project and are part of KPMG's/Smartronix value-added business techniques, and it's their option to not reveal those practices.
I'm not too concerned. Wait until the site opens up.
Email is already used to deliver messages that have lower immediacy expectations than IM or Cellular. Authentication may slow down delivery even further, but this usage pattern is putting email behind-the-times on the technology ladder.
Right now it's still good for mixed-media and longer messages, but mostly its a holdover from an earlier era. Eventually, users will simply a document and then share it with a target audience, not actually clone content to inboxes.
I don't mind the death of email. "Offline" reading is redundant given content capture techniques, and the messages are vastly wasteful in their design (copied threads).
Either the authentication traffic kills us, or the spammers clone any sort of component embedded in email to lend credibility. If you can fake an email as spam, you can fake a stamp.
If Centmail stamps are auto-verified, then either an API must authenticate the key and authorize the action - which is a lot of traffic - at a single server/authority, or we disperse it. With dispersal, possibly for abuse goes up, and then we have new keys arriving which means more traffic. We of course can't use keys per mail, but perhaps per-sender. This is still a huge number of keys to be managed.
Filters work as a form of decentralized authentication, where the proper "key" is passing the filter, which is slowly morphing from user feedback. This seems to me to degrade over time, as the filters cannot change quick enough, still weighing-in prior exclusions while accepting new ones. There's a fair amount of noise to ignore while people mark email they don't like as SPAM and similarities are extracted.
Blacklists and Whitelists are just filters with a central authority, but open to more abuse and too coarse-grained to remove much, as spammers hop or spoof origins quickly.
Overall, I don't feel like bolt-on public systems can categorize the messages other than how we're doing it today. If we had a re-do on email, it might involve some encryption for senders, certificate stamps, and a trust level of pathways and a distributed authorization system with feedback to violators. But we're a long ways off from that.
This has all been discussed for years.
They don't need to. They already provide a platform (iPod/iPhone) that is the marketplace for content. They don't need to compete for "eReaders" because there are already dozens of them available on the Apple store.
While his style is well-known, there is possibly still something more to ask of him that would tie the movies together outside of any simple plotline.
If he could be commissioned for something new, using some of the erotic or torture pieces as a haunting/dream-like "infection" plot device, he might be able to really breath some new visual life into the series.
Giger was given ample room to express himself in the original, but sadly was not credited as much as he should have been for the derivative works of the monsters. This could be a great way to welcome him back, although I've read that he can be a bit eccentric to work with (The Ghost Train ordeal).
I sure hope they throw a bit at the Pilot/Space Jockey subplot.
There's lots already proposed for that item's existence in the story, and I'd be happy with almost any of them.
Before I answer the question, remember that this happens anyway, whether or not the system permits it.
Now: If their church (or whatever other marriage-issuing authority they chose) permitted it, yes. This would, however, be completely meaningless as the person forcibly married could simply choose to ignore the marriage if they desired.
And if this daughter was a minor? Remember, there is a case that was tried against a church that did just this, and they lost.
The same way they are for cohabiting partners at the moment. Quite simple, really.
Except we'd fill the courts with claims to ownership or liens that would only have heresay as evidence. I'd rather not wait behind that docket. A state may explicitly declare how ownership works within marriage (CA's 50% law) or it may not, but it overwhelmingly simplifies things from the onset.
Yes. Probably along the lines of failure to pay court-arranged child support. The marriage may also (at the option of the couple at the time of the marriage) have included a contract to share possessions in some fashion, at which point he may also be in violation of that contract, and could be ordered to comply and (like this lawyer) imprisoned if he refused to comply with the court's order.
So now you're slowly edging back into a optional contractual definition that most people would take anyway (when viewed as insurance toward the other party fulfilling obligations such as taxes, childcare, property). The state formalizes this contract and adds a few other things (hospital visitation, rights of survivorship, credit responsibilities) and they called it "Marriage".
Overall, think of the meta-level: Two people would be able to disagree on the fact if they were even married, ever. Either side (yes/no) could be abused:
- Yes : Stalker ex-boyfriend claims he's married to starlet. Were they? Must we really have a case to decide this?
- No : Family abandonment by 1 party in the relationship after X years. "We were never really married, I have owe them nothing" Sorry, no "contract" no crime? Do you really want a society built around that much welfare?
The state attempts to keep a formal switch in place (and the ceremonial aspect to it) called Marriage so that all these messy details are at least somewhat filtered through a point: It's when 2 witnesses, an officiant, a notary, and a country records clerk all interact with 2 people to ensure they "enter freely and willingly" into a loving bond that has certain rights and obligations. It's not perfect, but it's better than a lot of other options.
And romantically, who wants to have a giant meandering semantic discussion instead of following social custom? Marriage is really fun when two people are in love, so why spoil it?
Except you ignore the true ways marriage is used/abused and instead make up some wacky questions.
Marriage changes certain rights a person has, and allows legal claims that arose because of abuse, not the other way around:
- Would we allow families to marry off their daughter to older men in return for payment?
- How would monetary issues, property ownership, health care coverage, duties of care for minors, and land transfers be regulated? Would a couple participate in both, but would we need the proof of identity in each transaction?
- If a crafty husband walks out on his family and 4 kids, leaving nothing for them, would any crime have been committed?
Overall, if the government didn't have a single record of which 2 people were married, many of the crimes we prosecute now would get mired down in claims without more than testimonial evidence. It doesn't seem like it would simplify anything, to me.
Well, to expand on the above... IF you really want to build that passion, then guided learning is best. You'll not waste time on the wrong things, and you'll learn quickly if an unbearable amount of work - even to make something as stimulating as a game - is your type of thing.
New people are necessary in all careers all the time, except you may have to compete viciously. If you want to make a game, this is much different from wanting to make a living (in games).
Think of game design and game programming as different. Think of game programming and programming as similar. Think of math and programming as similar. Think of design and art as similar.
Do you have a passion for art? Do you sketch, draw, model characters, sets, stories? Can you write a compelling narrative?
Do you have a passion for programming? Do you tinker with visual environments, from 2D to 3D on any platform at all?
If you don't - you should begin. You should fill your time with this - all of it. The only time you shouldn't be swimming in this is when you're tasked with homework or job work. That's the level of competition in these arenas. Start immediately, and remember that your progress needs to quite fast. You're not going to become a game programmer (or much of any kind) by stealing a few hours after the kids go to bed each week. Instead, live & breathe it. Showering and all the rest is up to you, but various circles will give you credibility if you wear the stains of devotion on your shirt.
Heh, subtle point, but they do in fact give the parts away to other nonprofits.
Not true. You are considering only new hardware.
However, not far from my house is a technology recycling warehouse. For some labor or a donation, you can pick up essentially free parts and build a machine of your liking. People use it for all kinds of projects, from PCs to hybrid microcontroller projects.
Most of the new technology replaces something, pushing it into the used stream, then finally the waste stream. However, even outdated technology has uses. It's basically free and sits in a many of the nonprofit offices around me.
Ok, so let's suppose life, in some primitive form, maybe even up to the level of crustaceans are found in these oceans. The first-non-Earth life, and quite exciting, sure.
I'm unsure how this challenges the religious life-origin stories around the world. Any one wants to take a stab at predicting the reactions from the traditional Earth-centric worldviews?
"Over unity devices would be truly revolutionary; they would completely overturn whole fields of science. That is good reason to be very skeptical and dismissive of them."
Its also a good reason to pay attention to them.
Therein lies the crux of these disagreements: Challenges to established models of the world are interesting, but not really difficult to examine. In fact, they are trivial: "You are capturing inducted power from a motor? More than what you put in? Let me show you the formula our current model uses. OK, what formula(e) are you supposing is wrong, that your machine is taking advantage of?" Beyond this amount of discussion, over-unity or bad science ideas are simply not worth the time. There are lots of people with feeble grasps of a topic that see magic in the details they don't understand. Research shouldn't continuously re-teach them that they're wrong via experiment. It should simply point at published literature that they should study. Who wants to teach a class about "ether" beyond the historical anecdote? Let's get to a model that works!
If the details of why a "free energy" machine doesn't work are difficult to understand... then it warrants research...people learn a lot figuring out why they do not work.
But that learning is usually because they skipped the elementary science of examining the current models we have, and what changes they think they're seeing. Mostly, it comes down to mistaking a unit, incorrect measurements, or not understanding the nuances of the machine they've devised.
I think through all of this, you are trying to agree, but I'm stressing: The math/models we have for the world is able to describe almost all but the slightest high/low energy edge cases. Yes, there are some amazing new discovering still to come: better superconductors, nano-scale machinery, artificial biological constructions, photovoltaic advances, battery advances, etc. I cannot predict all the areas of course.
But through all of "whatever is to come", the models we use for these realms won't be completely "rewritten" - they will be altered perhaps, to account for the edge cases that get discovered. For the high percentage of the science applied, our current models work well: They are repeatable, predictable and testable. Even Newton's laws are still used to teach the rough-grained effects of motion, etc.
No claim of any sort is going to suddenly "wipe out" and upend this body of work. I have to continue to stress: the gaps in science are not that our models are wrong (whatever that means) but that they mimic observable behavior, and thus can make predictions on scenarios we've not seen directly (think about astrophysics). As we continuous refine them, no machine is going to appear that suddenly "destroys" these models. This would imply all the existing devices using the same models would work differently. If one proposes that they observe an edge-case, perhaps a mystery's clue will be demonstrated, but science looks into those strange areas all the time, and we've learned a lot already - and it put into the models - to explain we we've observed. So far: No laws of thermodynamics broken.
Your examples prove my point. Quantum effects in use in the real world are the result of anomalies detected in the formulas, then a alternative formula proposed/debated, and then experiments formed that would demonstrate the concept after done on paper. Quantum theories are not new, and the General Theory has long punched holes at the micro-level of Newton - a clarification, really. But those variances are small enough that we didn't have technology to take advantage of them until lately. Now we do, cool enough.
There are tons of other ideas that don't make it off the paper. Anti-gravity, invisibility, fusion, induction concepts all have formulaic details that *might* allow for less-common effects. Except, only rarely does the math add up. If there's any doubt, an experiment is formed, but that consumes resources and labs aren't running on this "free energy". One cannot skip the gedanken, it simply saves tons of precious resources. Who wants to re-build the alternative "free energy" machine yet again to prove it doesn't work. Just do the math. The math works because you're using it every day.
You can be sure that there's not a lot of continuous, direct testing of the laws of thermodynamics. In fact, those laws are put into the planning of almost every experiment going on, without being re-tested. That's my point here - this company thinks it's seeing a statistical anomaly or edge-case in the laws of thermodynamics, but if they would put their hypothesis into the existing equations that already define energy's conversions in tons of working models (from power grids down to semiconductors), they'd be able to state "ah! our anomaly shows up as behavior here, here and here" and have reason to continue.
But it they don't state this. In fact, like all false science, they claim voodoo and the ability to create a scenario unique to the world. Perhaps even this is true, it has happened. (And been false before. Ahem, "cold" fusion). Even so, it'd be much easier to believe if they simply published details. But nope. We have to have this silly jury - and no surprise - the results of "nothing to see here" telephoned back to the real world.
I think we agree, but to me "open mind" means seeing how someone's hypothesis works in the existing world first. If you know the math they are challenging, you can simply ask - "OK, what formulas are you expecting to be different? Under what circumstances?" Then, you look at similar scenarios in the existing world and check. Nope, your formula doesn't match observation, try again.
Science has explained a lot. "Know" is a semantic problem, not a practical one. I'm excited that the future may hold wondrous discoveries, but they won't suddenly revise physics - they'll just add clarity.
Except when the laws you're testing are already being constantly tested, by motors, wires, chargers, etc - continuously around you. I'll admit, the subtle effects of magnetic fields are indeed interesting and strange in the details, but at SOME point one has to rely on the 1000's of prior experiments. Plus, there's a lot of machinery working because of the laws of physics, around us every day. "Current" laws of physics wouldn't change, but perhaps a very specialized edge case (usually at extremes of energy) may arise. This company is nowhere near this level of sophistication. Instead, it's just the same smoke and mirrors.
Would you rather test gravity, magnetic induction, inertia, conservation of energy and a slew of other physical concepts each day?
The place for experiment is where the math behind the observations is doubted, or leaves an anomaly. If there are solid formulas born from prior experiments, one simply can do the experiment "on paper" using the new scenario and deduce what will happen.
Then, if you're still interested, you can compare to a real-world experiment - that's real science.
Except that we're not. Seriously off-topic, but inflation isn't unpredictable. Right now, the double-digit unemployment and positive savings rate we have suggests people are hording their cash, not shopping with abandon.
As soon as any of the indicators go up (these are pretty reliable predictors of activity), the FED simply filters the money out of the banks, rates go up for daily business paper and money is more scarce.
It's been managed this way for 3 decades, and fairly stable since 1983. Check for yourself.
Not sure what you mean. Mod points are partially decided by the viewing account. Singularity is not just one thing, from one group. It's a series of things, and yes - what I'm describing is just a part of it. How would I know what it encompasses? How would you?
I can agree to all of what you said. The value of "information" is really, only in its use. But that's where innovation comes along and connects the dots. Most of the "innovation" we read about is just a mashup (GPS + Phone = neato map of phone pics). Some good uses right now are letting humans navigate their day-to-day adventures with nary a plan. Example: wanna bake bread? never tried it, just google a recipe from the store, pick up ingredients and follow along. Ding, passable bread ready. Repeat for almost anything.
TV is a wasteland of commercials, hypnotizing us to buy junk while TV shows interrupt them.
Web 2.0 is just a new skin on the existing information. It's not adding any value.
What we'll need is some automated sieve that builds a machine-ready semantic web from the general world. Probably a human-size effort like wikipedia, etc. From there, we've lowered the bar for machines to actually identify context in the info (so "apple" means just one thing instead of a mess, like a search engine). We end up somewhere above Wolfram's Alpha but still just a smarter search engine.
We'll have to find a way to put a feedback loop on a semantic web, and then let it synthesize concepts on its own, including the research to confirm what's just stored as facts. This is nontrivial and might encompass all of our current knowledge of computing machinery, but I think its possible.
From there, we get a big accurate model of the real world, and yet, still nothing new. Maybe if we can make AI smart enough, it can justify its existence for us, instead of us just stating "because its cool"
For a long time, the information on the web was put there magically by the techocracy that architected it. For non-tech users, getting their information online has been through ever-easier methods of publishing. Web-logging, aka blogging, was just another step in this phase.
The motivation for providing content varies, but psychologists would say that part of it is in the feeling of belonging with peers you identify with. From forum posts, Wikipedia editing, Amazon reviews, posting youtube vids of kittens in sinks, etc - there's a clic for everyone. These are new-found "friends" that people interact with by simply making something appear online.
There's also a compelling push to do what the longstanding "professional" journalism has done for years. So, there's a group that pushes to create look-alike content that fills a niche, but do it online and for free (except for ads). We get "independent" media outlets, political commentary, diy comedy routines, and websites covering local issues. Quality and regularity varies.
All of these things are good - it pushes the body of human knowledge and interaction into a universal format. The transmission (physical wires) and delivery styles might leave something to be desired, but it's in a fairly searchable format as uncontextual text (that context part is still a challenge, all you search engines out there).
I look forward to the slow spread of not just content, but the focus on a universal context system that gets us a more semantic web. Also, we might also get live connections directly to 1 or more senses in real time, someday. Putting these together and you pretty much get an augmented reality stream, completely customizable, so that you won't have to remember so much as be able to process the extra info fast enough. That'll probably hit an upper limit on our brainpower, but we always seem willing to try (driving while using phone and more). After that, jumping over the senses to just filling artificial neurons with the info, accessible by our natural ones, will be the challenge.
Exciting times, this Information Age, still in its infancy.
This isn't about just Linux/software. The essence of the argument is: If MS's market uses MS's search engine the most, and results are popularity or search-popularity weighted, then MS's own engine will look somewhat conceited.
I'm merely suggesting they weigh their search statistics according to a flat distribution, instead of a normal distribution based on their own captured user groups.
This is probably relevant only in the auto-complete section, which changes faster than the general search index. Just try a few bing vs. google auto-complete searches and notice the differences:
"windows 7" on bing
windows 7
windows 7.0
windows 7.1
windows 7.5
windows 7 download
[it's likely that bing users are already windows 7 users and are looking for more detail by searching on a sub-version]
"windows 7" on google
windows 7 beta
windows 7 download
windows 7 release date
windows 7 review
[google users are more of a general audience and examining windows 7 as a non-user]
This issue isn't huge, but it will affect the approachability of Bing, IMO.
This bias, built from MS's search seeing the world as highly MS-leaning from simply their own adherents using their products more, is somewhat self-defeating.
For popularity-driven ranks, the wider the audience and usage, the better the full audience will be able to make use of the statistics it employs. If MS's employees, contractors, proponents, vendors, etc are the primary users for the tool before a general web world, the stats will be be slanted towards MS's offerings, as you allude.
I would expect for a release as important as this to the MS portfolio, I would expect them to reset the statistics after the initial rollout, or even sub-sample the IP's, selecting for diversity, for the stats to fight bias. Without this, I can only wait until another set of "MS is just pushing more MS" posts across the blogosphere.
Then again, perhaps a healthy dose of bing-bombing (aka google-bombing) the site will re-skew it to those who fight such battles.
Scaling up the infrastructure, the issues (like animal-borne diseases and excrement in the streets) are completely different (from, say, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and petroleum products in the waste stream).
Also, idle-time maintenance of automotive tech is much lower than animal-based systems.
Efficiency competed within both realms for many years. Animals lost for many reasons, most of them fairly.
you forgot...
5. Nobody would know. Although determining if an ad-focused object is in the loaded dom, no many sites check. And why would they, this is more development effort.
There's no real way to tell how many firefox users are employing adblock. But at most it's around 23%
HMD's are so retro-chic. Don't you know that all the cool research is now tapping the brain's retina layer to augment/alter vision?
These days, I'm waiting for the hat/camera/socket that allow for text overlay, enhanced-spectrum cameras, and novel perspectives to our existing firmware.
Remember, when dreaming go big.