You're wrong, you know. We're all composed of atoms, so clearly all matter interaction should be studied as quantum physics, but clearly that's wrong too, since matter is just condensed energy. We all of life - from going to the drive-through at McDonalds to contemplating the meaning of life - is just energy interacting with energy. Clearly, we must always keep this in mind. Anyone who is not considering that all of their activities are actually quantum-mechanical energy interactions is missing what's Really Important, and only thinking about the non-essential parts of things.
Or, perhaps, there is some value at looking at things from the macro level. Wouldn't you say that the biological fields of medicine (most of it), plant breeding (most of it), animal breeding (most of it) have some merit?
These have little consideration of bionano, just as all of life isn't concerned with quantum-mechanical energy interactions, even if it is the stuff of all things.
That only works to a certain extent. I will never buy anything from X-10 ever, for instance, because their advertising was so incredibly obtrusive.
If I started seeing a lot of the same video game ads when I was looking for actual content, I'd stop going to that site. If I saw the same ad on all the sites in place of content, I'd boycott the product.
Today journalists only want money in their pockets. Why would I write a good article published every two weeks if I can write a poor article that is printed every week? It's the business, man, accept it or leave.
You're a journalist I take it?
Sorry, dude. I don't even consider badly written Slashdot comments acceptable. There's no way I'm going for bad journalism for which I have to pay. It better be fairly well written, and it better be honest, or I'm not spending a dime on it, and I'm not buying anything from the ads.
There's probably a fair number of others like me. Magazines don't make "$$$" that way. They make "$" - possibly even less.
They're probably talking about buying the new version. Which almost entirely misses that point.
Its about an astronaut fighting against a single ape on a planet that probably isn't earth. And he's good and pure. No racism from him.
So its easy to miss the connection on that one.
All of this is entirely beside the point. Probably the engineers that wrote the code are scratching their heads and wondering what's wrong with the management. The most likely possibility is that people who buy Planet of the Apes are historically more likely to buy the other recommendations than anything else, and they do that because it's happened before.
Statistical learning programs are easy to write. They don't think. They make impartial associations. You don't like them? Tough. They're true. If most of the people who bought "Lion King" also bought "Savannah Orgy" they'd be right in recommending it. Unless you code them wrong, of course. But what's the likelihood of that? We're talking about very well tested methods here, not some new prototype learning algorithms.
They've got Apache vulnerabilities listed on the Linux side, but not on the Windows side - vulnerabilities that affected both places, I might add.
This is true of most of the *nix vulnerabilities, actually.
So what we're really seeing is Windows-only vulnerabilities being compared to ones that are OS neutral. Not that its very suprising, though. Its 2006. With the exception of software written specifically for Windows, most software is cross-platform.
This is the only really meaningful way to do this kind of a report because of this characteristic. The important thing to keep in mind in that, though, is that Windows has all of its own vulnerabilities AND most of the others.:)
Can you imagine an entire news broadcast with one announcer, reading a teleprompter out of the shot and away from the camera with no breaks for stories?
Yes. If the broadcaster is a woman.
And she's pretty.
And parts are showing.
I believe this has actually been done. Was "Naked News" successful?
That ephemeral, rather than concrete, goods are now being touted as Americas most valuable possessions is nothing short of depressing.
Why? You've heard the old saying "give a man a fish...?" Part of the point there is that the knowledge of fishing is more valuable than the actual fish, or the actual fishing is.
Similarly, consider the atomic bomb. What would happen if the US had had two of them bestowed upon us by an alien race, rather than made by scientists? The fact that we could at any time make more was the thing that really clinched the decision to end WWII.
If we export mostly ideas then it is quite possible that we've got more ideas than we have people to handle them, and need to export the work to make them happen. Don't get me wrong: there's certainly lots of laziness and of living off of the squalor of other parts of the world to blame for why we're doing all that exporting of ideas only. But that's not all of it.
Ideas can be precious and highly valuable things, and those who produce them are sometimes the most productive people in the world.
Of course, I'm willing to admit I'm wrong, but you're going to have to do more than make claims without backing them up with facts or even examples.
You're right. But all of those cases have one thing in common: there are public services necessary for you to have them.
In the case of cars, you use the road. Taxes go towards maintenance and safety.
In the case of homes and businesses, taxes go towards public services such as police, fire departments, and governing costs.
What exactly do you get in exchange for having a software license? You provide all the hardware, all the software, and the cost of electricity and internet access. The government provides absolutely no services related to software to justify having a tax on it.
Of course, not all taxes are to pay for services. Some are punitive. However, I can't think of any reason that using more costly software is a reason to punish a business. Can you?
This just doesn't make sense in the context of most tax policies.
The government failed in its most essential function.
I would have to disagree there. The government's most essential function is the same for all governments the world over, and that have ever existed: to control violence within their realm of influence. This is the characteristic that makes government government.
Everything else is stuff that people think that government should do. Now whether or not our government failed there is definitely an issue. Was there too more violence in New Orleans than our government should have permitted?
It would instantly make the US dollar worthless, halt all foreign trade, and force Americans to use the barter system for goods and services...which means that most goods and services wouldn't be distributed. As a nonessential service, the internet would probably be shutdown. Martial law would be declared most places, and the FDIC would die. Probably the outcry would lead to a political revolution, as most things that cause people to no longer be able to eat do.
Doing something like that would make the great depression look like a walk in the park.
Of course, you could just not tax and also not print money. It would be easy. Our government could just declare itself bankrupt and erase all its loans. Foreign loans could be eliminated through force. Tons of people would lose their jobs, and whole industries would collapse. There would probably be a war or three. The size of our government would be drastically reduced and there would be a major depression.
But then we'd get better in less than a decade, probably - unlike what would happen if we printed money.
Either course, however, would make the people who did it vastly unpopular, and - more to the point - would drastically reduce the size and power of the government. It'll never happen.
Re:Save the batteries...Pen AND Paper Games...
on
Games That Travel Well
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Any reason why crosswords only entertain for 78 minutes?
Because that's how long it takes for you to realize you just spent 78 minutes doing a dull, monotonous crossword puzzle.
And that's not 78 minutes for the trip. Its 78 minutes for your whole life.
Yeah, pen and paper games don't really seem like such a good idea to me. It seems like another extension of those lame car songs they sang in all those Chevy Chase National Lampoon movies. I can see what would happen:
"Take that pen out of your sister's eye, or so help me I WILL STOP THIS CAR!"
"The window is not a sketchpad! Don't think that I can't take this belt off while driving."
"No, you can't get high off the ink. I don't care if you drink it. We're not stopping to get you a coke."
"No, the dog doesn't like it when you put a pen there. DON'T PUT IT IN YOUR MOUTH AFTER THAT!"
RTFA. He made one in the 60s for himself. Then YEARS later he patented it.
At any rate, you need to read more about patents, I think. There is a minimum level of specificity that must be present in a patent, or the patent office will reject it, and especially with things that CAN have an implementation, they usually require one.
The patent office has lots of things wrong with it, but I generally think that this is one of the things they do pretty well if they understand the patent enough and aren't allowing nonsense to be patented.
I'm gonna have to disagree with you there. Someone with two years of perl scripting and two years of experience with Java who doesn't do OO Perl is lying about something.
Perl is all about making things easier on you. So is OOP. So someone steeped (i.e. two years of experience) in an OOP language is going to immediately start using that approach in perl.
If they're not, then:
1) They don't really get the point of using OOP, so they're not really going to use it in such a way that other people can use it too down the line.
2) They haven't really been programming in Java that long. They lied about the amount of Java they've done. They've done very little of it in those two years, so they're not very comfortable with OOP.
3) They haven't really done anything major with perl, so they haven't needed OOP with it. So they were lying about that part.
Its possible that if you've gotten that experience that you're looking at a PHB backed by an engineer such as myself - who uses perl and java as his primary two languages - and who knows that a non-OOP-only perl programmer who uses Java regularly has something fishy about him.
Only the location must be taught. A child comes with built-in homing (they'll turn towards anything that touches their face), and built-in sucking and drinking.
So...its pretty close to not taught. Its not like they need that last bit. Their bodies aren't really strong enough to get to it even if they had some means of zeroing in on its precise location alone; they need the nurses for that.
By comparison, what other interfaces do you immediately know how to use as soon as you're holding it without any knowledge at all? I can't think of any. I'd say that the nipple is more intuitive and less learned than any other existing interface.,,,and I've used up my "totally useless argument" quota for the week.
Anyone who uses the phrase "jillions of volts of capacitance" obviously doesn't understand what's inside an LCD monitor, nor how dangerous it is.
Sounds like somebody wishes he was the one who made that comment first. Too late. The comment is out. He's already talked about all the jillions of volts of capacitance that live inside your monitor. You're going to have to talk about something else. Personally, I would have gone for the ultra-dangerous kabillion watt lightening vortex thats in the back of 'em.
There is really nothing dangerous in them, LCD's cathodes don't use more than 1kv, and unlike CRT's, there is no significant capacitor that will remain charged when the monitor is turned off.
Well, yeah, obviously. There's clearly no danger from the cathodes. Their capacitors are all tame. Its the doghodes you have to worry about. Their capacitors are easily excitable, and you have to wake them up just right or they end up escaping from your monitor. Those things'll live in your walls for years while slowly eroding the foundation of your house. The only way to get 'em then is highly toxic, massive bug bombs.
Obviously there would be some risk if you actually worked on the inverter while it was on, which isn't even dangerous if you are careful.
You've never worked with an inverter while its on, have you? It can totally suck you into a temporal vortex if you even look at it while its on. I would never even consider it except under the most dire circumstances.
And if you're that worried about the safety of cutting into a cold cathode, you could always use a shop vac to improvise a fume extraction system, in case you screw it up.
Too risky. You could get sucked up by the vac, and then how would you get out? You wouldn't. Then what good will the monitor be to you?
Or you could order a harder to find cold cathode that does not have the covering mentioned, or salvage one from a scanner.
Okay, that's just nonsense. Everybody knows that all a scanner can do is make people's heads explode.
How much RAM? How much flash? Which processor set? Is there a GCC available for it? Which serial communication protocols does it support (I2C, other)? USB? Ethernet? Which form factors are being released? How does one program it (what tools are required)? Price?
I'm very interested, but I'm afraid there's not even close to enough info in that article to give Linux developers any ideas about the product.
Another thought is that as soon as it really takes hold in a major US city and it works, city planners the nation over will take note.
And it'll happen again. And again, and again, and again until we don't need cellphone companies, cable companies, or telephone companies. So far it hasn't worked on a massive scale - mostly because it was too much cost for too few to benefit. Its the biggest threat to these companies that there is.
Still, such a violent self-preserving always disturbs me. It's why I work at a small company myself. Too many people all working together mean that there's going to be power at the top. And if power doesn't corrupt, it certainly attacts the corrupted like a moth to flame.
Sort of. Clearly, it'll be powered by Sony FuelSticks(TM), which are in every way equivalent, but in no way compatible with any other fuel cell technology for no good reason at all, but which cost slightly more.
computer powerful enough to run a comparable neural net at practical speeds
Once again, you're treating a software problem as if its a hardware problem.
Further, we can run our computer "neurons" at thousands of times the speed of a Fruit Fly's thanks to the fact that we're using silicon instead of protien, so we don't need as many, and we can store the feedback functions as actual functions rather than representing them chemically, so we save some usage there. We can also take designed shortcuts that save processor because something always works one way and doesn't need to be learned.
The point is that to build the functional equivalent of a fruit fly is easier than actually making a fruit fly. I believe I sort of covered that in my first post, though, didn't I?
Do I consider them comparable? No.
Clearly you're one of the "it has to work exactly the same for it to be intelligent" school of thought. I guess you won't see an intelligent machine in your lifetime. Good luck proving to others that it makes a difference when the really clever machines start to become commonplace.
We can even do "fruit fly" artificial intelligence yet, nor do they claim that, either.
I assume you actually mean "can't," and I'm going to have to disagree with you there.
I went to a competition where we were making flying vehicles that detected objects on the ground with much more complicated characteristics than a fruit fly is capable of recognizing. Someone there even had a helicopter, which is much less stable than a fruit fly is in terms of control, so the control system was more intelligent than the one a fruit fly uses to navigate.
I'm sort of wondering what would even lead you to this conclusion, and the only thing that I can think is that you mean "we can't make robot fruit flies." This is true, but only because of physical limitations. Fruit fly AI is an easy enough. Or perhaps you take the fact that no one has made a fruit fly AI an indication?
Well, why would they? They wouldn't be able to test it outside a simulator, and there are lots of harder problems that that actually CAN test and show that their AI is intelligent. Why would they bother?
Also, remember that the images that JPL posts aren't scientific quality.
You got that right. IIRC, those are the images used in the "36% More Rock Ninjas Coming Out of the Earth than in Previous Decades" paper, presented in 1997.
Explains why they were able to post it so quickly, too. After all, it would take a lot of care to actually get things like that right. Maybe even more than peer review would require, since that's mostly concerned with the text. I'm sure that they recycled. Especially since I've spent the last eight years fighting hordes of rock ninjas.
Slashdot Mirror
You're wrong, you know.
We're all composed of atoms, so clearly all matter interaction should be studied as quantum physics, but clearly that's wrong too, since matter is just condensed energy.
We all of life - from going to the drive-through at McDonalds to contemplating the meaning of life - is just energy interacting with energy. Clearly, we must always keep this in mind. Anyone who is not considering that all of their activities are actually quantum-mechanical energy interactions is missing what's Really Important, and only thinking about the non-essential parts of things.
Or, perhaps, there is some value at looking at things from the macro level. Wouldn't you say that the biological fields of medicine (most of it), plant breeding (most of it), animal breeding (most of it) have some merit?
These have little consideration of bionano, just as all of life isn't concerned with quantum-mechanical energy interactions, even if it is the stuff of all things.
That only works to a certain extent. I will never buy anything from X-10 ever, for instance, because their advertising was so incredibly obtrusive.
If I started seeing a lot of the same video game ads when I was looking for actual content, I'd stop going to that site. If I saw the same ad on all the sites in place of content, I'd boycott the product.
Today journalists only want money in their pockets. Why would I write a good article published every two weeks if I can write a poor article that is printed every week? It's the business, man, accept it or leave.
You're a journalist I take it?
Sorry, dude. I don't even consider badly written Slashdot comments acceptable. There's no way I'm going for bad journalism for which I have to pay. It better be fairly well written, and it better be honest, or I'm not spending a dime on it, and I'm not buying anything from the ads.
There's probably a fair number of others like me. Magazines don't make "$$$" that way. They make "$" - possibly even less.
They're probably talking about buying the new version. Which almost entirely misses that point.
Its about an astronaut fighting against a single ape on a planet that probably isn't earth.
And he's good and pure. No racism from him.
So its easy to miss the connection on that one.
All of this is entirely beside the point. Probably the engineers that wrote the code are scratching their heads and wondering what's wrong with the management. The most likely possibility is that people who buy Planet of the Apes are historically more likely to buy the other recommendations than anything else, and they do that because it's happened before.
Statistical learning programs are easy to write. They don't think. They make impartial associations. You don't like them? Tough. They're true. If most of the people who bought "Lion King" also bought "Savannah Orgy" they'd be right in recommending it. Unless you code them wrong, of course. But what's the likelihood of that? We're talking about very well tested methods here, not some new prototype learning algorithms.
They've got Apache vulnerabilities listed on the Linux side, but not on the Windows side - vulnerabilities that affected both places, I might add.
:)
This is true of most of the *nix vulnerabilities, actually.
So what we're really seeing is Windows-only vulnerabilities being compared to ones that are OS neutral. Not that its very suprising, though. Its 2006.
With the exception of software written specifically for Windows, most software is cross-platform.
This is the only really meaningful way to do this kind of a report because of this characteristic. The important thing to keep in mind in that, though, is that Windows has all of its own vulnerabilities AND most of the others.
RTFA. If its true then they could get a much smaller EM generator, a pressure-based scale, and a weight.
If it works then the weight will get lighter over the course of the experiment.
Then they can worry about extra-dimensional travel. Anti-gravity is already more than enough to shoot for.
Can you imagine an entire news broadcast with one announcer, reading a teleprompter out of the shot and away from the camera with no breaks for stories?
Yes. If the broadcaster is a woman.
And she's pretty.
And parts are showing.
I believe this has actually been done. Was "Naked News" successful?
All of them. Just have one of them running under VMWare on a separate monitor, and you can run two at the same time.
I've heard that lots of people like to the "two at the same time" sort of thing with MMORPGs. This keeps you from needing two full computers.
That ephemeral, rather than concrete, goods are now being touted as Americas most valuable possessions is nothing short of depressing.
Why? You've heard the old saying "give a man a fish...?" Part of the point there is that the knowledge of fishing is more valuable than the actual fish, or the actual fishing is.
Similarly, consider the atomic bomb. What would happen if the US had had two of them bestowed upon us by an alien race, rather than made by scientists? The fact that we could at any time make more was the thing that really clinched the decision to end WWII.
If we export mostly ideas then it is quite possible that we've got more ideas than we have people to handle them, and need to export the work to make them happen. Don't get me wrong: there's certainly lots of laziness and of living off of the squalor of other parts of the world to blame for why we're doing all that exporting of ideas only. But that's not all of it.
Ideas can be precious and highly valuable things, and those who produce them are sometimes the most productive people in the world.
Of course, I'm willing to admit I'm wrong, but you're going to have to do more than make claims without backing them up with facts or even examples.
You're right. But all of those cases have one thing in common: there are public services necessary for you to have them.
In the case of cars, you use the road. Taxes go towards maintenance and safety.
In the case of homes and businesses, taxes go towards public services such as police, fire departments, and governing costs.
What exactly do you get in exchange for having a software license? You provide all the hardware, all the software, and the cost of electricity and internet access. The government provides absolutely no services related to software to justify having a tax on it.
Of course, not all taxes are to pay for services. Some are punitive. However, I can't think of any reason that using more costly software is a reason to punish a business. Can you?
This just doesn't make sense in the context of most tax policies.
Science Daily are a bunch of 'tards who do no fact checking. It was MIT who discovered it, but it wasn't recently.
:)
Wikipedia knows.
My guess is that some discovery occurred, but the reporters who have only the vaguest understanding of science, didn't understand it.
In the spirit of Christmas, I'll forgive the mistake today. As long as they take care of the problem by tomorrow.
The government failed in its most essential function.
I would have to disagree there. The government's most essential function is the same for all governments the world over, and that have ever existed: to control violence within their realm of influence. This is the characteristic that makes government government.
Everything else is stuff that people think that government should do. Now whether or not our government failed there is definitely an issue. Was there too more violence in New Orleans than our government should have permitted?
It would instantly make the US dollar worthless, halt all foreign trade, and force Americans to use the barter system for goods and services...which means that most goods and services wouldn't be distributed. As a nonessential service, the internet would probably be shutdown. Martial law would be declared most places, and the FDIC would die. Probably the outcry would lead to a political revolution, as most things that cause people to no longer be able to eat do.
Doing something like that would make the great depression look like a walk in the park.
Of course, you could just not tax and also not print money. It would be easy. Our government could just declare itself bankrupt and erase all its loans. Foreign loans could be eliminated through force. Tons of people would lose their jobs, and whole industries would collapse. There would probably be a war or three. The size of our government would be drastically reduced and there would be a major depression.
But then we'd get better in less than a decade, probably - unlike what would happen if we printed money.
Either course, however, would make the people who did it vastly unpopular, and - more to the point - would drastically reduce the size and power of the government. It'll never happen.
Any reason why crosswords only entertain for 78 minutes?
Because that's how long it takes for you to realize you just spent 78 minutes doing a dull, monotonous crossword puzzle.
And that's not 78 minutes for the trip. Its 78 minutes for your whole life.
Yeah, pen and paper games don't really seem like such a good idea to me. It seems like another extension of those lame car songs they sang in all those Chevy Chase National Lampoon movies. I can see what would happen:
"Take that pen out of your sister's eye, or so help me I WILL STOP THIS CAR!"
"The window is not a sketchpad! Don't think that I can't take this belt off while driving."
"No, you can't get high off the ink. I don't care if you drink it. We're not stopping to get you a coke."
"No, the dog doesn't like it when you put a pen there. DON'T PUT IT IN YOUR MOUTH AFTER THAT!"
RTFA. He made one in the 60s for himself. Then YEARS later he patented it.
At any rate, you need to read more about patents, I think. There is a minimum level of specificity that must be present in a patent, or the patent office will reject it, and especially with things that CAN have an implementation, they usually require one.
The patent office has lots of things wrong with it, but I generally think that this is one of the things they do pretty well if they understand the patent enough and aren't allowing nonsense to be patented.
I'm gonna have to disagree with you there. Someone with two years of perl scripting and two years of experience with Java who doesn't do OO Perl is lying about something.
Perl is all about making things easier on you. So is OOP. So someone steeped (i.e. two years of experience) in an OOP language is going to immediately start using that approach in perl.
If they're not, then:
1) They don't really get the point of using OOP, so they're not really going to use it in such a way that other people can use it too down the line.
2) They haven't really been programming in Java that long. They lied about the amount of Java they've done. They've done very little of it in those two years, so they're not very comfortable with OOP.
3) They haven't really done anything major with perl, so they haven't needed OOP with it. So they were lying about that part.
Its possible that if you've gotten that experience that you're looking at a PHB backed by an engineer such as myself - who uses perl and java as his primary two languages - and who knows that a non-OOP-only perl programmer who uses Java regularly has something fishy about him.
one that must be taught
,,,and I've used up my "totally useless argument" quota for the week.
Only the location must be taught. A child comes with built-in homing (they'll turn towards anything that touches their face), and built-in sucking and drinking.
So...its pretty close to not taught. Its not like they need that last bit. Their bodies aren't really strong enough to get to it even if they had some means of zeroing in on its precise location alone; they need the nurses for that.
By comparison, what other interfaces do you immediately know how to use as soon as you're holding it without any knowledge at all? I can't think of any. I'd say that the nipple is more intuitive and less learned than any other existing interface.
Anyone who uses the phrase "jillions of volts of capacitance" obviously doesn't understand what's inside an LCD monitor, nor how dangerous it is.
Sounds like somebody wishes he was the one who made that comment first. Too late. The comment is out. He's already talked about all the jillions of volts of capacitance that live inside your monitor. You're going to have to talk about something else. Personally, I would have gone for the ultra-dangerous kabillion watt lightening vortex thats in the back of 'em.
There is really nothing dangerous in them, LCD's cathodes don't use more than 1kv, and unlike CRT's, there is no significant capacitor that will remain charged when the monitor is turned off.
Well, yeah, obviously. There's clearly no danger from the cathodes. Their capacitors are all tame. Its the doghodes you have to worry about. Their capacitors are easily excitable, and you have to wake them up just right or they end up escaping from your monitor. Those things'll live in your walls for years while slowly eroding the foundation of your house. The only way to get 'em then is highly toxic, massive bug bombs.
Obviously there would be some risk if you actually worked on the inverter while it was on, which isn't even dangerous if you are careful.
You've never worked with an inverter while its on, have you? It can totally suck you into a temporal vortex if you even look at it while its on. I would never even consider it except under the most dire circumstances.
And if you're that worried about the safety of cutting into a cold cathode, you could always use a shop vac to improvise a fume extraction system, in case you screw it up.
Too risky. You could get sucked up by the vac, and then how would you get out? You wouldn't. Then what good will the monitor be to you?
Or you could order a harder to find cold cathode that does not have the covering mentioned, or salvage one from a scanner.
Okay, that's just nonsense. Everybody knows that all a scanner can do is make people's heads explode.
How much RAM? How much flash? Which processor set?
Is there a GCC available for it? Which serial communication protocols does it support (I2C, other)? USB? Ethernet?
Which form factors are being released? How does one program it (what tools are required)?
Price?
I'm very interested, but I'm afraid there's not even close to enough info in that article to give Linux developers any ideas about the product.
Another thought is that as soon as it really takes hold in a major US city and it works, city planners the nation over will take note.
And it'll happen again. And again, and again, and again until we don't need cellphone companies, cable companies, or telephone companies. So far it hasn't worked on a massive scale - mostly because it was too much cost for too few to benefit. Its the biggest threat to these companies that there is.
Still, such a violent self-preserving always disturbs me. It's why I work at a small company myself. Too many people all working together mean that there's going to be power at the top. And if power doesn't corrupt, it certainly attacts the corrupted like a moth to flame.
Sort of. Clearly, it'll be powered by Sony FuelSticks(TM), which are in every way equivalent, but in no way compatible with any other fuel cell technology for no good reason at all, but which cost slightly more.
You know they're planning it.
computer powerful enough to run a comparable neural net at practical speeds
Once again, you're treating a software problem as if its a hardware problem.
Further, we can run our computer "neurons" at thousands of times the speed of a Fruit Fly's thanks to the fact that we're using silicon instead of protien, so we don't need as many, and we can store the feedback functions as actual functions rather than representing them chemically, so we save some usage there. We can also take designed shortcuts that save processor because something always works one way and doesn't need to be learned.
The point is that to build the functional equivalent of a fruit fly is easier than actually making a fruit fly. I believe I sort of covered that in my first post, though, didn't I?
Do I consider them comparable? No.
Clearly you're one of the "it has to work exactly the same for it to be intelligent" school of thought. I guess you won't see an intelligent machine in your lifetime. Good luck proving to others that it makes a difference when the really clever machines start to become commonplace.
We can even do "fruit fly" artificial intelligence yet, nor do they claim that, either.
I assume you actually mean "can't," and I'm going to have to disagree with you there.
I went to a competition where we were making flying vehicles that detected objects on the ground with much more complicated characteristics than a fruit fly is capable of recognizing. Someone there even had a helicopter, which is much less stable than a fruit fly is in terms of control, so the control system was more intelligent than the one a fruit fly uses to navigate.
I'm sort of wondering what would even lead you to this conclusion, and the only thing that I can think is that you mean "we can't make robot fruit flies." This is true, but only because of physical limitations. Fruit fly AI is an easy enough. Or perhaps you take the fact that no one has made a fruit fly AI an indication?
Well, why would they? They wouldn't be able to test it outside a simulator, and there are lots of harder problems that that actually CAN test and show that their AI is intelligent. Why would they bother?
I don't know that Babylon 5's process can be generalized to all things, or even that all the decisions were good ones.
I mean, who thinks "Special Effects? Lets get some old Amiga computers and use this 'Video Toaster' software. That works great!."
I think that has a lot more to do with the quality of the visuals than a lack of money.
Also, remember that the images that JPL posts aren't scientific quality.
You got that right. IIRC, those are the images used in the "36% More Rock Ninjas Coming Out of the Earth than in Previous Decades" paper, presented in 1997.
Explains why they were able to post it so quickly, too. After all, it would take a lot of care to actually get things like that right. Maybe even more than peer review would require, since that's mostly concerned with the text. I'm sure that they recycled. Especially since I've spent the last eight years fighting hordes of rock ninjas.