We need to get beyond this whole concept of sending up the best and the brightest and throwing gobs of money at the program. We need to get to the point where we will have establishments (most likely lunar at first) where we're going to have real workers and not just high end engineers
The definition of alien has come full circle.
The next step is to be able to send more people and keep them longer out there. They all have to be smart, principled, dedicated, and team players. Perhaps the education system is what needs to be prodded to turn out better people at all levels so that there's no shortage of people to do the heavy lifting. An education system that strives to produce an average grade at B- or C+ levels has got to be missing something.
Several of my professors mentioned that their target average was 70%, which is enough people passing to be a success but the average person wouldn't be spectacular. It's understandable to set a high bar so that it is a meaningful challenge, but it's also perceived that the teaching cuts corners in terms of quality so that some students fall behind while teaching workload is reduced. When one thinks back, there were a lot of poor presentations in the classroom.
I consider myself to be fairly smart, and I learned many things on my own to get good marks. These days it's not so hard to find all the knowledge required for a degree in sources close at hand - books and Internet - rather than in school. Perhaps the best and brightest should be motivated to view school as a secondary source of education and given the chance to earn their qualifications in a more compressed and streamlined path. School involves a huge amount of repetition and inefficiency that may well weaken student's views of themselves as it teaches tolerance for lower performance.
In space, a person needs to be able to operate independently as well as together. School makes people go in lockstep as much as possible due to economic restrictions. There's not enough personal guidance, and that may be the biggest factor in helping people succeed in all the typical careers. If a nation is powerful enough to defy gravity, it should educate people to have the qualities desired in astronauts.
Well, it is said that we make things fun. We must be such a gas.
I, for one, would like us to expand into space to get away from those who are total PITAs (pains in the ass).
Only ordinary people cavorting in space wastes so many resources that could be better used. An argument may be made to shrink the distance between habitable worlds perhaps by somehow bringing them closer together. Another answer is for people to rise above their ordinariness and achieve worthy goals in space. If the scientists can convince us that space is within reach, wouldn't we feel motivated enough to make it happen?
If you put your ear on a train track, you can hear a train approaching from far away
Has anyone done this before? The bumper sticker on a train reads If you can hear me, your head will be cut off.
Feel a rail on a track. Long after a train has passed, the track is still hot. I put my ear to the track, but could not hear the train through the rail. This was a rail that has its segments bolted for high speed trains. However, I did hear the train in the air, ear not on rail. The train was a high speed train with a loud diesel. As a wheel passes over the gap between two segments of track, there is a click that is loud enough to be a thunk, but the train would have to be too close before that sound is transmitted through the rail loud enough to be heard over the engine, which is audible when the train is over 2000 metres away and out of sight.
Trying to listen for the snap, crackle, pop of a bridge may be futile. A traffic bridge would have all kinds of noise from vehicles and surrounding industry. The bridge in Minneapolis crosses a river and a railway. Not a quiet scene.
This is a great time for OpenOffice to get out there and let the common person know about them. Firefox had ads in the newspaper, why couldn't OOo?
Anyways, it's a great business opportunity - why all the negativity? OpenOffice could incorporate ads too. All proceeds to support development of open source. People have been comparing to Microsoft and wondering why they have such a market share. Well, it's money that's made the difference.
Some people like a little imagination, newness, and pizzazz on their screens. We're not working in 800x600 any more but the work doesn't always take the full 2048x1600 or whatever. The important thing is to not be overly annoyed or distracted by ads that get in the way of doing your own thing, and as such people can vote on which ads are liked or not liked - keeping the decision making public in line with open source philosophy.
So we don't just whine about how commercialized Microsoft is. They know how to play to win. If open source wants to get ahead, it has to pick up on good ideas and make them better.
i think my PS2 is supercomputer isnt it? Weren't the US government going to restrict exports on them as they were considered munitions or something daft like that. Same thing for old Mac G5 as i recall. Might be a stupid urban myth though
FYI Apple computers can be used to make a supercomputer. The MACH5 is number 50 in the TOP500.
Supercomputers are cheap, but many other products aren't getting cheaper at the same rate. A pack of toilet paper might be practically free if prices dropped as fast. However, who would stay in the toilet paper business. Computers will be cheap as long as money can be made. But there should come a day when anyone can make their own computer from raw materials, instructions posted online, and specialized power tools.
Having more powerful computers is tantamount to having more power. If personal computers become more and more powerful, catching up with yesterday's supercomputers as they exist today, people will be able to construct various items for themselves, including computers and machinery merely by selecting a few options and clicking OK. We'll wait with bated breath what happens to prices of common commodities.
You know, if the machine is broken, how would it really know what was actually broken? The machine might have dispensed the right amount and recorded the wrong amount, or even done both wrong.
Considering the expenses of raising children, upgrading Office seems to be a lowest priority.
After the educational discount, the latest Office is a good way to obtain further non-backward-compatibility lockin. If the parents use the new Office and convert the business versions to the new Office, the ripple widens. So goes the old strategy. I wish Office would actually merit upgrading.
I would have thought computers would have surpasses cars a while ago.
Increased ownership of computers may reduce emissions by reducing the need to travel. Also more people may spend more time with their computers rather than going out.
For the population as a whole, Windows has allowed a wide spectrum of people to use computers with a variety of side-effects: (1) less expensive and improved technology, (2) increased awareness and knowledge, (3) heightened expectations of technological usability and achievement, (4) shift in culture and lifestyle. It's not all good or bad, but life in 2007 without computers as they are today would probably be precarious and unnatural.
Are we so sure the 1 billion count is accurate? Not entirely Microsoft's doing, but I've installed Windows about 7 times on my P4.... Oh, this software didn't uninstall but how can I fix that? I'll just reinstall Windows! First experience with spyware... reinstall Windows! Also, back in the day when I had a 166 and a lot of adventurousness, I installed Windows 4 times in a multiboot setup basically to have Windows 95 and NT. Computers got cheaper and virtual machines - no more multiboot, but come to think of it, I installed Windows 3 times on virtual machines. The installation counter runneth over.
10^9 OEM installs is a substantial critical mass. I started using Windows when it was 3.1 and I could barely do anything before a crash requiring a reboot - good thing the reboots were not as dragging as they are on Vista. You would think: Dual core vs. 486. Windows should reboot in 5 seconds? All the same, people have been provided with just what they liked to keep using Windows, and although I worked with Unix workstations so much that Windows seemed really stupid at first, Windows 95 was a big turnaround in comparison. The price/performance feeling was always good.
Many new computers costing only $400-$500 have Vista. I doubt people would buy Vista separately the way they switched from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. I wonder if a future version of Windows will make people want to switch from Vista--doesn't say much for Vista, but in Microsoft's shoes, how else do you make people buy a new version of a practically nondepreciating product?
Let's consider the above phrase. There are many opposing forces to Moore's Law if we draw a free-body diagram. Some people don't want better computers as we hear "I just use it for e-mail", as there are those with little time of their own to be ambitious with a computer though they may use fairly powerful software at work. Then, there's competition from the third world, who before couldn't afford anything good may be able to buy a computer that has a built in UPS and wireless networking. It's a revolutionary business tool that may raise the economic power of billions of people.
If I drive, I am master of my own destiny to a large degree. On a plane, if one stupid thing breaks, there's a higher chance for total control loss.
The statistics for flight safety are probably skewed heavily by the fear of flying. If the entire population flew even half as much as they ride in cars, the reality of flight dangers would make you cry for your mommy.
I'd make the guess that language matters more for citation than for acceptance. Acceptance only evaluates the scientific merits, citation requires the paper to have given the citing person insight.
To make an article understandable, it has to follow a standard of symbolism and language, first of all. This is well known, but often when I try to read a paper in an unfamiliar field I find that I don't have any idea of the notation that circulates only in a tight group of specialists. Searching for definitions of symbols is very painful. Tools like Google don't make it easy to search for non-natural-language expressions, many of which do not even permit search engines to sniff them anyways.
If a result is important, specialists will tend to use it frequently and clarify the idea after maybe 5 or 10 years. A researcher would only serve himself though to write clearly and be understood immediately.
Space and time are horrible constraints for researchers that are starting out and need to have quantity for the sake of keeping a job. The writing quality is dubious as a result. Suppose, then, after centuries of research writing, boilerplate formats are used to keep writing style and content on track. It helps writers not familiar with what to present as well as standardizes the language. Though many researchers would care to stick out like sore thumbs by publishing on a boilerplate, I would find it a lot easier to read.
Pi already contains all the works of Shakespeare, along with all other works. It's an infinite, non-repeating series of digits
Suppose Pi contains some works past, present, and future along with a lot of crap. Now just copy Pi to another number Qi, which has the same digits but with all the recognizable works cut out. Qi is still an infinite non-repeating sequence of digits. How do you know Pi has any works of value? The opposite direction is if Pi contains no works of value, insert works of value to obtain a new number Oi.
It comes down to the encoding then. But by this argument, I could encode the number 42 to represent the movie The Godfather--as long as I enter 42 into the movie software, the movie plays and what do I care how large the movie file is (2 bytes)? There probably is a 4 followed by a 2 in the digits of Pi.
Can anyone tell us if Pi contains every arbitrary finite permutation of digits? Somehow I doubt it. If there is a quiescent period of say 5 minutes in a movie represented by 3 Mb of all zeros with a few ones sprinkled about, Pi would have to contain this flatline in order for the theory to be universally applicable. Also, scenery is full of bland shades and very regular patterns. That would be encoded with a long substring of repetition.
However, what is to say we cannot give the monkey purpose? Suppose all the keys of the typewriter are not QWERTY but rather BER[SPACE]WHO'S[SPACE]THERE?[CARRIAGE RETURN]FRAN[SPACE]NAY,[SPACE]ANSWER[SPACE]ME:[SPAC E]STAND,[SPACE]AND[SPACE]UNFOLD[SPACE]YOURSELF?[CA RRIAGE RETURN]BER[SPACE]LONG[SPACE]LIVE[SPACE]THE[SPACE]K ING!
Shakespeare had purpose and he probably did a good deal of top down design. If a monkey had a language for expressing the fetching of a banana and sticking it in his ear, Shakespeare on a keyboard couldn't reproduce what the monkey would tell us.
Just because no human can reproduce Hamlet from scratch, and even Shakespeare couldn't do it, doesn't mean Shakespeare isn't Shakespeare or monkeys are stupid.
What makes Hamlet so unreproducible might be it contains a quantity of randomness.
In conclusion, to quote completely out of context,
And there assume some other horrible form Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason, And draw you into madness? think of it: The very place puts toys of desperation, Without more motive, into every brain
Hardly. The checkers program has no degree of intelligence whatsoever, it's just a gigantic brute force "tree" of board positions.
Yeah, but suppose a program was written to solve intelligence and found that the best intelligence can do is search a giant tree. Wouldn't life be so much fun?
We've already created rules and systems to help us go all day without thinking too much. When was the last time you took a big risk?
What about paranoid someone can frame you by re-creating your movements from a pattern but modifying to do something criminal? Or paranoid of not being able to do something just because people in power don't like that something, an example being having a Jewish friend in Nazi Germany. Paranoid because if you do something a little different like walk in the front door and out the back door you are an automatic suspect? Paranoid that someone can insert fake footage to incriminate?
Where are we heading to? Underground tunnels? Living like owls?
66.6 - some may say that is as it should be, but as some regard IE as the de facto standard after all these years, it is quite a good thing for some downward pressure on the market share since that would urge Microsoft to make IE less complaint-worthy. I use IE, as it is almost good enough for what I'm doing and I'm so used to it. However, this news is making me think quite seriously of trying Firefox although I believe the web sites that I favor have been designed to have to work in IE.
My biggest complaint, from my usage requirements, is that IE will flake out if tabs are opened closed opened closed opened closed about 7+ times. I'm reluctant to open more than 4 IE processes with 4 tabs each. My procedure is to never close a tab and instead drag links from one IE window to another. There seems to be an artificial limit on the number of tabs one can have per process, the number of processes, and the number of times a tab can be closed before the process has to be restarted.
IE7 has been a big stability improvement over IE6 for me, so let's hope IE8 is even better. The trend of software seems to have taken a most bizarre turn. Options have become either removed or hidden, and everything is moved around so much on the front end that you spend so much time fiddling around you forget what was ever there before. It's probably a gimmick to make you look for the next version to think you are getting something better but all you get is what used to be around.
So let's standardize the interface to all components and documents in order for open source software to be programmable for everything. That way, if I don't like a certain version of software for a certain task I can use a different version. Marketers are forcing us to continually upgrade and in too many cases it's a needless expense. Increases in the population of programmers should have provided more new features and easier compatibility instead of confusion and anxiety.
We've come round full circle, naturally, to the issue of how do I back up massive amounts of data on removable disks? I created a drive image of my Vista boot partition. That required two DVDs. That was required even from the factory install. After I installing several software packages, the space requirement was only marginal. What does Windows provide to require so much space?
For the masses, DVDs are quite affordable and easy to use. Also they tend to accumulate files and data rather than re-create large data files.
So for most people, do a backup.
The circle closes tighter with the question of how long DVDs can last?
At any rate, would it help at all to run a refreshing program on data stored on a hard drive? This would be analogous to retensioning tapes. The refreshing program randomizes the free space of a hard drive and then copies old files back to the same drive and deletes the originals, the idea being an old file may slowly decay but a fresh file would have to start decaying from a more pristine state where the 1s and 0s haven't drifted. The whole idea makes sense only so far as the magnetic avalanche has a higher likelihood of failure compared to that of the rest of the drive mechanism--the bearings, motors, power surge damage, etc. even without the higher workload of periodically refreshing everything on hundreds of gigs.
So far, I've been checking my files for corruption with an MD5 hash. Files that are years old have remained intact. Perhaps 1 in 100 DVD writes turn up to have a mismatched MD5. A write to another disk solves that problem. Check your DVDs and don't smack your hard drives around for peace of mind.
The toothpaste is out of the tube. One can only wonder what this will mean - how would the mercenaries and wanna bes with their interpretation of the right to bear arms going to react if they believe they have to use robot armies? Are we going to face machines on our streets?
Perhaps it's wisest to build defenses while there is time. The Laws of Robotics are good in fiction, but unknown robots have the predictability of pit bulls. Moore's Law tells us that in years to come robots will be everywhere and be small and difficult to detect. Never a dull moment.
Slashdot Mirror
We need to get beyond this whole concept of sending up the best and the brightest and throwing gobs of money at the program. We need to get to the point where we will have establishments (most likely lunar at first) where we're going to have real workers and not just high end engineers
The definition of alien has come full circle.
The next step is to be able to send more people and keep them longer out there. They all have to be smart, principled, dedicated, and team players. Perhaps the education system is what needs to be prodded to turn out better people at all levels so that there's no shortage of people to do the heavy lifting. An education system that strives to produce an average grade at B- or C+ levels has got to be missing something.
Several of my professors mentioned that their target average was 70%, which is enough people passing to be a success but the average person wouldn't be spectacular. It's understandable to set a high bar so that it is a meaningful challenge, but it's also perceived that the teaching cuts corners in terms of quality so that some students fall behind while teaching workload is reduced. When one thinks back, there were a lot of poor presentations in the classroom.
I consider myself to be fairly smart, and I learned many things on my own to get good marks. These days it's not so hard to find all the knowledge required for a degree in sources close at hand - books and Internet - rather than in school. Perhaps the best and brightest should be motivated to view school as a secondary source of education and given the chance to earn their qualifications in a more compressed and streamlined path. School involves a huge amount of repetition and inefficiency that may well weaken student's views of themselves as it teaches tolerance for lower performance.
In space, a person needs to be able to operate independently as well as together. School makes people go in lockstep as much as possible due to economic restrictions. There's not enough personal guidance, and that may be the biggest factor in helping people succeed in all the typical careers. If a nation is powerful enough to defy gravity, it should educate people to have the qualities desired in astronauts.
Well, it is said that we make things fun. We must be such a gas.
I, for one, would like us to expand into space to get away from those who are total PITAs (pains in the ass).
Only ordinary people cavorting in space wastes so many resources that could be better used. An argument may be made to shrink the distance between habitable worlds perhaps by somehow bringing them closer together. Another answer is for people to rise above their ordinariness and achieve worthy goals in space. If the scientists can convince us that space is within reach, wouldn't we feel motivated enough to make it happen?
If you put your ear on a train track, you can hear a train approaching from far away
Has anyone done this before? The bumper sticker on a train reads If you can hear me, your head will be cut off.
Feel a rail on a track. Long after a train has passed, the track is still hot. I put my ear to the track, but could not hear the train through the rail. This was a rail that has its segments bolted for high speed trains. However, I did hear the train in the air, ear not on rail. The train was a high speed train with a loud diesel. As a wheel passes over the gap between two segments of track, there is a click that is loud enough to be a thunk, but the train would have to be too close before that sound is transmitted through the rail loud enough to be heard over the engine, which is audible when the train is over 2000 metres away and out of sight.
Trying to listen for the snap, crackle, pop of a bridge may be futile. A traffic bridge would have all kinds of noise from vehicles and surrounding industry. The bridge in Minneapolis crosses a river and a railway. Not a quiet scene.
This is a great time for OpenOffice to get out there and let the common person know about them. Firefox had ads in the newspaper, why couldn't OOo?
Anyways, it's a great business opportunity - why all the negativity? OpenOffice could incorporate ads too. All proceeds to support development of open source. People have been comparing to Microsoft and wondering why they have such a market share. Well, it's money that's made the difference.
Some people like a little imagination, newness, and pizzazz on their screens. We're not working in 800x600 any more but the work doesn't always take the full 2048x1600 or whatever. The important thing is to not be overly annoyed or distracted by ads that get in the way of doing your own thing, and as such people can vote on which ads are liked or not liked - keeping the decision making public in line with open source philosophy.
So we don't just whine about how commercialized Microsoft is. They know how to play to win. If open source wants to get ahead, it has to pick up on good ideas and make them better.
i think my PS2 is supercomputer isnt it? Weren't the US government going to restrict exports on them as they were considered munitions or something daft like that. Same thing for old Mac G5 as i recall. Might be a stupid urban myth though
FYI Apple computers can be used to make a supercomputer. The MACH5 is number 50 in the TOP500.
Supercomputers are cheap, but many other products aren't getting cheaper at the same rate. A pack of toilet paper might be practically free if prices dropped as fast. However, who would stay in the toilet paper business. Computers will be cheap as long as money can be made. But there should come a day when anyone can make their own computer from raw materials, instructions posted online, and specialized power tools.
Having more powerful computers is tantamount to having more power. If personal computers become more and more powerful, catching up with yesterday's supercomputers as they exist today, people will be able to construct various items for themselves, including computers and machinery merely by selecting a few options and clicking OK. We'll wait with bated breath what happens to prices of common commodities.
You know, if the machine is broken, how would it really know what was actually broken? The machine might have dispensed the right amount and recorded the wrong amount, or even done both wrong.
Ooops. We overpaid you
;)
Could have figured that out without any math
It figures. The whole idea is batty.
Considering the expenses of raising children, upgrading Office seems to be a lowest priority.
After the educational discount, the latest Office is a good way to obtain further non-backward-compatibility lockin. If the parents use the new Office and convert the business versions to the new Office, the ripple widens. So goes the old strategy. I wish Office would actually merit upgrading.
McDonald's is at 99 billion from the signs here. Wonder how close to 100, if that's for real. Might be a prize for the customer at 100 ...
I would have thought computers would have surpasses cars a while ago.
Increased ownership of computers may reduce emissions by reducing the need to travel. Also more people may spend more time with their computers rather than going out.
For the population as a whole, Windows has allowed a wide spectrum of people to use computers with a variety of side-effects: (1) less expensive and improved technology, (2) increased awareness and knowledge, (3) heightened expectations of technological usability and achievement, (4) shift in culture and lifestyle. It's not all good or bad, but life in 2007 without computers as they are today would probably be precarious and unnatural.
Are we so sure the 1 billion count is accurate? Not entirely Microsoft's doing, but I've installed Windows about 7 times on my P4. ... Oh, this software didn't uninstall but how can I fix that? I'll just reinstall Windows! First experience with spyware ... reinstall Windows! Also, back in the day when I had a 166 and a lot of adventurousness, I installed Windows 4 times in a multiboot setup basically to have Windows 95 and NT. Computers got cheaper and virtual machines - no more multiboot, but come to think of it, I installed Windows 3 times on virtual machines. The installation counter runneth over.
10^9 OEM installs is a substantial critical mass. I started using Windows when it was 3.1 and I could barely do anything before a crash requiring a reboot - good thing the reboots were not as dragging as they are on Vista. You would think: Dual core vs. 486. Windows should reboot in 5 seconds? All the same, people have been provided with just what they liked to keep using Windows, and although I worked with Unix workstations so much that Windows seemed really stupid at first, Windows 95 was a big turnaround in comparison. The price/performance feeling was always good.
Many new computers costing only $400-$500 have Vista. I doubt people would buy Vista separately the way they switched from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. I wonder if a future version of Windows will make people want to switch from Vista--doesn't say much for Vista, but in Microsoft's shoes, how else do you make people buy a new version of a practically nondepreciating product?
affected by cheap hardware
Let's consider the above phrase. There are many opposing forces to Moore's Law if we draw a free-body diagram. Some people don't want better computers as we hear "I just use it for e-mail", as there are those with little time of their own to be ambitious with a computer though they may use fairly powerful software at work. Then, there's competition from the third world, who before couldn't afford anything good may be able to buy a computer that has a built in UPS and wireless networking. It's a revolutionary business tool that may raise the economic power of billions of people.
Moore's Law may be a self-perpetuating phrophecy.
variables not considered
If I drive, I am master of my own destiny to a large degree. On a plane, if one stupid thing breaks, there's a higher chance for total control loss.
The statistics for flight safety are probably skewed heavily by the fear of flying. If the entire population flew even half as much as they ride in cars, the reality of flight dangers would make you cry for your mommy.
Sitting close to the wing isn't a bad idea
But then I can't see down.
I'd say it's pretty #$@$ lucky to play a slot machine with bad software.
I'd make the guess that language matters more for citation than for acceptance.
Acceptance only evaluates the scientific merits, citation requires the paper to have given the citing person insight.
To make an article understandable, it has to follow a standard of symbolism and language, first of all. This is well known, but often when I try to read a paper in an unfamiliar field I find that I don't have any idea of the notation that circulates only in a tight group of specialists. Searching for definitions of symbols is very painful. Tools like Google don't make it easy to search for non-natural-language expressions, many of which do not even permit search engines to sniff them anyways.
If a result is important, specialists will tend to use it frequently and clarify the idea after maybe 5 or 10 years. A researcher would only serve himself though to write clearly and be understood immediately.
Space and time are horrible constraints for researchers that are starting out and need to have quantity for the sake of keeping a job. The writing quality is dubious as a result. Suppose, then, after centuries of research writing, boilerplate formats are used to keep writing style and content on track. It helps writers not familiar with what to present as well as standardizes the language. Though many researchers would care to stick out like sore thumbs by publishing on a boilerplate, I would find it a lot easier to read.
Pi already contains all the works of Shakespeare, along with all other works. It's an infinite, non-repeating series of digits
Suppose Pi contains some works past, present, and future along with a lot of crap. Now just copy Pi to another number Qi, which has the same digits but with all the recognizable works cut out. Qi is still an infinite non-repeating sequence of digits. How do you know Pi has any works of value? The opposite direction is if Pi contains no works of value, insert works of value to obtain a new number Oi.
It comes down to the encoding then. But by this argument, I could encode the number 42 to represent the movie The Godfather--as long as I enter 42 into the movie software, the movie plays and what do I care how large the movie file is (2 bytes)? There probably is a 4 followed by a 2 in the digits of Pi.
Can anyone tell us if Pi contains every arbitrary finite permutation of digits? Somehow I doubt it. If there is a quiescent period of say 5 minutes in a movie represented by 3 Mb of all zeros with a few ones sprinkled about, Pi would have to contain this flatline in order for the theory to be universally applicable. Also, scenery is full of bland shades and very regular patterns. That would be encoded with a long substring of repetition.
However, what is to say we cannot give the monkey purpose? Suppose all the keys of the typewriter are not QWERTY but rather BER[SPACE]WHO'S[SPACE]THERE?[CARRIAGE RETURN]FRAN[SPACE]NAY,[SPACE]ANSWER[SPACE]ME:[SPAC E]STAND,[SPACE]AND[SPACE]UNFOLD[SPACE]YOURSELF?[CA RRIAGE RETURN]BER[SPACE]LONG[SPACE]LIVE[SPACE]THE[SPACE]K ING!
Shakespeare had purpose and he probably did a good deal of top down design. If a monkey had a language for expressing the fetching of a banana and sticking it in his ear, Shakespeare on a keyboard couldn't reproduce what the monkey would tell us.
Just because no human can reproduce Hamlet from scratch, and even Shakespeare couldn't do it, doesn't mean Shakespeare isn't Shakespeare or monkeys are stupid.
What makes Hamlet so unreproducible might be it contains a quantity of randomness.
In conclusion, to quote completely out of context,
And there assume some other horrible form
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason,
And draw you into madness? think of it:
The very place puts toys of desperation,
Without more motive, into every brain
Yeah I thought so.
Hardly. The checkers program has no degree of intelligence whatsoever, it's just a gigantic brute force "tree" of board positions.
Yeah, but suppose a program was written to solve intelligence and found that the best intelligence can do is search a giant tree. Wouldn't life be so much fun?
We've already created rules and systems to help us go all day without thinking too much. When was the last time you took a big risk?
So the first move is to liquor up
any competition but not learning
That's not consistent. A competition can be about learning.
Besides if a computer is that powerful you can bet it learns quite well and it's really hard to construct in the first place.
Paranoid?
What about paranoid someone can frame you by re-creating your movements from a pattern but modifying to do something criminal? Or paranoid of not being able to do something just because people in power don't like that something, an example being having a Jewish friend in Nazi Germany. Paranoid because if you do something a little different like walk in the front door and out the back door you are an automatic suspect? Paranoid that someone can insert fake footage to incriminate?
Where are we heading to? Underground tunnels? Living like owls?
66.6 - some may say that is as it should be, but as some regard IE as the de facto standard after all these years, it is quite a good thing for some downward pressure on the market share since that would urge Microsoft to make IE less complaint-worthy. I use IE, as it is almost good enough for what I'm doing and I'm so used to it. However, this news is making me think quite seriously of trying Firefox although I believe the web sites that I favor have been designed to have to work in IE.
My biggest complaint, from my usage requirements, is that IE will flake out if tabs are opened closed opened closed opened closed about 7+ times. I'm reluctant to open more than 4 IE processes with 4 tabs each. My procedure is to never close a tab and instead drag links from one IE window to another. There seems to be an artificial limit on the number of tabs one can have per process, the number of processes, and the number of times a tab can be closed before the process has to be restarted.
IE7 has been a big stability improvement over IE6 for me, so let's hope IE8 is even better. The trend of software seems to have taken a most bizarre turn. Options have become either removed or hidden, and everything is moved around so much on the front end that you spend so much time fiddling around you forget what was ever there before. It's probably a gimmick to make you look for the next version to think you are getting something better but all you get is what used to be around.
So let's standardize the interface to all components and documents in order for open source software to be programmable for everything. That way, if I don't like a certain version of software for a certain task I can use a different version. Marketers are forcing us to continually upgrade and in too many cases it's a needless expense. Increases in the population of programmers should have provided more new features and easier compatibility instead of confusion and anxiety.
We've come round full circle, naturally, to the issue of how do I back up massive amounts of data on removable disks? I created a drive image of my Vista boot partition. That required two DVDs. That was required even from the factory install. After I installing several software packages, the space requirement was only marginal. What does Windows provide to require so much space?
For the masses, DVDs are quite affordable and easy to use. Also they tend to accumulate files and data rather than re-create large data files.
So for most people, do a backup.
The circle closes tighter with the question of how long DVDs can last?
At any rate, would it help at all to run a refreshing program on data stored on a hard drive? This would be analogous to retensioning tapes. The refreshing program randomizes the free space of a hard drive and then copies old files back to the same drive and deletes the originals, the idea being an old file may slowly decay but a fresh file would have to start decaying from a more pristine state where the 1s and 0s haven't drifted. The whole idea makes sense only so far as the magnetic avalanche has a higher likelihood of failure compared to that of the rest of the drive mechanism--the bearings, motors, power surge damage, etc. even without the higher workload of periodically refreshing everything on hundreds of gigs.
So far, I've been checking my files for corruption with an MD5 hash. Files that are years old have remained intact. Perhaps 1 in 100 DVD writes turn up to have a mismatched MD5. A write to another disk solves that problem. Check your DVDs and don't smack your hard drives around for peace of mind.
The toothpaste is out of the tube. One can only wonder what this will mean - how would the mercenaries and wanna bes with their interpretation of the right to bear arms going to react if they believe they have to use robot armies? Are we going to face machines on our streets?
Perhaps it's wisest to build defenses while there is time. The Laws of Robotics are good in fiction, but unknown robots have the predictability of pit bulls. Moore's Law tells us that in years to come robots will be everywhere and be small and difficult to detect. Never a dull moment.