Heck, the poster (and the moderators apparently) didn't even read the freaking blurb at the top:
"It works by detecting what radio station you're listening to as you pass by a billboard, then displaying advertisements targeted at that station's demographic... [a]nd it's entirely passive."
All this thing does is aggregate which signals emitted by all the tuning oscillators in everyone's radios are strongest and then change a digital billboard to display an add which is most appropriate to the most drivers on the road. Your iPod/FM adapter plays your iPod's music over some frequency that no one else is using. You would be a statistical anomaly on the billboard's system due to having to use a different station from everybody else and would be irrelevant to the system.
It does NOT override the FM signal in the area with new ads. That would be a severe violation of FCC regulations as well as cause a ton of road rage.
According to this page, products thrown into a windhexe get pulverized down to "micron sized particles." Since staphylococcus is about 2 microns long, I'd say that the pure mechanical powdering effect would not destroy the disease. However, the process also takes almost all of the water out of anything thrown into it, I have a feeling that even bacteria might be torn open and sucked dry of fluids via an evaporative process. I don't think sufficient documentation of this is available online yet.
However, this would be useless for recycling most fibers. You would get dry-powdered cellulose from throwing cloth into this thing. It really wouldn't be good for paper either because of the need for interwoven cellulose fibers for sturdy paper.
The war wasn't about letting Americans buy cheaper oil.
The war was about letting Iraqis sell oil and spend it on US companies to rebuild their infrastructure after two wars and over a decade of sanctions. Oil is merely the how Iraq is going to pay for a Japan-like reconstruction period during which Bush-supporting companies like Haliburton will make money hand over fist. The recent policy decision to exclude countries who opposed the war from the reconstruction period just about confirms that a major motivator for the war was handing US taxpayer and Iraqi oil money straight into the hands of Bush's supporters.
Okay, I didn't support the war on Iraq for many reasons, but to claim that Saddam's not a bad guy is just simply ludicrous revisionist history. Put down the agitprop and step away from the soapbox.
Saddam Hussein's Baathist Party has done several horrible things that have been well-documented. His regime has a history of torture, oppression, and genocide. The Kurds, the Marsh Arabs, and the Shiites have all suffered greatly at his regime's hands for helping us in the Gulf War and for standing up for their own rights. My mother works with an Iraqi Kurd who fled with her husband to America after her husbands brothers were tortured and killed and had their bodies returned to them in mutilated condition because the two of them were reporters trying to expose the abuses of the regime to the international community. Whole towns of Kurds were killed with chemical weapons for their aid of the UN forces in the Gulf War.
Then you have the draining of Iraq's wetlands as punishment to the Marsh Arabs. An entire ecosystem and economic infrastructure has been utterly destroyed, leaving many of the Marsh Arabs without a means of sustenance and without a home. This is in addition to the usual panorama of torture, kidnapping, and execution that faced many dissidents in Iraq.
Oh, and in case all of this doesn't convince you, how about the senseless, retaliatory destruction of the economic lifeblood of Kuwait that poisoned thousands? You know, the blackening of the skies which was visible from space? Then, there's the man's sweetheart sons who reveal how good of a man he was as a father. How about the horrible life story of a man who was forced to act as a body double for Uday?
I don't think that all necessarily justified us getting involved when we have made a policy of ignoring or supporting many other brutal regimes -- especially when close friends of certain of our administration stand to profit mightily -- but saying that there's no evidence that Saddam's a bad guy is farsical. As to his popularity, Saddam didn't just get 90%+ of the vote. He got 100% of the vote on a ballot where he was the ONLY candidate listed. No candidate gets that kind of support in any healthy democracy, and we are right to question anyone who does.
Yeah, the movie dispensed with the awful baggage of character development, credible aliens, and viable military tactics. It also added the much needed Verhoeven sex and gore touch -- in every way a superior work of fiction.
Start with "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," "Starship Troopers," and then "The Puppet Masters." (Try to cleanse your mind of any movie adaptation you might have seen of the last two.
Then go back aways to his earlier books: "Revolt in 2100," "Waldo & Magic, Inc.," and "The Man Who Sold the Moon," and for an introduction to his long-lived repeat protagonist Lazarus Long read "Methuselah's Children." Then check out his juvenile works, "Have Spacesuit -- Will Travel," "The Star Beast," and "Podkayne of Mars," are all good, simple fun from the days of wide-eyed adventure SF.
Then, stop at anything past "Glory Road" (1963) with only two exceptions -- the aforementioned "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and "Job: A Comedy of Justice," which is very different from most of his works. Starting with "Farnham's Freehold," the quality of Heinlein's writing starts to decline, in my opinion. Preachiness and an obsession with polyamory starts to just take over. Many of Heinlein's later books feature the character Lazarus Long, who is an interesting guy trapped in a terrible plot for all of the books after his first.
Avoid the following overhyped Heinlein books: "Stranger in a Strange Land," "Time Enough For Love," and "Friday." (The first two have some redeeming merits, but "Friday" is just dull.) Also avoid the following deservedly not overhyped Heinlein books: "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls" and "Number of the Beast." Both have very weak plots, and the latter is a nigh-impenetrable mishmash of all his previous books timelines.
Do not let the last part of Heinlein's career deter you from reading the earlier parts. He is definitively part of the Golden Age of SF for a reason.
There's this wonderful, light-weight, streaming protocol that can handle all of your needs without consuming excessive company bandwidth and getting you fired -- it's called "radio," and I hear they make cheap custom hardware to receive and playback audio and visual media. You might want to look into that. I hear you can even get HDTV over it!
Re:My Biggest PC Annoyance...
on
PC Annoyances
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· Score: 1
You mean you'd rather have your data shipped off to a publicly accessible junk pile that anyone can rummage through instead of melted down to unrecognizeable slag?
All human societies are pyramid-shaped, and all efforts to change that end up killing millions.
Actually, modern western society has been relatively diamond-shaped for that past century or so. The majority of people in the US fall into the middle class instead of the lower class, and the truly impoverished are very rare. This is in sharp contrast to modern third-world nations and our own pre-20th century history, where the vast majority were equally on the bottom of a pyramid of wealth.
All that one can hope for is that some day the said exploitees won't be starving to death as we speak, but somehow I don't think even that is likely.
It's rare today in Western society for the exploited to be starving to death. The homeless have effectively dropped off of the map of society and aren't even getting exploited anymore. Even the working poor are generally able to feed themselves, though not as well as the upper and middle classes.
Unfortunately, yes. There are a few sectors of the economy that cannot be eliminated by getting rid of the need for specialized manufacturing plants:
1) Energy and raw materials production 2) Services, Including:
a) Legal
b) Education
c) Sanitation
d) Entertainment & Comfort
e) Real Estate & Property 3) Intellectual property-driven businesses
This is not an all-inclusive list. Manufacturing and (theoretically) agriculture could be gotten rid of, but in both cases the current trend in strengthening IP indicates that in the future we will almost certainly have to license designs for use. Unless care is taken to make sure that IP enters the public domain, IP will become the new real estate -- in a serf/fiefdom sort of way. All common goods will require licensing of IP which will increasingly be held by certain wealthy families or ever-living corporations. Economic progress may permanently be tilted towards a have and have-not class divide. We'll see. It could turn out for the best, but the current trend in the wake of the internet for the law to chain-down its potential to freely distribute IP indicates that it probably won't.
Other technologies may make some of the above-listed sectors of the economy obsolete. Severe advances in artificial intelligence could eliminate all of the above-listed services except physical waste disposal, and future IP could be created by advanced AI servitors, leaving only energy and raw material production as viable economic bottlenecks. Advanced AI is more likely to render money obsolete by rendering nearly 90% of our current jobs irrelevant.
Unfortunately, this future "utopia" makes the vast majority of humanity redundant and useless. Only the owners of energy, materials, and IP-generating companies and people capable of accomplishing the few intellectual tasks that AIs cannot will be of any economic value in this future where anything can be manufactured at a whim and machines handle all drudgework. Uneducated, blue-collar workers could be made obsolete, which would utterly destroy the economy as we know it. Those intellectual and economic "have-nots" will be left with nothing worthwhile with which to earn a living.
There would be no more janitors, no more people in retail, no more farmers, and no more mailmen. There would be no more gas station attendants, no more hotel clerks, no more parking lot attendants, and no more real estate agents. With sufficiently advanced technology, there would be no more programmers, no more musicians, no more lawyers, no more surgeons, nor even any human robot repairmen.
If humanity as we know it is still alive, this "Utopia" will have to result in one of two things -- a Star Trek-like, socialist, pampered, moneyless world where people don't have to work to live the easy life or a brutal revolution and new Luddite dark age if those with power and wealth do not wish to move away from the capitalist system which has served us so well at this point. Not everyone can be a PhD. Not everyone can be a rich business owner by the time the shift comes (which I estimate at current rates to be possible within 20-40 years of the invention of true AI).
I think that the latter scenario is far more likely than the former. The Unskilled Masses will not be forced into homeless, jobless poverty without a struggle, and the Wealthy Elite will not give up their advantages without a struggle. Nanotech and AI are the seeds of a revolution, and if they don't wipe out humanity purely by their misuse, then we will have to find a way to surive our own obsolescene.
But I digress...
Humanity will need money for a while yet. Nanotech won't end that on its own. AI might, but nanotech will not. There are still too many things for humans to do for a living.
Correction - things violate the *currently known* laws of physics. Important difference.
Fundamentally, if laws of physics exist, some things must be by definition impossible. It is sheerest fallacy to say that, with time, anything is possible. Some things, by definition, have to be fundamentally impossible or utterly impractical. The examples I listed are what we currently understand to fall within those categories, and you are nitpicking examples with undisprovable statements rather than addressing the fundamental point that there are impossible goals.
It is very likely that molecular assemblers may be one due to thermal and quantum effects.
The Prior Art for the first, third, and forth patents may be found in the Rock Ridge Interchange Protocol standard for UNIX, which was an IEEE draft specification as far back as July 13th, 1993 according to this PDF file. The first patent is definitely covered by this.
Now, the second patent, the very specific one about tracking name changes and automatically generating the short-form name and about storing all this info in a B-tree predates the RRIP by about a year. This is one of the nicer features of the extended FAT filesystem -- the part that automatically downgrades "My Lovely File.doc" into "MYLOVE~1.doc" and provides a fast lookup method for it. This may be the bulletproof patent for them. Though the IEEE group definitely was meeting before 1993, we can't be sure that they had discussed implementation-level details of using RRIP as a rewriteable format where files can be renamed. I couldn't find any discussion of using B-trees in the filesystem in a brief skimming of the RRIP draft.
Also, in rereading the third and fourth patents, I realize that they're talking about your ability to either reference your document by either the long or the short file name at the same time. I can't remember if RRIP allows you to use the ISO 9660 8.3 filenames or not. This too may be solid.
I'd honestly like to see this thing drive away from an accident still mostly intact. I don't think this system looks very robust. It looks to me like any kind of impact would seriously damage one or more of the wheel assemblies, especially if you pit one of these things against an SUV.
It would help the comparison out if temaki and club sandwiches actually shared even just one ingredient. You might as well compare Indian samosas or seasoned pork tacos.
Now having been to Japan, I can say that their club sandwiches are smaller, though I don't know how you measure their efficiency.
Smalley knows what he's talking about. Drexler never once explains exactly how he expects to hold onto these atoms & molecules without running into problems from interaction between the fragment to be manipulated and the mechanical arm's substrate. This is the "sticky" and "fat" fingers problem. The arm and the base for the reaction will have to be made out of physical, real-world materials that will interfere with the reaction.
Furthermore, Dexler seems to live in a fantasy world where Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle doesn't exist and the position and momentum of atoms can be precisely measured and controlled. While it is theoretically possible to control a reaction if you can move atoms with perfect precision, you simply cannot do this, especially at any reasonable temperature, and exactly how useful is a process that can only happen in a vacuum at near absolute zero? The energy involved in working at room temperature will make atoms jump around wildly and uncontrollably. (Creating pre-cooked food, my arse...)
Then we get into the problem of actually precisely positioning the mechanical arm. It's made out of real-world materials too, and yet it must be perfectly moved on an atomic scale for this to work. What larger mechanism is capable of doing this? We've shown that we can nudge atoms slowly with an electron beam, but we have yet to demonstrate that we can control a reaction at that scale, and I doubt that we ever will. I'm positive that it's absolutely impossible to do at room temperature.
So what year do you think that we'll get perpetual motion machines, safe and survivable FTL travel, and the ability to perfectly predict both the position and the momentum of a single molecule?
Some things are simply physically impossible because they violate the laws of physics, like perpetual motion machines. Others are economically unfeasable because they require too much energy or too many resources, like building a Dyson sphere. Molecular assemblers may be in one of these categories.
Ah, fair enough. After all, he did roll his own tools to do it. That's a little more impressive than I first gave him credit for. I do know exactly how much effort it takes to properly design an editing package to deal with extremely large datasets.
I like your argument, though I'd disagree on the fundamental meaning of the 2nd Amendment, which isn't a broad affirmation of owning weapons for any sort of self-defense. It's clearly worded with the intention of equipping Americans with the tools they need to resist enemy governments, both foreign and domestic. It's a minor distinction but an important one. I wrote a reply here to later post by the person who I originally replied to, and I'd like your input on it.
Heck, what about the image of the Earth without any clouds taken over months at a time and stitched together? How big is that sucker?
The trick is the caveat of a non-scientific image. Pfft. Big freaking deal. All he did was make a mosaic of existing photo images. Why don't I hammer together all of my digital manga collection and call it the first 10 Gigapixel scanner image?
This is nothing. I work regularly with scientific datasets larger than this. I just recently had to fix a memory leak bug exposed by a customer who was trying to mosaic together 6 GB of satellite imagery together in the product I work with.
This is a total non-accomplishment, especially if the software he was using was already tested and working with >2 GB output. Call us back when a single sensor does this.
I personally believe that the mere ownership (and by extension, the action of aquisition) of any particular thing should never be illegal. Crimes should be limited to criminal actions. When someone uses a thing to coerce, threaten, or kill someone, that's a crime.
Sure, it makes things a lot simpler to regulate and control obvious things that have very little non-destructive use, but then you are the one drawing the arbitrary line.
There's an old Libertarian saw that this reminds me of that I've always had issues with: "Your right to swing your fist ends at my face." The implicit meaning of this statement is that you should be able to do whatever you like as long as it doesn't hurt anyone. A good idea, but ultimately one that's just as short-sighted and limited in its scope as its catch phrase is. Your right to swing your fist doesn't just end at my face. It also ends with waving it around threateningly at me even if you never actually impact me with it. Similarly, your right to own an item ends when your ownership presents a not-insignificant risk to me.
Gun ownership is a responsibility, not just a "basic human right." Treating it as such is part of the entitlement mentality that is choking America and is inherently an obstacle to training people in proper firearm safety. Our Constitution gives us this right for one explicit purpose -- to maintain a militia. In other words, owning a firearm is part of every man's civic duty to protect his country and resist oppresion and is not an inherent right to go waving about like you automatically deserve to handle a dangerous weapon simply for breathing.
I personally believe that people should be allowed to own firearms for personal protection, but I don't see it as an inherent human right. That sort of speech should be reserved for things like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
What's obviously something only used for destruction? There's not much. Carmack trying to get pure hydrogen peroxide is one example. It's obviously a potentially dangerous substance, but he plans to only use it for launching his rockets.
Should we ban his rocket research too, since he might fashion an ICBM of some sort?
I say it's the authoritarians who draw the real arbitrary line, and it's of a much wider scope than just guns.
Now it's time for me to digress from the topic at hand.
The line is not arbitrary most of the time. It just often seems that way. Civilization requires the careful analysis of cost/benefit ratios. What is the cost of allowing extremely powerful oxidants into the hands of average citizens versus the benefit of it? I deliberately drew out the examples of tanks, cruise missles, and CBNR weapons as increasing levels of hazard and risk to the public to see if you'd draw on the fact that a line absolutely has to be drawn somewhere for civilization to hold together. Imagine how much trouble the DC sinpers could've caused if they could've gotten their hands on a cheap radiological or chemical weapon instead of a firearm. Imagine how much worse the Oklahoma City Bombing could've been with access to better bomb-making supplies than fertilizer.
The origins of the 2nd Amendment are in a time when the most terrible weapons that men had available to them were cannons and muskets. In that time, it was perfectly feasable for average citizens to own weapons technology on par with an invading foreign army or an oppressive domestic one.
Following the trends of history, one can note the effectiveness of weapons technology and its impact on a society by looking at how much damage a small team of well-funded malicious individuals can do before being taken down. The number hadn't changed that much from the era of rocks and bronze swords to the era of muskets and cannons. However, from the time of fast-reloading rifles, cannons, and gatling guns to the age of fully automatic riles, mustard gas, and napa
Slashdot Mirror
Heck, the poster (and the moderators apparently) didn't even read the freaking blurb at the top:
"It works by detecting what radio station you're listening to as you pass by a billboard, then displaying advertisements targeted at that station's demographic... [a]nd it's entirely passive."
All this thing does is aggregate which signals emitted by all the tuning oscillators in everyone's radios are strongest and then change a digital billboard to display an add which is most appropriate to the most drivers on the road. Your iPod/FM adapter plays your iPod's music over some frequency that no one else is using. You would be a statistical anomaly on the billboard's system due to having to use a different station from everybody else and would be irrelevant to the system.
It does NOT override the FM signal in the area with new ads. That would be a severe violation of FCC regulations as well as cause a ton of road rage.
According to this page, products thrown into a windhexe get pulverized down to "micron sized particles." Since staphylococcus is about 2 microns long, I'd say that the pure mechanical powdering effect would not destroy the disease. However, the process also takes almost all of the water out of anything thrown into it, I have a feeling that even bacteria might be torn open and sucked dry of fluids via an evaporative process. I don't think sufficient documentation of this is available online yet.
However, this would be useless for recycling most fibers. You would get dry-powdered cellulose from throwing cloth into this thing. It really wouldn't be good for paper either because of the need for interwoven cellulose fibers for sturdy paper.
The war wasn't about letting Americans buy cheaper oil.
The war was about letting Iraqis sell oil and spend it on US companies to rebuild their infrastructure after two wars and over a decade of sanctions. Oil is merely the how Iraq is going to pay for a Japan-like reconstruction period during which Bush-supporting companies like Haliburton will make money hand over fist. The recent policy decision to exclude countries who opposed the war from the reconstruction period just about confirms that a major motivator for the war was handing US taxpayer and Iraqi oil money straight into the hands of Bush's supporters.
Woah, woah, woah, woah!
Okay, I didn't support the war on Iraq for many reasons, but to claim that Saddam's not a bad guy is just simply ludicrous revisionist history.
Put down the agitprop and step away from the soapbox.
Saddam Hussein's Baathist Party has done several horrible things that have been well-documented. His regime has a history of torture, oppression, and genocide. The Kurds, the Marsh Arabs, and the Shiites have all suffered greatly at his regime's hands for helping us in the Gulf War and for standing up for their own rights. My mother works with an Iraqi Kurd who fled with her husband to America after her husbands brothers were tortured and killed and had their bodies returned to them in mutilated condition because the two of them were reporters trying to expose the abuses of the regime to the international community. Whole towns of Kurds were killed with chemical weapons for their aid of the UN forces in the Gulf War.
Then you have the draining of Iraq's wetlands as punishment to the Marsh Arabs. An entire ecosystem and economic infrastructure has been utterly destroyed, leaving many of the Marsh Arabs without a means of sustenance and without a home. This is in addition to the usual panorama of torture, kidnapping, and execution that faced many dissidents in Iraq.
Oh, and in case all of this doesn't convince you, how about the senseless, retaliatory destruction of the economic lifeblood of Kuwait that poisoned thousands? You know, the blackening of the skies which was visible from space? Then, there's the man's sweetheart sons who reveal how good of a man he was as a father. How about the horrible life story of a man who was forced to act as a body double for Uday?
I don't think that all necessarily justified us getting involved when we have made a policy of ignoring or supporting many other brutal regimes -- especially when close friends of certain of our administration stand to profit mightily -- but saying that there's no evidence that Saddam's a bad guy is farsical. As to his popularity, Saddam didn't just get 90%+ of the vote. He got 100% of the vote on a ballot where he was the ONLY candidate listed. No candidate gets that kind of support in any healthy democracy, and we are right to question anyone who does.
Yeah, the movie dispensed with the awful baggage of character development, credible aliens, and viable military tactics. It also added the much needed Verhoeven sex and gore touch -- in every way a superior work of fiction.
Personally, I'm of the opinion that you shouldn't subject yourself to that book at all.
Start with "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," "Starship Troopers," and then "The Puppet Masters." (Try to cleanse your mind of any movie adaptation you might have seen of the last two.
Then go back aways to his earlier books: "Revolt in 2100," "Waldo & Magic, Inc.," and "The Man Who Sold the Moon," and for an introduction to his long-lived repeat protagonist Lazarus Long read "Methuselah's Children." Then check out his juvenile works, "Have Spacesuit -- Will Travel," "The Star Beast," and "Podkayne of Mars," are all good, simple fun from the days of wide-eyed adventure SF.
Then, stop at anything past "Glory Road" (1963) with only two exceptions -- the aforementioned "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and "Job: A Comedy of Justice," which is very different from most of his works. Starting with "Farnham's Freehold," the quality of Heinlein's writing starts to decline, in my opinion. Preachiness and an obsession with polyamory starts to just take over. Many of Heinlein's later books feature the character Lazarus Long, who is an interesting guy trapped in a terrible plot for all of the books after his first.
Avoid the following overhyped Heinlein books: "Stranger in a Strange Land," "Time Enough For Love," and "Friday." (The first two have some redeeming merits, but "Friday" is just dull.) Also avoid the following deservedly not overhyped Heinlein books: "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls" and "Number of the Beast." Both have very weak plots, and the latter is a nigh-impenetrable mishmash of all his previous books timelines.
Do not let the last part of Heinlein's career deter you from reading the earlier parts. He is definitively part of the Golden Age of SF for a reason.
iV) JRR Tolkein's most esoteric back-of-an-envelope scribbling, lovingly -- and profitably -- edited by his hack son.
Ooo! Ooo! How about Frank Herbert's most esoteric back-of-an-envelope scribbling, lovingly -- and profitably -- edited by his hack son?
I can feel a big commentary fight coming on this post :)
Pro-MACs on my left, pro-PCs on my right.
I think Rush Limbaugh might take offense at being placed on the Left.
There's this wonderful, light-weight, streaming protocol that can handle all of your needs without consuming excessive company bandwidth and getting you fired -- it's called "radio," and I hear they make cheap custom hardware to receive and playback audio and visual media. You might want to look into that. I hear you can even get HDTV over it!
You mean you'd rather have your data shipped off to a publicly accessible junk pile that anyone can rummage through instead of melted down to unrecognizeable slag?
A reading assignment for you.
All human societies are pyramid-shaped, and all efforts to change that end up killing millions.
Actually, modern western society has been relatively diamond-shaped for that past century or so. The majority of people in the US fall into the middle class instead of the lower class, and the truly impoverished are very rare. This is in sharp contrast to modern third-world nations and our own pre-20th century history, where the vast majority were equally on the bottom of a pyramid of wealth.
All that one can hope for is that some day the said exploitees won't be starving to death as we speak, but somehow I don't think even that is likely.
It's rare today in Western society for the exploited to be starving to death. The homeless have effectively dropped off of the map of society and aren't even getting exploited anymore. Even the working poor are generally able to feed themselves, though not as well as the upper and middle classes.
Unfortunately, yes. There are a few sectors of the economy that cannot be eliminated by getting rid of the need for specialized manufacturing plants:
1) Energy and raw materials production
2) Services, Including:
a) Legal
b) Education
c) Sanitation
d) Entertainment & Comfort
e) Real Estate & Property
3) Intellectual property-driven businesses
This is not an all-inclusive list. Manufacturing and (theoretically) agriculture could be gotten rid of, but in both cases the current trend in strengthening IP indicates that in the future we will almost certainly have to license designs for use. Unless care is taken to make sure that IP enters the public domain, IP will become the new real estate -- in a serf/fiefdom sort of way. All common goods will require licensing of IP which will increasingly be held by certain wealthy families or ever-living corporations. Economic progress may permanently be tilted towards a have and have-not class divide. We'll see. It could turn out for the best, but the current trend in the wake of the internet for the law to chain-down its potential to freely distribute IP indicates that it probably won't.
Other technologies may make some of the above-listed sectors of the economy obsolete. Severe advances in artificial intelligence could eliminate all of the above-listed services except physical waste disposal, and future IP could be created by advanced AI servitors, leaving only energy and raw material production as viable economic bottlenecks. Advanced AI is more likely to render money obsolete by rendering nearly 90% of our current jobs irrelevant.
Unfortunately, this future "utopia" makes the vast majority of humanity redundant and useless. Only the owners of energy, materials, and IP-generating companies and people capable of accomplishing the few intellectual tasks that AIs cannot will be of any economic value in this future where anything can be manufactured at a whim and machines handle all drudgework. Uneducated, blue-collar workers could be made obsolete, which would utterly destroy the economy as we know it. Those intellectual and economic "have-nots" will be left with nothing worthwhile with which to earn a living.
There would be no more janitors, no more people in retail, no more farmers, and no more mailmen. There would be no more gas station attendants, no more hotel clerks, no more parking lot attendants, and no more real estate agents. With sufficiently advanced technology, there would be no more programmers, no more musicians, no more lawyers, no more surgeons, nor even any human robot repairmen.
If humanity as we know it is still alive, this "Utopia" will have to result in one of two things -- a Star Trek-like, socialist, pampered, moneyless world where people don't have to work to live the easy life or a brutal revolution and new Luddite dark age if those with power and wealth do not wish to move away from the capitalist system which has served us so well at this point. Not everyone can be a PhD. Not everyone can be a rich business owner by the time the shift comes (which I estimate at current rates to be possible within 20-40 years of the invention of true AI).
I think that the latter scenario is far more likely than the former. The Unskilled Masses will not be forced into homeless, jobless poverty without a struggle, and the Wealthy Elite will not give up their advantages without a struggle. Nanotech and AI are the seeds of a revolution, and if they don't wipe out humanity purely by their misuse, then we will have to find a way to surive our own obsolescene.
But I digress...
Humanity will need money for a while yet. Nanotech won't end that on its own. AI might, but nanotech will not. There are still too many things for humans to do for a living.
Correction - things violate the *currently known* laws of physics. Important difference.
Fundamentally, if laws of physics exist, some things must be by definition impossible. It is sheerest fallacy to say that, with time, anything is possible. Some things, by definition, have to be fundamentally impossible or utterly impractical. The examples I listed are what we currently understand to fall within those categories, and you are nitpicking examples with undisprovable statements rather than addressing the fundamental point that there are impossible goals.
It is very likely that molecular assemblers may be one due to thermal and quantum effects.
The Prior Art for the first, third, and forth patents may be found in the Rock Ridge Interchange Protocol standard for UNIX, which was an IEEE draft specification as far back as July 13th, 1993 according to this PDF file. The first patent is definitely covered by this.
Now, the second patent, the very specific one about tracking name changes and automatically generating the short-form name and about storing all this info in a B-tree predates the RRIP by about a year. This is one of the nicer features of the extended FAT filesystem -- the part that automatically downgrades "My Lovely File.doc" into "MYLOVE~1.doc" and provides a fast lookup method for it. This may be the bulletproof patent for them. Though the IEEE group definitely was meeting before 1993, we can't be sure that they had discussed implementation-level details of using RRIP as a rewriteable format where files can be renamed. I couldn't find any discussion of using B-trees in the filesystem in a brief skimming of the RRIP draft.
Also, in rereading the third and fourth patents, I realize that they're talking about your ability to either reference your document by either the long or the short file name at the same time. I can't remember if RRIP allows you to use the ISO 9660 8.3 filenames or not. This too may be solid.
Here, Microsoft's patents relate to algorithms for fitting long filenames onto a file system that only supports short filenames.
Innn-teresting...
Do the Rock Ridge extensions for ISO 9660 count as prior art?
I'd honestly like to see this thing drive away from an accident still mostly intact. I don't think this system looks very robust. It looks to me like any kind of impact would seriously damage one or more of the wheel assemblies, especially if you pit one of these things against an SUV.
It would help the comparison out if temaki and club sandwiches actually shared even just one ingredient. You might as well compare Indian samosas or seasoned pork tacos.
Now having been to Japan, I can say that their club sandwiches are smaller, though I don't know how you measure their efficiency.
Smalley knows what he's talking about. Drexler never once explains exactly how he expects to hold onto these atoms & molecules without running into problems from interaction between the fragment to be manipulated and the mechanical arm's substrate. This is the "sticky" and "fat" fingers problem. The arm and the base for the reaction will have to be made out of physical, real-world materials that will interfere with the reaction.
Furthermore, Dexler seems to live in a fantasy world where Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle doesn't exist and the position and momentum of atoms can be precisely measured and controlled. While it is theoretically possible to control a reaction if you can move atoms with perfect precision, you simply cannot do this, especially at any reasonable temperature, and exactly how useful is a process that can only happen in a vacuum at near absolute zero? The energy involved in working at room temperature will make atoms jump around wildly and uncontrollably. (Creating pre-cooked food, my arse...)
Then we get into the problem of actually precisely positioning the mechanical arm. It's made out of real-world materials too, and yet it must be perfectly moved on an atomic scale for this to work. What larger mechanism is capable of doing this? We've shown that we can nudge atoms slowly with an electron beam, but we have yet to demonstrate that we can control a reaction at that scale, and I doubt that we ever will. I'm positive that it's absolutely impossible to do at room temperature.
As for the future, well anything is possible.
So what year do you think that we'll get perpetual motion machines, safe and survivable FTL travel, and the ability to perfectly predict both the position and the momentum of a single molecule?
Some things are simply physically impossible because they violate the laws of physics, like perpetual motion machines. Others are economically unfeasable because they require too much energy or too many resources, like building a Dyson sphere. Molecular assemblers may be in one of these categories.
Ah, fair enough. After all, he did roll his own tools to do it. That's a little more impressive than I first gave him credit for. I do know exactly how much effort it takes to properly design an editing package to deal with extremely large datasets.
I like your argument, though I'd disagree on the fundamental meaning of the 2nd Amendment, which isn't a broad affirmation of owning weapons for any sort of self-defense. It's clearly worded with the intention of equipping Americans with the tools they need to resist enemy governments, both foreign and domestic. It's a minor distinction but an important one. I wrote a reply here to later post by the person who I originally replied to, and I'd like your input on it.
Heck, what about the image of the Earth without any clouds taken over months at a time and stitched together? How big is that sucker?
The trick is the caveat of a non-scientific image. Pfft. Big freaking deal. All he did was make a mosaic of existing photo images. Why don't I hammer together all of my digital manga collection and call it the first 10 Gigapixel scanner image?
This is nothing. I work regularly with scientific datasets larger than this. I just recently had to fix a memory leak bug exposed by a customer who was trying to mosaic together 6 GB of satellite imagery together in the product I work with.
This is a total non-accomplishment, especially if the software he was using was already tested and working with >2 GB output. Call us back when a single sensor does this.
There's an old Libertarian saw that this reminds me of that I've always had issues with: "Your right to swing your fist ends at my face." The implicit meaning of this statement is that you should be able to do whatever you like as long as it doesn't hurt anyone. A good idea, but ultimately one that's just as short-sighted and limited in its scope as its catch phrase is. Your right to swing your fist doesn't just end at my face. It also ends with waving it around threateningly at me even if you never actually impact me with it. Similarly, your right to own an item ends when your ownership presents a not-insignificant risk to me.
Gun ownership is a responsibility, not just a "basic human right." Treating it as such is part of the entitlement mentality that is choking America and is inherently an obstacle to training people in proper firearm safety. Our Constitution gives us this right for one explicit purpose -- to maintain a militia. In other words, owning a firearm is part of every man's civic duty to protect his country and resist oppresion and is not an inherent right to go waving about like you automatically deserve to handle a dangerous weapon simply for breathing.
I personally believe that people should be allowed to own firearms for personal protection, but I don't see it as an inherent human right. That sort of speech should be reserved for things like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Now it's time for me to digress from the topic at hand.
The line is not arbitrary most of the time. It just often seems that way. Civilization requires the careful analysis of cost/benefit ratios. What is the cost of allowing extremely powerful oxidants into the hands of average citizens versus the benefit of it? I deliberately drew out the examples of tanks, cruise missles, and CBNR weapons as increasing levels of hazard and risk to the public to see if you'd draw on the fact that a line absolutely has to be drawn somewhere for civilization to hold together. Imagine how much trouble the DC sinpers could've caused if they could've gotten their hands on a cheap radiological or chemical weapon instead of a firearm. Imagine how much worse the Oklahoma City Bombing could've been with access to better bomb-making supplies than fertilizer.
The origins of the 2nd Amendment are in a time when the most terrible weapons that men had available to them were cannons and muskets. In that time, it was perfectly feasable for average citizens to own weapons technology on par with an invading foreign army or an oppressive domestic one.
Following the trends of history, one can note the effectiveness of weapons technology and its impact on a society by looking at how much damage a small team of well-funded malicious individuals can do before being taken down. The number hadn't changed that much from the era of rocks and bronze swords to the era of muskets and cannons. However, from the time of fast-reloading rifles, cannons, and gatling guns to the age of fully automatic riles, mustard gas, and napa