The comparison between how the robot sketches faces and the various other "how to sketch faces" instruction videos that YouTube helpfully provides is interesting. It looks like the robot is using some sort of priority algorithm for deciding the next stroke that has no concept of either the current stroke or the basic features of the face itself.
So while a human sketch artist builds a face out of a library of pre-defined components that are effectively parameterized by the particular individual being sketched, it looks like the robot is doing something quite different at the drawing stage, even if it is doing some kind of decomposition of the face into to components at the analysis stage.
Yeah, I've heard it. It is said by idiots who don't know anything about weather. Ask any climate scientist if it is ever too cold to snow and they will laugh at you.
Climate models for the most part do not conserve energy and/or have unphysical boundary conditions, and all of them are parameterized in unphysical ways. Anyone who isn't sceptical of them is missing something.
Unfortunately, the whole issue has been so heavily politicized that we have idiots responding to this story with completely invented claims that "denialists made up the term 'climate change'" because they simply can't imagine that their favoured side would so something so obviously slimy.
There are significant signals of increasing global heat content: ocean temperature is the strongest. But anyone who pretends the science on global warming is anything like a slam-dunk (as, for example, the existence of the W and Z bosons is) is talking moonshine.
I once worked with a fairly large legacy system that had been ported to Solaris from its original development system, which was a PDP-11 running RT-11/TSX, which as those of us who learned on it knew, had and addressing limit of 64k code and 64 k data in a single "overlay". TSX was a multi-tasking layer on top of RT-11, which meant that one way to get around this limit was to run multiple processes and have them communicate via pipes, and this fundamental architecture had been maintained in the port.
This meant the most trivial path of execution involved multiple fork/execs and what amounted to asynchronous processing via message passing. It was kind of elegant, in its own twisted way, but it meant that by far the easiest way of coming to grips with it was to put printf's everywhere (it was written in C) and have every program generate time-stamped output into its own file, then run a script to interleave the output so I could see a synchronous picture of what was going on.
After that I could attached gdb to various spawned processes and dig into them in a bit more detail, but that was a hopelessly laborious procedure for getting the overview, and because the pipe code was blind (the pipe endpoints were reused for whatever pipe happened to be open at the moment) it was almost impossible at any point to know what process you were talking to at a given point unless you'd seen it created: there was essentially no way that any amount of static analysis could have revealed the underlying structure.
The company wanted me to change the code to add functionality that would have required touching virtually every file, and I was eventually able to show via various software engineering metrics that doing so would take approximately three years, mostly due to bug fixes (the cyclomatic complexity of some of the routines was into the hundreds, even not accounting for the bizarre architecture.) They killed the project and we wrote something simpler and cleaner to do the same job from scratch. That's rarely the best solution, but keep it in mind if things get too out of hand.
State actors are yesterday's enemy, and your argument is an example of the aphorism that the military always plans to fight the last war over again.
While nuclear armed states are a problem, and missile defence is certainly a better use of tax dollars than most of the deadweight-loss industry, non-state actors are by far the dominant risk with regard to nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately, there is no remotely plausible solution to nuclear terrorism, other than some decades of constructive engagement with the social and cultural groups that are likely to engage in it, particularly Muslims, these days.
The best way to destroy an enemy is to turn them into a friend. With regard to non-state actors, that may very well be the only way.
Only if you want to cling to silly quasi-dualistic Searle-inspired objections towards functionalism.
Your argument is of the form:
A is not X B is not X Ergo, A is B.
That is, you can reasonably claim that we don't have a deep understanding of what consciousness is without being a dualist. Consciousness is obviously an activity of the brain. But that's just hand-waving, because we have barely any clue of how the brain works, and certainly nothing even remotely approaching an understanding of the brain that allows us to state anything even approximately like the necessary and/or sufficient conditions for consciousness.
Furthermore, functional assessment of the brain is enormously difficult: we don't understand much about neural structure, and even less about neurochemistry, which is where all the interesting work gets done.
So imputing dualism to someone just because they don't think functionalist claims are sufficiently detailed to be interesting, particularly in the context of an engineering discussion of AI, is pretty lame.
Should society and the government have the authority to ban videos and literature detailing weapon manufacture and security-breaking techniques?
The question is not "should it?" but "does it?"
The Federal Government in the United States does not, unless you mean something by the words, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech..." that is quite different from what I mean by them.
If you believe that sociopaths are more likely to become effective CEOs, as has been claimed
Actually, what has been empirically demonstrated is that sociopaths are more likely to become CEOs, not that they are effective--they are not. The question that motivated the research was, "How come all these ineffective assholes are running these big companies?" The answer is: self-aggrandizing jerks are just the kind of people who are successful in clawing and manipulating their way into CEO positions, where they act like self-aggrandizing jerks, much to everyone's surprise.
while female's role is to pick the most successful one among them and reproduce his genes
The female's role is to socially pair bond with the most successful male she can get to do so, and then reproduce with as many different higher-status males as she can get away with. Anything else is clearly evolutionarily sub-optimal, and believing it is nothing but sexist myopia.
If you think that these ridiculously high paying jobs require no skills and nothing other than a buddy from the tennis club downtown, then why aren't you doing that?
Speaking for myself: because I have no desire to. The hours suck, the non-skills are schmoozing and making small-talk with small-minded ignoramuses, and while the financial rewards are considerable the lifestyle is hollow and dull.
I ran my own company for quite a few years, and saw very clearly from my clients and partner companies that on average the higher up the food chain you went the less it mattered what you know and the more it mattered who you know. If "knowing the right people" and "fitting in with an unbelievably dull and ignorant social set" can be considered skills then I'll grant you these jobs require skill: the skills of a self-interested political manipulator, perhaps.
But the fact remains that in my current position I could do everything the company president does (I know this because I was the president of my own company and have worked in senior management at companies larger than my current employer) while he could not do a single aspect of my job.
Ergo, the GP's point is correct: CXO jobs require little to no actual skill, as the term is generally used. Or rather, to do them well does require skill and talent, but the majority of the occupants of these positions today are unskilled and talentless, which explains the dismal state of America's once-great corporations.
To me, this takes Ubuntu NE out of the equation for all possible uses.
Likewise. I use my netbook offline all the time, and have spotty connectivity most of the day. This would make Ubuntu useless to me out of the box, and it reflects a very strange set of priorities: closed source proprietary remote apps vs open source free local ones is about the worst choice imaginable for a linux distro.
I used to use Abiword on my netbook, an d found it annoyingly sluggish saving largish documents. Replaced it with OOo and have been very happy.
The big thing for me about a netbook is long battery life (> 6 hours) and light weight ( 1.5g). Compared to my laptop it's a feather. Network connectivity is the third priority, and not nearly important enough to give up freedom, privacy and control for.
So the idea here is apparently that the energy itself can be transmitted instantly, but you can't actually transmit information this way. Just energy.
I'm pretty much pushing a rock up hill here, but some people enjoy pointless struggle.
Nothing is transmitted instantaneously. Not mass, not energy, not information. Nor, contrary to the article's false claims, has anyone ever teleported an electron, photon or atom, although people who don't understand quantum mechanics and physicists who would rather mislead the public to get positive mention in the press than do actual science will claim otherwise.
The only thing that gets "teleported" is the quantum state of an atom, electron or atom. As anyone who knows anything about quantum mechanics knows, the ontology of quantum states is a slippery beast, so talking about "teleporting" one as if it was ontologically identical to a brick or Captain Kirk is pretty questionable right off.
Teleporting a quantum state is completely different from teleporting a particle: if you could teleport a particle then the particle quantum numbers at the transmitter and receiver would change. In the case of quantum "teleportation" they do not. And the information is carried via entanglement using a perfectly ordinary beam of particles: if you were to stick your hand into the space through which information is being "teleported" the perfectly ordinary classical carrier particles would burn a hole through it.
In the case at hand, what is being discussed appears to be a fairly tame equivalent of quantum tunnelling, in which a spatially extended object like a string is excited into a higher energy state by an interaction at one end. There may be a small but finite chance that you can then de-excite the string from the other end pretty much instantaneously, because the excited state is a state of the whole spatially extended string, although the question of the speed at which that can occur is much debated.
Arguments over the "velocity" of the wavefunction under the barrier in quantum tunnelling have been going on since the early 1930's--there's a nice paper in Phys Rev from 1932 or thereabouts in which the authors did a pre-electronic-computer numerical solution to Schrodinger's equation to study the issue.
So to my mind, this is pretty ordinary, although a nice way of studying a much-debated and well-known curiosity of the quantum world, that has been marketed in a misleading and dishonest way to an ignorant press by the scientists in question, or which has been picked up the the ignorant press and distorted beyond all recognition despite the scientist's attempts at an honest and clear presentation.
It's not really hard to tell where all this is leading.
One area that hasn't been mentioned here is paternity testing, which should be routine for all newborns, given we're doing this kind of genetic screening anyway.
Between 2% and 25% of children are currently fathered by someone other than their mother's socially pair-bonded partner because women have such a strong evolutionary incentive to separate sex and love. They want to be pair-bonded with the highest-status male they can find, and then have sex with many different higher-status males so their children will be genetically superior.
So women are basically tuned up by evolution to cheat with any man with a higher perceived social status than their husband, and they do this all the time, producing the observed rates of children fathered by men other than their mate. In societies with flatter social hierarchies the rates are lower, and vice versa.
The only people who get screwed, as it were, by this arrangement is lower-status men, who end up raising children not their own, although "lower status" is a complicated thing to measure. A physically virile poor man may be perceived by a woman's hormones as "higher status" than a more frail rich man.
Men are tuned up by evolution to be indiscriminate. Women are tuned up by evolution to be dishonest.
It would be wonderfully socially disruptive, therefore, at a very deep level, to make paternity testing routine. It's likely to happen for medical reasons anyway, as we come to understand the genetic basis of health and disease more completely, and doctors will simply want to know more about a child's genetic history. But doing so will put a massive spoke in the wheels of the most basic female evolutionary drive: to have children by as many different high-status men as possible, while remaining pair-bonded to the highest status man she can deceive into supporting her and her offspring.
Papers along the lines of: "here's an approach you might have thought would work, but it turned out that it didn't, and in retrospect we can see why, which this paper will explain".
In experimental papers I ususally try to have a section entitled (really) "Things that did not work so well" in which I mention approaches that seemed like good ideas that didn't work out. If I were an editor of an experimental journal I would make this part of the standard format, as any experiment that doesn't lead to the discovery of failed approaches is clearly not difficult enough to be worth doing.
This approach does mean at the end of the day I have to have some positive result, though, which may be couched in terms of "New limits on phenomenon XYZ (that we found no evidence of)".
There's still bias, though. In the search for "physics beyond the standard model" null results are the norm, but the odd (and inevitably mistaken) positive result gets vastly more attention. When I was working in the field and my colleagues in more prolific areas would get a positive result I'd tell them, "Don't worry--that's just as good as a null result", as when I got null results they'd tell me they were just as good as positive results. The fact that they were surprised to be told that suggests the truth: positive results are generally considered better.
S02 emissions trading was also local and not between countries
The rest of your comment is interesting and I'll have to look into what you're claiming, which is at variance with the usual account of cap and trade in sulphur emissions.
However, this comment is just plain false: Canada is and continues to be a separate country, and the cap and trade system for sulphur emissions was a Canadian initiative that was jointly undertaken with the US.
"Cap and trade" can so easily be corrupted that there is no point in going that route unless corruption is your goal.
Sure, look at what happend with cap and trade in sulpher emissions in North America in the '80's. It was such a complete failure that acid rain is no longer a looming problem... oh, wait.
Just as a matter of interest, why do you hate market solutions so much? Are you some kind of socialist?
Women need an un-fake-able signal of a man's seriousness, so the signal must take the form of something very (to the suitor) expensive.
Like, say, buying agricultural tools or other infrastructure for starving Elbonians, or donating a wack of money in her name to a medical research program, or supporting an AIDs hospice...
I don't actually buy your faux-evolutionary argument, which only makes what little sense it does in the context of nuclear families, which aren't at all the norm in our evolutionary past. But in any case it fails to explain why women are so utterly and brutally selfish and uncaring about anyone's needs but their own in this process.
Charity also has no resale value, and it would do far more good in the world than pretty rocks.
So I seriously suggest that men present to the woman they want to marry proof of their economic prowess by donating two or three months salary in her name to a charity they know to be important to her. This has two important effects: it increases the resources available to people at the bottom of the food chain, and it reveals those cases where the man is in love with a gold-digging bitch who doesn't give a shit about anyone to the extent that she'd rather have an expensive but useless pretty rock than see others far worse off than herself helped out.
Here's the thing: you're right, people who are the subject of violence can often (although certainly not always) do things to avoid being placed in a situation where violence is the end result.
There's a name for people like that. We call them "men".
Men are victimized by all violent crimes (except possibly rape, where men report lower rates by a factor of up to ten, but want to bet the reporting bias is huge?) at rates up to several times greater than women. A large part of the difference can be accounted for by differences in crime-avoidant behaviors. Women are taught a lot about how to avoid being a victim of violent crime. Men are not. And no one much cares.
One of the reasons idiots give for not caring is that "men are also the perpetrators". Somehow in the minds of idiots this makes everything ok. I'm not stupid enough to understand quite how, but I think it has something to do with collective guilt and the belief that men are somehow complicit in their own victimization simply by virtue of being men.
All you've done is make up a fictional world where the odds of getting caught are low, the penalties of the crime are sufficiently proportionate to act as a deterent, and people behave as rational animals instead of what they are, which is social primates. That's not much like the world we actually live in, where if you're a white collar criminal the situation is not too different from what the GP described.
If you don't take into account the actual nature of human beings as they objectively exist you can't make any claim to objectivity. Human beings are the ongoing product of an evolutionary process that has selected for various kinds of sociability at least as strongly as rationality--certainly more strongly than the kind of rationality involved in the sort of deductive arguments you are making.
So the odds of people being unwilling to trade with thieves are essentially nil, a fact that makes perfect sense on my understanding of objectively real human nature, but makes no sense at all in your fantasy-land. I may consider that fact unfortunate, and I do, but it does not make it any less a fact that a rational individual takes into account.
That you can imagine a world where theft is not a rationally selfish choice is nice, but it is not the world we live in. Even in our world theft is rarely a rationally selfish choice, but providing an endless list of examples where that is the case does not change the objective fact of the matter that under some circumstances theft is the rationally selfish choice.
Doesn't mean it's ethical, but the debate of moral absolutes and human nature is another subject entirely.
Don't confuse "moral absolutes" with "moral concretes".
"Stealing in wrong" is not just absolute (context free), it is also concrete (it describes the absolute in terms of a particular, very narrowly defined act.)
It is quite possible to believe that there are no concrete moral absolutes, while continuing to believe in abstract moral absolutes. Concrete moral absolutes are like engineer's rules, or Aristotelian physics. They describe particular, limited systems in very concrete terms. Newtonian physics describes those same systems in much more abstract terms, but no one would claim that Newtonian physics is not absolute (at least not within its domain of application, which is so vast it took 200 years to find exceptions.)
This is a question that has confused me for a long time, becuase it seems to me obvious that there are moral absolutes--the regularities we observe in human behaviour would be incomprehensible if there were not. But they exist at a sufficiently abstract level that they are not obvious, and ethics has been stuck in the equivalent of the Aristotelian phase of physics for a long time.
That we only have a vague idea of what the abstract moral absolutes are does not mean they don't exist. Only intellectually bankrupt nihilists like Zeno argued that our imperfect understanding of the laws of motion implied that there weren't any.
I wouldn't want this done, simply because it doesn't seem logical to carry electrical components (the amplifier) in my mouth.
Logical? What do you mean? Would it violate some sylogism or Bayesian rule?
Since the signal is conducted through the teeth, and the amplifier is what drives the teeth, and the teeth are in the mouth, it would not be "logical" to put the amplifier outside the mouth. Nor would it be physical or electrical.
As someone with progressive congenital deafness this looks damned interesting, and I really can't think of anything more logical than avoiding having a permanent wire stuck up my cochlea in favour of some easily removable and servicable electronics that, amongst other things, wouldn't make it practically impossible to have an MRI.
So there's the LS3, trailing the squad, when someone spots something that needs to be destroyed
"Something that needs to be destroyed."
I just want to pause and contemplate that phrase for a while. What exactly is such a thing, that has an fully internalized requirement that it be destroyed? That's what a "need" is, isn't it? If I say, "I need a drink of water" it means that I, personally, for my own purposes, require water.
What exactly are the purposes of these things, such that those purposes lead them to a fully internal requirement, having nothing to do with anyone else's wants or desires, to be destroyed?
Also a bullet has anywhere from 8-18 inches to accelerate, a vest has to stop it in usually less than 2.
Which is irrelevant. Total momentum transfer is what knocks you over (or not), not peak force--it's the integral under the curve, not the peak of the curve that matters.
A bullet has a mass of 10 g or so--up to 30 for really big guns. It travels at around 500 m/s. That's 0.01*500 = 5 kg*m/s momentum, enough to impart a velocity of 0.1 m/s to a 50 kg (very light) person or 0.05 m/s to a 100 kg person (quite heavy).
Walking speed is a few m/s, so I don't see anyone being thrown back. Maybe staggered a little if hit by a really big gun. People are thrown back in the movies because people who don't know any physics think it looks good, but to those of us who do it makes as much sense as people being thrown up in the air by the impact of a bullet.
Thanks--we all know that every/. patent story is full of lies, and I appreciate you taking the time to figure out which specific lies were in this one.
Rob Malda et al believe deeply in the fundamental soundness of the US patent system, to the extent that it wouldn't surprise me that they held substantial portfolios of non-trivial software patents themselves. You can tell this is the case because every single patent-related story on/. is substantially false: either the summary is full of lies about what has actually been patented, or a patent application is presented as a patent grant. The level of ignorance expressed by the/. editors may actually be beyond the limit of "never assume venality where stupidity will do", although admittedly that is a tough boundary to cross.
In any case, if they had any fundamental beef with the US patent system they would be posting stories of genuine abuse, not fabricated and misleading summaries and headlines that are clearly the work of people who think the only way to make the US patent system look bad is to lie about it.
Furthermore many involve masterful engineering and mechanics
Which is deeply, deeply sad. Firearms are the most heavily engineered implements on the planet. If we put a tiny fraction of the effort into refining products that saved lives we'd be in far better shape.
Firearms have had an important role to play, historically, in the growth of personal autonomy. But it is notable today that places where firearms are most freely available--failed states--have the least personal autonomy. Weapons == Good is not a general truth, and in the developed world it is simply sad that so many people still think that more firepower is the solution to all their problems. It isn't, and it may very well be the source of some of them.
Slashdot Mirror
The comparison between how the robot sketches faces and the various other "how to sketch faces" instruction videos that YouTube helpfully provides is interesting. It looks like the robot is using some sort of priority algorithm for deciding the next stroke that has no concept of either the current stroke or the basic features of the face itself.
So while a human sketch artist builds a face out of a library of pre-defined components that are effectively parameterized by the particular individual being sketched, it looks like the robot is doing something quite different at the drawing stage, even if it is doing some kind of decomposition of the face into to components at the analysis stage.
Ever heard the phrase "too cold to snow"?
Yeah, I've heard it. It is said by idiots who don't know anything about weather. Ask any climate scientist if it is ever too cold to snow and they will laugh at you.
Climate models for the most part do not conserve energy and/or have unphysical boundary conditions, and all of them are parameterized in unphysical ways. Anyone who isn't sceptical of them is missing something.
Unfortunately, the whole issue has been so heavily politicized that we have idiots responding to this story with completely invented claims that "denialists made up the term 'climate change'" because they simply can't imagine that their favoured side would so something so obviously slimy.
There are significant signals of increasing global heat content: ocean temperature is the strongest. But anyone who pretends the science on global warming is anything like a slam-dunk (as, for example, the existence of the W and Z bosons is) is talking moonshine.
Set up an execution environment with debugger
I once worked with a fairly large legacy system that had been ported to Solaris from its original development system, which was a PDP-11 running RT-11/TSX, which as those of us who learned on it knew, had and addressing limit of 64k code and 64 k data in a single "overlay". TSX was a multi-tasking layer on top of RT-11, which meant that one way to get around this limit was to run multiple processes and have them communicate via pipes, and this fundamental architecture had been maintained in the port.
This meant the most trivial path of execution involved multiple fork/execs and what amounted to asynchronous processing via message passing. It was kind of elegant, in its own twisted way, but it meant that by far the easiest way of coming to grips with it was to put printf's everywhere (it was written in C) and have every program generate time-stamped output into its own file, then run a script to interleave the output so I could see a synchronous picture of what was going on.
After that I could attached gdb to various spawned processes and dig into them in a bit more detail, but that was a hopelessly laborious procedure for getting the overview, and because the pipe code was blind (the pipe endpoints were reused for whatever pipe happened to be open at the moment) it was almost impossible at any point to know what process you were talking to at a given point unless you'd seen it created: there was essentially no way that any amount of static analysis could have revealed the underlying structure.
The company wanted me to change the code to add functionality that would have required touching virtually every file, and I was eventually able to show via various software engineering metrics that doing so would take approximately three years, mostly due to bug fixes (the cyclomatic complexity of some of the routines was into the hundreds, even not accounting for the bizarre architecture.) They killed the project and we wrote something simpler and cleaner to do the same job from scratch. That's rarely the best solution, but keep it in mind if things get too out of hand.
State actors are yesterday's enemy, and your argument is an example of the aphorism that the military always plans to fight the last war over again.
While nuclear armed states are a problem, and missile defence is certainly a better use of tax dollars than most of the deadweight-loss industry, non-state actors are by far the dominant risk with regard to nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately, there is no remotely plausible solution to nuclear terrorism, other than some decades of constructive engagement with the social and cultural groups that are likely to engage in it, particularly Muslims, these days.
The best way to destroy an enemy is to turn them into a friend. With regard to non-state actors, that may very well be the only way.
Only if you want to cling to silly quasi-dualistic Searle-inspired objections towards functionalism.
Your argument is of the form:
A is not X
B is not X
Ergo, A is B.
That is, you can reasonably claim that we don't have a deep understanding of what consciousness is without being a dualist. Consciousness is obviously an activity of the brain. But that's just hand-waving, because we have barely any clue of how the brain works, and certainly nothing even remotely approaching an understanding of the brain that allows us to state anything even approximately like the necessary and/or sufficient conditions for consciousness.
Furthermore, functional assessment of the brain is enormously difficult: we don't understand much about neural structure, and even less about neurochemistry, which is where all the interesting work gets done.
So imputing dualism to someone just because they don't think functionalist claims are sufficiently detailed to be interesting, particularly in the context of an engineering discussion of AI, is pretty lame.
Should society and the government have the authority to ban videos and literature detailing weapon manufacture and security-breaking techniques?
The question is not "should it?" but "does it?"
The Federal Government in the United States does not, unless you mean something by the words, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech..." that is quite different from what I mean by them.
If you believe that sociopaths are more likely to become effective CEOs, as has been claimed
Actually, what has been empirically demonstrated is that sociopaths are more likely to become CEOs, not that they are effective--they are not. The question that motivated the research was, "How come all these ineffective assholes are running these big companies?" The answer is: self-aggrandizing jerks are just the kind of people who are successful in clawing and manipulating their way into CEO positions, where they act like self-aggrandizing jerks, much to everyone's surprise.
while female's role is to pick the most successful one among them and reproduce his genes
The female's role is to socially pair bond with the most successful male she can get to do so, and then reproduce with as many different higher-status males as she can get away with. Anything else is clearly evolutionarily sub-optimal, and believing it is nothing but sexist myopia.
If you think that these ridiculously high paying jobs require no skills and nothing other than a buddy from the tennis club downtown, then why aren't you doing that?
Speaking for myself: because I have no desire to. The hours suck, the non-skills are schmoozing and making small-talk with small-minded ignoramuses, and while the financial rewards are considerable the lifestyle is hollow and dull.
I ran my own company for quite a few years, and saw very clearly from my clients and partner companies that on average the higher up the food chain you went the less it mattered what you know and the more it mattered who you know. If "knowing the right people" and "fitting in with an unbelievably dull and ignorant social set" can be considered skills then I'll grant you these jobs require skill: the skills of a self-interested political manipulator, perhaps.
But the fact remains that in my current position I could do everything the company president does (I know this because I was the president of my own company and have worked in senior management at companies larger than my current employer) while he could not do a single aspect of my job.
Ergo, the GP's point is correct: CXO jobs require little to no actual skill, as the term is generally used. Or rather, to do them well does require skill and talent, but the majority of the occupants of these positions today are unskilled and talentless, which explains the dismal state of America's once-great corporations.
1.5 kg, obviously.
To me, this takes Ubuntu NE out of the equation for all possible uses.
Likewise. I use my netbook offline all the time, and have spotty connectivity most of the day. This would make Ubuntu useless to me out of the box, and it reflects a very strange set of priorities: closed source proprietary remote apps vs open source free local ones is about the worst choice imaginable for a linux distro.
I used to use Abiword on my netbook, an d found it annoyingly sluggish saving largish documents. Replaced it with OOo and have been very happy.
The big thing for me about a netbook is long battery life (> 6 hours) and light weight ( 1.5g). Compared to my laptop it's a feather. Network connectivity is the third priority, and not nearly important enough to give up freedom, privacy and control for.
So the idea here is apparently that the energy itself can be transmitted instantly, but you can't actually transmit information this way. Just energy.
I'm pretty much pushing a rock up hill here, but some people enjoy pointless struggle.
Nothing is transmitted instantaneously. Not mass, not energy, not information. Nor, contrary to the article's false claims, has anyone ever teleported an electron, photon or atom, although people who don't understand quantum mechanics and physicists who would rather mislead the public to get positive mention in the press than do actual science will claim otherwise.
The only thing that gets "teleported" is the quantum state of an atom, electron or atom. As anyone who knows anything about quantum mechanics knows, the ontology of quantum states is a slippery beast, so talking about "teleporting" one as if it was ontologically identical to a brick or Captain Kirk is pretty questionable right off.
Teleporting a quantum state is completely different from teleporting a particle: if you could teleport a particle then the particle quantum numbers at the transmitter and receiver would change. In the case of quantum "teleportation" they do not. And the information is carried via entanglement using a perfectly ordinary beam of particles: if you were to stick your hand into the space through which information is being "teleported" the perfectly ordinary classical carrier particles would burn a hole through it.
In the case at hand, what is being discussed appears to be a fairly tame equivalent of quantum tunnelling, in which a spatially extended object like a string is excited into a higher energy state by an interaction at one end. There may be a small but finite chance that you can then de-excite the string from the other end pretty much instantaneously, because the excited state is a state of the whole spatially extended string, although the question of the speed at which that can occur is much debated.
Arguments over the "velocity" of the wavefunction under the barrier in quantum tunnelling have been going on since the early 1930's--there's a nice paper in Phys Rev from 1932 or thereabouts in which the authors did a pre-electronic-computer numerical solution to Schrodinger's equation to study the issue.
So to my mind, this is pretty ordinary, although a nice way of studying a much-debated and well-known curiosity of the quantum world, that has been marketed in a misleading and dishonest way to an ignorant press by the scientists in question, or which has been picked up the the ignorant press and distorted beyond all recognition despite the scientist's attempts at an honest and clear presentation.
It's not really hard to tell where all this is leading.
One area that hasn't been mentioned here is paternity testing, which should be routine for all newborns, given we're doing this kind of genetic screening anyway.
Between 2% and 25% of children are currently fathered by someone other than their mother's socially pair-bonded partner because women have such a strong evolutionary incentive to separate sex and love. They want to be pair-bonded with the highest-status male they can find, and then have sex with many different higher-status males so their children will be genetically superior.
So women are basically tuned up by evolution to cheat with any man with a higher perceived social status than their husband, and they do this all the time, producing the observed rates of children fathered by men other than their mate. In societies with flatter social hierarchies the rates are lower, and vice versa.
The only people who get screwed, as it were, by this arrangement is lower-status men, who end up raising children not their own, although "lower status" is a complicated thing to measure. A physically virile poor man may be perceived by a woman's hormones as "higher status" than a more frail rich man.
Men are tuned up by evolution to be indiscriminate. Women are tuned up by evolution to be dishonest.
It would be wonderfully socially disruptive, therefore, at a very deep level, to make paternity testing routine. It's likely to happen for medical reasons anyway, as we come to understand the genetic basis of health and disease more completely, and doctors will simply want to know more about a child's genetic history. But doing so will put a massive spoke in the wheels of the most basic female evolutionary drive: to have children by as many different high-status men as possible, while remaining pair-bonded to the highest status man she can deceive into supporting her and her offspring.
Papers along the lines of: "here's an approach you might have thought would work, but it turned out that it didn't, and in retrospect we can see why, which this paper will explain".
In experimental papers I ususally try to have a section entitled (really) "Things that did not work so well" in which I mention approaches that seemed like good ideas that didn't work out. If I were an editor of an experimental journal I would make this part of the standard format, as any experiment that doesn't lead to the discovery of failed approaches is clearly not difficult enough to be worth doing.
This approach does mean at the end of the day I have to have some positive result, though, which may be couched in terms of "New limits on phenomenon XYZ (that we found no evidence of)".
There's still bias, though. In the search for "physics beyond the standard model" null results are the norm, but the odd (and inevitably mistaken) positive result gets vastly more attention. When I was working in the field and my colleagues in more prolific areas would get a positive result I'd tell them, "Don't worry--that's just as good as a null result", as when I got null results they'd tell me they were just as good as positive results. The fact that they were surprised to be told that suggests the truth: positive results are generally considered better.
S02 emissions trading was also local and not between countries
The rest of your comment is interesting and I'll have to look into what you're claiming, which is at variance with the usual account of cap and trade in sulphur emissions.
However, this comment is just plain false: Canada is and continues to be a separate country, and the cap and trade system for sulphur emissions was a Canadian initiative that was jointly undertaken with the US.
"Cap and trade" can so easily be corrupted that there is no point in going that route unless corruption is your goal.
Sure, look at what happend with cap and trade in sulpher emissions in North America in the '80's. It was such a complete failure that acid rain is no longer a looming problem... oh, wait.
Just as a matter of interest, why do you hate market solutions so much? Are you some kind of socialist?
Women need an un-fake-able signal of a man's seriousness, so the signal must take the form of something very (to the suitor) expensive.
Like, say, buying agricultural tools or other infrastructure for starving Elbonians, or donating a wack of money in her name to a medical research program, or supporting an AIDs hospice...
I don't actually buy your faux-evolutionary argument, which only makes what little sense it does in the context of nuclear families, which aren't at all the norm in our evolutionary past. But in any case it fails to explain why women are so utterly and brutally selfish and uncaring about anyone's needs but their own in this process.
Charity also has no resale value, and it would do far more good in the world than pretty rocks.
So I seriously suggest that men present to the woman they want to marry proof of their economic prowess by donating two or three months salary in her name to a charity they know to be important to her. This has two important effects: it increases the resources available to people at the bottom of the food chain, and it reveals those cases where the man is in love with a gold-digging bitch who doesn't give a shit about anyone to the extent that she'd rather have an expensive but useless pretty rock than see others far worse off than herself helped out.
Here's the thing: you're right, people who are the subject of violence can often (although certainly not always) do things to avoid being placed in a situation where violence is the end result.
There's a name for people like that. We call them "men".
Men are victimized by all violent crimes (except possibly rape, where men report lower rates by a factor of up to ten, but want to bet the reporting bias is huge?) at rates up to several times greater than women. A large part of the difference can be accounted for by differences in crime-avoidant behaviors. Women are taught a lot about how to avoid being a victim of violent crime. Men are not. And no one much cares.
One of the reasons idiots give for not caring is that "men are also the perpetrators". Somehow in the minds of idiots this makes everything ok. I'm not stupid enough to understand quite how, but I think it has something to do with collective guilt and the belief that men are somehow complicit in their own victimization simply by virtue of being men.
All you've done is make up a fictional world where the odds of getting caught are low, the penalties of the crime are sufficiently proportionate to act as a deterent, and people behave as rational animals instead of what they are, which is social primates. That's not much like the world we actually live in, where if you're a white collar criminal the situation is not too different from what the GP described.
If you don't take into account the actual nature of human beings as they objectively exist you can't make any claim to objectivity. Human beings are the ongoing product of an evolutionary process that has selected for various kinds of sociability at least as strongly as rationality--certainly more strongly than the kind of rationality involved in the sort of deductive arguments you are making.
So the odds of people being unwilling to trade with thieves are essentially nil, a fact that makes perfect sense on my understanding of objectively real human nature, but makes no sense at all in your fantasy-land. I may consider that fact unfortunate, and I do, but it does not make it any less a fact that a rational individual takes into account.
That you can imagine a world where theft is not a rationally selfish choice is nice, but it is not the world we live in. Even in our world theft is rarely a rationally selfish choice, but providing an endless list of examples where that is the case does not change the objective fact of the matter that under some circumstances theft is the rationally selfish choice.
Doesn't mean it's ethical, but the debate of moral absolutes and human nature is another subject entirely.
Don't confuse "moral absolutes" with "moral concretes".
"Stealing in wrong" is not just absolute (context free), it is also concrete (it describes the absolute in terms of a particular, very narrowly defined act.)
It is quite possible to believe that there are no concrete moral absolutes, while continuing to believe in abstract moral absolutes. Concrete moral absolutes are like engineer's rules, or Aristotelian physics. They describe particular, limited systems in very concrete terms. Newtonian physics describes those same systems in much more abstract terms, but no one would claim that Newtonian physics is not absolute (at least not within its domain of application, which is so vast it took 200 years to find exceptions.)
This is a question that has confused me for a long time, becuase it seems to me obvious that there are moral absolutes--the regularities we observe in human behaviour would be incomprehensible if there were not. But they exist at a sufficiently abstract level that they are not obvious, and ethics has been stuck in the equivalent of the Aristotelian phase of physics for a long time.
That we only have a vague idea of what the abstract moral absolutes are does not mean they don't exist. Only intellectually bankrupt nihilists like Zeno argued that our imperfect understanding of the laws of motion implied that there weren't any.
I wouldn't want this done, simply because it doesn't seem logical to carry electrical components (the amplifier) in my mouth.
Logical? What do you mean? Would it violate some sylogism or Bayesian rule?
Since the signal is conducted through the teeth, and the amplifier is what drives the teeth, and the teeth are in the mouth, it would not be "logical" to put the amplifier outside the mouth. Nor would it be physical or electrical.
As someone with progressive congenital deafness this looks damned interesting, and I really can't think of anything more logical than avoiding having a permanent wire stuck up my cochlea in favour of some easily removable and servicable electronics that, amongst other things, wouldn't make it practically impossible to have an MRI.
So there's the LS3, trailing the squad, when someone spots something that needs to be destroyed
"Something that needs to be destroyed."
I just want to pause and contemplate that phrase for a while. What exactly is such a thing, that has an fully internalized requirement that it be destroyed? That's what a "need" is, isn't it? If I say, "I need a drink of water" it means that I, personally, for my own purposes, require water.
What exactly are the purposes of these things, such that those purposes lead them to a fully internal requirement, having nothing to do with anyone else's wants or desires, to be destroyed?
Also a bullet has anywhere from 8-18 inches to accelerate, a vest has to stop it in usually less than 2.
Which is irrelevant. Total momentum transfer is what knocks you over (or not), not peak force--it's the integral under the curve, not the peak of the curve that matters.
A bullet has a mass of 10 g or so--up to 30 for really big guns. It travels at around 500 m/s. That's 0.01*500 = 5 kg*m/s momentum, enough to impart a velocity of 0.1 m/s to a 50 kg (very light) person or 0.05 m/s to a 100 kg person (quite heavy).
Walking speed is a few m/s, so I don't see anyone being thrown back. Maybe staggered a little if hit by a really big gun. People are thrown back in the movies because people who don't know any physics think it looks good, but to those of us who do it makes as much sense as people being thrown up in the air by the impact of a bullet.
Thanks--we all know that every /. patent story is full of lies, and I appreciate you taking the time to figure out which specific lies were in this one.
Rob Malda et al believe deeply in the fundamental soundness of the US patent system, to the extent that it wouldn't surprise me that they held substantial portfolios of non-trivial software patents themselves. You can tell this is the case because every single patent-related story on /. is substantially false: either the summary is full of lies about what has actually been patented, or a patent application is presented as a patent grant. The level of ignorance expressed by the /. editors may actually be beyond the limit of "never assume venality where stupidity will do", although admittedly that is a tough boundary to cross.
In any case, if they had any fundamental beef with the US patent system they would be posting stories of genuine abuse, not fabricated and misleading summaries and headlines that are clearly the work of people who think the only way to make the US patent system look bad is to lie about it.
Furthermore many involve masterful engineering and mechanics
Which is deeply, deeply sad. Firearms are the most heavily engineered implements on the planet. If we put a tiny fraction of the effort into refining products that saved lives we'd be in far better shape.
Firearms have had an important role to play, historically, in the growth of personal autonomy. But it is notable today that places where firearms are most freely available--failed states--have the least personal autonomy. Weapons == Good is not a general truth, and in the developed world it is simply sad that so many people still think that more firepower is the solution to all their problems. It isn't, and it may very well be the source of some of them.