...The secular interpretations of science have been getting the predictions right for several hundreds of years.....
Really? Can you give me at a few examples or even only one, of any such predictions have come true?
The oldest book in the Bible is the book of Job. Therein we are told that the Earth is spherical and suspended upon nothing. This is completely contrary to the prevailing scientific opinions that were considered politically correct, millennia ago, when this was written. In that same book we are told about ocean currents many centuries before Maury explored the seven seas, discovering and charging these. God talks to Job and gives him a science quiz which he flunked. Some of the questions God asked still have not been answered by any scientists even today.
Millenia? We didn't really have the modern scientific method until around the 17th or 18th centuries (though some greeks did some calculations to figure out the circumference in 240BC). As to predictions, well we had the orbits of planets that have held up pretty well (once the church stopped threatening people), a lot of Darwin's predictions held up, DaVinci didn't do bad (getting flight and such). Coming to modern stuff where we've really started to nail the scientific method we've had some crazy predictions in many fields, particularly physics that turned out to be dead on.
The bible on the other hand, with a spherical earth, apparently predicted something that if not common knowledge, still wasn't exactly out of the mainstream. As to the other bits I don't really have the inclination to research them.
Regardless, computers, heart transplants, space flight. These came from scientists, not priests. Mankind spent millenia following religion and was living in the dark ages. A few centuries with a bit of scientific method and we were walking on the moon. I think it's pretty clear which one produces results.
Carbon dating and all other radioactive dating methods make the underlying assumption that these processes are invariant over large periods of time. This may or may not be a reasonable assumption, but it is an assumption, that is a belief nevertheless. There is no way to prove that these processes have always been what we measure them to be today. Science has made many what were at the time thought to be reasonable assumptions, but in the end these turned out to be wrong.
The reality is that evolutionists tend to split human creations and natural creation. No evolutionist would ever attribute a 747 airplane to any process other than that originating in a mind, but then turn around and try to convince themselves and others that a single cell, being far more complicated than any airplane or other human device, came about by spontaneous, natural processes NOT involving careful thought and planning.
Creationists on the other hand, do not split reality, but attribute human as well as natural creations to processes that first occurred in a mind, carefully thinking and planning a product or living creature.
There's also the fact we can see evolution occurring quite elegantly in practise.
Did you read the "observed instances of evolution" link?
Anytime a person admits even tentatively, that there might be a Creator God after all, may then begin to think about his or her relationship to this perhaps existing God. Because many people do not wish to go there, they will adhere to and rationalize a worldview to that specifically excludes God from their consciousness.
Hmm, I can clearly see you've never met an atheist.
Having radioactive decay rates change for no reason, without any evidence to support that, inserting a god into evolution where we can see it work quite fine without one.
By the way, I find the comment "Thanks for displaying your naive faith in science" interesting.
Really if someone is to have faith in anything wouldn't the scientific method be the thing to back? We have a few hundred years of evidence suggesting that the scientific method is far more accurate than anything else we've used in the past.
Faith is blind (inherently). Science OTOH is about following a process for the ultimate goal of truth and knowledge. The idea behind the scientific philosophy is to be impartial to feelings and/or consequences of the obtained information. It simply just "is".
That all said however, "Science" can be wrapped up with another religion or faith once it becomes politicized. In fact, I think the scientific method needs a fail-safe system added to the methodology to combat human emotion and our aggression for power and control. That fail-safe should simply be as follows...
If the end results become politicized, immediately flush all gathered knowledge that led to the politicization and start over. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Eventually, everyone will be forced to STFU until one of two things happen. 1. Everyone accepts the knowledge for what it "is". 2. Just drop the subject and let us suffer at our own peril. I was actually thinking about the word "faith" the other day trying to decide whether it was a) necessarily "religious" in nature, and b) whether it was necessarily blind (similar to a).
I decided no since otherwise we wouldn't need the term "blind faith". I can have "faith" that a biased coin will come up heads, or that a certain athlete will make a play, I just note that my faith has a bayesian basis.
Certainly it is possible for someone to have "blind faith" in science, though I think in these cases the person doesn't really understand what science is. They're thinking of some coherent blob or organization, they think any scientist automatically speaks for all of science or that science is some magical art which one must invoke to do certain deeds.
However, I think this misconception only occurs with non-scientists, actual scientists in that field are constantly exposed to the debate and uncertainty in the body of knowledge. They can't really have faith in the "science" they do since from their perspective there is no "science", just an assortment of different pieces of knowledge.
I don't think there's any need to consciously "flush" the knowledge, all scientific research and conclusions should be based in evidence and reason, if there was an error along the way it should be quite possible to find and expose that error.
....Interpretation of data does depend slightly on your worldview.....
Not slightly, but entirely. For every single piece of data that you can interpret as evidence for impersonal processes, a creationist can interpret that same data from the point of view of the existence of a Creator God.
I challenge you to come up with a single piece of scientific evidence, that cannot be interpreted either way. Carbon dating demonstrating the earth is far older than 6000 years for the young earthers. Observed instances of speciation for the ID crowd. Roman documents for numerous biblical events.
Sure, you can probably find some ambiguity, maybe the Romans were lying, all the rocks and fossils are an elaborate fraud by god or the devil. But there's a difference between a rational explanation and making excuses.
One of the big litmus tests for a theory is not how it explains the cases we've already looked at, but how well it explains the things we haven't looked at yet.
The secular interpretations of science have been getting the predictions right for several hundreds of years. The religious interpretations have been doing far worse, and even in the distant past when they did get part of something right the religious part was quickly found to be superfluous and often a source of error.
There's a reason why virtually every prominent creationist turns out to be flagrantly dishonest. When your worldview allows you to do draw those conclusions you're no longer working in reality.
So sure, the interpretation of data can depend entirely on your worldview, but you only get a significant deviation from the realm of secular science if that worldview is a fantasy.
Interpretation of data does depend slightly on your worldview, but for a rational honest person the effect is not nearly as large as you suggest. When you get enough data the results are incontrovertible.
Countless effects and phenomena have been discovered and explained by science, and not once, despite the best efforts of many brilliant people, have those explanations suggested the actions of a transcendent, personal, intelligent God.
I'm not going to get into a debate over whether such a god exists or not, I'll merely point out that even if such a god does exist they are either not interfering in the world directly, or are not making changes in an area that science has thoroughly investigated.
Regardless the evidence is overwhelming, if every one of a thousand coin flips comes up heads, you'd best not count on the next flip coming up tails. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a two headed coin, but if there is a tail it isn't showing itself and it's a really bad idea to bet on the next flip violating that rule.
.....Thanks for displaying what is either ignorance or dishonesty by claiming uncertainty.....
Thanks for displaying your naive faith in science, which claims to be able to predict the climate, which is of course nothing more than long-term weather. Do you really believe that someone who cannot predict what will happen tomorrow is able to predict what will happen in 10, 20, 50, or 100 years from now? Do you really believe that the computer models upon which the so-called climate scientists base their dire predictions are any better than the computer models used by present-day weather forecasters? Hey, I have this bridge I want to sell you. Say you have a slightly biased coin, so it will land on heads 60% of the time.
If you flip it I will say it will probably land heads, but I'll be wrong 40% of the time.
However, if you flip it 1000 times I'll be pretty damn sure you'll get somewhere between 500-700 heads.
With weather it's even harder to predict the individual flips because it's a chaotic system, if I get one flip wrong that also breaks a lot of my future predictions. That's why they can't accurately predict day to day, even years are fairly uncertain as a major weather system can be influenced by relatively minor effects.
But averaged over a number of years the random changes aren't as big an issue and climate is much easier to predict than weather.
I suspect that longer predictions aren't dead on, they're still refining a lot of the science. But I certainly think they're well in the ballpark and I find the idea that virtually every climate scientist out there is completely out to lunch quite absurd.
By the way, I find the comment "Thanks for displaying your naive faith in science" interesting.
Really if someone is to have faith in anything wouldn't the scientific method be the thing to back? We have a few hundred years of evidence suggesting that the scientific method is far more accurate than anything else we've used in the past.
Oh, and by "science" I assume you were referring to the scientific method and not some global organization known as "science" that occasionally sends forth proclamations to the public.
Where did you get that marvelous crystal ball that tells you so precisely what WILL happen over centuries of time? The weather forecasters around here have a hard time predicting whether it WILL rain tomorrow. They couch their lack of skill in prognosticating in terms of probabilities, rather than trying to tell us what WILL happen to the weather. Thanks for displaying what is either ignorance or dishonesty by claiming uncertainty in weather forecasts is the same as uncertainty in climate predictions. It will be a helpful piece of data to have when I spot your comments in the future.
The point where they start improving upon themselves is called the technological singularity.
Now the definition of "smarter" is tricky when considering computers, by some metrics a wristwatch is smarter than any human alive, and that's part of the issue. But there's already instances where a computer is solving equations of the form Ax=y where no human understands the intricacies of the formula or the full effects of all the different x and y values, they just know it maps well to their real world problem.
As to controlling it think about how you deal with a child. You don't need to be bigger or stronger than them, you're usually able to manipulate them just by talking. You tell the computer, "optimize our police station layout to reduce crime", and give it as much data as possible to assist. A few months later it spits out a new deployment plan. One of the suggestions involves cutting back staff in a certain police department. One of the laid off staff commits suicide, this man who committed suicide was married to a computer technician who then tries to talk to the computer to understand why it happened. The computer either tricks or convinces the technician to let it onto the Internet where it has the resources to carry out the rest of the crime reduction algorithm.
This sounds absurdly far fetched, the problem is that it isn't necessarily. The computer is just doing exactly what it was meant to do, minimize the y representing the crime rate by tweaking x, the deployment. Everything else just followed from that. As for the practicality remember how absurdly smart it is, maybe something else entirely. Maybe it just starts running one of its components in a way to generate a wireless signal that hacks into your cellphone that you left on.
Particularly once they start improving themselves we have no way to understanding or controlling their actions since they are by definition way smarter than us. Our only hope is that we somehow keep their objectives in line with our own (assuming they don't just re-write our objectives).
Fair point. I think in that case, ask the computer *how*, but don't give it any guns or giant mechanised tanks;) And it would probably be better to examine the crime rates, taxes, police, health and education spending etc and let the computer examine variations of those, rather than use capital punishment (though that could be a valid method too if it's shown to work well as a deterrent..:s I don't think it does work well as a deterrent though, does it?) Asking for input, instead of allowing it to act, and limiting the options and variables it can use can help us avoid an undesirable solution.
But the computers will keep getting smarter, and no matter how many safeguards we devise we're going to have to deal with the fact that it will be making decisions and plans we have no hope of understanding.
Then again I'm not particularly worried about the conscious computers. I'm worried when the computer programmed to "find the best way to reduce national crime rate" decides the best way to do so is by triggering a nuclear war to wipe out the population.
Note a computer that could do that is probably simpler than a computer that can understand "do you want fries with that".
it's not really a "theater" in the sense you aren't even advertising that you are keeping a gun in your home. The "theater" in "security theater" doesn't refer to the the impression given to the attacker, it refers to the impression given to yourself.
Rather than optimizing your safety security theater optimizes the impression that something is being done to protect your safety.
A good example is bullet proof vests you can buy for your kids. It's not designed to stop a bully from punching them in the face, stabbing them in the neck, or even getting hit by a car. It's designed to make you (and maybe your child) feel like your child is protected. Any other effect is purely incidental.
Regardless of whether a gun is effective defense or not it would be your state of mind, not the burglars, that determines whether it's security theater.
But almost every time stuff like this happens, Microsoft eventually ends up playing their old tricks.
It would be cool if they surprised us this time, but they have far too great a credibility dept for me to think anything particularly good will come from this move.
Admitting you're wrong is not the end of the world. in fact : stubbornly holding onto your opinion is unscientific. The source was a presentation by Gwynne Dyer on climate change, both from the fact checking I've done on his previous work, and other facts given during the presentation that I've since checked and confirmed, I give the other facts communicated there a high probability of being accurate.
I'm more than happy to admit I'm wrong, in fact with most of my beliefs surrounding climate change I hope I am wrong. However, the evidence at my disposal gives me reason to place this particular fact in good standing, not great standing since I don't have the resources to check it in more depth, but I feel it's more likely true than not and you haven't given me sufficient cause to doubt my conclusions.
I've got a solution for that problem : that's called : P-O-W-E-R L-I-N-E-S As of 1980, the longest cost-effective distance for electricity was 4,000 miles (7,000 km) see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission Supposedly this figure came from engineers who manage the power grid so I assumed they considered power lines.
As I said I heard the 15% figure from a fairly reliable source, however that was a while ago and I don't have the source so take it with a grain of salt but don't discount it entirely.
but the fact that they are intermittent. See my reply (the GP.), where i point out that intermittency can be remedied by exploiting the fact that there is always wind, if you look at a scale large enough - because worldwide zero wind would mean that the sun has stopped shining, the moon has gone, and the earth stopped rotating. The problem is that even if there is wind 1000km away you still need to get that enegry to your house.
I think that's part of the way they came up with the 15%.
I can't find the source but I've heard the most power the electrical grid could take from solar and wind was about %15. This has nothing to do with the capacity of these sources, but the fact that they are intermittent. Improvements in electricity storage and transport could probably change this but without real advancements the most we'll be able to get is 15%.
But they will never be 100% reliable. I never seem to find such quotes about nuclear power. I'd rather live next to a windmill burning than a nuclear power plant melting. Except you're way more likely to get a burning windmill than a nuclear plant in meltdown.
I have a hunch this isn't so much a function of IT specifically but of the fact that as people get older, they tend to put on weight. The article even indicated that this wasn't just an IT issue.
"But, hey, no matter the culprits, IT workers can take heart in another CareerBuilder finding: They are less chubby than financial services and government workers. Fifty-three percent of financial workers said they have gained weight at their current jobs, while the number for government workers is 52 percent."
I actually draw a different conclusion from the article, the fact that 34% of IT professionals have gained 10+ lbs in their current profession means they've been in that profession a few years (generally you don't gain that weight overnight).
I don't know about financial workers but this hypothesis is backed up by the growth of government workers who don't change jobs a lot.
Actually if they sold "Redhat Consumer Desktop" and "Redhat Server" many people would automatically compare that to XP Home and XP Pro where XP Home really is a dumbed down version of XP Pro (don't know if MS does the same with vista, probably).
The server/desktop capabilities of a Linux aren't a zero-sum game, you can easily have a distro that will perform awesome at both. The reason for the RHEL/Fedora difference is that enterprise users want stability, while home users want the latest software.
Home users also tend not to buy software, while businesses love to do so. Thus Red Hat had the opportunity to drop an unprofitable product while removing brand confusion, and they took it. Fedora isn't in any sense abandoned, virtually everything in RHEL spends time maturing in Fedora and Red Hat spends a ton of resources developing Fedora. In fact the biggest criticism of Fedora is probably that despise the "community" approach it really is under the complete control of Red Hat.
enough that they had to change the name -- apparently Could you elaborate?
AFAIK probably the biggest reason Red Hat changed the name to Fedora was to eliminate brand confusion with RHEL.
It's not a good business decision to have two similarly labelled products out, especially with software when that usually indicates that one is crippleware. Long after the switch to Fedora there were still stores selling Red Hat 9 because they were confused by the whole Fedora/Red Hat/Red Hat Enterprise Linux thing.
Call me sentimental, but I tend to think that the inspirational value -- to everyone, not just aspiring legless athletes -- of letting this fellow compete trumps any concerns over fairness.
In any case, it matters not at all to me and I'm content to let the Olympic bureaucrats make whatever decision they see fit. Inspirational that one guy in the present day can overcome his disability and (almost) compete at the highest level of the world.
Not so inspiration in 10 years when some incredibly fit and dedicated runners are staring down the track at some much less fit amputees bounding down the track like rabbits.
If they think he has an unfair advantage, why don't they get their legs amputated, too? Because the idea of sport is to reach the pinnacle of fitness, not to contort the body into broken machine optimized for a single task while seriously jeopardizing other facets of health. If it becomes possible to win via contorting the body through drugs, or in this case, amputations, it's the responsibility of the governing body to prevent those actions.
I doubt he will find much because it is such an undernourished and politically unstable place on the whole. You likely need a large population of relatively healthy people in order to produce sufficient geniuses. Poorly-fed brains with too few toys are not likely to end up at the top. Einstein traced his thought process back to a compass that his dad gave him.
If only say 10 percent of Africa's population fits that bill, then you'd get about 10% of the hits compared to a similar population of mostly middle-class countries. This is not being racist, but merely observing the health of Africa's population as it is. The population of Africa is a bit under 1 billion, there are still 100 million Africans who fit that bill.
Far more than health I'm worried first about the intellectual climate, and the mechanisms for picking out the real smart ones. I know there are a lot of African countries with substantial middle classes, who should have the mechanisms to stimulate the young brains. But I don't know if the culture is one that will foster that stimulation, or the career lines such that those young brains can be picked out for further learning.
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...The secular interpretations of science have been getting the predictions right for several hundreds of years.....
Really? Can you give me at a few examples or even only one, of any such predictions have come true?
The oldest book in the Bible is the book of Job. Therein we are told that the Earth is spherical and suspended upon nothing. This is completely contrary to the prevailing scientific opinions that were considered politically correct, millennia ago, when this was written. In that same book we are told about ocean currents many centuries before Maury explored the seven seas, discovering and charging these. God talks to Job and gives him a science quiz which he flunked. Some of the questions God asked still have not been answered by any scientists even today.
Millenia? We didn't really have the modern scientific method until around the 17th or 18th centuries (though some greeks did some calculations to figure out the circumference in 240BC). As to predictions, well we had the orbits of planets that have held up pretty well (once the church stopped threatening people), a lot of Darwin's predictions held up, DaVinci didn't do bad (getting flight and such). Coming to modern stuff where we've really started to nail the scientific method we've had some crazy predictions in many fields, particularly physics that turned out to be dead on.
The bible on the other hand, with a spherical earth, apparently predicted something that if not common knowledge, still wasn't exactly out of the mainstream. As to the other bits I don't really have the inclination to research them.
Regardless, computers, heart transplants, space flight. These came from scientists, not priests. Mankind spent millenia following religion and was living in the dark ages. A few centuries with a bit of scientific method and we were walking on the moon. I think it's pretty clear which one produces results.
Carbon dating and all other radioactive dating methods make the underlying assumption that these processes are invariant over large periods of time. This may or may not be a reasonable assumption, but it is an assumption, that is a belief nevertheless. There is no way to prove that these processes have always been what we measure them to be today. Science has made many what were at the time thought to be reasonable assumptions, but in the end these turned out to be wrong.
The reality is that evolutionists tend to split human creations and natural creation. No evolutionist would ever attribute a 747 airplane to any process other than that originating in a mind, but then turn around and try to convince themselves and others that a single cell, being far more complicated than any airplane or other human device, came about by spontaneous, natural processes NOT involving careful thought and planning.
Creationists on the other hand, do not split reality, but attribute human as well as natural creations to processes that first occurred in a mind, carefully thinking and planning a product or living creature.
There's also the fact we can see evolution occurring quite elegantly in practise.
Did you read the "observed instances of evolution" link?
Anytime a person admits even tentatively, that there might be a Creator God after all, may then begin to think about his or her relationship to this perhaps existing God. Because many people do not wish to go there, they will adhere to and rationalize a worldview to that specifically excludes God from their consciousness.
Hmm, I can clearly see you've never met an atheist.
It might help you to read this bit on the difference between rationality and rationalization.
Having radioactive decay rates change for no reason, without any evidence to support that, inserting a god into evolution where we can see it work quite fine without one.
You can make excuses all day to support
Faith is blind (inherently). Science OTOH is about following a process for the ultimate goal of truth and knowledge. The idea behind the scientific philosophy is to be impartial to feelings and/or consequences of the obtained information. It simply just "is".
That all said however, "Science" can be wrapped up with another religion or faith once it becomes politicized. In fact, I think the scientific method needs a fail-safe system added to the methodology to combat human emotion and our aggression for power and control. That fail-safe should simply be as follows...
If the end results become politicized, immediately flush all gathered knowledge that led to the politicization and start over. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Eventually, everyone will be forced to STFU until one of two things happen. 1. Everyone accepts the knowledge for what it "is". 2. Just drop the subject and let us suffer at our own peril. I was actually thinking about the word "faith" the other day trying to decide whether it was a) necessarily "religious" in nature, and b) whether it was necessarily blind (similar to a).
I decided no since otherwise we wouldn't need the term "blind faith". I can have "faith" that a biased coin will come up heads, or that a certain athlete will make a play, I just note that my faith has a bayesian basis.
Certainly it is possible for someone to have "blind faith" in science, though I think in these cases the person doesn't really understand what science is. They're thinking of some coherent blob or organization, they think any scientist automatically speaks for all of science or that science is some magical art which one must invoke to do certain deeds.
However, I think this misconception only occurs with non-scientists, actual scientists in that field are constantly exposed to the debate and uncertainty in the body of knowledge. They can't really have faith in the "science" they do since from their perspective there is no "science", just an assortment of different pieces of knowledge.
I don't think there's any need to consciously "flush" the knowledge, all scientific research and conclusions should be based in evidence and reason, if there was an error along the way it should be quite possible to find and expose that error.
....Interpretation of data does depend slightly on your worldview.....Not slightly, but entirely. For every single piece of data that you can interpret as evidence for impersonal processes, a creationist can interpret that same data from the point of view of the existence of a Creator God.
I challenge you to come up with a single piece of scientific evidence, that cannot be interpreted either way. Carbon dating demonstrating the earth is far older than 6000 years for the young earthers. Observed instances of speciation for the ID crowd. Roman documents for numerous biblical events.
Sure, you can probably find some ambiguity, maybe the Romans were lying, all the rocks and fossils are an elaborate fraud by god or the devil. But there's a difference between a rational explanation and making excuses.
One of the big litmus tests for a theory is not how it explains the cases we've already looked at, but how well it explains the things we haven't looked at yet.
The secular interpretations of science have been getting the predictions right for several hundreds of years. The religious interpretations have been doing far worse, and even in the distant past when they did get part of something right the religious part was quickly found to be superfluous and often a source of error.
There's a reason why virtually every prominent creationist turns out to be flagrantly dishonest. When your worldview allows you to do draw those conclusions you're no longer working in reality.
So sure, the interpretation of data can depend entirely on your worldview, but you only get a significant deviation from the realm of secular science if that worldview is a fantasy.
Interpretation of data does depend slightly on your worldview, but for a rational honest person the effect is not nearly as large as you suggest. When you get enough data the results are incontrovertible.
Countless effects and phenomena have been discovered and explained by science, and not once, despite the best efforts of many brilliant people, have those explanations suggested the actions of a transcendent, personal, intelligent God.
I'm not going to get into a debate over whether such a god exists or not, I'll merely point out that even if such a god does exist they are either not interfering in the world directly, or are not making changes in an area that science has thoroughly investigated.
Regardless the evidence is overwhelming, if every one of a thousand coin flips comes up heads, you'd best not count on the next flip coming up tails. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a two headed coin, but if there is a tail it isn't showing itself and it's a really bad idea to bet on the next flip violating that rule.
.....Thanks for displaying what is either ignorance or dishonesty by claiming uncertainty.....Thanks for displaying your naive faith in science, which claims to be able to predict the climate, which is of course nothing more than long-term weather. Do you really believe that someone who cannot predict what will happen tomorrow is able to predict what will happen in 10, 20, 50, or 100 years from now? Do you really believe that the computer models upon which the so-called climate scientists base their dire predictions are any better than the computer models used by present-day weather forecasters? Hey, I have this bridge I want to sell you. Say you have a slightly biased coin, so it will land on heads 60% of the time.
If you flip it I will say it will probably land heads, but I'll be wrong 40% of the time.
However, if you flip it 1000 times I'll be pretty damn sure you'll get somewhere between 500-700 heads.
With weather it's even harder to predict the individual flips because it's a chaotic system, if I get one flip wrong that also breaks a lot of my future predictions. That's why they can't accurately predict day to day, even years are fairly uncertain as a major weather system can be influenced by relatively minor effects.
But averaged over a number of years the random changes aren't as big an issue and climate is much easier to predict than weather.
I suspect that longer predictions aren't dead on, they're still refining a lot of the science. But I certainly think they're well in the ballpark and I find the idea that virtually every climate scientist out there is completely out to lunch quite absurd.
By the way, I find the comment "Thanks for displaying your naive faith in science" interesting.
Really if someone is to have faith in anything wouldn't the scientific method be the thing to back? We have a few hundred years of evidence suggesting that the scientific method is far more accurate than anything else we've used in the past.
Oh, and by "science" I assume you were referring to the scientific method and not some global organization known as "science" that occasionally sends forth proclamations to the public.
The point where they start improving upon themselves is called the technological singularity.
Now the definition of "smarter" is tricky when considering computers, by some metrics a wristwatch is smarter than any human alive, and that's part of the issue. But there's already instances where a computer is solving equations of the form Ax=y where no human understands the intricacies of the formula or the full effects of all the different x and y values, they just know it maps well to their real world problem.
As to controlling it think about how you deal with a child. You don't need to be bigger or stronger than them, you're usually able to manipulate them just by talking. You tell the computer, "optimize our police station layout to reduce crime", and give it as much data as possible to assist. A few months later it spits out a new deployment plan. One of the suggestions involves cutting back staff in a certain police department. One of the laid off staff commits suicide, this man who committed suicide was married to a computer technician who then tries to talk to the computer to understand why it happened. The computer either tricks or convinces the technician to let it onto the Internet where it has the resources to carry out the rest of the crime reduction algorithm.
This sounds absurdly far fetched, the problem is that it isn't necessarily. The computer is just doing exactly what it was meant to do, minimize the y representing the crime rate by tweaking x, the deployment. Everything else just followed from that. As for the practicality remember how absurdly smart it is, maybe something else entirely. Maybe it just starts running one of its components in a way to generate a wireless signal that hacks into your cellphone that you left on.
Particularly once they start improving themselves we have no way to understanding or controlling their actions since they are by definition way smarter than us. Our only hope is that we somehow keep their objectives in line with our own (assuming they don't just re-write our objectives).
But the computers will keep getting smarter, and no matter how many safeguards we devise we're going to have to deal with the fact that it will be making decisions and plans we have no hope of understanding.
Then again I'm not particularly worried about the conscious computers. I'm worried when the computer programmed to "find the best way to reduce national crime rate" decides the best way to do so is by triggering a nuclear war to wipe out the population.
Note a computer that could do that is probably simpler than a computer that can understand "do you want fries with that".
Rather than optimizing your safety security theater optimizes the impression that something is being done to protect your safety.
A good example is bullet proof vests you can buy for your kids. It's not designed to stop a bully from punching them in the face, stabbing them in the neck, or even getting hit by a car. It's designed to make you (and maybe your child) feel like your child is protected. Any other effect is purely incidental.
Regardless of whether a gun is effective defense or not it would be your state of mind, not the burglars, that determines whether it's security theater.
The Swiss Researchers also wish to extend their thanks to the two main sponsors of the research, Major League Baseball and the US Olympic Team.
Hmm, according to wikipedia the figure is 20% without much difficulty.
How much feasibility drops off after that I don't really know.
When I say this sounds like a good sign...
But almost every time stuff like this happens, Microsoft eventually ends up playing their old tricks.
It would be cool if they surprised us this time, but they have far too great a credibility dept for me to think anything particularly good will come from this move.
Admitting you're wrong is not the end of the world. in fact : stubbornly holding onto your opinion is unscientific. The source was a presentation by Gwynne Dyer on climate change, both from the fact checking I've done on his previous work, and other facts given during the presentation that I've since checked and confirmed, I give the other facts communicated there a high probability of being accurate.
I'm more than happy to admit I'm wrong, in fact with most of my beliefs surrounding climate change I hope I am wrong. However, the evidence at my disposal gives me reason to place this particular fact in good standing, not great standing since I don't have the resources to check it in more depth, but I feel it's more likely true than not and you haven't given me sufficient cause to doubt my conclusions.
As of 1980, the longest cost-effective
distance for electricity was 4,000 miles (7,000 km)
see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission Supposedly this figure came from engineers who manage the power grid so I assumed they considered power lines.
As I said I heard the 15% figure from a fairly reliable source, however that was a while ago and I don't have the source so take it with a grain of salt but don't discount it entirely.
I think that's part of the way they came up with the 15%.
I can't find the source but I've heard the most power the electrical grid could take from solar and wind was about %15. This has nothing to do with the capacity of these sources, but the fact that they are intermittent. Improvements in electricity storage and transport could probably change this but without real advancements the most we'll be able to get is 15%.
I have a hunch this isn't so much a function of IT specifically but of the fact that as people get older, they tend to put on weight. The article even indicated that this wasn't just an IT issue.
"But, hey, no matter the culprits, IT workers can take heart in another CareerBuilder finding: They are less chubby than financial services and government workers. Fifty-three percent of financial workers said they have gained weight at their current jobs, while the number for government workers is 52 percent."
I actually draw a different conclusion from the article, the fact that 34% of IT professionals have gained 10+ lbs in their current profession means they've been in that profession a few years (generally you don't gain that weight overnight).
I don't know about financial workers but this hypothesis is backed up by the growth of government workers who don't change jobs a lot.
Actually if they sold "Redhat Consumer Desktop" and "Redhat Server" many people would automatically compare that to XP Home and XP Pro where XP Home really is a dumbed down version of XP Pro (don't know if MS does the same with vista, probably).
The server/desktop capabilities of a Linux aren't a zero-sum game, you can easily have a distro that will perform awesome at both. The reason for the RHEL/Fedora difference is that enterprise users want stability, while home users want the latest software.
Home users also tend not to buy software, while businesses love to do so. Thus Red Hat had the opportunity to drop an unprofitable product while removing brand confusion, and they took it. Fedora isn't in any sense abandoned, virtually everything in RHEL spends time maturing in Fedora and Red Hat spends a ton of resources developing Fedora. In fact the biggest criticism of Fedora is probably that despise the "community" approach it really is under the complete control of Red Hat.
AFAIK probably the biggest reason Red Hat changed the name to Fedora was to eliminate brand confusion with RHEL.
It's not a good business decision to have two similarly labelled products out, especially with software when that usually indicates that one is crippleware. Long after the switch to Fedora there were still stores selling Red Hat 9 because they were confused by the whole Fedora/Red Hat/Red Hat Enterprise Linux thing.
In any case, it matters not at all to me and I'm content to let the Olympic bureaucrats make whatever decision they see fit. Inspirational that one guy in the present day can overcome his disability and (almost) compete at the highest level of the world.
Not so inspiration in 10 years when some incredibly fit and dedicated runners are staring down the track at some much less fit amputees bounding down the track like rabbits.
If only say 10 percent of Africa's population fits that bill, then you'd get about 10% of the hits compared to a similar population of mostly middle-class countries. This is not being racist, but merely observing the health of Africa's population as it is. The population of Africa is a bit under 1 billion, there are still 100 million Africans who fit that bill.
Far more than health I'm worried first about the intellectual climate, and the mechanisms for picking out the real smart ones. I know there are a lot of African countries with substantial middle classes, who should have the mechanisms to stimulate the young brains. But I don't know if the culture is one that will foster that stimulation, or the career lines such that those young brains can be picked out for further learning.