First, be careful what you wish for. You'd better add some sensory data to that sleep environment you claim to want. Sensory deprivation is an extremely effective means of driving someone insane. You may be a vegetable before you get through the first night:-)
Second, be careful what you wish for. It seems that you're wishing for a computer with extensive capabilities of gathering data about you and your environment, the capability of making complex judgements concerning whether your safety or a probable multitude of other things that concern you has crossed some threshold requiring action, and the capability to act on that when it is in your best interests. Hmmmm.
Depending on which extreme of the estimates you believe, we will have computers with the processing and storage potential of the human brain in something like 9 to 19 years. Of course, we're unlikely to know how to program it. We'll solve that problem by figuring out how to download an existing program to it, i.e. scan an existing brain's program. That may take 5 years if they aren't already working on it. Give 5 years past that for the supercomputer initially needed to scale down to a chip (will happen at an accelerated rate because the first few people scanned into these systems will be experts in microelectronics, physics, etc. and their capabilities will scale somewhat as the machines scale), and you'll have the full potential for your gadget. So, a plausible answer for you is sometime between 2020 (assuming some development overlap) and 2035. But, I don't wish for this development.
This will change, though it may come too late. The key experiment in this arena is of course the UK, not China due to the decade+ head start they have. As they inevitably move towards being able to process their massive video capture in ways that find crimes and other costs to society automatically (catch all speeders, catch everyone that runs a stop sign, catch every jaywalker, catch everyone who doesn't properly use a blinker, direct bill for exact usage of all public facilities, not just roads, catch hate crimes for everyone that flips the bird at someone in public, etc.), people will rebel. The question is whether it will happen in time or the outcome will be more like throwing a frog into a pot of water and gradually bringing it to a boil.
I'm not sure that it is so clear that the limit will truly be reached before a processor capable of performing as if it had a transistor for every atom of the earth is created. Assuming we're still around, I believe we'll be able to maintain the increases in speed and scale predicted by Moore's law through means we can only just imagine now.
Certainly, it is starting to appear that we'll see combinations of quantum and other processing. There was also recently a development in tri-state per bit quantum storage that may be extendable to n-state per bit. Perhaps we'll find ways to put subatomic particles together into things other than atoms that don't even require atoms as a trapping mechanism and be able to fully exploit that scale. We could explore processing in ways where a single "transistor" or whatever happens to be the smallest scale component participates in different ways in multiple operations or memories like neurons already do. Technologies for processing that don't generate anywhere near as much waste heat are appearing (magnetic for instance) thus allowing the full exploitation of the third dimension to look more plausible without hitting heat dissapation barriers (solid cubes instead of layered wafers). And what about other dimensions? At the atomic scales we're reaching, it is much more believable that we'll eventually be able to exploit some physical phenomenon to put some of the processing or storage mechanisms into non-temporospatial dimensions.
Anyway, I believe it to be very unimaginative to say that Moore's Law will ever hit a barrier. I would call it a virtual law. Sure, its not a "law" as in a law of physics. It isn't a theory either. Rather, its a good guess at a rate of development that we can sustain.
I personally believe that the law is going to change in a few more years as computers reach a level of sophistication necessary to directly participate in more of the scientific research necessary to bootstrap the next generation, gradually eliminating the man in the loop unless we find ways to start scaling the brain's capabilities. At that point, we may start to see the 18 months per generation become one of the variables of the law that is scaling down toward 0.
Chinese companies frequently offer one product in country and another product out of country. Its actually a critical component of their economic strategy because using their own unique standards and protocols in country helps to keep the competition out so that, unlike America, they are the main suppliers of their people, especially in the high tech arena. Add to that the benefits the Chinese government would derive from being able to collect the type of information that Google can collect while being paid to do it as well as the fact that they have the necessary R&D talent in language related computing on hand. An unknown, government supported organization coming out of China is probably a larger threat to Google than Microsoft in the long run.
They have been smarter than that. We are only a small fraction of their economy. And if our credit ever did run out, China would be about the last one effected. Their goods are cheaper than those in most of the other countries we trade with on credit. And they are largely the everyday goods that people have to have.
At current growth rates, which appear to be sustainable, China will soon be the largest economy in the world in every measure. As long as we allow China to market in the US, no US company will have a chance to survive without the mass of China's market. If China launched a Google competitor targetting 1 billion potential customers that Google can't reach + all of Google's customers, Google's advertising revenue would plummet because Google's advertisers can no more survive without China than Google itself.
The reality here is that any effort by Google to fight the Chinese government on this would result in nothing more than Google's demise. And why should we expect Google to stand up to China when our own government has caved at every opportunity for over a decade?
Platforms are always the bulk of what has to be learned and the knowledge is generally not perfectly portable to other platforms. Try porting your Java knowledge to a C++ platform for example. The languages are close enough that language isn't the issue. The issue is that 95%+ of the knowledge of a good Java programmer has nothing to do with the syntax of the Java language, but has to do with the libraries supporting the Java platform.
Megapixels aren't dead, though they may be dead as a buzzword. The reasons for going beyond the current level are many, but would probably be sold by the features they enable, not "megapixels". For example, the problem with digital versus optical zoom is that you lose image fidelity. That's not a problem if you have far more image fidelity than you need. So, pack on some more megapixels and the need for optical zoom greatly diminishes. Add a wide angle lens and the need to aim the camera greatly diminishes. Now, instead of point and shoot, you just shoot and then perform your cropping and zooming after the fact. Taking a bad picture is much harder.
We can also gain a lot by techniques like those used with the Foveon sensor. Stacking the sensors so that there are multiple sensors per pixel while maintaining the same pixels does achieve noticeable image differences.
How about more light frequencies? Using other frequencies to add definition to low light shots would be very useful.
We can also spend many years in a race to get more sensitivity with less noise. Eliminating the need for a flash in any lighting condition beyond total darkness would be awesome.
How about a multiexposure feature. Instead of a single read and clear of the sensors after a fixed time, read them again and again and again without clearing them and store all of the results. Offer up the best guess at which is the best exposure, but allow the user to adjust it. Offline processing would then have the information to do things like combine the short exposure information of well lit foreground subjects with long exposure information of background subjects.
And you may want to do that with some pixels while taking separate snaps at intervals timed by a camera shake sensor with others. With this and enough resolution and sensor speed, you could take advantage of the camera shake to obtain info necessary to construct the third dimension. i.e. same shot with slightly different angles. In the shorter term, a binocular camera with two megapixel sensors could get you the same thing.
Anyway, if the camera manufacturers have any vision at all, the megapixel war will only be over in name. In fact, the real war has just begun.
The method being proposed does not prevent the chase. It only allows the police to hang back a little because they have to be close enough to not give the criminal a head start on a foot chase.
Someone running from the police at high speed is wielding a deadly weapon against the public. Use of lethal force is unquestionably justified, but the police can't just shoot at these folks in most situations due to the danger of missing and hitting a civilian.
Why not just replace the payload on these things with a radio controlled explosive device that is chemically rigged to have a short lifetime after arming? The concept would be to fire a few of them at the car and use a directional antenna to command the ones that actually attached to explode whenever the car is in a relatively safe (for others) location. If the device armed upon being fired and became chemically inert around an hour later, the danger of civilians being hurt by devices that missed would be minimized.
True and not true. This is THE thing that differentiates.Net from the Java platform..Net is a platform that removes the majority of the advantages/disadvantages of programming in any particular language. Once you know the platform, the only time required to switch from one language to another within the platform is the usual couple of weeks to pick up syntax differences. For an example, turn on both C# and VB examples in the Microsoft help and note how the code is nearly identical on a line for line basis with the exception of syntax differences.
So, though not a programming language,.Net allows programming languages to be nothing more than that and greatly reduces the need to be an expert in any particular one. And when looking for.Net platform programmers, a potential employer does not need to put anywhere near as much emphasis on the languages they've coded in. Someone who has coded in VB.Net for years would be a far better choice for a Managed C++.Net project than someone who has programmed in C++ on another platform for years.
Since politicians are nothing more than actors with artificially created identities, would this, if successful, not set a precedent that would allow all politicians to protect their "identities" in the same way? i.e. all of the facts they spew throughout their lives would become their property and thus the ability to gather facts on a politician for investigation would be under their control?
I'm not even sure that you'd have to successfully hack the security protections to harm somebody with this. Maybe somebody who knows could comment on what a very high power signal tuned to the right frequency could do to the circuitry connected to this internal antenna? Could you deliver enough power to fry it? Maybe the processor would be protected but the signal amplification structures fused and thus, at the least, forcing an operation to replace the unit?
that I consider the ability to hide all comments so that code is more easily read and the non-functional and often misleading comments cannot result in confusion and lost time to be critical. Far more critical aspects of code maintainability include code being formatted in the style that the viewer has become accustomed to and usage of object names that are informative and not misleading.
One great advantage of removing comments is that auto code formatting to the style that you are use to seeing becomes nearly 100% effective. Handling of comments is always the big hangup in creating a good autoformatter. So, removing comments can have a very positive effect in this area. The need for formatting standards goes away if autoformatting to each engineer's preferences is 100% effective. This also helps in the portability of engineers as the spinup time into a different formatting standard when moving from one group to another goes away. Studies have shown that using the format that one's mind is trained to both increases code production and decreases bugs.
I've also seen very few studies that look at the statistical question of whether the cost of commenting pays off. There are at least two major cases in which the cost of commenting will not pay off, the code doesn't need maintenance and major changes in design, platform, or development technology force a rewrite. I believe these two cases are very common. For example, when features are added to code, they are frequently added as new modules that hook into only a few places in the existing code or completely replace existing modules. In either case, the cost of commenting all code on the chance that it may need to be understood by someone with a coding personality type that requires comments may not have been a good investment.
And that is another important point. Our current software engineering theory seems to look at programmers as all the same with all the same abilities and flaws. This causes as much trouble in our field as it does in the medical field. We need to be creating development platform technologies that allow each software engineer to be as effective as possible taking into account their specific strengths and weaknesses. This monocultural theory of software engineering we have today forces us to realizing the potential of the average of even the LCD instead of the realizing the maximum potential of each individual through techniques like automatically converting the view of the code base to each individual's needs. We are people, not machines.
The cost of innovation in the hard drive market is skyrocketing. In some areas, the required materials and fundamental physics research is going beyond that of the major processor vendors. Also, dividing the patents amongst too many players hurts innovation.
As it is not so much blue sky innovation that is needed as carefully planned research and engineering (the cost of making a major mistake in a generation is that your company dies), this merger is likely to allow Seagate to increase their new technology deployment pace in their ongoing battle with Western Digital.
Let's just say that the mean difference in genomic content does not appear to be very high. Medical studies done for India, might well be best done in India. Medical studies done for the US needs to be somewhere with a high proportion of hispanic, african-american (very different from African), caucasion, oriental and other ethnicities.
In fact, this is one of the biggest problems in our current medical knowledgebase. Many important drug and poison studies have been conducted in India due to its unique mix of being technologically advanced enough to manage a study, structured enough to organize them, and having a large body of people willing to join them.
The big downside is that India is not an ethnically diverse country. Thus, the results are not necessarily transferrable.
Back in the '50s and '60s, the PCB studies were performed in India. PCBs were found to be highly toxic. It wasn't until the '70s and '80s that followup studies identified the fact that PCBs are vastly (as in 100x type vastly) more toxic to people of Indian and Japanese descent than to people of Caucasion and African descent. If the studies had been done in South America, America, Canada, or Europe, we'd probably still be using PCBs all over the place.
It is critical for the further advancement of medicine that we move beyond our current statistical approach to medicine and studies and start defining which genetic and environmental factors are indications or contraindications for specific medicines. Many medicines kill some people and save others. Rather than tossing them aside, we must start learning to identify when they will kill and when they will save. That requires tests across diverse populations. India doesn't qualify.
You're right, its not just head but eye position that has to be monitored. Its difficult, but its already being done. So the only thing left for the 10 years to do is bring the price and bulk down. Since its a military application at the moment, the funds to cause that are already being applied.
I'd also agree with your other points, but think they should be targeted to the two to five year realm.
The responsiveness goal won't be met due to peripheral speeds. The most annoying responsiveness issues are almost always due to hard drive and internet speeds. Start by using cheap drives in a RAID 0 configuration and you'll make some headway. Many motherboards support it now, and many people already have the two drives necessary to start. If you're not RAIDing drives, you're missing out.
The long haul here is the screen resolution. IBM did a study that showed that screen resolution was a more important factor than vertical refresh in fixing eye strain issues several years ago. A resolution of 170DPI at arms length is considered the max that the human eye can resolve by most photographers and would be a good starting goal. But this isn't going to happen until someone does it and does it cheap. Only then will the others be forced to follow. This means a new technology has to appear. There are several candidates, but market forces are slowing them. I personally believe that displays integrated into glasses is the best approach to this because it eliminates the problem of making very large perfect substrates and through miniturization, puts Moore's law in control of the price and quality outcome.
Many of us work with multiple monitors to fix the width problem today. I use two 20 inch LCDs at 1600x1200 a piece to give myself a 3200x1200 desktop.
And I use an optical mouse.
But these are all baby steps. 10 year steps should be research level only at this point. I see my ideal as an appropriate 10 year stretch goal. Truly integrating computers into our environment so that the conscious recognition of the computer as a computer starts to disappear is necessary to reducing the complexity of our environment back to human norms.
It is sad that anyone has the vision of people still sitting in front of displays ten years from now. My prescription, switch to glasses with very high resolution across the full field of view but the ability to be transparent too, give the computer multiple cameras placed strategically around the room so that it has a full 3D view, integrate head position detection and a point of view camera into the glasses also, and then create an interface where the computer places virtual objects in your environment in a natural fashion. i.e. Let's read virtual books on our real desk, see the images of people we're talking too remotely as if they are sitting in a chair in our office, have virtual office decorations, have a virtual whiteboard that we can stand in front of and interact with (just a blank space on the wall that the glasses allow us to see as a whiteboard for a while), etc. i.e. augmented reality should be our 10 year vision.
is because enough high level graphics functionality is moving into and being required of the graphics hardware now that the performance loss on most machines will be acceptable. i.e. it is heavily tied to the hardware requirements Vista has added. If they couldn't do it without losing significant performance, they wouldn't. Performance sells before stability.
That is not a failure rate if they can reliably identify and recycle the bad disks. Then it simply becomes a part of the manufacturing process being used. It is frequently cheaper to use simpler methodologies with lower yields and feed the bad items back to the grinder than to strive for a perfect yield. When yield is not measured at the door, process costs can be unnecessarily driven out of control by causing a focus on perfection at the wrong point.
He's using heat to create a vortex, perhaps creating a permanent storm and using it to power windmills around the periphery would be better. Storms sustain themselves due to both the shadow they create and the moisture release. The moisture release would be problematic as it isn't always available, so, we'd want to go with the calmer version that just works via shadow.
What if we put large reflective films in an elliptical orbit that causes one of the reflectors to stay precisely between the sun and a spot in a desert each day. The shadow cast would create a cool area where air would sink, flow outward from the center, be reheated, and rise, essentially an artificial storm. The power concentration factor would be less than a tornado and thus safer to work with.
Essentially, this is just another way to implement a solar collecting satellite. The satellite materials may be cheaper, requiring less active control, and rather than sending concentrated heat beams down using a film formed into a focusable dish, a less weaponizable / dangerous method of cooling an area is being used.
All are reasonable assumptions. The first true AI will be a copy of someone. The problem of growing a copy of the brain up from birth is far more difficult then the problem of building a functionally equivalent copy of an adult brain and transferring the programming from one to another. This is because our development is dependent not just on our learning but on a machine whose capabilities physically change over time. Note that those capabilities don't just grow, they change. Its an important difference. We don't just gain capabilities, we also lose them. The losses are as important to our mental development as the gains. So, to grow an AI from birth involves creating a lot more functions than the copying of an adult AI. i.e. you have to solve more problems to grow one than to copy one.
So, we will copy one. Who do you think an AI expert is going to copy? Someone who doesn't strive for greater knowledge? Someone who doesn't have any desire to change the world?
And, as for resources, the AI will have the resources of its creators and those resources will grow as the success of the AI enriches its creators.
The really tricky part is how to increase adult intelligence without the copy going insane. I personally don't think you can beyond relatively small changes. For example, the ability to forget is important to our sanity. In the years leading up to the first true AI, we will create many failures that will quickly go insane in the process of learning lessons like this. Once we create a stable AI, we will seek to add to its capabilities in ways that don't destroy that stability. These will be the other generations, copies of the AI placed in new machines that augment capabilities. You wouldn't want to experiment using your existing one because its what you keep coming back too when the advancements fail. Ultimately, we will fail unless we use the AI's slightly increased intelligence to explore the mathematics of its own psychology. The problem of creating higher functioning yet still stable psychologies is beyond us, so we'll have to turn it over to the machine. I believe that we will understand this and our first copy will be of someone who is striving to turn psychology into a calculable science. The hope will be that by augmenting this individual's capabilities, the breakthroughs necessary can be made. The machine will likely succeed, in creating a higher functioning model and convincing us of the stability of the higher functioning model, not in creating a stable (in all meanings of the word) higher functioning model. That's what psychologists do today, they define a norm based on statistics instead of right and wrong, good and bad. Many deny that there even is right and wrong, good and bad and rather believe that there is only stable and unstable. That fluidity in the norm will allow us to justify the creation of advanced intelligences that are psychologically stable in that they function without complete breakdown, but whose psychology is a perversion of our own. We will give them control of their own destiny out of our greed for greater intelligence. We will justify the perversions for a while out of that same greed. We will realize our mistake only when it is too late.
The only Google hits on nonesevent have to do with this puzzle. The remarkable thing here is not the solving of the puzzle, its the solving of the puzzle with a word so completely fake that even Google hasn't seen its likes before.
Slashdot Mirror
First, be careful what you wish for. You'd better add some sensory data to that sleep environment you claim to want. Sensory deprivation is an extremely effective means of driving someone insane. You may be a vegetable before you get through the first night :-)
Second, be careful what you wish for. It seems that you're wishing for a computer with extensive capabilities of gathering data about you and your environment, the capability of making complex judgements concerning whether your safety or a probable multitude of other things that concern you has crossed some threshold requiring action, and the capability to act on that when it is in your best interests. Hmmmm.
Depending on which extreme of the estimates you believe, we will have computers with the processing and storage potential of the human brain in something like 9 to 19 years. Of course, we're unlikely to know how to program it. We'll solve that problem by figuring out how to download an existing program to it, i.e. scan an existing brain's program. That may take 5 years if they aren't already working on it. Give 5 years past that for the supercomputer initially needed to scale down to a chip (will happen at an accelerated rate because the first few people scanned into these systems will be experts in microelectronics, physics, etc. and their capabilities will scale somewhat as the machines scale), and you'll have the full potential for your gadget. So, a plausible answer for you is sometime between 2020 (assuming some development overlap) and 2035. But, I don't wish for this development.
This will change, though it may come too late. The key experiment in this arena is of course the UK, not China due to the decade+ head start they have. As they inevitably move towards being able to process their massive video capture in ways that find crimes and other costs to society automatically (catch all speeders, catch everyone that runs a stop sign, catch every jaywalker, catch everyone who doesn't properly use a blinker, direct bill for exact usage of all public facilities, not just roads, catch hate crimes for everyone that flips the bird at someone in public, etc.), people will rebel. The question is whether it will happen in time or the outcome will be more like throwing a frog into a pot of water and gradually bringing it to a boil.
Sure, its not a law. But...
I'm not sure that it is so clear that the limit will truly be reached before a processor capable of performing as if it had a transistor for every atom of the earth is created. Assuming we're still around, I believe we'll be able to maintain the increases in speed and scale predicted by Moore's law through means we can only just imagine now.
Certainly, it is starting to appear that we'll see combinations of quantum and other processing. There was also recently a development in tri-state per bit quantum storage that may be extendable to n-state per bit. Perhaps we'll find ways to put subatomic particles together into things other than atoms that don't even require atoms as a trapping mechanism and be able to fully exploit that scale. We could explore processing in ways where a single "transistor" or whatever happens to be the smallest scale component participates in different ways in multiple operations or memories like neurons already do. Technologies for processing that don't generate anywhere near as much waste heat are appearing (magnetic for instance) thus allowing the full exploitation of the third dimension to look more plausible without hitting heat dissapation barriers (solid cubes instead of layered wafers). And what about other dimensions? At the atomic scales we're reaching, it is much more believable that we'll eventually be able to exploit some physical phenomenon to put some of the processing or storage mechanisms into non-temporospatial dimensions.
Anyway, I believe it to be very unimaginative to say that Moore's Law will ever hit a barrier. I would call it a virtual law. Sure, its not a "law" as in a law of physics. It isn't a theory either. Rather, its a good guess at a rate of development that we can sustain.
I personally believe that the law is going to change in a few more years as computers reach a level of sophistication necessary to directly participate in more of the scientific research necessary to bootstrap the next generation, gradually eliminating the man in the loop unless we find ways to start scaling the brain's capabilities. At that point, we may start to see the 18 months per generation become one of the variables of the law that is scaling down toward 0.
Chinese companies frequently offer one product in country and another product out of country. Its actually a critical component of their economic strategy because using their own unique standards and protocols in country helps to keep the competition out so that, unlike America, they are the main suppliers of their people, especially in the high tech arena. Add to that the benefits the Chinese government would derive from being able to collect the type of information that Google can collect while being paid to do it as well as the fact that they have the necessary R&D talent in language related computing on hand. An unknown, government supported organization coming out of China is probably a larger threat to Google than Microsoft in the long run.
They have been smarter than that. We are only a small fraction of their economy. And if our credit ever did run out, China would be about the last one effected. Their goods are cheaper than those in most of the other countries we trade with on credit. And they are largely the everyday goods that people have to have.
At current growth rates, which appear to be sustainable, China will soon be the largest economy in the world in every measure. As long as we allow China to market in the US, no US company will have a chance to survive without the mass of China's market. If China launched a Google competitor targetting 1 billion potential customers that Google can't reach + all of Google's customers, Google's advertising revenue would plummet because Google's advertisers can no more survive without China than Google itself.
The reality here is that any effort by Google to fight the Chinese government on this would result in nothing more than Google's demise. And why should we expect Google to stand up to China when our own government has caved at every opportunity for over a decade?
For example, how is it that so many Danish flags turn up to burn just at the right moment. Do you know where to get your hands on a Danish flag TODAY?
Platforms are always the bulk of what has to be learned and the knowledge is generally not perfectly portable to other platforms. Try porting your Java knowledge to a C++ platform for example. The languages are close enough that language isn't the issue. The issue is that 95%+ of the knowledge of a good Java programmer has nothing to do with the syntax of the Java language, but has to do with the libraries supporting the Java platform.
Megapixels aren't dead, though they may be dead as a buzzword. The reasons for going beyond the current level are many, but would probably be sold by the features they enable, not "megapixels". For example, the problem with digital versus optical zoom is that you lose image fidelity. That's not a problem if you have far more image fidelity than you need. So, pack on some more megapixels and the need for optical zoom greatly diminishes. Add a wide angle lens and the need to aim the camera greatly diminishes. Now, instead of point and shoot, you just shoot and then perform your cropping and zooming after the fact. Taking a bad picture is much harder.
We can also gain a lot by techniques like those used with the Foveon sensor. Stacking the sensors so that there are multiple sensors per pixel while maintaining the same pixels does achieve noticeable image differences.
How about more light frequencies? Using other frequencies to add definition to low light shots would be very useful.
We can also spend many years in a race to get more sensitivity with less noise. Eliminating the need for a flash in any lighting condition beyond total darkness would be awesome.
How about a multiexposure feature. Instead of a single read and clear of the sensors after a fixed time, read them again and again and again without clearing them and store all of the results. Offer up the best guess at which is the best exposure, but allow the user to adjust it. Offline processing would then have the information to do things like combine the short exposure information of well lit foreground subjects with long exposure information of background subjects.
And you may want to do that with some pixels while taking separate snaps at intervals timed by a camera shake sensor with others. With this and enough resolution and sensor speed, you could take advantage of the camera shake to obtain info necessary to construct the third dimension. i.e. same shot with slightly different angles. In the shorter term, a binocular camera with two megapixel sensors could get you the same thing.
Anyway, if the camera manufacturers have any vision at all, the megapixel war will only be over in name. In fact, the real war has just begun.
The method being proposed does not prevent the chase. It only allows the police to hang back a little because they have to be close enough to not give the criminal a head start on a foot chase.
Someone running from the police at high speed is wielding a deadly weapon against the public. Use of lethal force is unquestionably justified, but the police can't just shoot at these folks in most situations due to the danger of missing and hitting a civilian.
Why not just replace the payload on these things with a radio controlled explosive device that is chemically rigged to have a short lifetime after arming? The concept would be to fire a few of them at the car and use a directional antenna to command the ones that actually attached to explode whenever the car is in a relatively safe (for others) location. If the device armed upon being fired and became chemically inert around an hour later, the danger of civilians being hurt by devices that missed would be minimized.
So, though not a programming language, .Net allows programming languages to be nothing more than that and greatly reduces the need to be an expert in any particular one. And when looking for .Net platform programmers, a potential employer does not need to put anywhere near as much emphasis on the languages they've coded in. Someone who has coded in VB.Net for years would be a far better choice for a Managed C++.Net project than someone who has programmed in C++ on another platform for years.
And you leave work too? You're in the wrong business and you're definitely not a nerd.
Since politicians are nothing more than actors with artificially created identities, would this, if successful, not set a precedent that would allow all politicians to protect their "identities" in the same way? i.e. all of the facts they spew throughout their lives would become their property and thus the ability to gather facts on a politician for investigation would be under their control?
I'm not even sure that you'd have to successfully hack the security protections to harm somebody with this. Maybe somebody who knows could comment on what a very high power signal tuned to the right frequency could do to the circuitry connected to this internal antenna? Could you deliver enough power to fry it? Maybe the processor would be protected but the signal amplification structures fused and thus, at the least, forcing an operation to replace the unit?
that I consider the ability to hide all comments so that code is more easily read and the non-functional and often misleading comments cannot result in confusion and lost time to be critical. Far more critical aspects of code maintainability include code being formatted in the style that the viewer has become accustomed to and usage of object names that are informative and not misleading.
One great advantage of removing comments is that auto code formatting to the style that you are use to seeing becomes nearly 100% effective. Handling of comments is always the big hangup in creating a good autoformatter. So, removing comments can have a very positive effect in this area. The need for formatting standards goes away if autoformatting to each engineer's preferences is 100% effective. This also helps in the portability of engineers as the spinup time into a different formatting standard when moving from one group to another goes away. Studies have shown that using the format that one's mind is trained to both increases code production and decreases bugs.
I've also seen very few studies that look at the statistical question of whether the cost of commenting pays off. There are at least two major cases in which the cost of commenting will not pay off, the code doesn't need maintenance and major changes in design, platform, or development technology force a rewrite. I believe these two cases are very common. For example, when features are added to code, they are frequently added as new modules that hook into only a few places in the existing code or completely replace existing modules. In either case, the cost of commenting all code on the chance that it may need to be understood by someone with a coding personality type that requires comments may not have been a good investment.
And that is another important point. Our current software engineering theory seems to look at programmers as all the same with all the same abilities and flaws. This causes as much trouble in our field as it does in the medical field. We need to be creating development platform technologies that allow each software engineer to be as effective as possible taking into account their specific strengths and weaknesses. This monocultural theory of software engineering we have today forces us to realizing the potential of the average of even the LCD instead of the realizing the maximum potential of each individual through techniques like automatically converting the view of the code base to each individual's needs. We are people, not machines.
The cost of innovation in the hard drive market is skyrocketing. In some areas, the required materials and fundamental physics research is going beyond that of the major processor vendors. Also, dividing the patents amongst too many players hurts innovation.
As it is not so much blue sky innovation that is needed as carefully planned research and engineering (the cost of making a major mistake in a generation is that your company dies), this merger is likely to allow Seagate to increase their new technology deployment pace in their ongoing battle with Western Digital.
Let's just say that the mean difference in genomic content does not appear to be very high. Medical studies done for India, might well be best done in India. Medical studies done for the US needs to be somewhere with a high proportion of hispanic, african-american (very different from African), caucasion, oriental and other ethnicities.
In fact, this is one of the biggest problems in our current medical knowledgebase. Many important drug and poison studies have been conducted in India due to its unique mix of being technologically advanced enough to manage a study, structured enough to organize them, and having a large body of people willing to join them.
The big downside is that India is not an ethnically diverse country. Thus, the results are not necessarily transferrable.
Back in the '50s and '60s, the PCB studies were performed in India. PCBs were found to be highly toxic. It wasn't until the '70s and '80s that followup studies identified the fact that PCBs are vastly (as in 100x type vastly) more toxic to people of Indian and Japanese descent than to people of Caucasion and African descent. If the studies had been done in South America, America, Canada, or Europe, we'd probably still be using PCBs all over the place.
It is critical for the further advancement of medicine that we move beyond our current statistical approach to medicine and studies and start defining which genetic and environmental factors are indications or contraindications for specific medicines. Many medicines kill some people and save others. Rather than tossing them aside, we must start learning to identify when they will kill and when they will save. That requires tests across diverse populations. India doesn't qualify.
You're right, its not just head but eye position that has to be monitored. Its difficult, but its already being done. So the only thing left for the 10 years to do is bring the price and bulk down. Since its a military application at the moment, the funds to cause that are already being applied.
I'd also agree with your other points, but think they should be targeted to the two to five year realm.
The responsiveness goal won't be met due to peripheral speeds. The most annoying responsiveness issues are almost always due to hard drive and internet speeds. Start by using cheap drives in a RAID 0 configuration and you'll make some headway. Many motherboards support it now, and many people already have the two drives necessary to start. If you're not RAIDing drives, you're missing out.
The long haul here is the screen resolution. IBM did a study that showed that screen resolution was a more important factor than vertical refresh in fixing eye strain issues several years ago. A resolution of 170DPI at arms length is considered the max that the human eye can resolve by most photographers and would be a good starting goal. But this isn't going to happen until someone does it and does it cheap. Only then will the others be forced to follow. This means a new technology has to appear. There are several candidates, but market forces are slowing them. I personally believe that displays integrated into glasses is the best approach to this because it eliminates the problem of making very large perfect substrates and through miniturization, puts Moore's law in control of the price and quality outcome.
Many of us work with multiple monitors to fix the width problem today. I use two 20 inch LCDs at 1600x1200 a piece to give myself a 3200x1200 desktop.
And I use an optical mouse.
But these are all baby steps. 10 year steps should be research level only at this point. I see my ideal as an appropriate 10 year stretch goal. Truly integrating computers into our environment so that the conscious recognition of the computer as a computer starts to disappear is necessary to reducing the complexity of our environment back to human norms.
It is sad that anyone has the vision of people still sitting in front of displays ten years from now. My prescription, switch to glasses with very high resolution across the full field of view but the ability to be transparent too, give the computer multiple cameras placed strategically around the room so that it has a full 3D view, integrate head position detection and a point of view camera into the glasses also, and then create an interface where the computer places virtual objects in your environment in a natural fashion. i.e. Let's read virtual books on our real desk, see the images of people we're talking too remotely as if they are sitting in a chair in our office, have virtual office decorations, have a virtual whiteboard that we can stand in front of and interact with (just a blank space on the wall that the glasses allow us to see as a whiteboard for a while), etc. i.e. augmented reality should be our 10 year vision.
is because enough high level graphics functionality is moving into and being required of the graphics hardware now that the performance loss on most machines will be acceptable. i.e. it is heavily tied to the hardware requirements Vista has added. If they couldn't do it without losing significant performance, they wouldn't. Performance sells before stability.
That is not a failure rate if they can reliably identify and recycle the bad disks. Then it simply becomes a part of the manufacturing process being used. It is frequently cheaper to use simpler methodologies with lower yields and feed the bad items back to the grinder than to strive for a perfect yield. When yield is not measured at the door, process costs can be unnecessarily driven out of control by causing a focus on perfection at the wrong point.
He's using heat to create a vortex, perhaps creating a permanent storm and using it to power windmills around the periphery would be better. Storms sustain themselves due to both the shadow they create and the moisture release. The moisture release would be problematic as it isn't always available, so, we'd want to go with the calmer version that just works via shadow.
What if we put large reflective films in an elliptical orbit that causes one of the reflectors to stay precisely between the sun and a spot in a desert each day. The shadow cast would create a cool area where air would sink, flow outward from the center, be reheated, and rise, essentially an artificial storm. The power concentration factor would be less than a tornado and thus safer to work with.
Essentially, this is just another way to implement a solar collecting satellite. The satellite materials may be cheaper, requiring less active control, and rather than sending concentrated heat beams down using a film formed into a focusable dish, a less weaponizable / dangerous method of cooling an area is being used.
All are reasonable assumptions. The first true AI will be a copy of someone. The problem of growing a copy of the brain up from birth is far more difficult then the problem of building a functionally equivalent copy of an adult brain and transferring the programming from one to another. This is because our development is dependent not just on our learning but on a machine whose capabilities physically change over time. Note that those capabilities don't just grow, they change. Its an important difference. We don't just gain capabilities, we also lose them. The losses are as important to our mental development as the gains. So, to grow an AI from birth involves creating a lot more functions than the copying of an adult AI. i.e. you have to solve more problems to grow one than to copy one.
So, we will copy one. Who do you think an AI expert is going to copy? Someone who doesn't strive for greater knowledge? Someone who doesn't have any desire to change the world?
And, as for resources, the AI will have the resources of its creators and those resources will grow as the success of the AI enriches its creators.
The really tricky part is how to increase adult intelligence without the copy going insane. I personally don't think you can beyond relatively small changes. For example, the ability to forget is important to our sanity. In the years leading up to the first true AI, we will create many failures that will quickly go insane in the process of learning lessons like this. Once we create a stable AI, we will seek to add to its capabilities in ways that don't destroy that stability. These will be the other generations, copies of the AI placed in new machines that augment capabilities. You wouldn't want to experiment using your existing one because its what you keep coming back too when the advancements fail. Ultimately, we will fail unless we use the AI's slightly increased intelligence to explore the mathematics of its own psychology. The problem of creating higher functioning yet still stable psychologies is beyond us, so we'll have to turn it over to the machine. I believe that we will understand this and our first copy will be of someone who is striving to turn psychology into a calculable science. The hope will be that by augmenting this individual's capabilities, the breakthroughs necessary can be made. The machine will likely succeed, in creating a higher functioning model and convincing us of the stability of the higher functioning model, not in creating a stable (in all meanings of the word) higher functioning model. That's what psychologists do today, they define a norm based on statistics instead of right and wrong, good and bad. Many deny that there even is right and wrong, good and bad and rather believe that there is only stable and unstable. That fluidity in the norm will allow us to justify the creation of advanced intelligences that are psychologically stable in that they function without complete breakdown, but whose psychology is a perversion of our own. We will give them control of their own destiny out of our greed for greater intelligence. We will justify the perversions for a while out of that same greed. We will realize our mistake only when it is too late.
The only Google hits on nonesevent have to do with this puzzle. The remarkable thing here is not the solving of the puzzle, its the solving of the puzzle with a word so completely fake that even Google hasn't seen its likes before.