I think we can be fairly certain that his prototype was not used for anything at all (and that it only took 10 minutes for him to throw together -- using VB5 for crying out loud). Have a look for yourself.
It's no surprise that a politician asked for the thing, or even that he found someone to write it. Politicians have never been the shining example of morality that they tell us they are. That's just the nature of the job. As Douglas Adams said, "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President..."
That doesn't mean his prototype got used, of course. It just means that (a) such a beast is possible (which we already knew), and (b) politicians want it (which we already knew).
Now, if he'd been an employee of Diebold instead, THAT would be news.
Therefore the total fuel requirement would also be proportional to the square of the speed.
You're forgetting the fact that faster aircraft fly higher where the air is thinner and drag is decreased.
At, say, 50,000 feet, you can travel with a ground speed of 400 MPH while only incurring the drag you'd expect at 200 MPH at sea level. Sure, it's only details, but as long as we're doing calculations, let's get the right numbers.
By installing this simple CGI script on my home computer, I've done better far than that. I can now claim the distinction of hosting the majority of the internet on my very own laptop!
Where's the evidence? Or did slashdot just post this without checking?
The evidence is gleaned from viewing the "strings" output of a SysMaster executable. You find such gems as
Asterisk CVS-05/30/03-20:39:27, Copyright (C) 1999-2001 Linux Support Services, Inc. Written by Mark Spencer <markster@linux-support.net>
Of course, this evidence was compiled by NuFone (a contributer to Asterisk), so you can choose to disbelieve it if you want. But if you want to verify its veracity on your own and post your results, I'm sure that would be OK.
Re:One question...
on
Flying By Brain
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
How did the clump of neurons know what they were trying to accomplish? More precicely, why didn't they try to crash the plane?
I think it's significant that they chose a flight simulator instead of a more traditional "game" to teach the newly formed brain.
Here's a couple of points to remember:
The difference between the makeup, function, and behavior of a given type of cells between one species and another is so insignificant (remember, we're talking on a cellular level) that they can generally be ignored. You can almost always assume that a given cell type in one organism will behave identically to a parallel cell in another. The species that the cell came from is all but insignificant.
Brain cells, (in humans and in other species) are amazingly versatile. While capable of specializing (vision centers, speech centers, etc.), these cells seem to be capable of taking on any function necessary for the benefit of the organism. For example, humans brains in which a specific part has been damaged (such as the vision center) have actually re-mapped other cell groups to take over that function. They do what they have to to survive.
Brain cells are cooperative in nature: if placed in proximity to eachother, they'll work together for their common good (read: survival). They'll "instinctively" form a structure similar to how they're pre-designed to work. They'll form a brain--as fully functional as the situation permits. It doesn't necessarily matter how you arrange them, the brain cells can sort those details out--somehow.
Brains look for order. We've known that for ages. Finding order is how a brain learns, it's how the brain separates relevant details from the background noise. The ability to identify order is the whole basis of intelligence. Every sense, every stimulus, every aspect of the brain has order-seeking overtones. This feature of brains is so absolutely universal that it must be deeply ingrained into the neurons themselves.
Put those details together, and you end up with the following scenario: if you take neurons out of an organism and place them together, they'll form a brain. Probably not as complex or capable a brain as you started with, but a brain none the less. Actually this is the ideal brain to study, as you're starting "from scratch": there's no evolutionary specialization involved. Each cell will attempt to make sense of its neighbors, and as a result, the organism as a whole will attempt to make sense of its environment (brain processes are the ultimate in emergent algorithms). The brain will follow this behavior as if it were necessary to the brain's survival.
Which brings us to the flight simulator. If you instead had the brain play with a chessboard or a clock, the results would probably be unimpressive. But a flight simulator--that's really the perfect environment. There's the potential for the brain to actually order its environment: there are equilibrium points that the brain will eventually find where it has greater control over its inputs. Assuming that flying too hight or too low creates a more chaotic state, you can likely expect the brain to learn to avoid it.
In fact, I'd be very much surprised if you didn't actually see the brain cells start to specialize. Some cells will become responsibe for directly manipulating the flight controls based on the inputs from the brain. Some will attempt to maintain aircraft equilibrium in absence of any other input from the brain. Others will control the aircraft as a whole, their location in the network giving them a better overall picture of the situation than, say, the cells near the controls. Furthermore, I fully expect some cells to not participate at all: cells that are "out of the loop", so to speak, will proably cease most activity to avoid disturbing the overall process.
I, personally, have been waiting to see this very experiment conducted and see the results. I think this is very exciting science.
A friend who worked in the Hazardous Waste disposal industry lamented the ignorance of many protesters who came out to his site and harrassed the workers.
On a related note: a relative of mine who works high up for the DOE in charge of hazardous material cleanup/storage pointed out one of the most subtle ironies of the endless protests against nuclear power:
Self-anointed Environmentalists protest the creation of new nuclear power plants because of the awful dangers of the nuclear waste they produce. Instead, they favor the more traditional, low tech, coal burning powerplans, insisting that it's the lesser of the two evils--especially when wind and water power aren't an option.
And here's the irony: aside the production of greenhouse gasses and smog, and their consumption of non-renewable resources; watt-for-watt, coal powerplants rank right up there with nuclear powerplants for their production of nuclear waste. People don't quite understand the high concentration of radioactive material natually found in coal.
Te best part, of course, is that coal powerplants release that radioactive waste into the atmosphere instead of storing them safely away in shielded containers.
Let's be a bit more specific, here. Linux potentially infringes on 283 patents? Shouldn't that actually read:
Various independant software packages that compile under Linux potentially infringe on 283 software patents. (
The majority of which will most likely be discarded if challenged in court, and and in fact most other operating systems have corresponding software packages that infringe on exactly the same patents).
This sounds to me like more of a problem with the application, not the OS.
Three words:
GetTickCount()
Returns the number of milliseconds since the machine was last booted.
From reading the article, one would surmise that this function is used to assign a timestamp to a particular flight plan or other record. After the machine has been running for 49.7 days, the GetTickCount() function rolls over to zero, which could cause a whole plethora of problems. Almost certainly those problems would include things like corruption of data, lost records, old records showing up as new, application crashes, and, of course, swarms of locusts. The only fix is to reboot.
The developers cleverly noticed the potential disaster before it crashed any planes, and as a workaround, instituted a policy requiring the servers to be rebooted at monthly intervals. Failure to do so would result in the calamities described above.
So while the problem wasn't the old Win95 bug, it was the same crappy windows API that caused both. The POSIX-compliant gettimeofday() function uses a 64-bit structure and does not suffer from the same flaw, and can be relied upon for at least the next 30 years or so (which isn't amazing, but it's a lot better than 50 days).
Note that the FAA insists that they're currently implementing a better solution than "reboot every month". Better hurry, guys, you've only got 47.3 days left.
...Google-surpassing technology comes from a group of '10 researchers... working on new ways to drill deep into the Internet and select and organize the information found there.'
Sorry to say it, but I really don't find anything dissatisfying about the way Google selects and organizes information found on the Internet. Rarely do I ever even look at the second page of search results, because the first one always has the information I was after.
If Microsoft wants to beat Google, they're going to have to pick a different venue.
I wonder how they'll handle the Unix(TM) code in there and all the various other contributed stuff from Samsung etc.
Who wrote the code is only relevent if the original author retains the rights to that code. If contributing authors surrendered control of the code to Sun, well then Sun can do whatever they want with it.
Because I know someone will ask, here's the answer right now:
Q:How is tar cf - dir{1,2} | (ssh host2 'cd destdir; tar xpf -') better than
scp -p dir{1,2} host2:destdir
A:tar preserves more about the files than scp, for example, scp follows symbolic links, tar copies the links themselves. Also, the method I proposed allows more versatility, such as:
tar cf - * | (ssh host 'md destdir; cd destdir; tar xpf -')
I see you mentioned the O'reilly books - they are the best. I found Unix Power Tools and System Administration (Alein Frisch, sp?) to be the best books you can buy.
There's nothing that even comes close to having a hardcore hacker as a good friend. Information is quickest gained through other people's personal experience.
I've done it all. I've read a whole series of O'Reilly books (don't even bother with any other publisher) on various Linux and Network related subjects--I've read at least 25 of them cover-to-cover in the last 4 years. I have a whole bookshelf lined with them.
Then I subscribed to O'Reilly's Safari online program, and will never again be without it. I'll never have to buy another tech book again. If you can tolerate reading books online, getting a subscription is an ABSOLUTE must. And if you buy (or would like to buy) an average of more then two or three books a year, this will save you loads of cash. You can read up to about 60 books a year for $10/mo.
However, when you need to come up to speed as quick as possible, by far and away the best resource is a friend who knows it all. Install Linux on all your computers, and play with every piece of software you may be even slightly interested. Read all the books, read all the man pages. Write a few scripts in Bash, Perl, Sed, Awk, and anything else you hear about. And when you get stuck (and believe me, you will), call up that friend or drop by his desk. You'll be an expert faster than you can immagine.
It's the little things, you know, that make you an expert. Anybody can copy files to another computer, but if you can come up with something like
tar cf - dir{1,2} | (ssh host2 'cd destdir; tar xpf -')
off the top of your head, then people will start feeling the respect.
Finding a few collisions, or even an algorithm to generate collisions doesn't change a damn thing. We've always known that there are collisions. A hash function maps in infinite input set to a finite output set. Of course there are collisions. There are an infinite number of collisions for ANY hash function. We already knew that--it's a mathematical certainty. Yet somehow we're shocked and horrified when we actually find some.
Tell me something I didn't already know. Then I'll be impressed.
Why not? Alpha blending allows web developers to make fine adjustments to page layouts with necessitating the "recutting" of overlapping layers in Photoshop. It also allows for variance in browser layout without causing visible breaks -- thus Mozilla and KDE don't need to render "exactly" like MSIE down to the last pixel in order for layouts to basically look the same.
Yes... now if only MSIE would correctly render alpha transparency in PNGs (without resorting to absurd coding tricks).
Speaking of which, that's a big problem I see with giving people flying cars. Flying (in the sense of using wings to generate lift) is VERY different from driving. For example, most people don't know that you have to nudge the stick, then move it back into a straight position to properly execute a bank. The bank will continue until you nudge the stick back the other way, and force the plane to level.
Even worse is the shear number of control surfaces that are completely unnatural to a driver. You can't just move the stick. That will cause the plane to slide. You have to give it some rudder. I'm not even going to go into how queasy bouncing on thermals is going to make most people.
Ermm... You must not be a pilot. With an hour or two of actual experience (no, not Combat Simulator 2004), flying a plane is amazingly intuitive. Working the control surfaces? Second nature. It takes you just as long to learn to drive a car--that's not a barrier to entry. My plane, a high-performance, complex, 4-seater can be easily flown by someone with absolutely no flying experience. Of course, I'm there with my hand on the controls in case something happens.
Flying takes more training because you need to learn what to do when things go wrong. Stall-recovery isn't tricky, but if you do it wrong, you'll get into a spin. Spin recovery is amazingly counter-intuitive, and in many cases, simply impossible. You need training, sure, but for reasons the average joe may not have thought about.
I don't see people EVER being allowed to pilot a flying-car without a pilot's license. And I certainly hope the rules never change.
On the other hand, I think the cost of getting a pilot's license will decrease dramatically once the cost of aircraft decreases. If aircraft were as common as cars, they'd be mass-produced like cars, at a fraction of the current cost. If the plane price goes down, the insurance cost will go down, and the rental/training cost will decrease as well.
There's no doubt that storing a duplicate of the printed information in a digital form (especially if cryptographically signed... which, sadly, it's not) would make passports many orders of magnitude more difficult to forge. That wouldn't help defend anyone against terrorists, of course, but it would help protect against fake IDs.
I admit that accessing the information using RFID is an unnecessary complication: It makes the chip easier to destroy at-a-distance and doesn't add much in the way of functionality.
Still, I'm not worried about the government using this technology to track my every move: I certainly don't carry my passport around with me wherever I go; many people don't even HAVE a passport. Hell of a tracking mechanism THAT would make.
Discussions of AI always bring my mind back to Dijkstra's illumination of the obvious: "The question of whether computers can think is just like the question of whether submarines can swim."
Computers can be programmed to self-preserve within the limits of their ability to perceive and react. They can be programmed to "think" choices through and choose the best option based on a set of objectives and expected outcomes (think chess).
Hell, even with today's technology, you could design robot capable of reproducing itself, possibly even modifying the decendant to adapt to a changing environment. Of course, that would be a LOT of work to create, and the return on investment would be dismal.
So, will a computers ever really "wake up"? Well, will submarines ever really swim? AI research really is the process of boiling the methods of human reasoning down to algorithms simple enough to be applied using current technology.
You can make a computer "think" within the bounds outlined by the amount of work you want to put into transcribing that thought process into a computer program. Even creativity is reasonably replicated: a chess program can play in ways that otherwise would have been considered "creative" had the moves not come from a computer. Even general creativity could be duplicated by randomly associating known data in previously unobserved ways, and examining the potential result. That's really how we do it, anyway.
Again, ROI, not technological capability, is the killer.
There's never going to be an event that sparks the general awakening of "real" artificial intelligence. There is no missing technology. All that's missing is a compelling enough reason to put that much work into it. What you'll see instead is a gradual increase in the use of computers to solve everyday problems, accompanied by a gradual increase in the computer's ability to solve these problems. Nothing magic. Nothing earth-changing. Nothing even worth writing about.
It seems to me that creating a new version of a highly contagious disease is a dubious way to go about trying to cure it. What happens if the new disease escapes into the wild? The plague was carried by mice and their flees after all.
Am I way off base here?
Completely.
Prions are proteins that are found (in at least their harmless, unfolded, flexible state) in most (if not all) plants and animals on the planet. If the harmful (folded and rigid) prions are introduced into an organism, they either (a) convert existing harmless prions into the harmful type, or (b) force the body to produce the harmful type instead of harmless type by blocking or modifying the body's normal metabolic pathway. We're not entirely sure which.
These researchers have shown that you can actually create the harmful prions by simply "shaking up" the harmless ones and getting them to deform.
They didn't "create a new disease" -- the disease was already there. They just proved that the disease is as simple as some had theorized it was. Some scientists had though that the prions where just a byproduct of some traditional infection, which would explain how it spreads. This research shows that is definately not the case.
There is actually no "disease" involved in the classic sense. No bacteria, no virus, no microbes of any sort. Nothing with any sort of RNA or DNA. Just a piece of protein. That's what these researchers have proved. Note that "prion infection" is completely unlike any other contageous condition ever discovered, which is why some scientists have been so slow to accept the idea. This research is a sort of wake-up call to the scientific community.
Now we know that sterilization (cooking, burining, chemicals, etc.) can't protect you because there's nothing to kill. Your immune system won't protect you because it's lived with (harmless) prions all your life, and sees no threat.
This reasearch helps in the search for a cure because it shows *where* you have to look. They've shown that traditional methods can't help you because this isn't a traditional disease. Instead, you have to try to somehow denature these proteins without killing the patient. Either that, or somehow stop the harmful prions from being produced.
Make no mistake, this discovery is a major step in the right direction.
The Linux version of the popcorn maker uses a much better kernel than the windows version.
The Linux popper does infact use a much more solid kernel than the Windows version. Microsoft tried to harden their kernels by popping modified microkernels instead.
Unfortunately, over time, the unpopped pieces tend to accumulate at the bottom of the Windows popper, substantially slowing the popping process, and periodically requiring the user to completely wipe the machine and start over fresh with a new batch.
The Windows popper also seems to be highly susceptible to contamination by foreign elements, affecting output performance and popcorn quality. Microsoft, in response to this problem, simply stated that "well-behaved butter would not damage the popper". Unfortunately, there's a wide selection of low-grade butter available for the Windows popper; some of it actually targets the weaker aspects of the Microsoft kernels and can cause substantial damage to the popper and anything connected to it.
The Linux popper is much better adapted for mission-critical kitchens, though the Windows popper is extremely popular in the home.
From personal experience, I've found that only a very small percentage of spam I get comes from using the catch-all address.
The same was true for me until a few months ago. My tactic was, whenever I needed to give out an email address, it would be their_company_name@my_domain. If I started getting spam to that address, I'd know who was to blame for selling me out. I could also just blacklist that address.
Then, very recently, after my domain started getting popular on google, I started getting spam sent to a whole ever-changing list of random names @my_domain: cunningham@ dennis@ schmidt@, etc. Something on the order of 300 pieces per day. It's very clear that this is all from the same spammer, because it's always the same product: software. And the content of the email always follows the same pattern: chunks of web pages pulled at random to fool the spam filters, followed by something like: "N0r-t0n S0ftw-are 0-n Sa1e T0d-ay".
He uses a huge variety of mail servers all across the world. I'm thinking of blocking email from all Non US/EU IP ranges, though I could probably just install a filter a basic lameness filter that check for too many zeroes in the message body:)
Slashdot Mirror
It's no surprise that a politician asked for the thing, or even that he found someone to write it. Politicians have never been the shining example of morality that they tell us they are. That's just the nature of the job. As Douglas Adams said, "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President..."
That doesn't mean his prototype got used, of course. It just means that (a) such a beast is possible (which we already knew), and (b) politicians want it (which we already knew).
Now, if he'd been an employee of Diebold instead, THAT would be news.
...that whatever you want to prove, you can find a study to back up your claim.
You're forgetting the fact that faster aircraft fly higher where the air is thinner and drag is decreased.
At, say, 50,000 feet, you can travel with a ground speed of 400 MPH while only incurring the drag you'd expect at 200 MPH at sea level. Sure, it's only details, but as long as we're doing calculations, let's get the right numbers.
The evidence is gleaned from viewing the "strings" output of a SysMaster executable. You find such gems as
Of course, this evidence was compiled by NuFone (a contributer to Asterisk), so you can choose to disbelieve it if you want. But if you want to verify its veracity on your own and post your results, I'm sure that would be OK.
I think it's significant that they chose a flight simulator instead of a more traditional "game" to teach the newly formed brain.
Here's a couple of points to remember:
The difference between the makeup, function, and behavior of a given type of cells between one species and another is so insignificant (remember, we're talking on a cellular level) that they can generally be ignored. You can almost always assume that a given cell type in one organism will behave identically to a parallel cell in another. The species that the cell came from is all but insignificant.
Brain cells, (in humans and in other species) are amazingly versatile. While capable of specializing (vision centers, speech centers, etc.), these cells seem to be capable of taking on any function necessary for the benefit of the organism. For example, humans brains in which a specific part has been damaged (such as the vision center) have actually re-mapped other cell groups to take over that function. They do what they have to to survive.
Brain cells are cooperative in nature: if placed in proximity to eachother, they'll work together for their common good (read: survival). They'll "instinctively" form a structure similar to how they're pre-designed to work. They'll form a brain--as fully functional as the situation permits. It doesn't necessarily matter how you arrange them, the brain cells can sort those details out--somehow.
Brains look for order. We've known that for ages. Finding order is how a brain learns, it's how the brain separates relevant details from the background noise. The ability to identify order is the whole basis of intelligence. Every sense, every stimulus, every aspect of the brain has order-seeking overtones. This feature of brains is so absolutely universal that it must be deeply ingrained into the neurons themselves.
Put those details together, and you end up with the following scenario: if you take neurons out of an organism and place them together, they'll form a brain. Probably not as complex or capable a brain as you started with, but a brain none the less. Actually this is the ideal brain to study, as you're starting "from scratch": there's no evolutionary specialization involved. Each cell will attempt to make sense of its neighbors, and as a result, the organism as a whole will attempt to make sense of its environment (brain processes are the ultimate in emergent algorithms). The brain will follow this behavior as if it were necessary to the brain's survival.
Which brings us to the flight simulator. If you instead had the brain play with a chessboard or a clock, the results would probably be unimpressive. But a flight simulator--that's really the perfect environment. There's the potential for the brain to actually order its environment: there are equilibrium points that the brain will eventually find where it has greater control over its inputs. Assuming that flying too hight or too low creates a more chaotic state, you can likely expect the brain to learn to avoid it.
In fact, I'd be very much surprised if you didn't actually see the brain cells start to specialize. Some cells will become responsibe for directly manipulating the flight controls based on the inputs from the brain. Some will attempt to maintain aircraft equilibrium in absence of any other input from the brain. Others will control the aircraft as a whole, their location in the network giving them a better overall picture of the situation than, say, the cells near the controls. Furthermore, I fully expect some cells to not participate at all: cells that are "out of the loop", so to speak, will proably cease most activity to avoid disturbing the overall process.
I, personally, have been waiting to see this very experiment conducted and see the results. I think this is very exciting science.
On a related note: a relative of mine who works high up for the DOE in charge of hazardous material cleanup/storage pointed out one of the most subtle ironies of the endless protests against nuclear power:
Self-anointed Environmentalists protest the creation of new nuclear power plants because of the awful dangers of the nuclear waste they produce. Instead, they favor the more traditional, low tech, coal burning powerplans, insisting that it's the lesser of the two evils--especially when wind and water power aren't an option.
And here's the irony: aside the production of greenhouse gasses and smog, and their consumption of non-renewable resources; watt-for-watt, coal powerplants rank right up there with nuclear powerplants for their production of nuclear waste. People don't quite understand the high concentration of radioactive material natually found in coal.
Te best part, of course, is that coal powerplants release that radioactive waste into the atmosphere instead of storing them safely away in shielded containers.
Or to put it more concisely:
Three words:
Returns the number of milliseconds since the machine was last booted.
From reading the article, one would surmise that this function is used to assign a timestamp to a particular flight plan or other record. After the machine has been running for 49.7 days, the GetTickCount() function rolls over to zero, which could cause a whole plethora of problems. Almost certainly those problems would include things like corruption of data, lost records, old records showing up as new, application crashes, and, of course, swarms of locusts. The only fix is to reboot.
The developers cleverly noticed the potential disaster before it crashed any planes, and as a workaround, instituted a policy requiring the servers to be rebooted at monthly intervals. Failure to do so would result in the calamities described above.
So while the problem wasn't the old Win95 bug, it was the same crappy windows API that caused both. The POSIX-compliant gettimeofday() function uses a 64-bit structure and does not suffer from the same flaw, and can be relied upon for at least the next 30 years or so (which isn't amazing, but it's a lot better than 50 days).
Note that the FAA insists that they're currently implementing a better solution than "reboot every month". Better hurry, guys, you've only got 47.3 days left.
Sorry to say it, but I really don't find anything dissatisfying about the way Google selects and organizes information found on the Internet. Rarely do I ever even look at the second page of search results, because the first one always has the information I was after.
If Microsoft wants to beat Google, they're going to have to pick a different venue.
Who wrote the code is only relevent if the original author retains the rights to that code. If contributing authors surrendered control of the code to Sun, well then Sun can do whatever they want with it.
Q:How is
tar cf - dir{1,2} | (ssh host2 'cd destdir; tar xpf -')
better than
scp -p dir{1,2} host2:destdir
A:tar preserves more about the files than scp, for example, scp follows symbolic links, tar copies the links themselves. Also, the method I proposed allows more versatility, such as:
There's nothing that even comes close to having a hardcore hacker as a good friend. Information is quickest gained through other people's personal experience.
I've done it all. I've read a whole series of O'Reilly books (don't even bother with any other publisher) on various Linux and Network related subjects--I've read at least 25 of them cover-to-cover in the last 4 years. I have a whole bookshelf lined with them.
Then I subscribed to O'Reilly's Safari online program, and will never again be without it. I'll never have to buy another tech book again. If you can tolerate reading books online, getting a subscription is an ABSOLUTE must. And if you buy (or would like to buy) an average of more then two or three books a year, this will save you loads of cash. You can read up to about 60 books a year for $10/mo.
However, when you need to come up to speed as quick as possible, by far and away the best resource is a friend who knows it all. Install Linux on all your computers, and play with every piece of software you may be even slightly interested. Read all the books, read all the man pages. Write a few scripts in Bash, Perl, Sed, Awk, and anything else you hear about. And when you get stuck (and believe me, you will), call up that friend or drop by his desk. You'll be an expert faster than you can immagine.
It's the little things, you know, that make you an expert. Anybody can copy files to another computer, but if you can come up with something like
off the top of your head, then people will start feeling the respect.Donno where I'd be with good ol' "nc".
Have we forgotten what a hash function is?
Finding a few collisions, or even an algorithm to generate collisions doesn't change a damn thing. We've always known that there are collisions. A hash function maps in infinite input set to a finite output set. Of course there are collisions. There are an infinite number of collisions for ANY hash function. We already knew that--it's a mathematical certainty. Yet somehow we're shocked and horrified when we actually find some.
Tell me something I didn't already know. Then I'll be impressed.
Yes... now if only MSIE would correctly render alpha transparency in PNGs (without resorting to absurd coding tricks).
Even worse is the shear number of control surfaces that are completely unnatural to a driver. You can't just move the stick. That will cause the plane to slide. You have to give it some rudder. I'm not even going to go into how queasy bouncing on thermals is going to make most people.
Ermm... You must not be a pilot. With an hour or two of actual experience (no, not Combat Simulator 2004), flying a plane is amazingly intuitive. Working the control surfaces? Second nature. It takes you just as long to learn to drive a car--that's not a barrier to entry. My plane, a high-performance, complex, 4-seater can be easily flown by someone with absolutely no flying experience. Of course, I'm there with my hand on the controls in case something happens.
Flying takes more training because you need to learn what to do when things go wrong. Stall-recovery isn't tricky, but if you do it wrong, you'll get into a spin. Spin recovery is amazingly counter-intuitive, and in many cases, simply impossible. You need training, sure, but for reasons the average joe may not have thought about.
I don't see people EVER being allowed to pilot a flying-car without a pilot's license. And I certainly hope the rules never change.
On the other hand, I think the cost of getting a pilot's license will decrease dramatically once the cost of aircraft decreases. If aircraft were as common as cars, they'd be mass-produced like cars, at a fraction of the current cost. If the plane price goes down, the insurance cost will go down, and the rental/training cost will decrease as well.
I admit that accessing the information using RFID is an unnecessary complication: It makes the chip easier to destroy at-a-distance and doesn't add much in the way of functionality.
Still, I'm not worried about the government using this technology to track my every move: I certainly don't carry my passport around with me wherever I go; many people don't even HAVE a passport. Hell of a tracking mechanism THAT would make.
Computers can be programmed to self-preserve within the limits of their ability to perceive and react. They can be programmed to "think" choices through and choose the best option based on a set of objectives and expected outcomes (think chess).
Hell, even with today's technology, you could design robot capable of reproducing itself, possibly even modifying the decendant to adapt to a changing environment. Of course, that would be a LOT of work to create, and the return on investment would be dismal.
So, will a computers ever really "wake up"? Well, will submarines ever really swim? AI research really is the process of boiling the methods of human reasoning down to algorithms simple enough to be applied using current technology.
You can make a computer "think" within the bounds outlined by the amount of work you want to put into transcribing that thought process into a computer program. Even creativity is reasonably replicated: a chess program can play in ways that otherwise would have been considered "creative" had the moves not come from a computer. Even general creativity could be duplicated by randomly associating known data in previously unobserved ways, and examining the potential result. That's really how we do it, anyway.
Again, ROI, not technological capability, is the killer.
There's never going to be an event that sparks the general awakening of "real" artificial intelligence. There is no missing technology. All that's missing is a compelling enough reason to put that much work into it. What you'll see instead is a gradual increase in the use of computers to solve everyday problems, accompanied by a gradual increase in the computer's ability to solve these problems. Nothing magic. Nothing earth-changing. Nothing even worth writing about.
Am I way off base here?
Completely.
Prions are proteins that are found (in at least their harmless, unfolded, flexible state) in most (if not all) plants and animals on the planet. If the harmful (folded and rigid) prions are introduced into an organism, they either (a) convert existing harmless prions into the harmful type, or (b) force the body to produce the harmful type instead of harmless type by blocking or modifying the body's normal metabolic pathway. We're not entirely sure which.
These researchers have shown that you can actually create the harmful prions by simply "shaking up" the harmless ones and getting them to deform.
They didn't "create a new disease" -- the disease was already there. They just proved that the disease is as simple as some had theorized it was. Some scientists had though that the prions where just a byproduct of some traditional infection, which would explain how it spreads. This research shows that is definately not the case.
There is actually no "disease" involved in the classic sense. No bacteria, no virus, no microbes of any sort. Nothing with any sort of RNA or DNA. Just a piece of protein. That's what these researchers have proved. Note that "prion infection" is completely unlike any other contageous condition ever discovered, which is why some scientists have been so slow to accept the idea. This research is a sort of wake-up call to the scientific community.
Now we know that sterilization (cooking, burining, chemicals, etc.) can't protect you because there's nothing to kill. Your immune system won't protect you because it's lived with (harmless) prions all your life, and sees no threat.
This reasearch helps in the search for a cure because it shows *where* you have to look. They've shown that traditional methods can't help you because this isn't a traditional disease. Instead, you have to try to somehow denature these proteins without killing the patient. Either that, or somehow stop the harmful prions from being produced.
Make no mistake, this discovery is a major step in the right direction.
The Linux popper does infact use a much more solid kernel than the Windows version. Microsoft tried to harden their kernels by popping modified microkernels instead.
Unfortunately, over time, the unpopped pieces tend to accumulate at the bottom of the Windows popper, substantially slowing the popping process, and periodically requiring the user to completely wipe the machine and start over fresh with a new batch.
The Windows popper also seems to be highly susceptible to contamination by foreign elements, affecting output performance and popcorn quality. Microsoft, in response to this problem, simply stated that "well-behaved butter would not damage the popper". Unfortunately, there's a wide selection of low-grade butter available for the Windows popper; some of it actually targets the weaker aspects of the Microsoft kernels and can cause substantial damage to the popper and anything connected to it.
The Linux popper is much better adapted for mission-critical kitchens, though the Windows popper is extremely popular in the home.
http://www.aircraft.com/listings/searchredirect.as p?bcatid=13&etid=1&FTS=Y&setype=1&fulltext=Aeronic a+Champ
The same was true for me until a few months ago. My tactic was, whenever I needed to give out an email address, it would be their_company_name@my_domain. If I started getting spam to that address, I'd know who was to blame for selling me out. I could also just blacklist that address.
Then, very recently, after my domain started getting popular on google, I started getting spam sent to a whole ever-changing list of random names @my_domain: cunningham@ dennis@ schmidt@, etc. Something on the order of 300 pieces per day. It's very clear that this is all from the same spammer, because it's always the same product: software. And the content of the email always follows the same pattern: chunks of web pages pulled at random to fool the spam filters, followed by something like: "N0r-t0n S0ftw-are 0-n Sa1e T0d-ay".
He uses a huge variety of mail servers all across the world. I'm thinking of blocking email from all Non US/EU IP ranges, though I could probably just install a filter a basic lameness filter that check for too many zeroes in the message body :)
Spoken like a true Windows user.
Tivo's a PC too, you know, it just doesn't run Windows.
Two words: NAT