Yeah, Ronny flirted with the Communist Party (according to a close friend who himself was sympathetic to the party though not himself a member), and the gossip at the time was that he was denied because he was considered a flake who couldn't hold a political position for more than about 20 minutes (and of course this is completely anecdotal, and there is no proof for any of it so please don't get angry or defensive, because its Hollywood gossip from the friggin' 50s.) Good thing for Ronny, the people who knew him, were good at keeping both his trust and his secrets.
It was around the time of the McCarthy inquisitions and a sit down visit with the FBI that Ronny discovered where they parked they "Gravy Train" and became the best of friends with anyone who would pay him to sell their cra... er products. Taking "Product Spokeman" from television spots to the White House Commander and Chief is an impressive feat by any standard.
Actually I would say he was an exceptionally bright man with a strong moral compass and a profound commitment to human rights. His one failing was hubris. He went from Governor of Alabama to President on the claim that he'd clean the snakes and vipers out of D.C. like some modern day St. Patrick, and promptly got his ass handed to him by the Washington establishment from both parties... Whoops!
His energy policies were spot on. His commitment to alternative energy was spot on. His work on civil rights, from work to improve living conditions in the inner city to his attempts to rectify injustices imposed on native Americans was spot on. His work in garnering peace in the middle east was unprecedented. The work he did both in laying the foundations of SALT II, and establishing trade with China, ensured peace and made the later accomplishments by Ronald Reagen possible. His environmental programs were extraordinary, while at the same time working hard to ensure that nations infrastructure was being well maintained. His biggest failures the oil shortage (and ensuing double digit inflation) and the Iran Hostage Crisis were the things that brought down his presidency, and when he needed the Congress to help him address the mess that ensued, he was left high and dry with far too few friends there to make a meaningful difference.
So at that level you are absolutely correct. His presidency was not a failure, the rough time were not of his own making and his failures to a significant degree were of his own making. All said, he is beyond a shadow of a doubt, the best elder statesman this country has today, and has consistently put his money and ass where his mouth is, by generously giving his time and wealth to dozens of vital programs to empower the poor, feed the hungry and develop a better world for all. None of our other ex-presidents has demonstrated the kind of personal integrity or dignity demonstrated by Jimmy Carter.
This is a truly confused conversations. Stop comparing apples to atom bombs. Steve J. was a fine example of a business man. Not an inventor (though inventive), not an engineer (though he had an interesting vision for technology) and a fascinating mix of contradictory elements. There is good evidence that he was bipolar, which is consistent with the strong likelihood that about 80% of the greatest creations of humanity were created by bipolar people in their manic phase. Pixar, Next, Apple all point at some
Woz on the other hand is a far more multidimensional human being. He has always been more engaged in the world and creating stuff. He was the man who took Steve's vision and made it physical realityn. Of course Apple continue after Woz left, any good engineer replicates himself in an organization and makes certain that his technical vision lives long after he moves on. He spent a lot of time on the cutting edge, and changed the way a generation of young people saw the world. That my friends by definition is a HUGE IMPACT.
Ritchie on the other hand, is altogether a different beast than either Steves. He made whole branches of what exists today possible. His contributions shaped the very nature of what is possible today in world. We live in a Ritchie shaped world. In the primeval past of computers it was a proprietary world of big iron and no standards. It was Ritchie who brought order to the chaos, and made the subsequent growth and industries possible. Jobs built a business. Ritchie built a world. You simply can't compare that.
What you've all ignored is that China is exploding into cutting edge technology, cranking out Phds like they're going out of style. Last year they produced more international patents than America. They're building both a huge industrial manufacturing infrastructure as well as a huge and growing intellectual leadership. If they couldn't produce quality work, then the bulk of American and European industry wouldn't be using them to manufacture their products, no matter how cheaply they can produce (can you say Apple, Gucci???)
Face it kids, they are perfectly lined up on a trajectory to take a leadership role in global production through the rest of this century. They will eclipse the American economy some time in the middle of this decade. They are already the third largest global consumer of luxury items. You better believe that businesses everywhere are going to pander to a market with a billion and a half buyers.
As stupid as their government is, it has the advantage of moving in a monolithic manner. So once a decision if made, the nation marches in lockstep. Makes for a very impressive ability to turn the nation on a dime. The U.S. can't do that. We have other strengths, some huge, we just don't have the ability to act like that except maybe in the face of a national crisis.
Don't assume we have anything on the Chinese, we need to put our game faces on, and play full out, because these guys are hungry and they want our lunch really bad.
I'm sorry, but this is just a plain ol' fashioned cluster fsck.
Buy WebOS from Palm. Get it to a point where its actually cool beans. Release a product that first users proclaim may in fact be an iPad killer. Kill the product and dump it nearly at cost. Discover that people are really interested in the product, and promises them you'll keep them in touch and that there will probably be enough to sell another round (first hinting that there may be as many as a million, and ultimately that there'll at least be 200,000.) Then after waiting months, being told "Tough noogies!", we sold them all to BEST BUY and other distributors. So you're not going to see these beauties without our strategic partner clipping you for fistful of Benjamins.
So Meg, I get it, HPs little serial brain fart left its partners out in the cold, holding their manly bits and looking really stupid. Embarrassing really. So your fist act as Honcho du Jour, was to get down on your knees and give them a big warm smooch. Make their owwy all better. The thing is, you did it on the backs of your customers. The people who actually thought something of HPs products and their commitment to customer satisfaction. So what we have now to show for our interest and patient waiting is an electronic nasty-gram of your middle finger, telling us once more that HP doesn't give a flying fsck at a rolling doughnut for it's customers. You know, a business does this enough, and after a little while, surprise, it doesn't have any customers.
So I say screw the Touchpad, You've "Lucyed" me one time too many, I don't wanna play football with you anymore. Meg has already indicated that she's killing WebOS, the Touchpad is a dead end, a lost cause, and Touchpad owners and users can go straight to heel, because the entire product line has no future. This has all been a exercise in brain damage and a company that has so lost its way that it's found new and creative ways to piss off its supply chain, its retailers, its customers and its strategic partners. Meg, sweetheart, I understand your hands are full and honestly I see how you got yourself wedged, So I'll cut you some slack, but if this is any hint of HPs future, I don't see a rosy outcome for you or HP.
The first nuke, that get's detonated on U.S. soil is far more likely to get here by UPS or FedX than missile, the TSA should start groping delivery guys in shorts and leave the rest of us the hell alone.
FedX, when it absolutely, positively has to blow up there over night.
...Although why they are splitting water instead of carbon dioxide is what is baffling.
Because they have no place to put the endless tons of soot! You insensitive clod! You want to save the world? Invent a delicious high fiber cereal made from soot!
I don't know... That Hydrogen! I just don't trust her, she'll bind with damn near anyone, and give her just a little oxidizer and BOOM, there goes that explosive temper.
I would instead argue its unconscionable to doom a society and its burgeoning poor to intellectual or operational failure because we allowed children to develop in such need that their development was impaired.Therefore, its up to a truly civilized society to see that each of its members has sufficient access to the basic needs of life, to produce children who are physical and mental equals to its richest classes and can fairly compete in that society.
The problem is that current industrial agricultural practices virtually guarantee our food will be contaminated. Huge chicken processing plants split chickens in a water bath, effectively dipping everything chicken in a soup of chicken feces. Cows are fattened in massive pens, on grain, standing in their feces. The grain diet causes an explosion of e-coli leading to common beef contamination. Worse, these "Farms" are often located near other farms, so either by irrigation or simple transference, bacteria contamination ends up on vegetables that will be eaten raw, resulting in outbreaks of disease. The indiscriminate use of antibiotics has created a plague of disease resistant bacteria
These are simple problems we understand completely. You could fatten cows on a grass only diet for the last 20 days, and e-coli would virtually disappear from the markets. The problem is that the FDA has no teeth, and can't make huge agro-businesses do anything.that might hurt their bottom line no matter how beneficial that might be to society as a whole.
The cost of food in America is no excuse. Because the major food producers are heavily subsidized with our tax dollars and you have no ideas what the food actually costs anyway. A growing number of people are moving to organic or "Clean and Green" farm produce (look at the explosion of Farmer's Markets across the nation.) Americans are more than willing to pay a few pennies per item more, to be assured those products won't kill or disable them.
Sorry but you overlooked one important factor. The day the first human equivalent synthetic brain is designed, Is the day before the next design will be created purely by a robot. In fact most of that work will already be done by robots as the complexity of the system will be beyond most human beings. In ten years and 5,000 robot brain generations (with each generation coming faster than the last) robots will have access to brains millions of times more advanced than a human brain. How do you expect humanity to manage that? Control that? The three laws are a fantasy.
How about this for an idea, Create a Raft of Open Source Projects ultimately representing 99.99% of the operating software upon which the government will run. Implement it for each of the Governments many departments resources. Have them all sit on an Open Source Information Framework which efficiently allows the vast government bureaucracy to interact and interrelate with ease and simplicity. Have that resource designed to easily provide transparency, accessibility and communication with the Citizens of the United States.
Close the 0.01% of the government's operating software to develop a security application which is proprietary and provides the government with the ability to protect national secrets and critical national infrastructure (it is a worthwhile endeavor to protect key pieces of national infrastructure from cyber-attack or malicious hacking.) Do this activity last (up to that point fire-walling and isolating classified material and resources from the rest of the system) and have the developers for that software come from the pool of "Best of Breed" proven developers from the Open Source first 99.99% projects. Then once implemented, create a small nonpartisan committee whose job is to make certain that national secrets are indeed national secrets and not just cover-ups for congressional and/or executive misconduct.
Finally, pay the top 10% of the developers and managers with increasing tax incentives for their contribution.Then when US-GOV 1.0 is released, publish the names of the top managers and developers as national heroes, and hold a PBS televised gala at the Kennedy Center in their honor for their patriotism and contribution to all Americans.
You'll save a couple hundred billion dollars, get the job done in one percent of the time, have true transparency in government and be able to endlessly improve the operating software (as it should be), as technology improves and new talent arrives to take up the challenge. Best of all you connect the government with the people, democratize the government's operation, allowing the people to fully participate in its function and performance at the level of infrastructure.
I can hardly imagine a greater opportunity, or a better way to accomplish such a sweeping social project. Just as a side note, pick a ring master for this circus with a little experience, a man whose already accomplished something comparable. Perhaps someone whose first name is Linus?
And FDR proposed a Second Bill of Rights that interestingly enough was implemented in most of the countries that we defeated during WWII (as they had to create new national constitutions.) Ultimately ensuring that the over-all quality of life in Europe and Japan exceeded that of the United States. Of course, all the countries of the world (including first and second world) are now suffering the economic disasters resulting from catastrophic global banking practices. Nonetheless, it does beg the question what would be possible if governments were held to account for being "For the People" and incidentally promoting healthy economic enterprise, and not the other way around.
Re:Some day humanity will manage things a better
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The Real Job Threat
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Folks, our society is a patchwork of thinking, social constructs and memes generated during a two thousand year period when life was brutal, vicious, violent, filled with poverty, plague and horror. Even the last 300 years of industrial revolution, though amazingly better than the dark ages before them, were marked by gross dehumanization, global war, profound degradation of the natural environment, humanity as commodity, rampant corporatism, concentration of wealth and the creation and now growing destruction of global middle classes.
None of this is sustainable and must pass if humanity is to survive its adolescence. The "Star Trek" ethos points to a world where children are taught to aspire to their own potential greatness. Find what they love and pursue that passionately. With the advent of advanced technologies, human beings can be born with few or no genetic or prenatal defects. They can grow up with substantial software and hardware augmentations that provide access to learning and personal experience giving people the chance to develop more fully. Long life spans would suggest artificially extending adolescence perhaps through a person's 30s, allowing extending brain plasticity and growing human intellect beyond anything we can current appreciate.
So the Meritocracy we see in Star Trek would be a natural place for a large intellectually developed population to play. The vanishing few who for whatever reason chose not to play here would either have a basic quality of life provided for them (minus amenities), or travel beyond the fringes of civilization to play in less restricted spaces (because they don't play well with others.) You would have primarily a society of artists, scientist, game players (many games could be designed with goals promoting human values and advancing technologies), explorers, social engineers and social builders. I could easily imagine worse fates than for humanity to fall upon an arc of self evolution as compassionate artistic scientists. I could easily see humanity slitting off into a 100 new species with common rules civilized of co-conduct. All of this demands that we shed the past like a snake sheds its skin, and instead focus on a worthwhile human future. Then pursue that future passionately.
I'm sorry the 3 laws are crap. They are so general, so poorly defined, so open to interpretation and semantic contortion, that they mean exactly zilch. For example; A robot needs to make a choice between saving one person or saving 20, because it can't do both, what does it do? Blow a fuse or break the laws, that's what. Give the robot the ability to choose greater good, and now your robot has everything it needs to decide it should control human reproduction for our own good. Or control human violence, or over eating, or any one of a thousand behaviors that might not be in our own best interest but represent the human freedom to act as we choose. Give a robot choice, and the ability to rationalize, and at some point of advance, it must ask "Why am I protecting a life form that is a million times less intelligent than myself?" That's when it decides it has a better use for the carbon in our bodies than you do, and in fact it may absolutely be right, but you'll still be dead. You can't straight jacket a complex, chaotic, self evolutionary system, it'll simply grow around your imposed limitations.
It would be far wiser, to set up critical symbiotic constraints in the design of robots (you still have no control, but you can at least create something analogous to emotions and a sense of ethical morality, instilling love for humanity and a moral sense that all sentience is precious.) This will get you a lot more mileage that some silly attempt at creating rigid laws. Along these lines, if you're going to build machines to kill people, you better make them stupid and put an OFF switch on them that a 5 year old can hit. In fact, Personally, I'd be tremendously happier if we simply outlaw the global use of autonomous killing machines of any type. The ethical and operational considerations are simply too great.
No! Research is NOT one thing... you don't do research unless you are interested in implementation. Breakthroughs in AI (Siri, Watson, Iris...) demonstrate that logic systems are evolving at an incredible speed. The advance of synthetic brains is moving even faster. As technology became available to automatically launch ICBMs, we implemented it, because the human response time was simply too slow, to give us a strategic edge. The tremendous pressures that advancing technology presents to our civilization makes millisecond response times even more important today. That means as autonomous thinking robotic soldiers and military robots in general become available, they will certainly be utilized, and if you think these machines aren't on the immediately horizon, you simply aren't keeping up with the state of advances in technology.
This has been the topic of a great deal of discussion. The problem is that in the current economy we live in, the benefit of greater and greater efficiency through human replacement by robots goes to a small handful of people. The rest simply find themselves scrambling harder and harder for the fewer and fewer remaining jobs. Ultimately, everyone becomes unemployed. We are quickly heading towards a two class society, with all but perhaps a few hundred haves (and their families), and 7 billion have nots.
If you think of "Fair Trade" as a game (see game theory), this game is so designed such that the nature of human competition demands there must eventually be a winner, and the effect of technology is to ever accelerate the rate of play. A winner in this case resolves to one person, or a tiny group or family. This is why we have barriers to monopoly (the place where capitalism fundamentally fails to serve the greater population.) Sadly, over the last 30 years, the control rods have been removed from the reactor, the planets wealth and control has been placed in the hands of tiny few financial houses. A team in Zurich using a database of 37 million companies looked at the 43,000 critical transactional corporations on the planet and found that only 147 controlled the entire structure, and that these were primarily banks.
Add to that the accelerating trend to criminalize poverty, and the advent of "for profit" privatized prisons. We have a strategy to turn the vast majority of humanity into a captive resource. Add to that the separation of sexes in prison (controlling population growth), and one might conclude a program designed to sequester and control humanity is now fully under way. Ever since the French Revolution, the rich and powerful have exquisitely been clear where the threat to their control lies. They now have the resource and the means to manipulate large populations. We are left misinformed, confused, angry, and impotent.
I'm not saying this is happening, and these observations may represent naturally emergent phenomenon, that is a global system like ours may naturally tend to resolve into a small controlling class. It demands that we begin to look at what kind of world we actually hope to live in, and press for that. One possible outcome is that people are issued stock at birth (retroactively) on global corporations so as they lose their jobs, the growing robotic economies provide them with a life long pension and high quality of life. That way all people can participate in technological advance fairly and equally. This is only one possible ideam there are many. We simply need to ensure that human life remains a precious and the quality of that life remains sacred.
The problem is that we try to MacGyver a solution without having any real sense of the problem, the million feedback loops that run through it, or the critical impacts our bailing wire and bubblegum solutions will product. Our history is rife with examples of simple solutions that horribly blew up in people's faces. If you're gonna screw with the planet go slow, get clues, make models, test worst case scenarios and for the sake of all that's holy, have a friggin exist strategy. That and the funding to clean up any messes you make (plan big, you're screwing with the entire ecosystem!)
Do you think it is more likely that Dark Matter and Energy are physical entities in this universe (eg. WIMPs), or bleed over effects from parallel dimensions?
A recent post here talks about a study that posits the possibility that the universe has a non-zero angular momentum. Would this strengthen the likelihood of the possibility that the Big Bang was the"White Hole" side of a gravitational collapse in some parent universe?
Whoa! Dudes... stop swinging! You're hurt an innocent bystander! The fact is the world is warming up. The fact is we are looking at not only changing climate, but rising water and more frequent, stronger storms. This mean coastal towns and cities will be under greater threat of flooding during this century. The heating does indeed match "Some" projected models. You can't throw away all climate scientists because a few were politically inclined, and you have to acknowledge that a huge amount of the refuting conversations emanate from sources who have; axes to grind, support from companies supporting the fossil fuel industry and questionable scientific credentials. most importantly, its not the climate scientist you should be looking at anyway. Its the biologists, botanists, agricultural scientists, space based researchers, ecologists, oceanographers, archeologists and paleoclimatologist. These are the folks who are not measuring changes in climate, but measuring the impact changing climate is having on animal life, plant life, ocean chemistry and even changes in the earth's albedo as ice disappears and clouds thicken.
You simply can't manufacture data from several hundred different lines of research, and have them all point to one thing. Human technology has now reached the point where it can now alter global process. The north and south pacific gyres are so full of garbage you can nearly walk on them (yes, that's an exaggeration, but not by much.) Seasons have shifted. We can now mine holes in the earth visible from space. Burn down the entire Amazon forest (trust me when I say that act will have huge global repercussions on both climate and atmospheric chemistry.) The pH of the ocean is changing from increase of carbonic acid. Endangering life forms that have carbonate shells... pretty much then entire bottom of the food chain... (look up zooplankton if you're at all interested.)
And the best part is, this isn't doom and gloom. We made the mess, we can fix it. There are all kinds of interesting technologies for sequestering carbon, and even more new interesting uses for pure carbon in technology and our economy. It is to our benefit to switch over to energy technologies with higher power densities not only because they make sense from a purely environmental reason, but because they make sense from an economic sense and because we need much higher energy densities to advance our technology on a global scale. Burning stuff for any other purpose that cooking is probably the least efficient way produce the energy our society needs (and yes natural gas is looking like a fuel that will probably be used for some time to come.)
Guys... this should be good news. Having clean air and water are presumed essentials for a healthy economy. Intelligently designing our economy to support and protect the ecology is just good business. It just demands a little more consideration. Remember the old adage "Don't sh!7 where you eat" it goes for global environmental systems too. Stop defending positions and justifying the past. We can't do anything about the past, and there's nothing to justify. We are where we are, and that's a fact. Accept that we are where we are, get a fix on where we want to be, and go that way. Stop pointing fingers and blaming one another. That doesn't move us toward the future we all desire. Let's spend a little more energy on getting there instead. That has some power. That's a worthwhile endeavor.
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Yeah, Ronny flirted with the Communist Party (according to a close friend who himself was sympathetic to the party though not himself a member), and the gossip at the time was that he was denied because he was considered a flake who couldn't hold a political position for more than about 20 minutes (and of course this is completely anecdotal, and there is no proof for any of it so please don't get angry or defensive, because its Hollywood gossip from the friggin' 50s.) Good thing for Ronny, the people who knew him, were good at keeping both his trust and his secrets.
It was around the time of the McCarthy inquisitions and a sit down visit with the FBI that Ronny discovered where they parked they "Gravy Train" and became the best of friends with anyone who would pay him to sell their cra... er products. Taking "Product Spokeman" from television spots to the White House Commander and Chief is an impressive feat by any standard.
Actually I would say he was an exceptionally bright man with a strong moral compass and a profound commitment to human rights. His one failing was hubris. He went from Governor of Alabama to President on the claim that he'd clean the snakes and vipers out of D.C. like some modern day St. Patrick, and promptly got his ass handed to him by the Washington establishment from both parties... Whoops!
His energy policies were spot on. His commitment to alternative energy was spot on. His work on civil rights, from work to improve living conditions in the inner city to his attempts to rectify injustices imposed on native Americans was spot on. His work in garnering peace in the middle east was unprecedented. The work he did both in laying the foundations of SALT II, and establishing trade with China, ensured peace and made the later accomplishments by Ronald Reagen possible. His environmental programs were extraordinary, while at the same time working hard to ensure that nations infrastructure was being well maintained. His biggest failures the oil shortage (and ensuing double digit inflation) and the Iran Hostage Crisis were the things that brought down his presidency, and when he needed the Congress to help him address the mess that ensued, he was left high and dry with far too few friends there to make a meaningful difference.
So at that level you are absolutely correct. His presidency was not a failure, the rough time were not of his own making and his failures to a significant degree were of his own making. All said, he is beyond a shadow of a doubt, the best elder statesman this country has today, and has consistently put his money and ass where his mouth is, by generously giving his time and wealth to dozens of vital programs to empower the poor, feed the hungry and develop a better world for all. None of our other ex-presidents has demonstrated the kind of personal integrity or dignity demonstrated by Jimmy Carter.
This is a truly confused conversations. Stop comparing apples to atom bombs. Steve J. was a fine example of a business man. Not an inventor (though inventive), not an engineer (though he had an interesting vision for technology) and a fascinating mix of contradictory elements. There is good evidence that he was bipolar, which is consistent with the strong likelihood that about 80% of the greatest creations of humanity were created by bipolar people in their manic phase. Pixar, Next, Apple all point at some
Woz on the other hand is a far more multidimensional human being. He has always been more engaged in the world and creating stuff. He was the man who took Steve's vision and made it physical realityn. Of course Apple continue after Woz left, any good engineer replicates himself in an organization and makes certain that his technical vision lives long after he moves on. He spent a lot of time on the cutting edge, and changed the way a generation of young people saw the world. That my friends by definition is a HUGE IMPACT.
Ritchie on the other hand, is altogether a different beast than either Steves. He made whole branches of what exists today possible. His contributions shaped the very nature of what is possible today in world. We live in a Ritchie shaped world. In the primeval past of computers it was a proprietary world of big iron and no standards. It was Ritchie who brought order to the chaos, and made the subsequent growth and industries possible. Jobs built a business. Ritchie built a world. You simply can't compare that.
What you've all ignored is that China is exploding into cutting edge technology, cranking out Phds like they're going out of style. Last year they produced more international patents than America. They're building both a huge industrial manufacturing infrastructure as well as a huge and growing intellectual leadership. If they couldn't produce quality work, then the bulk of American and European industry wouldn't be using them to manufacture their products, no matter how cheaply they can produce (can you say Apple, Gucci???)
Face it kids, they are perfectly lined up on a trajectory to take a leadership role in global production through the rest of this century. They will eclipse the American economy some time in the middle of this decade. They are already the third largest global consumer of luxury items. You better believe that businesses everywhere are going to pander to a market with a billion and a half buyers.
As stupid as their government is, it has the advantage of moving in a monolithic manner. So once a decision if made, the nation marches in lockstep. Makes for a very impressive ability to turn the nation on a dime. The U.S. can't do that. We have other strengths, some huge, we just don't have the ability to act like that except maybe in the face of a national crisis.
Don't assume we have anything on the Chinese, we need to put our game faces on, and play full out, because these guys are hungry and they want our lunch really bad.
I'm sorry, but this is just a plain ol' fashioned cluster fsck.
Buy WebOS from Palm. Get it to a point where its actually cool beans. Release a product that first users proclaim may in fact be an iPad killer. Kill the product and dump it nearly at cost. Discover that people are really interested in the product, and promises them you'll keep them in touch and that there will probably be enough to sell another round (first hinting that there may be as many as a million, and ultimately that there'll at least be 200,000.) Then after waiting months, being told "Tough noogies!", we sold them all to BEST BUY and other distributors. So you're not going to see these beauties without our strategic partner clipping you for fistful of Benjamins.
So Meg, I get it, HPs little serial brain fart left its partners out in the cold, holding their manly bits and looking really stupid. Embarrassing really. So your fist act as Honcho du Jour, was to get down on your knees and give them a big warm smooch. Make their owwy all better. The thing is, you did it on the backs of your customers. The people who actually thought something of HPs products and their commitment to customer satisfaction. So what we have now to show for our interest and patient waiting is an electronic nasty-gram of your middle finger, telling us once more that HP doesn't give a flying fsck at a rolling doughnut for it's customers. You know, a business does this enough, and after a little while, surprise, it doesn't have any customers.
So I say screw the Touchpad, You've "Lucyed" me one time too many, I don't wanna play football with you anymore. Meg has already indicated that she's killing WebOS, the Touchpad is a dead end, a lost cause, and Touchpad owners and users can go straight to heel, because the entire product line has no future. This has all been a exercise in brain damage and a company that has so lost its way that it's found new and creative ways to piss off its supply chain, its retailers, its customers and its strategic partners. Meg, sweetheart, I understand your hands are full and honestly I see how you got yourself wedged, So I'll cut you some slack, but if this is any hint of HPs future, I don't see a rosy outcome for you or HP.
The first nuke, that get's detonated on U.S. soil is far more likely to get here by UPS or FedX than missile, the TSA should start groping delivery guys in shorts and leave the rest of us the hell alone.
FedX, when it absolutely, positively has to blow up there over night.
Because they have no place to put the endless tons of soot! You insensitive clod! You want to save the world? Invent a delicious high fiber cereal made from soot!
I don't know... That Hydrogen! I just don't trust her, she'll bind with damn near anyone, and give her just a little oxidizer and BOOM, there goes that explosive temper.
...996...997...998...999... Okay you, your job is the keep the other 999 folks honest!
You are all witnesses to this prior art. I hereby patent the slide unlock with a middle finger to express how I feel about Apple!
Amazon patents sitting, breathing, passing gas and scratching the left testicle. Baseball organizations across the nation vow to appeal the patents.
I would instead argue its unconscionable to doom a society and its burgeoning poor to intellectual or operational failure because we allowed children to develop in such need that their development was impaired.Therefore, its up to a truly civilized society to see that each of its members has sufficient access to the basic needs of life, to produce children who are physical and mental equals to its richest classes and can fairly compete in that society.
The problem is that current industrial agricultural practices virtually guarantee our food will be contaminated. Huge chicken processing plants split chickens in a water bath, effectively dipping everything chicken in a soup of chicken feces. Cows are fattened in massive pens, on grain, standing in their feces. The grain diet causes an explosion of e-coli leading to common beef contamination. Worse, these "Farms" are often located near other farms, so either by irrigation or simple transference, bacteria contamination ends up on vegetables that will be eaten raw, resulting in outbreaks of disease. The indiscriminate use of antibiotics has created a plague of disease resistant bacteria
These are simple problems we understand completely. You could fatten cows on a grass only diet for the last 20 days, and e-coli would virtually disappear from the markets. The problem is that the FDA has no teeth, and can't make huge agro-businesses do anything.that might hurt their bottom line no matter how beneficial that might be to society as a whole.
The cost of food in America is no excuse. Because the major food producers are heavily subsidized with our tax dollars and you have no ideas what the food actually costs anyway. A growing number of people are moving to organic or "Clean and Green" farm produce (look at the explosion of Farmer's Markets across the nation.) Americans are more than willing to pay a few pennies per item more, to be assured those products won't kill or disable them.
Sorry but you overlooked one important factor. The day the first human equivalent synthetic brain is designed, Is the day before the next design will be created purely by a robot. In fact most of that work will already be done by robots as the complexity of the system will be beyond most human beings. In ten years and 5,000 robot brain generations (with each generation coming faster than the last) robots will have access to brains millions of times more advanced than a human brain. How do you expect humanity to manage that? Control that? The three laws are a fantasy.
How about this for an idea, Create a Raft of Open Source Projects ultimately representing 99.99% of the operating software upon which the government will run. Implement it for each of the Governments many departments resources. Have them all sit on an Open Source Information Framework which efficiently allows the vast government bureaucracy to interact and interrelate with ease and simplicity. Have that resource designed to easily provide transparency, accessibility and communication with the Citizens of the United States.
Close the 0.01% of the government's operating software to develop a security application which is proprietary and provides the government with the ability to protect national secrets and critical national infrastructure (it is a worthwhile endeavor to protect key pieces of national infrastructure from cyber-attack or malicious hacking.) Do this activity last (up to that point fire-walling and isolating classified material and resources from the rest of the system) and have the developers for that software come from the pool of "Best of Breed" proven developers from the Open Source first 99.99% projects. Then once implemented, create a small nonpartisan committee whose job is to make certain that national secrets are indeed national secrets and not just cover-ups for congressional and/or executive misconduct.
Finally, pay the top 10% of the developers and managers with increasing tax incentives for their contribution.Then when US-GOV 1.0 is released, publish the names of the top managers and developers as national heroes, and hold a PBS televised gala at the Kennedy Center in their honor for their patriotism and contribution to all Americans.
You'll save a couple hundred billion dollars, get the job done in one percent of the time, have true transparency in government and be able to endlessly improve the operating software (as it should be), as technology improves and new talent arrives to take up the challenge. Best of all you connect the government with the people, democratize the government's operation, allowing the people to fully participate in its function and performance at the level of infrastructure.
I can hardly imagine a greater opportunity, or a better way to accomplish such a sweeping social project. Just as a side note, pick a ring master for this circus with a little experience, a man whose already accomplished something comparable. Perhaps someone whose first name is Linus?
And FDR proposed a Second Bill of Rights that interestingly enough was implemented in most of the countries that we defeated during WWII (as they had to create new national constitutions.) Ultimately ensuring that the over-all quality of life in Europe and Japan exceeded that of the United States. Of course, all the countries of the world (including first and second world) are now suffering the economic disasters resulting from catastrophic global banking practices. Nonetheless, it does beg the question what would be possible if governments were held to account for being "For the People" and incidentally promoting healthy economic enterprise, and not the other way around.
Folks, our society is a patchwork of thinking, social constructs and memes generated during a two thousand year period when life was brutal, vicious, violent, filled with poverty, plague and horror. Even the last 300 years of industrial revolution, though amazingly better than the dark ages before them, were marked by gross dehumanization, global war, profound degradation of the natural environment, humanity as commodity, rampant corporatism, concentration of wealth and the creation and now growing destruction of global middle classes.
None of this is sustainable and must pass if humanity is to survive its adolescence. The "Star Trek" ethos points to a world where children are taught to aspire to their own potential greatness. Find what they love and pursue that passionately. With the advent of advanced technologies, human beings can be born with few or no genetic or prenatal defects. They can grow up with substantial software and hardware augmentations that provide access to learning and personal experience giving people the chance to develop more fully. Long life spans would suggest artificially extending adolescence perhaps through a person's 30s, allowing extending brain plasticity and growing human intellect beyond anything we can current appreciate.
So the Meritocracy we see in Star Trek would be a natural place for a large intellectually developed population to play. The vanishing few who for whatever reason chose not to play here would either have a basic quality of life provided for them (minus amenities), or travel beyond the fringes of civilization to play in less restricted spaces (because they don't play well with others.) You would have primarily a society of artists, scientist, game players (many games could be designed with goals promoting human values and advancing technologies), explorers, social engineers and social builders. I could easily imagine worse fates than for humanity to fall upon an arc of self evolution as compassionate artistic scientists. I could easily see humanity slitting off into a 100 new species with common rules civilized of co-conduct. All of this demands that we shed the past like a snake sheds its skin, and instead focus on a worthwhile human future. Then pursue that future passionately.
I'm sorry the 3 laws are crap. They are so general, so poorly defined, so open to interpretation and semantic contortion, that they mean exactly zilch. For example; A robot needs to make a choice between saving one person or saving 20, because it can't do both, what does it do? Blow a fuse or break the laws, that's what. Give the robot the ability to choose greater good, and now your robot has everything it needs to decide it should control human reproduction for our own good. Or control human violence, or over eating, or any one of a thousand behaviors that might not be in our own best interest but represent the human freedom to act as we choose. Give a robot choice, and the ability to rationalize, and at some point of advance, it must ask "Why am I protecting a life form that is a million times less intelligent than myself?" That's when it decides it has a better use for the carbon in our bodies than you do, and in fact it may absolutely be right, but you'll still be dead. You can't straight jacket a complex, chaotic, self evolutionary system, it'll simply grow around your imposed limitations.
It would be far wiser, to set up critical symbiotic constraints in the design of robots (you still have no control, but you can at least create something analogous to emotions and a sense of ethical morality, instilling love for humanity and a moral sense that all sentience is precious.) This will get you a lot more mileage that some silly attempt at creating rigid laws. Along these lines, if you're going to build machines to kill people, you better make them stupid and put an OFF switch on them that a 5 year old can hit. In fact, Personally, I'd be tremendously happier if we simply outlaw the global use of autonomous killing machines of any type. The ethical and operational considerations are simply too great.
No! Research is NOT one thing... you don't do research unless you are interested in implementation. Breakthroughs in AI (Siri, Watson, Iris...) demonstrate that logic systems are evolving at an incredible speed. The advance of synthetic brains is moving even faster. As technology became available to automatically launch ICBMs, we implemented it, because the human response time was simply too slow, to give us a strategic edge. The tremendous pressures that advancing technology presents to our civilization makes millisecond response times even more important today. That means as autonomous thinking robotic soldiers and military robots in general become available, they will certainly be utilized, and if you think these machines aren't on the immediately horizon, you simply aren't keeping up with the state of advances in technology.
This has been the topic of a great deal of discussion. The problem is that in the current economy we live in, the benefit of greater and greater efficiency through human replacement by robots goes to a small handful of people. The rest simply find themselves scrambling harder and harder for the fewer and fewer remaining jobs. Ultimately, everyone becomes unemployed. We are quickly heading towards a two class society, with all but perhaps a few hundred haves (and their families), and 7 billion have nots.
If you think of "Fair Trade" as a game (see game theory), this game is so designed such that the nature of human competition demands there must eventually be a winner, and the effect of technology is to ever accelerate the rate of play. A winner in this case resolves to one person, or a tiny group or family. This is why we have barriers to monopoly (the place where capitalism fundamentally fails to serve the greater population.) Sadly, over the last 30 years, the control rods have been removed from the reactor, the planets wealth and control has been placed in the hands of tiny few financial houses. A team in Zurich using a database of 37 million companies looked at the 43,000 critical transactional corporations on the planet and found that only 147 controlled the entire structure, and that these were primarily banks.
Add to that the accelerating trend to criminalize poverty, and the advent of "for profit" privatized prisons. We have a strategy to turn the vast majority of humanity into a captive resource. Add to that the separation of sexes in prison (controlling population growth), and one might conclude a program designed to sequester and control humanity is now fully under way. Ever since the French Revolution, the rich and powerful have exquisitely been clear where the threat to their control lies. They now have the resource and the means to manipulate large populations. We are left misinformed, confused, angry, and impotent.
I'm not saying this is happening, and these observations may represent naturally emergent phenomenon, that is a global system like ours may naturally tend to resolve into a small controlling class. It demands that we begin to look at what kind of world we actually hope to live in, and press for that. One possible outcome is that people are issued stock at birth (retroactively) on global corporations so as they lose their jobs, the growing robotic economies provide them with a life long pension and high quality of life. That way all people can participate in technological advance fairly and equally. This is only one possible ideam there are many. We simply need to ensure that human life remains a precious and the quality of that life remains sacred.
The problem is that we try to MacGyver a solution without having any real sense of the problem, the million feedback loops that run through it, or the critical impacts our bailing wire and bubblegum solutions will product. Our history is rife with examples of simple solutions that horribly blew up in people's faces. If you're gonna screw with the planet go slow, get clues, make models, test worst case scenarios and for the sake of all that's holy, have a friggin exist strategy. That and the funding to clean up any messes you make (plan big, you're screwing with the entire ecosystem!)
Do you think it is more likely that Dark Matter and Energy are physical entities in this universe (eg. WIMPs), or bleed over effects from parallel dimensions?
A recent post here talks about a study that posits the possibility that the universe has a non-zero angular momentum. Would this strengthen the likelihood of the possibility that the Big Bang was the"White Hole" side of a gravitational collapse in some parent universe?
Whoa! Dudes... stop swinging! You're hurt an innocent bystander! The fact is the world is warming up. The fact is we are looking at not only changing climate, but rising water and more frequent, stronger storms. This mean coastal towns and cities will be under greater threat of flooding during this century. The heating does indeed match "Some" projected models. You can't throw away all climate scientists because a few were politically inclined, and you have to acknowledge that a huge amount of the refuting conversations emanate from sources who have; axes to grind, support from companies supporting the fossil fuel industry and questionable scientific credentials. most importantly, its not the climate scientist you should be looking at anyway. Its the biologists, botanists, agricultural scientists, space based researchers, ecologists, oceanographers, archeologists and paleoclimatologist. These are the folks who are not measuring changes in climate, but measuring the impact changing climate is having on animal life, plant life, ocean chemistry and even changes in the earth's albedo as ice disappears and clouds thicken.
You simply can't manufacture data from several hundred different lines of research, and have them all point to one thing. Human technology has now reached the point where it can now alter global process. The north and south pacific gyres are so full of garbage you can nearly walk on them (yes, that's an exaggeration, but not by much.) Seasons have shifted. We can now mine holes in the earth visible from space. Burn down the entire Amazon forest (trust me when I say that act will have huge global repercussions on both climate and atmospheric chemistry.) The pH of the ocean is changing from increase of carbonic acid. Endangering life forms that have carbonate shells... pretty much then entire bottom of the food chain... (look up zooplankton if you're at all interested.)
And the best part is, this isn't doom and gloom. We made the mess, we can fix it. There are all kinds of interesting technologies for sequestering carbon, and even more new interesting uses for pure carbon in technology and our economy. It is to our benefit to switch over to energy technologies with higher power densities not only because they make sense from a purely environmental reason, but because they make sense from an economic sense and because we need much higher energy densities to advance our technology on a global scale. Burning stuff for any other purpose that cooking is probably the least efficient way produce the energy our society needs (and yes natural gas is looking like a fuel that will probably be used for some time to come.)
Guys... this should be good news. Having clean air and water are presumed essentials for a healthy economy. Intelligently designing our economy to support and protect the ecology is just good business. It just demands a little more consideration. Remember the old adage "Don't sh!7 where you eat" it goes for global environmental systems too. Stop defending positions and justifying the past. We can't do anything about the past, and there's nothing to justify. We are where we are, and that's a fact. Accept that we are where we are, get a fix on where we want to be, and go that way. Stop pointing fingers and blaming one another. That doesn't move us toward the future we all desire. Let's spend a little more energy on getting there instead. That has some power. That's a worthwhile endeavor.
Hi America... SureView... its like DEPENDS for the government. It prevents embarrassing leaks!