Desalination plants are also used for treatment of alkali water.
"A new report from the Asian Development Bank sent a warning signal to Mongolia that, despite its wealth of natural resources and pristine image, the country faces a severe water scarcity and quality crisis"
So if you can't fix the quantity, fix the quality.
I'm pretty sure the interconnect bus is not the issue.
The thing that slows down most ARM devices is the memory controller, which is why iPhones are such a win: the PA Semi folks were able to speed up the memory controller considerable, but only for Apple's chips. The nVidia people have made some forward progress, but the bottleneck is still the memory bandwidth making the graphics (among other things) pretty crappy. They are almost an order of magnitude slower than the A9. If you had an A9 at the core of these things, yes, the interconnect would become the bottleneck, but good luck sourcing Apple's hard-won designs.
The secondary problem is that the parts are not uniform between models, meaning you can't depend on anything but the lowest common denominator, which translates to intentionally limiting feature so that this will run on everything. This include using older API sets because not all of the phones can run the latest (which is what you expect, since that's sunk cost, so you lose out on any of the modern features that would compete with integrated phones. A lot of this has to do with carrier certification for the combinations of components, which go up by a power of two for each ne possible module you can plug in.
The idea is pretty doomed due to the least common denominator alone, even ignoring that it's a s mid-mash, and they are using real software engineers of component isolation and interface contract. In other words, it's a mess of epic proportions;
Less general answer: most startups come from the U.S., not China; the economy is bad in China and Greece (and maybe two other EU countries, who are now regretting letting Germany be in charge of their economies, the way Germany wanted to be in WWI and WWII), and that's not a problem for the U.S.. This is not like the dot bomb, where everyone was afraid to invest in startups, who were going to lose money on every customer, but make it up in volume.
Theocratic busybodies are no good at answering that question..
Now at what point does a human first gain anything considered consciousness? That has yet to be proven, but most guesses put it at or around 15-20 weeks of gestation; around the same time the brain forms...
Actually, cognitive psychologists put it at the point where someone can recognize themselves in a mirror. So if you are disinclined to accept religious involvement in definition of civil law because of a little thing called the Establishment Clause of the 1st amendment, i.e.: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...", and you happen to believe in the separation of church and state... they can go pound sand.
We should no more make laws based on precepts of Christianity than we should make laws based on Sharia.
Once the traffic hits an exit node, it's no longer in Tor. It's also more or less impossible to "disguise botnet traffic" using Tor, since it's not like the botnet is running an entry or exit node.
Did you even read the paper? Botnets are using Tor to scan and attack corporate networks. Blocking Tor exit nodes will block those scans and attacks.
Yes. I did. They implied but didn't specifically state, in a single sentence (the one I quoted in fact) blocking of exit nodes. All of the other sentences suggested "block Tor", which implies the protocol (which -- did you even read what I wrote? -- is pretty stupid advice).
Do you really expect people to be able to implement TorDNSEL DNS lookups on reverse addresses for all incoming connections, or that if people start using this for blocking, that it will continue to be published? Or that if people start really banging on it with queries, it won't simply go down? Because continuing to publish as soon as even a single major ISP starts blocking on behalf of all their customers would be pretty critically stupid on the part of the Tor project, don't you think?
You are also aware that it is at best 30 minutes out of date at all times, right?
Also -- you are aware it's possible to run a private Tor network, since the software is Open Source, and deploy via Amazon or similar services, using stolen credit cards, so blocking the official Tor exit nodes is unlikely to be nothing more than a trigger to escalate the arms race, right?
"IBM said its data shows a “steady increase” over the past few years in attacks originating from Tor exit nodes, with attackers increasingly using Tor to disguise botnet traffic."
What part of "exit node" does IBM not understand?
Once the traffic hits an exit node, it's no longer in Tor. It's also more or less impossible to "disguise botnet traffic" using Tor, since it's not like the botnet is running an entry or exit node.
At worst, a bot on one of your servers will hit a Tor entry node in order to disguise that the traffic is coming from *your* server, as opposed to somewhere else. Frankly, if you have a bot on one of your servers doing this (which makes really no sense, since there's really no economic value in protecting individual bots from discovery of their identity), the problem isn't Tor, it's that you've allowed your server to become a bot in the first place.
Why IBM is involved in this anti-Tor scare tactic is anyones guess... but if you wonder about something like that, you should probably follow the money, since blocking the Tor protocol only buys you the ability to prevent entry or exit nodes on your network, and seriously, no one is going to trust an unvalidated entry/exit node enough that they'd be willing to peer with the thing in the first place.
Now at what point does a human first gain anything considered consciousness?
I'm going to say "after they are sufficiently programmed", which is about 5 years old. Then it goes away again when they become a teenager. Then it comes back again when they go off to college. Then it goes away permenantly when they get their MBA. More or less.
A: Officer, why am I being arrested? O: For crapping in the street. A: But I didn't! O: I have a picture of it right here. A: Sorry, but that's a piece of performance art, and you are in violation of my copyright; delete the picture now! O: OK....
Probably not the way things would go, even in Germany.
The article is vague, but if you changed a person's metabolic rate (how many calories are burnt without exercises) you would also expect them to have a corresponding change in body temperature.
This is precisely what they found.
I've made another posting (later) in which I link to a PDF of the original research paper, if you care to read it.
In every experiment they've tried until now, it actually causes more people to start working rather than fewer.
Is this why the Soviet Union won the cold war, and the former United States has broken itself up into small nations, with no one wanting to get everyone back together but Massachusetts and their insane dictator?
I'm not sure, but are you arguing that a basic income would automatically lead to a totalitarian militarised police state?
No, I'm saying that running a social experiment 9 times and getting the same result (which you don't like), running it a 10th time is unlikely to get you a different result.
Several proponents in the documentary I linked actually argue for it from a libertarian point of view [...]
I'm predominantly Libertarian, and I'm all for a UBI -- and not because it makes the people more independent (although that may, in fact, have been what the documentarians wanted to hear in order to be willing to put a Libertarian on camera).
I'm doubting the veracity of the statement that it's resulted in more people working, and I'm doubting the speculation about the total job availability numbers, given that we are already in massive unemployment, according to World Bank numbers, since the U.S. Department of Labor only tracks eligible workers (those workers who are displaced, and eligible for unemployment benefits, whether or not they are receiving them).
Don't get me wrong: I have *no problem whatsoever* with people on UBI *not* working. We have a looming "end to human labor" problem, and I don't think having a bunch of Unhappy Campers(tm), with nothing better to do with their time than smash things, is a sterling idea.
We agree that a UBI stopgaps that problem.
Where we disagree is whether all the economically disenfranchised people receiving UBI will rush out and work a bunch of non-existent jobs, or whether they're going to stay home with their cable TV, bong, and X-Box 360. I'm personally *fine* with them doing that; you don't have to make up happy little stories of them working jobs in order to satisfy the Libertarian in me. I'm not going to buy hat you're selling anyway, and you already have my vote in favor of a UBI, so you really need to stop trying so hard to make stuff up to get me on your side.
What are you talking about? Soviet Union never had a basic income in first place.
Besides, who knows what might have happened if nobody had tried to destroy it for the whole time of its existence.
You mean "What if there had never been a Stalin or a Lenin or a Brezhnev or a Khrushchev?"; because those are pretty much the people who were accomplishing destroying it. Soviet Agriculture was almost completely destroyed by Lysenko under Stalin; up to that point, Russia was an exporter of wheat, but Stalin's opposition to Mendelian genetics as "decadent" and "Western" screwed that pooch.
What would have happened with the Soviet Union, had its leaders not been intent on destroying it from the inside? Who knows. Well. Probably China knows.
What's so hard about being active on social media and GitHub?
Jesus wept.
It's not what's "hard" about it. The problem is that you have to live with yourself afterwards, with a bunch of strangers sending you highly-refined stupidity and looking for "follow-backs" and "likes" and "favorites". People posting pictures of their goddamn dinner. Then there are the bots dressed up as humans. Saying stupid cut and paste friendliness, but you don't want to block them because it just doesn't feel right and then it'll bring down the number of accounts that follow you to single digits.
That's not the half of it.
If you think GitHub is bad, you should try getting on social media. Those things are even worse there. The only saving grace to social media is that most of those people aren't recruiters looking for "full stack engineers" on the next "facebook++".
BMR (basal metabolic rate) really doesn't vary much person to person.
Actually, the article is stating precisely the opposite. It states that the BMR is controlled by IRX3 and IRX5, and that this varies from person to person, and thus people have different propensities for fat storage as a result of the state of those genes. They went on to modify the nucleotide in mice, and demonstrated that they had in fact found the regulatory mechanism for the metabolic pathway.
Ayn Randian here. I like this because it cuts away huge swathes of state apparatus, all the civil servants and evaluators deciding who is worthy or not. [...]
People constantly attempt to paint Libertarians as Objectivists, but to Ayn Rand they were very different, and anarchy was anathema to her:
"All kinds of people today call themselves “libertarians,” especially something calling itself the New Right, which consists of hippies who are anarchists instead of leftist collectivists; but anarchists are collectivists. Capitalism is the one system that requires absolute objective law, yet libertarians combine capitalism and anarchism. That’s worse than anything the New Left has proposed. It’s a mockery of philosophy and ideology. " -- Ayn Rand
Personally, I think it should require a test before you are allowed to read Ayn Rand; you must at least recognize that the people in her books where caricatures, rather than representations of real people, or you could easily be sucked into the flawed philosophy of Objectivism, with no way to realize that it was flawed, and more than a Christian is capable of recognizing that "Intelligent Design" is just a renamed version of Creationism, dressed up in different clothes and a fake mustache.
Either way, you are either an Objectivist or you are a Libertarian, but you are not both.
In every experiment they've tried until now, it actually causes more people to start working rather than fewer.
Is this why the Soviet Union won the cold war, and the former United States has broken itself up into small nations, with no one wanting to get everyone back together but Massachusetts and their insane dictator?
They state as their intent to shrink the size of government. This is them wanting to get rid of INS. They are pretty radical, even as Libertarians go, since most Libertarians are OK with UBI (for example), as a means of paying poor people to not steal their stuff. These guys are far... not right or left... up?
They have no memory of the room even though they routinely operate in the same room.
I would call this a feature, rather than a drawback, since obstacles such as doors could be open or closed, and obstacles such as dining chairs may move around. Given that, a static map would be a detriment, rather than a benefit.
They do not know where doors are, where given activities happen, etc and thus cannot know where the focus of any cleaning should be.
OK, I already conceded "frequency of operation for a given area"; however for their mop-bot or for shag carpet, either is going to look funny if you don't do all of it, so I'm not sure that's an issue. As long as it does all of it, yes, it's doing unnecessary vacuuming, but no moreso than a cleaning lady would probably do.
Their programming is too limited to allow for a larger more effective robot because they're too stupid to clean under things properly the way a human would.
You mean "by using their arms to move the chair out of the way" and so on? Or do you mean that the robot should be like a cannister vacuum, with the head unit separate from the body unit, in order to get more suction?
As someone else in the thread said, they don't understand that some things they're touching actually should be left alone.
One guy was talking about how his roomba just spread cat vomit all over the place because his cat will throw up... as cats do... and then the roomba will roll over it and wipe cat vomit all over the place.
Yes, well, that's going to be a limitation of pretty much anything below just above dog intelligence. At dog intelligence, it would *eat* the cat vomit.
So there you go... Roombas don't have the brain power they should.
So far, we've got "cat vomit" as a valid argument for more brains. And better sensors, which are typically, at the level of cat vomit detection, going to be more expensive than "better brains".
They should have a detailed 3d map of the area they operate in
Totally not getting this one, unless you plan on putting a quadcoptor onto the thing... it's a 2d device.
they should know where things get dirty both from logging done by the roomba itself and by what a human would program into it
You potentially have a point with the "this needs extra cleaning", but the UI for the "this needs extra cleaning" should probably connect you to the "buy a more powerful model Roomba" Amazon page. This *could* be covered by the "frequency of operation over an area argument"; how would you design as "this area was dirtier than that area" sensor, or conclude that you need to do something about it? I could see a "this is where I eat lunch, so I need it cleaned twice a day instead of once a day because I am a slob" being useful.
by saying "here are doors".
Seriously: transient barriers, which argues for not having a memory of where the barriers have been historically; what if you leave a dining chair pulled out, instead of pushing it in? Should it remember where it was, or should it just adapt its operation?
On doors themselves: it does it no good to know this, unless you either equip all your doors with an "open enough for a Roomba to get through" sensor and transponder, or add automatic door openers so the Roomba can come through the door even though it's closed. This actually does not require as much intelligence as you want the thing to have -- or any at all, if your house system has "I know the Roomba runs from 11:45AM to 12:11AM, so open all the doors at 11:40AM, and then at 12:15AM, close all the ones that used to be closed before, so the human is not subtly disturbed when they come home".
A bigger robot could do a better job cleaning. Anyone that uses a roomba knows that it takes it DAYS to clean a room and it onl
Oh, Roombas are mostly fine. My issue with them more than anything is that they're stupid, don't interface with say a program running on a computer that could make them less stupid, and they've unacceptably high maintenance issues.
I don't understand the stupidity complaint; they are about as smart as they need to be in order to clean the entire floor which is reachable by a vacuuming robot that is 2D constrained. Making them smarter would only be useful for something like "avoid this area"; what other uses do you foresee could be applied, other than "don't go there" and "frequency of operation for a given area"? I suppose you could have "delay operation on Saturdays for 2 hours, as I will be hung over", and other scheduling stuff...
As far as maintenance, there are 3D models for most Roomba parts you'd want to replace, as well as for a lot of modifications, if you are interested. Some of them are here: http://www.yeggi.com/q/roomba/... and there are other sites.
You could either just print replacement parts in plastic, or, assuming you had the right printing hardware, you could have the metal geas you are asking for instead of the plastic ones. NB: My take on the metal gears is that they would typically be a bad idea, since I would prefer the motor tear a stuck gear apart (and leave a live motor) than the motor tear itself apart over a stuck gear, leaving me trying to replace the motor.
how about DNA methylation? There's some evidence that it might be heritable
It is, generally as undesirable mutations, although must such methylations are repaired by the MATA mechanism based on the p50 gene and the genes at the end of the long arm ob c20.
Typically, you can get "thalidomide effects" and similar mutations, if done at exactly the right time, and impacting a germ cell involved in the gametogenesis, but no long chain mutations of the type this article (and Lysenkoism) is interested in have been demonstrated in the lab.
In order to trigger them, you have to specifically hit the terminator prior to an intron sequence, and do it in such a way that you either triggered a fold or an excision. This would basically take a knock-out on one side just prior, and on the other side just after, the termination sequence.
I suppose we could try to simulate this using CRISPR methods to intentionally make the half cuts at exactly the right spot, since getting it to happen at random is pretty statistically out there (as in "lifetime of the universe" out there) -- although technically not impossible.
On the other hand... you would expect to see orders of magnitude more speciation in bacteria as a result, since they outnumber us by so much, and we haven't observed that, meaning that a working hypothesis of "probably not" would be a safe bet.
It'd be fascinating, if true, which is, I guess, why there are as many people looking for that particular grail as there are...
When people say "personal home robot" what I think they're looking for is a robotic maid. Rosy the robot. Pick my crap up. Dust. Organize things. Clean. Make me food. Clean up. etc.
The roomba etc are about as close as we've gotten to that. And the roomba has so many fucking problems.
To be entirely fair, until we get further along with room temperature superconductors, you just can't build something like a Roomba without the cat ass magnets.
Slashdot Mirror
Desalination plants are also used for treatment of alkali water.
"A new report from the Asian Development Bank sent a warning signal to Mongolia that, despite its wealth of natural resources and pristine image, the country faces a severe water scarcity and quality crisis"
So if you can't fix the quantity, fix the quality.
Can you send a genetic sample instead? Because I know people who'd be willing to pay for this right now.
Obviously, it will be the ones with inadequate desalination plants.
I'm pretty sure the interconnect bus is not the issue.
The thing that slows down most ARM devices is the memory controller, which is why iPhones are such a win: the PA Semi folks were able to speed up the memory controller considerable, but only for Apple's chips. The nVidia people have made some forward progress, but the bottleneck is still the memory bandwidth making the graphics (among other things) pretty crappy. They are almost an order of magnitude slower than the A9. If you had an A9 at the core of these things, yes, the interconnect would become the bottleneck, but good luck sourcing Apple's hard-won designs.
The secondary problem is that the parts are not uniform between models, meaning you can't depend on anything but the lowest common denominator, which translates to intentionally limiting feature so that this will run on everything. This include using older API sets because not all of the phones can run the latest (which is what you expect, since that's sunk cost, so you lose out on any of the modern features that would compete with integrated phones. A lot of this has to do with carrier certification for the combinations of components, which go up by a power of two for each ne possible module you can plug in.
The idea is pretty doomed due to the least common denominator alone, even ignoring that it's a s mid-mash, and they are using real software engineers of component isolation and interface contract. In other words, it's a mess of epic proportions;
The actual finance guys I know want interest up.
The day traders I know are afraid it's going to kill their ability to make money.
The high frequency traders I know don't care, since they are still able to game the system.
General answer: no
Less general answer: most startups come from the U.S., not China; the economy is bad in China and Greece (and maybe two other EU countries, who are now regretting letting Germany be in charge of their economies, the way Germany wanted to be in WWI and WWII), and that's not a problem for the U.S.. This is not like the dot bomb, where everyone was afraid to invest in startups, who were going to lose money on every customer, but make it up in volume.
Theocratic busybodies are no good at answering that question..
Now at what point does a human first gain anything considered consciousness? That has yet to be proven, but most guesses put it at or around 15-20 weeks of gestation; around the same time the brain forms...
Actually, cognitive psychologists put it at the point where someone can recognize themselves in a mirror. So if you are disinclined to accept religious involvement in definition of civil law because of a little thing called the Establishment Clause of the 1st amendment, i.e.: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...", and you happen to believe in the separation of church and state... they can go pound sand.
We should no more make laws based on precepts of Christianity than we should make laws based on Sharia.
Once the traffic hits an exit node, it's no longer in Tor. It's also more or less impossible to "disguise botnet traffic" using Tor, since it's not like the botnet is running an entry or exit node.
Did you even read the paper? Botnets are using Tor to scan and attack corporate networks. Blocking Tor exit nodes will block those scans and attacks.
Yes. I did. They implied but didn't specifically state, in a single sentence (the one I quoted in fact) blocking of exit nodes. All of the other sentences suggested "block Tor", which implies the protocol (which -- did you even read what I wrote? -- is pretty stupid advice).
Do you really expect people to be able to implement TorDNSEL DNS lookups on reverse addresses for all incoming connections, or that if people start using this for blocking, that it will continue to be published? Or that if people start really banging on it with queries, it won't simply go down? Because continuing to publish as soon as even a single major ISP starts blocking on behalf of all their customers would be pretty critically stupid on the part of the Tor project, don't you think?
You are also aware that it is at best 30 minutes out of date at all times, right?
Also -- you are aware it's possible to run a private Tor network, since the software is Open Source, and deploy via Amazon or similar services, using stolen credit cards, so blocking the official Tor exit nodes is unlikely to be nothing more than a trigger to escalate the arms race, right?
"IBM said its data shows a “steady increase” over the past few years in attacks originating from Tor exit nodes, with attackers increasingly using Tor to disguise botnet traffic."
What part of "exit node" does IBM not understand?
Once the traffic hits an exit node, it's no longer in Tor. It's also more or less impossible to "disguise botnet traffic" using Tor, since it's not like the botnet is running an entry or exit node.
At worst, a bot on one of your servers will hit a Tor entry node in order to disguise that the traffic is coming from *your* server, as opposed to somewhere else. Frankly, if you have a bot on one of your servers doing this (which makes really no sense, since there's really no economic value in protecting individual bots from discovery of their identity), the problem isn't Tor, it's that you've allowed your server to become a bot in the first place.
Why IBM is involved in this anti-Tor scare tactic is anyones guess... but if you wonder about something like that, you should probably follow the money, since blocking the Tor protocol only buys you the ability to prevent entry or exit nodes on your network, and seriously, no one is going to trust an unvalidated entry/exit node enough that they'd be willing to peer with the thing in the first place.
Now at what point does a human first gain anything considered consciousness?
I'm going to say "after they are sufficiently programmed", which is about 5 years old. Then it goes away again when they become a teenager. Then it comes back again when they go off to college. Then it goes away permenantly when they get their MBA. More or less.
A: Officer, why am I being arrested? ...
O: For crapping in the street.
A: But I didn't!
O: I have a picture of it right here.
A: Sorry, but that's a piece of performance art, and you are in violation of my copyright; delete the picture now!
O: OK.
Probably not the way things would go, even in Germany.
The article is vague, but if you changed a person's metabolic rate (how many calories are burnt without exercises) you would also expect them to have a corresponding change in body temperature.
This is precisely what they found.
I've made another posting (later) in which I link to a PDF of the original research paper, if you care to read it.
Original paper, New England Journal of Medicine
http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10...
In every experiment they've tried until now, it actually causes more people to start working rather than fewer.
Is this why the Soviet Union won the cold war, and the former United States has broken itself up into small nations, with no one wanting to get everyone back together but Massachusetts and their insane dictator?
I'm not sure, but are you arguing that a basic income would automatically lead to a totalitarian militarised police state?
No, I'm saying that running a social experiment 9 times and getting the same result (which you don't like), running it a 10th time is unlikely to get you a different result.
Several proponents in the documentary I linked actually argue for it from a libertarian point of view [...]
I'm predominantly Libertarian, and I'm all for a UBI -- and not because it makes the people more independent (although that may, in fact, have been what the documentarians wanted to hear in order to be willing to put a Libertarian on camera).
I'm doubting the veracity of the statement that it's resulted in more people working, and I'm doubting the speculation about the total job availability numbers, given that we are already in massive unemployment, according to World Bank numbers, since the U.S. Department of Labor only tracks eligible workers (those workers who are displaced, and eligible for unemployment benefits, whether or not they are receiving them).
Don't get me wrong: I have *no problem whatsoever* with people on UBI *not* working. We have a looming "end to human labor" problem, and I don't think having a bunch of Unhappy Campers(tm), with nothing better to do with their time than smash things, is a sterling idea.
We agree that a UBI stopgaps that problem.
Where we disagree is whether all the economically disenfranchised people receiving UBI will rush out and work a bunch of non-existent jobs, or whether they're going to stay home with their cable TV, bong, and X-Box 360. I'm personally *fine* with them doing that; you don't have to make up happy little stories of them working jobs in order to satisfy the Libertarian in me. I'm not going to buy hat you're selling anyway, and you already have my vote in favor of a UBI, so you really need to stop trying so hard to make stuff up to get me on your side.
What are you talking about? Soviet Union never had a basic income in first place.
Besides, who knows what might have happened if nobody had tried to destroy it for the whole time of its existence.
You mean "What if there had never been a Stalin or a Lenin or a Brezhnev or a Khrushchev?"; because those are pretty much the people who were accomplishing destroying it. Soviet Agriculture was almost completely destroyed by Lysenko under Stalin; up to that point, Russia was an exporter of wheat, but Stalin's opposition to Mendelian genetics as "decadent" and "Western" screwed that pooch.
What would have happened with the Soviet Union, had its leaders not been intent on destroying it from the inside? Who knows. Well. Probably China knows.
Jesus wept.
It's not what's "hard" about it. The problem is that you have to live with yourself afterwards, with a bunch of strangers sending you highly-refined stupidity and looking for "follow-backs" and "likes" and "favorites". People posting pictures of their goddamn dinner. Then there are the bots dressed up as humans. Saying stupid cut and paste friendliness, but you don't want to block them because it just doesn't feel right and then it'll bring down the number of accounts that follow you to single digits.
That's not the half of it.
If you think GitHub is bad, you should try getting on social media. Those things are even worse there. The only saving grace to social media is that most of those people aren't recruiters looking for "full stack engineers" on the next "facebook++".
The problem is that the HR departments want X years in specific technology.
You still go through HR for jobs?
That's so darn cute!
BMR (basal metabolic rate) really doesn't vary much person to person.
Actually, the article is stating precisely the opposite. It states that the BMR is controlled by IRX3 and IRX5, and that this varies from person to person, and thus people have different propensities for fat storage as a result of the state of those genes. They went on to modify the nucleotide in mice, and demonstrated that they had in fact found the regulatory mechanism for the metabolic pathway.
Ayn Randian here. I like this because it cuts away huge swathes of state apparatus, all the civil servants and evaluators deciding who is worthy or not. [...]
You're aware Ayn Rand hated Libertarians, right?
http://aynrandlexicon.com/ayn-...
People constantly attempt to paint Libertarians as Objectivists, but to Ayn Rand they were very different, and anarchy was anathema to her:
"All kinds of people today call themselves “libertarians,” especially something calling itself the New Right, which consists of hippies who are anarchists instead of leftist collectivists; but anarchists are collectivists. Capitalism is the one system that requires absolute objective law, yet libertarians combine capitalism and anarchism. That’s worse than anything the New Left has proposed. It’s a mockery of philosophy and ideology. " -- Ayn Rand
Personally, I think it should require a test before you are allowed to read Ayn Rand; you must at least recognize that the people in her books where caricatures, rather than representations of real people, or you could easily be sucked into the flawed philosophy of Objectivism, with no way to realize that it was flawed, and more than a Christian is capable of recognizing that "Intelligent Design" is just a renamed version of Creationism, dressed up in different clothes and a fake mustache.
Either way, you are either an Objectivist or you are a Libertarian, but you are not both.
In every experiment they've tried until now, it actually causes more people to start working rather than fewer.
Is this why the Soviet Union won the cold war, and the former United States has broken itself up into small nations, with no one wanting to get everyone back together but Massachusetts and their insane dictator?
Actually the Niskanen Center is Libertarian.
They state as their intent to shrink the size of government. This is them wanting to get rid of INS. They are pretty radical, even as Libertarians go, since most Libertarians are OK with UBI (for example), as a means of paying poor people to not steal their stuff. These guys are far ... not right or left ... up?
They have no memory of the room even though they routinely operate in the same room.
I would call this a feature, rather than a drawback, since obstacles such as doors could be open or closed, and obstacles such as dining chairs may move around. Given that, a static map would be a detriment, rather than a benefit.
They do not know where doors are, where given activities happen, etc and thus cannot know where the focus of any cleaning should be.
OK, I already conceded "frequency of operation for a given area"; however for their mop-bot or for shag carpet, either is going to look funny if you don't do all of it, so I'm not sure that's an issue. As long as it does all of it, yes, it's doing unnecessary vacuuming, but no moreso than a cleaning lady would probably do.
Their programming is too limited to allow for a larger more effective robot because they're too stupid to clean under things properly the way a human would.
You mean "by using their arms to move the chair out of the way" and so on? Or do you mean that the robot should be like a cannister vacuum, with the head unit separate from the body unit, in order to get more suction?
As someone else in the thread said, they don't understand that some things they're touching actually should be left alone.
One guy was talking about how his roomba just spread cat vomit all over the place because his cat will throw up... as cats do... and then the roomba will roll over it and wipe cat vomit all over the place.
Yes, well, that's going to be a limitation of pretty much anything below just above dog intelligence. At dog intelligence, it would *eat* the cat vomit.
So there you go... Roombas don't have the brain power they should.
So far, we've got "cat vomit" as a valid argument for more brains. And better sensors, which are typically, at the level of cat vomit detection, going to be more expensive than "better brains".
They should have a detailed 3d map of the area they operate in
Totally not getting this one, unless you plan on putting a quadcoptor onto the thing... it's a 2d device.
they should know where things get dirty both from logging done by the roomba itself and by what a human would program into it
You potentially have a point with the "this needs extra cleaning", but the UI for the "this needs extra cleaning" should probably connect you to the "buy a more powerful model Roomba" Amazon page. This *could* be covered by the "frequency of operation over an area argument"; how would you design as "this area was dirtier than that area" sensor, or conclude that you need to do something about it? I could see a "this is where I eat lunch, so I need it cleaned twice a day instead of once a day because I am a slob" being useful.
by saying "here are doors".
Seriously: transient barriers, which argues for not having a memory of where the barriers have been historically; what if you leave a dining chair pulled out, instead of pushing it in? Should it remember where it was, or should it just adapt its operation?
On doors themselves: it does it no good to know this, unless you either equip all your doors with an "open enough for a Roomba to get through" sensor and transponder, or add automatic door openers so the Roomba can come through the door even though it's closed. This actually does not require as much intelligence as you want the thing to have -- or any at all, if your house system has "I know the Roomba runs from 11:45AM to 12:11AM, so open all the doors at 11:40AM, and then at 12:15AM, close all the ones that used to be closed before, so the human is not subtly disturbed when they come home".
A bigger robot could do a better job cleaning. Anyone that uses a roomba knows that it takes it DAYS to clean a room and it onl
Oh, Roombas are mostly fine. My issue with them more than anything is that they're stupid, don't interface with say a program running on a computer that could make them less stupid, and they've unacceptably high maintenance issues.
I don't understand the stupidity complaint; they are about as smart as they need to be in order to clean the entire floor which is reachable by a vacuuming robot that is 2D constrained. Making them smarter would only be useful for something like "avoid this area"; what other uses do you foresee could be applied, other than "don't go there" and "frequency of operation for a given area"? I suppose you could have "delay operation on Saturdays for 2 hours, as I will be hung over", and other scheduling stuff...
As far as maintenance, there are 3D models for most Roomba parts you'd want to replace, as well as for a lot of modifications, if you are interested. Some of them are here: http://www.yeggi.com/q/roomba/... and there are other sites.
You could either just print replacement parts in plastic, or, assuming you had the right printing hardware, you could have the metal geas you are asking for instead of the plastic ones. NB: My take on the metal gears is that they would typically be a bad idea, since I would prefer the motor tear a stuck gear apart (and leave a live motor) than the motor tear itself apart over a stuck gear, leaving me trying to replace the motor.
how about DNA methylation? There's some evidence that it might be heritable
It is, generally as undesirable mutations, although must such methylations are repaired by the MATA mechanism based on the p50 gene and the genes at the end of the long arm ob c20.
Typically, you can get "thalidomide effects" and similar mutations, if done at exactly the right time, and impacting a germ cell involved in the gametogenesis, but no long chain mutations of the type this article (and Lysenkoism) is interested in have been demonstrated in the lab.
In order to trigger them, you have to specifically hit the terminator prior to an intron sequence, and do it in such a way that you either triggered a fold or an excision. This would basically take a knock-out on one side just prior, and on the other side just after, the termination sequence.
I suppose we could try to simulate this using CRISPR methods to intentionally make the half cuts at exactly the right spot, since getting it to happen at random is pretty statistically out there (as in "lifetime of the universe" out there) -- although technically not impossible.
On the other hand... you would expect to see orders of magnitude more speciation in bacteria as a result, since they outnumber us by so much, and we haven't observed that, meaning that a working hypothesis of "probably not" would be a safe bet.
It'd be fascinating, if true, which is, I guess, why there are as many people looking for that particular grail as there are...
When people say "personal home robot" what I think they're looking for is a robotic maid. Rosy the robot. Pick my crap up. Dust. Organize things. Clean. Make me food. Clean up. etc.
The roomba etc are about as close as we've gotten to that. And the roomba has so many fucking problems.
To be entirely fair, until we get further along with room temperature superconductors, you just can't build something like a Roomba without the cat ass magnets.