Wait a bit. Android will get remote wiping. Blackberry and Windows Mobile have it, and it's lack was one of the biggest complaints businesses had about the iPhone until the feature was added.
I very much doubt it's intended for the general public. It's an add on to a standard feature that lets a corporate IT department disable and/or wipe corporate phones that are stolen.
Yes, it's been implemented since OS 3.0 I believe. It's a business feature, and it's lack in the iPhone was cited as one of the reasons the iPhone was business unfriendly. It lets businesses wipe phones that have been stolen or lost. Many smart phones, including Blackberries, have the same feature.
Apple's patent seems to be more about tools to figure out whether you SHOULD wipe the device.
This is pretty clearly linked to the remote-wipe feature Apple added to the iPhone to make it more business friendly. Apple's not trying to protect you from yourself, they're trying to make it easier for your employer to detect when the iPhone they provided you with has been stolen and should be wiped.
Su-per-sym-met-ry. Five syllables. Su-sy. Two syllables. See why they did it?
If your job involved referring to supersymmetry constantly you'd probably shorten it too. Does the abbreviation belong in a news article? Maybe not, but it doesn't really hurt anything.
"I don't want to buy ten widgets for $10 today if I think I can get eleven for the same price tomorrow. So the widgets don't sell, the widget vendor gets desperate and drops his prices, and now he has to cut wages or lay off employees, and the cycle continues."
Hm. The computer industry has never known any other situation. It seems to be doing pretty well.
Ah, see, the problem is you've got wrong how the idea of inflation came about.
Basically, since the CMB is so uniform, the different parts of the cosmos must have been in contact at some point in the past. When you run the numbers, this cannot have been the case if the old big bang theory (a big explosion, followed by slowing in the rate of expansion due to gravity) were the case. Enter inflation. It solves the CMB uniformity problem.
But the CMB isn't completely uniform - there are fluctuations. Well, inflation also explains those, VERY well. I saw the observation vs. theory graph once. It's very good.
Inflation is a good model. It's not a hack that some guy made up one day because it happened to fit one particular observation and nothing else.
It's possible for optical cables to perform better than electrical. Besides the grounding issue that the other reply mentioned, optical cables can have fewer connection problems (they don't corrode) and don't pick up stray interference.
Sure, if the bits get to the other end the sound is exactly the same. The optical cable comes in handy if the bits are NOT always getting to the other end. It's not a subtle thing, it's not something you have to be an audiophile to hear, and it's usually easily fixed by simply cleaning electrical connectors, but it is possible.
Personally, I use optical cables because a) that's what kind of digital connector my receiver has and b) they cost about the same as electrical cables (i.e. cheap, when you buy both at appropriate places).
In the case of the super SATA cable, you wouldn't hear anything (because your computer wouldn't boot) unless the bits were making it over the wire.
Some atheists? I have yet to meet an atheist who doesn't behave closer to the idealized "how Jesus behaved" than a large fraction of the Christians in the world. And that large fraction tends to be the more adamantly Christian at that.
" I've never heard of a college designing, testing, and printing their own textbooks"
It happens all the time. And did long before Lulu. TAs or some unlucky bookstore employee used to photocopy the things.
Stewart's math text actually isn't as badly overpriced as many textbooks - the full text is over a thousand pages and is generally used for up to four semesters, plus being a valuable reference afterward.
"but I'd be surprised if he gets more than $10-$15 for each book that sells."
I'd be VERY surprised if he made that much. While single author books work a bit differently, many textbooks now are compilations. I certainly don't get any cut at all from book chapters.
Read more carefully. I did not say "artificial intelligence." I said "intelligence." We certainly know intelligence is possible. But we do not know how to create it artificially, yet.
The idea that artificial intelligence is impossible is ridiculous. It may be impossible, or prohibitively difficult, to create artificial intelligence using classical computers, but that doesn't have any bearing on whether AI itself is possible.
Kurzweil says a lot of things that aren't necessarily justified, or are overly optimistic, but he sees that as his job. Everything Kurzweil says is founded on some sort of extrapolation of actual observations though. On the other hand, Chopra just makes stuff up, promises people he can make them feel better, and charges them for it.
A non-erasable FPGA using a a fuse-type approach or something similar undergoes physical changes when it is programmed. Depending on what you consider a "physical change," so do chips that are UV or electrically erasable.
As the other poster pointed out, your example is irrelevant.
You are actually correct (but not in the way that you think) in that an actual general purpose computer is limited by it's hardware. But that limitation is in the amount of memory it has, and possibly by the amount of time you want to wait around for it to finish a calculation. It is NOT limited, in a computational sense, by the "fixed" nature of the circuits in the CPU. Your C64 CPU, given access to an adequate amount of memory and time, is quite capable of doing any calculation that any other classical computer is capable of.
"Why is it so hard to understand how compression algorithms works?"
Not sure. Why is it? I'm pretty sure Kurzweil is talking about the non-trivial example, where your compression algorithm takes up a very small amount of space. Your example is technically correct, in a pedantic kind of way, but isn't relevant.
If you actually understood compression, you'd understand that the compressibility (using the word in the usual, non-trivial way) is an indication of the actual information content of a dataset. Most data we deal with, whether pictures, video, audio, text or other recordings is sparse - it contains less information than the number of samples is capable of encoding. That is, it is compressible.
"Well, decades later it still hasn't happened and the only things in the field of computer science that seems to have a life of its own are spam and computer viruses."
I don't know how old you are, but things that people wondered whether computers could even do ten or twenty years ago are now common place. My phone is capable of doing reasonable hand writing and speech recognition. Thirty years ago that was the stuff of science fiction and even up to ten it was an impractical novelty. That advances in computer vision in the last five to ten years have been astonishing. Things like realtime object recognition and tracking that used to be pipe dreams are now implemented in toys.
None of those are full AI, but they're important components, and the rate of progress has increased over time. Our basic understanding of how the brain works has likewise increased rapidly in the last ten years. You mention fMRI yourself (a pretty strange example if you were trying to make the point that we haven't made any progress towards understanding the brain). The has also been an explosion in brain computer interfaces, and even brain prosthetics.
We're not going to have science fiction hard AI in the next couple of years, and probably not in the next ten, but it's going to happen, and sooner than you probably think.
As does a computer. Effectively, that's what software is - virtual reconfiguration of the computer, on the fly. Read some Turing. As someone else pointed out, if you go for the physical reconfiguration, you can use FPGAs.
You're conflating things that are entirely made up and claimed to be fact, predictions based on certain observations (singularity), and things that are known to be possible but that we don't know how to pull off artificially yet (intelligence). These three categories are very different. PZ actually should be ashamed for being so lazy as to compare Kurzweil, particularly in this instance, to Chopra.
The posts that are after a +5 whatever are frequently not worth reading. Sometimes they are though, simply because, when it works, the moderation system encourages at least some useful content.
The "checkin" scheme doesn't. All it requires is that you be at a place. Knowing that Eldavojohn is mayor of 1st St. Chipotle can I tell if it's a good place to eat? Can I tell if Eldavojohn likes it, even? No.
You're right, it's a game. But it seems very much like a useless one. Free advertising, I guess. I suppose if I owned a restaurant I'd be all in favour of people checking in from it.
Yeah, but then Jaimie would have to read (and copy) more than the first paragraph.
To be fair, PZ obviously slept through the class in high school where they teach you that the first paragraph of a news article should act as an abstract.
Not quite. The ephemerides data changes with position and over time. Normal gps units download updates slowly from the satellites themselves. Cell phone gps can speed this up by grabbing the data over the cell data network. IIRC most of the cell phone gps chips can ONLY do this, which means they can't work without a cell data connection. It appears that the cell companies here in Canada let this data pass even if you don't have a data connection. Others may not. And if you're outside cell reception you might be SOL.
Engaget is a pretty general tech site. They do carry rumors occasionally, but mostly do actual reviews of real products they have in their hands. They certainly don't only give favorable reviews only to Apple products. They've been quite enthusiastic about several Android phones, for example.
If you learn to adjust your backlight then you won't have any problem with the screen. And charging every couple of days isn't a big burden to most people.
So you've managed to go through his list and find other devices that (maybe) do almost all his items better than a tablet. So let's see, instead of an iPad you're suggesting I get (and carry around) a notebook, an eBook reader and... an iPad.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait a bit. Android will get remote wiping. Blackberry and Windows Mobile have it, and it's lack was one of the biggest complaints businesses had about the iPhone until the feature was added.
I very much doubt it's intended for the general public. It's an add on to a standard feature that lets a corporate IT department disable and/or wipe corporate phones that are stolen.
Yes, it's been implemented since OS 3.0 I believe. It's a business feature, and it's lack in the iPhone was cited as one of the reasons the iPhone was business unfriendly. It lets businesses wipe phones that have been stolen or lost. Many smart phones, including Blackberries, have the same feature.
Apple's patent seems to be more about tools to figure out whether you SHOULD wipe the device.
This is pretty clearly linked to the remote-wipe feature Apple added to the iPhone to make it more business friendly. Apple's not trying to protect you from yourself, they're trying to make it easier for your employer to detect when the iPhone they provided you with has been stolen and should be wiped.
Su-per-sym-met-ry. Five syllables. Su-sy. Two syllables. See why they did it?
If your job involved referring to supersymmetry constantly you'd probably shorten it too. Does the abbreviation belong in a news article? Maybe not, but it doesn't really hurt anything.
"I don't want to buy ten widgets for $10 today if I think I can get eleven for the same price tomorrow. So the widgets don't sell, the widget vendor gets desperate and drops his prices, and now he has to cut wages or lay off employees, and the cycle continues."
Hm. The computer industry has never known any other situation. It seems to be doing pretty well.
Ah, see, the problem is you've got wrong how the idea of inflation came about.
Basically, since the CMB is so uniform, the different parts of the cosmos must have been in contact at some point in the past. When you run the numbers, this cannot have been the case if the old big bang theory (a big explosion, followed by slowing in the rate of expansion due to gravity) were the case. Enter inflation. It solves the CMB uniformity problem.
But the CMB isn't completely uniform - there are fluctuations. Well, inflation also explains those, VERY well. I saw the observation vs. theory graph once. It's very good.
Inflation is a good model. It's not a hack that some guy made up one day because it happened to fit one particular observation and nothing else.
It's possible for optical cables to perform better than electrical. Besides the grounding issue that the other reply mentioned, optical cables can have fewer connection problems (they don't corrode) and don't pick up stray interference.
Sure, if the bits get to the other end the sound is exactly the same. The optical cable comes in handy if the bits are NOT always getting to the other end. It's not a subtle thing, it's not something you have to be an audiophile to hear, and it's usually easily fixed by simply cleaning electrical connectors, but it is possible.
Personally, I use optical cables because a) that's what kind of digital connector my receiver has and b) they cost about the same as electrical cables (i.e. cheap, when you buy both at appropriate places).
In the case of the super SATA cable, you wouldn't hear anything (because your computer wouldn't boot) unless the bits were making it over the wire.
"Heck I know some atheists that fit #2."
Some atheists? I have yet to meet an atheist who doesn't behave closer to the idealized "how Jesus behaved" than a large fraction of the Christians in the world. And that large fraction tends to be the more adamantly Christian at that.
" I've never heard of a college designing, testing, and printing their own textbooks"
It happens all the time. And did long before Lulu. TAs or some unlucky bookstore employee used to photocopy the things.
Stewart's math text actually isn't as badly overpriced as many textbooks - the full text is over a thousand pages and is generally used for up to four semesters, plus being a valuable reference afterward.
"but I'd be surprised if he gets more than $10-$15 for each book that sells."
I'd be VERY surprised if he made that much. While single author books work a bit differently, many textbooks now are compilations. I certainly don't get any cut at all from book chapters.
Read more carefully. I did not say "artificial intelligence." I said "intelligence." We certainly know intelligence is possible. But we do not know how to create it artificially, yet.
The idea that artificial intelligence is impossible is ridiculous. It may be impossible, or prohibitively difficult, to create artificial intelligence using classical computers, but that doesn't have any bearing on whether AI itself is possible.
Kurzweil says a lot of things that aren't necessarily justified, or are overly optimistic, but he sees that as his job. Everything Kurzweil says is founded on some sort of extrapolation of actual observations though. On the other hand, Chopra just makes stuff up, promises people he can make them feel better, and charges them for it.
Frequently not worth reading. A +5 Troll doesn't come around very much (nor a +5 Flamebait).
A non-erasable FPGA using a a fuse-type approach or something similar undergoes physical changes when it is programmed. Depending on what you consider a "physical change," so do chips that are UV or electrically erasable.
As the other poster pointed out, your example is irrelevant.
You are actually correct (but not in the way that you think) in that an actual general purpose computer is limited by it's hardware. But that limitation is in the amount of memory it has, and possibly by the amount of time you want to wait around for it to finish a calculation. It is NOT limited, in a computational sense, by the "fixed" nature of the circuits in the CPU. Your C64 CPU, given access to an adequate amount of memory and time, is quite capable of doing any calculation that any other classical computer is capable of.
Read this to start.
"Why is it so hard to understand how compression algorithms works?"
Not sure. Why is it? I'm pretty sure Kurzweil is talking about the non-trivial example, where your compression algorithm takes up a very small amount of space. Your example is technically correct, in a pedantic kind of way, but isn't relevant.
If you actually understood compression, you'd understand that the compressibility (using the word in the usual, non-trivial way) is an indication of the actual information content of a dataset. Most data we deal with, whether pictures, video, audio, text or other recordings is sparse - it contains less information than the number of samples is capable of encoding. That is, it is compressible.
"Well, decades later it still hasn't happened and the only things in the field of computer science that seems to have a life of its own are spam and computer viruses."
I don't know how old you are, but things that people wondered whether computers could even do ten or twenty years ago are now common place. My phone is capable of doing reasonable hand writing and speech recognition. Thirty years ago that was the stuff of science fiction and even up to ten it was an impractical novelty. That advances in computer vision in the last five to ten years have been astonishing. Things like realtime object recognition and tracking that used to be pipe dreams are now implemented in toys.
None of those are full AI, but they're important components, and the rate of progress has increased over time. Our basic understanding of how the brain works has likewise increased rapidly in the last ten years. You mention fMRI yourself (a pretty strange example if you were trying to make the point that we haven't made any progress towards understanding the brain). The has also been an explosion in brain computer interfaces, and even brain prosthetics.
We're not going to have science fiction hard AI in the next couple of years, and probably not in the next ten, but it's going to happen, and sooner than you probably think.
As does a computer. Effectively, that's what software is - virtual reconfiguration of the computer, on the fly. Read some Turing. As someone else pointed out, if you go for the physical reconfiguration, you can use FPGAs.
You're conflating things that are entirely made up and claimed to be fact, predictions based on certain observations (singularity), and things that are known to be possible but that we don't know how to pull off artificially yet (intelligence). These three categories are very different. PZ actually should be ashamed for being so lazy as to compare Kurzweil, particularly in this instance, to Chopra.
The posts that are after a +5 whatever are frequently not worth reading. Sometimes they are though, simply because, when it works, the moderation system encourages at least some useful content.
The "checkin" scheme doesn't. All it requires is that you be at a place. Knowing that Eldavojohn is mayor of 1st St. Chipotle can I tell if it's a good place to eat? Can I tell if Eldavojohn likes it, even? No.
You're right, it's a game. But it seems very much like a useless one. Free advertising, I guess. I suppose if I owned a restaurant I'd be all in favour of people checking in from it.
Yeah, but then Jaimie would have to read (and copy) more than the first paragraph.
To be fair, PZ obviously slept through the class in high school where they teach you that the first paragraph of a news article should act as an abstract.
Not quite. The ephemerides data changes with position and over time. Normal gps units download updates slowly from the satellites themselves. Cell phone gps can speed this up by grabbing the data over the cell data network. IIRC most of the cell phone gps chips can ONLY do this, which means they can't work without a cell data connection. It appears that the cell companies here in Canada let this data pass even if you don't have a data connection. Others may not. And if you're outside cell reception you might be SOL.
Engaget is a pretty general tech site. They do carry rumors occasionally, but mostly do actual reviews of real products they have in their hands. They certainly don't only give favorable reviews only to Apple products. They've been quite enthusiastic about several Android phones, for example.
Precedent says assignment is :=. C programmers are lazy and didn't want to have to hit a different key.
If you learn to adjust your backlight then you won't have any problem with the screen. And charging every couple of days isn't a big burden to most people.
So you've managed to go through his list and find other devices that (maybe) do almost all his items better than a tablet. So let's see, instead of an iPad you're suggesting I get (and carry around) a notebook, an eBook reader and... an iPad.
That's very frugal of you.