The Columbus Dispatch is reporting that Ohio University leads the nation in illegal music download notifications, having received 1,287 RIAA complaints since September, with between ten and 15 notices arriving daily.
Gives me kind of a warm, fuzzy feeling about Ohio U.
The same problem will exist that dogs pure-electric vehicles: existing infrastructure for delivering power and fuel for industrial and residential purposes won't be able to handle the additional load of millions of automobiles. Designing a practical car that will run on some alternative fuel or even battery power is not especially difficult, but you do need to get fuel to all those cars. That requires a distribution network rivaling that for gasoline. The cost of that buildout has to be factored in, it would take decades whether you're talking electric, hydrogen, methane, you-name-it, and is probably more than we can afford at this point anyway. The private sector is unlikely to ever undertake such project without some overriding motivation, and let's face it: the end of petroleum won't do it.
I doubt we'll ever need to invade Canada, per se. I can't imagine that Americans would tolerate slaughtering innocent Canucks for their petrochemicals. On the other hand, given the road that Bin Laden and George Bush have set us down, I wouldn't be surprised if Canada found itself annexed some day.
Never happen though. By the time China finishes off our industrial base so we can't support our military, and after Mexico has finished turning us into a clone of their own third-world nation, we wouldn't be able to attack Canada even if we wanted to. If they're smart, up in the North, they'll start building out their own power reserves: at some point our grid won't be able to handle them.
Perhaps this study will finally convince people to only use RAID for performance or huge-JBOD reasons, never for (the illusion of) reliability.
Properly done, mirroring can certainly increase the reliability of your storage solution. The servers in my basement are all mirrored and while I've experienced a couple of drive failures along the way I've never lost a byte. I make sure the drives have sufficient airflow to run at room temperature and they run on filtered power, but nothing lasts forever. So mirroring helps. Matter of fact, when I do have a crash, the system continues running on the remaining functional drive in the array: if it weren't for the fact that the server emails my cell phone I'd never know about it.
However, the myth that I would like to see dispelled is the one that goes "Oh cool! If I have a RAID 0+1 solution I don't need to worry about backups!"
True overall, but the United States did institute some significant curtailment of certain civil liberties during World War II, after which they were rescinded. So it can happen that a powerful government will voluntarily give up powers... but then again, this was the aftermath of a World War, in a different time, with a less apathetic population. Moreover, the current United States governments (all of them) seem Hell-bent on acquiring more power regardless of need.
But all of these statements -- that the Windows Virtualization Technology will be stunning...
Look, you said it yourself... FUD. Any time that Microsoft says "will be stunning", when referring to some future product, you know it means "we're promising everything our competition can already do that we aren't even close to delivering, plus some extra cool-sounding stuff so you'll hold off investing in them until we're ready." Look at the features Microsoft promised that Vista would ship with that got removed because they couldn't make them work in time, if at all. This will be no different. Microsoft marketing people must stand in front of the mirror before breakfast, telling lies just for the practice. I ignore all pre-release statements from those people until I have a CD in my hands. Why anyone would believe Microsoft's marketing department is just beyond me.
This is impressive from a purely technological perspective... but frankly, my own life just isn't that interesting, even to me, and there's still a lot of it that I'm trying very hard to forget.
... and the steps actors are taking to protect their digital assets.
What that really means is that actors are taking steps to protect their real-world asses, because CGI will, at some point, make actual physical actors unnecessary to the production of a movie. There still may be a need for people that look like popular computer-generated characters, I suppose, so that someone can show up at the various award ceremonies. But those individuals won't command multi-million-dollar salaries.
Like every other group of professionals that has been supplanted by advancing technology, don't be surprised to see them head off to Congress at some point to try and make CGI illegal for replacing live actors in feature films. These people actually have the money to buy such law, and I fully expect they will try. They have some time to spare, because the technology isn't ready for prime time, but give it ten years.
In the long run, it won't make any difference. They're screwed.
Let's see, 95's "sweet spot" was what, 32 Mb? Windows '98 was 64, Win2K did well in 256, XP likes 512+ and Vista really wants four gigabytes? Ouch. Of course, when you factor in how much less the cost per bit of memory and hard disk is compared to a decade ago, it's not too incredible... but still.
I think they mean they're making DDOS attacks more illegal. I can't believe that such destructive behavior was previously legal, nor do I believe that merely passing a law will have the slightest effect on reality. I mean, I'm frequently amazed at how stupidly U.S.-centric our Congress is when it passes laws regarding Internet crime, but I guess such thinking isn't limited to just our government. Practically speaking, such a law is likely to encourage more and more damaging attacks, just to show how ineffectual it is.
Personally, I think that government (any government) would be better off quietly diverting sufficient resources to law enforcement to enable them to catch these assholes. Throwing down the gauntlet by passing more legislation with much fanfare is just stupid and serves no real purpose. Unless they're being sneaky and trying to attract the DOS lightning to make it easier to nail the perpetrators... nah, they're not that smart.
The woman is a vigilante, taking traffic law into her own hands. End of story. If you've read any of my other posts on the subject you know what I think of SUV drivers in general, but I gotta say, this lady takes the cake. Shoot some video of her repeatedly doing her thing, send it to the cops (anonymously, if you prefer) and let them deal with it. It's their job, not yours, and I suspect that a pair of gun-toting officers showing up at her door asking for an explanation of her actions would put a stop to it. Matter of fact, make absolutely sure that this idiotic female sees you videotaping her: that might be enough all by itself. Throw some accountability back in her direction.
On the other hand, given that the proponents of most of those religions (those claiming to be firmly on God's side) have consistently persecuted those who were trying to make progress, and destroyed their accomplishments as "Works of the Devil", maybe it's really Satan that wants us advance, and God that is trying to hold us back. That won't be a popular view I'm sure, but looking at the past thousand years of human history it's just as reasonable.
Or maybe it's just a bunch of selfish, shortsighted human beings who are so focused on staying in control of everyone else that they lack the very enlightenment they claim to have already achieved via communion with God. I'd put my money on that explanation.
Any way you slice this, we can't stay where we are. We just can't. There are those who would like us to return to some idealized agrarian existence, without all that Satan-spawned science and technology to support us. The Western world is not going to put up with that, that's for sure, and even if we did nations like China and India will continue to progress at an accelerating pace. So we need technology, we need industry, but the industrial base we currently have won't support us long term.
That leaves us with but few options. All we can do is keep learning, and applying what we learn, and hope that it is enough to ensure our survival. Trying to maintain the status quo simply won't work anymore.
The real question is whether a human mind is being moved (i.e., the process is destructive to the source brain) or is simply being copied. If it's just being copied, hell, I'd be first in line. Immortality of a sort, I mean, it wouldn't be me, but it would be me... at least until the two minds began to diverge with differing experience. But if it's an either-or proposition, I'd have to think about it for a while. If nothing else, I'd want to have a bunch of other people make the jump before me, just to see how it works out (I hate being a guinea pig.)
I don't see that there's any difference. If it's got the mind of a human being, why does it matter whether the body is natural or artificial?
Mainly because the two aren't separate and distinct. Who we are, how our minds work, is very much tied into our bodies and how we perceive them (and how others perceive them.) I don't think that a disembodied once-human intelligence would be human anymore, not after a while, certainly it wouldn't be something that we could interact with as we interact with each other now. Sure, if you could copy/move you mind into a body that was indistinguishable from a human body (both to you and to others) that might be okay, but if you look like a machine people are going to think of you as a machine, and who knows what effect that would have. Presumably being a computer representation of a human mind would confer some interesting attributes: greater speed of thought perhaps, instant access to information... a group of converted human brains could communicate at such speeds that it is doubtful they could even be considered individual minds any longer. In any event, I suspect that anyone subjected to such changes would come out of it a very different "person". I'm not assuming that would be a bad thing, but they'd most certainly be different.
Arthur C. Clarke's novel A Meeting With Medusa explores what happens when a man is severely injured and is cybernetically augmented to a degree that he becomes less and less human as the story progress. You don't find out until the very end exactly what was done to him, that he wasn't just "repaired" after the original accident. Clarke himself referred to humans as "watery bags of unstable carbon compounds", and talked about the creatures of metal who would one day replace us.
A much more positive view of human-to-machine intelligence was described in the Heechee novels by Frederik Pohl. The way he presented matters, human minds were digitized (non-destructively) and then were able to create virtual-reality environments and interact with each other (and the vastly slower "real world") that way. So far as they were concerned, they were just ordinary folks with the ability to create any environment they wanted. They could easily be cloned or copied, and communicate with their originals (at a, to them, frustratingly slow pace.) The Heechee themselves, when you finally meet them, carry their ancestors around with them. At first, you think it's just some kind of odd custom, then you realize that they really are carrying their ancestors around with them. Anyway, Pohl's depiction of that technology was really cool, and if I had to get turned in to some kind of AI that's the way I'd want to do it.
Is a person any less of a person if their mind has been precisely simulated by an advanced computer, rather than using their original biological one?
Damned good question, and one to which we won't have an answer until we can actually perform such a simulation, if then! Hell, the legal and religious ramifications alone of such an accomplishment would be staggering. Does it have rights? Does it have a soul? Many would say "No" to one or both counts. For that matter, would a fully synthetic intelligence be granted the same rights? Whether you or I think that matters is irrelevant: believe me, the controversy will never end. So, I wouldn't automatically assume "yes" to any of the above, if I were you.
Yes, creating colonies of people is important, if you consider the survival of our species important (another open question, actually.) What kind of legacy would you like to leave behind you: grandchildren or grandrobots? I know which I would prefer, but then again, I'm old-fashioned about such things.
Downloading stored human minds into a human brain will probably never be possible: human brains aren't writable like RAM, and long-term data are stored in synaptic patterns that grow over time. However, granting that we are able to do this, it might not be the best way to go about it. I'd say a more likely scenario would be a first generation of children grown in artificial wombs from stored genetic material, or even from fertilized ova synthesized from scratch. That would avoid any issues of degradation or radiation damage from the trip, as long as the computer memories were kept intact. That first generation would be raised by robots and educated by AI, with succeeding generations gestated normally.
Building an interstellar vessel of any kind would be Mankind's greatest effort to date, but trying to get the people on this planet to agree upon how the AI should raise those children would be task of even greater magnitude.
Re:Why "Fortunately for the human race"?
on
Interstellar Ark
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· Score: 1
I guess I conveyed the wrong impression. My encounters with other kids up through high school were frequently violent, and taught me a. don't be afraid to fight if you have to, and b. don't fight if you don't have to (my ex-Marine uncle taught me that last part, it wasn't obvious to me at the time.) Some people enjoy beating the crap out of other people, as it happens I don't... but if you start something with me I will finish it, as quickly and efficiently as I can. So far as I'm concerned, it's much better if you are the one lying on the ground licking your wounds. If that makes me a pussy in your eyes, so be it.
But you're right... and I'm a firm believer in the right to bear arms, and the only reason I don't own a gun at this time in my life is that I don't feel the need. My neighbors are pretty civilized, you see. If I ever do feel the need, you can bet I'll be carrying something. But that wasn't the point I was originally addressing anyway.
True, but on the other hand multiple moving targets are even harder to hit. In other words, a large number of human-settled worlds would give us some redundancy, civilization-wise.
Slashdot Mirror
The Columbus Dispatch is reporting that Ohio University leads the nation in illegal music download notifications, having received 1,287 RIAA complaints since September, with between ten and 15 notices arriving daily.
Gives me kind of a warm, fuzzy feeling about Ohio U.
Instead of Acrobat Bleeder, try running Foxit Software's free FoxitReader. Slick and fast, and I haven't had it fail to render a PDF yet.
Which just means that they switched from one variant of Unix to another variant of Unix.
The same problem will exist that dogs pure-electric vehicles: existing infrastructure for delivering power and fuel for industrial and residential purposes won't be able to handle the additional load of millions of automobiles. Designing a practical car that will run on some alternative fuel or even battery power is not especially difficult, but you do need to get fuel to all those cars. That requires a distribution network rivaling that for gasoline. The cost of that buildout has to be factored in, it would take decades whether you're talking electric, hydrogen, methane, you-name-it, and is probably more than we can afford at this point anyway. The private sector is unlikely to ever undertake such project without some overriding motivation, and let's face it: the end of petroleum won't do it.
Stop writing misleading headlines like these just to grap page-views ...
Ah, I believe you mispelled grep.
they've been serving up Windows Genuine Advantage for some time now.
I doubt we'll ever need to invade Canada, per se. I can't imagine that Americans would tolerate slaughtering innocent Canucks for their petrochemicals. On the other hand, given the road that Bin Laden and George Bush have set us down, I wouldn't be surprised if Canada found itself annexed some day.
Never happen though. By the time China finishes off our industrial base so we can't support our military, and after Mexico has finished turning us into a clone of their own third-world nation, we wouldn't be able to attack Canada even if we wanted to. If they're smart, up in the North, they'll start building out their own power reserves: at some point our grid won't be able to handle them.
As I understand it, because it burns rather hot tends to produce nitrous oxides. Or something like that. IANAC.
Perhaps this study will finally convince people to only use RAID for performance or huge-JBOD reasons, never for (the illusion of) reliability.
Properly done, mirroring can certainly increase the reliability of your storage solution. The servers in my basement are all mirrored and while I've experienced a couple of drive failures along the way I've never lost a byte. I make sure the drives have sufficient airflow to run at room temperature and they run on filtered power, but nothing lasts forever. So mirroring helps. Matter of fact, when I do have a crash, the system continues running on the remaining functional drive in the array: if it weren't for the fact that the server emails my cell phone I'd never know about it.
However, the myth that I would like to see dispelled is the one that goes "Oh cool! If I have a RAID 0+1 solution I don't need to worry about backups!"
Gagh.
True overall, but the United States did institute some significant curtailment of certain civil liberties during World War II, after which they were rescinded. So it can happen that a powerful government will voluntarily give up powers ... but then again, this was the aftermath of a World War, in a different time, with a less apathetic population. Moreover, the current United States governments (all of them) seem Hell-bent on acquiring more power regardless of need.
How will he safety store these terrabytes?
Well, if they're really terra bytes, I presume he'll simply bury them.
But all of these statements -- that the Windows Virtualization Technology will be stunning ...
... FUD. Any time that Microsoft says "will be stunning", when referring to some future product, you know it means "we're promising everything our competition can already do that we aren't even close to delivering, plus some extra cool-sounding stuff so you'll hold off investing in them until we're ready." Look at the features Microsoft promised that Vista would ship with that got removed because they couldn't make them work in time, if at all. This will be no different. Microsoft marketing people must stand in front of the mirror before breakfast, telling lies just for the practice. I ignore all pre-release statements from those people until I have a CD in my hands. Why anyone would believe Microsoft's marketing department is just beyond me.
Look, you said it yourself
This is impressive from a purely technological perspective ... but frankly, my own life just isn't that interesting, even to me, and there's still a lot of it that I'm trying very hard to forget.
... and the steps actors are taking to protect their digital assets.
What that really means is that actors are taking steps to protect their real-world asses, because CGI will, at some point, make actual physical actors unnecessary to the production of a movie. There still may be a need for people that look like popular computer-generated characters, I suppose, so that someone can show up at the various award ceremonies. But those individuals won't command multi-million-dollar salaries.
Like every other group of professionals that has been supplanted by advancing technology, don't be surprised to see them head off to Congress at some point to try and make CGI illegal for replacing live actors in feature films. These people actually have the money to buy such law, and I fully expect they will try. They have some time to spare, because the technology isn't ready for prime time, but give it ten years.
In the long run, it won't make any difference. They're screwed.
Let's see, 95's "sweet spot" was what, 32 Mb? Windows '98 was 64, Win2K did well in 256, XP likes 512+ and Vista really wants four gigabytes? Ouch. Of course, when you factor in how much less the cost per bit of memory and hard disk is compared to a decade ago, it's not too incredible ... but still.
I think they mean they're making DDOS attacks more illegal. I can't believe that such destructive behavior was previously legal, nor do I believe that merely passing a law will have the slightest effect on reality. I mean, I'm frequently amazed at how stupidly U.S.-centric our Congress is when it passes laws regarding Internet crime, but I guess such thinking isn't limited to just our government. Practically speaking, such a law is likely to encourage more and more damaging attacks, just to show how ineffectual it is.
... nah, they're not that smart.
Personally, I think that government (any government) would be better off quietly diverting sufficient resources to law enforcement to enable them to catch these assholes. Throwing down the gauntlet by passing more legislation with much fanfare is just stupid and serves no real purpose. Unless they're being sneaky and trying to attract the DOS lightning to make it easier to nail the perpetrators
The woman is a vigilante, taking traffic law into her own hands. End of story. If you've read any of my other posts on the subject you know what I think of SUV drivers in general, but I gotta say, this lady takes the cake. Shoot some video of her repeatedly doing her thing, send it to the cops (anonymously, if you prefer) and let them deal with it. It's their job, not yours, and I suspect that a pair of gun-toting officers showing up at her door asking for an explanation of her actions would put a stop to it. Matter of fact, make absolutely sure that this idiotic female sees you videotaping her: that might be enough all by itself. Throw some accountability back in her direction.
What if everybody has enough currency to support themselves comfortably, instead of our current situation?
... we don't need currency? Okay, forget I said that.
What if
On the other hand, given that the proponents of most of those religions (those claiming to be firmly on God's side) have consistently persecuted those who were trying to make progress, and destroyed their accomplishments as "Works of the Devil", maybe it's really Satan that wants us advance, and God that is trying to hold us back. That won't be a popular view I'm sure, but looking at the past thousand years of human history it's just as reasonable.
Or maybe it's just a bunch of selfish, shortsighted human beings who are so focused on staying in control of everyone else that they lack the very enlightenment they claim to have already achieved via communion with God. I'd put my money on that explanation.
Any way you slice this, we can't stay where we are. We just can't. There are those who would like us to return to some idealized agrarian existence, without all that Satan-spawned science and technology to support us. The Western world is not going to put up with that, that's for sure, and even if we did nations like China and India will continue to progress at an accelerating pace. So we need technology, we need industry, but the industrial base we currently have won't support us long term.
That leaves us with but few options. All we can do is keep learning, and applying what we learn, and hope that it is enough to ensure our survival. Trying to maintain the status quo simply won't work anymore.
The real question is whether a human mind is being moved (i.e., the process is destructive to the source brain) or is simply being copied. If it's just being copied, hell, I'd be first in line. Immortality of a sort, I mean, it wouldn't be me, but it would be me ... at least until the two minds began to diverge with differing experience. But if it's an either-or proposition, I'd have to think about it for a while. If nothing else, I'd want to have a bunch of other people make the jump before me, just to see how it works out (I hate being a guinea pig.)
... a group of converted human brains could communicate at such speeds that it is doubtful they could even be considered individual minds any longer. In any event, I suspect that anyone subjected to such changes would come out of it a very different "person". I'm not assuming that would be a bad thing, but they'd most certainly be different.
I don't see that there's any difference. If it's got the mind of a human being, why does it matter whether the body is natural or artificial?
Mainly because the two aren't separate and distinct. Who we are, how our minds work, is very much tied into our bodies and how we perceive them (and how others perceive them.) I don't think that a disembodied once-human intelligence would be human anymore, not after a while, certainly it wouldn't be something that we could interact with as we interact with each other now. Sure, if you could copy/move you mind into a body that was indistinguishable from a human body (both to you and to others) that might be okay, but if you look like a machine people are going to think of you as a machine, and who knows what effect that would have. Presumably being a computer representation of a human mind would confer some interesting attributes: greater speed of thought perhaps, instant access to information
Arthur C. Clarke's novel A Meeting With Medusa explores what happens when a man is severely injured and is cybernetically augmented to a degree that he becomes less and less human as the story progress. You don't find out until the very end exactly what was done to him, that he wasn't just "repaired" after the original accident. Clarke himself referred to humans as "watery bags of unstable carbon compounds", and talked about the creatures of metal who would one day replace us.
A much more positive view of human-to-machine intelligence was described in the Heechee novels by Frederik Pohl. The way he presented matters, human minds were digitized (non-destructively) and then were able to create virtual-reality environments and interact with each other (and the vastly slower "real world") that way. So far as they were concerned, they were just ordinary folks with the ability to create any environment they wanted. They could easily be cloned or copied, and communicate with their originals (at a, to them, frustratingly slow pace.) The Heechee themselves, when you finally meet them, carry their ancestors around with them. At first, you think it's just some kind of odd custom, then you realize that they really are carrying their ancestors around with them. Anyway, Pohl's depiction of that technology was really cool, and if I had to get turned in to some kind of AI that's the way I'd want to do it.
Is a person any less of a person if their mind has been precisely simulated by an advanced computer, rather than using their original biological one?
Damned good question, and one to which we won't have an answer until we can actually perform such a simulation, if then! Hell, the legal and religious ramifications alone of such an accomplishment would be staggering. Does it have rights? Does it have a soul? Many would say "No" to one or both counts. For that matter, would a fully synthetic intelligence be granted the same rights? Whether you or I think that matters is irrelevant: believe me, the controversy will never end. So, I wouldn't automatically assume "yes" to any of the above, if I were you.
Yes, creating colonies of people is important, if you consider the survival of our species important (another open question, actually.) What kind of legacy would you like to leave behind you: grandchildren or grandrobots? I know which I would prefer, but then again, I'm old-fashioned about such things.
Downloading stored human minds into a human brain will probably never be possible: human brains aren't writable like RAM, and long-term data are stored in synaptic patterns that grow over time. However, granting that we are able to do this, it might not be the best way to go about it. I'd say a more likely scenario would be a first generation of children grown in artificial wombs from stored genetic material, or even from fertilized ova synthesized from scratch. That would avoid any issues of degradation or radiation damage from the trip, as long as the computer memories were kept intact. That first generation would be raised by robots and educated by AI, with succeeding generations gestated normally.
Building an interstellar vessel of any kind would be Mankind's greatest effort to date, but trying to get the people on this planet to agree upon how the AI should raise those children would be task of even greater magnitude.
I guess I conveyed the wrong impression. My encounters with other kids up through high school were frequently violent, and taught me a. don't be afraid to fight if you have to, and b. don't fight if you don't have to (my ex-Marine uncle taught me that last part, it wasn't obvious to me at the time.) Some people enjoy beating the crap out of other people, as it happens I don't ... but if you start something with me I will finish it, as quickly and efficiently as I can. So far as I'm concerned, it's much better if you are the one lying on the ground licking your wounds. If that makes me a pussy in your eyes, so be it.
... and I'm a firm believer in the right to bear arms, and the only reason I don't own a gun at this time in my life is that I don't feel the need. My neighbors are pretty civilized, you see. If I ever do feel the need, you can bet I'll be carrying something. But that wasn't the point I was originally addressing anyway.
But you're right
True, but on the other hand multiple moving targets are even harder to hit. In other words, a large number of human-settled worlds would give us some redundancy, civilization-wise.
That's just goofy.
No, that's reality distortion, something which is intrinsic to Jobs' personality.
Yes, but frankly I'm not interested in sending out a colony of robots. I thought the idea here was to plant colonies of people.