You can patent circuits can't you? Why not software?
Because a circuit isn't math. It can be described by math, but a circuit isn't math. You can say "I have invented a type of semiconductor-based transistor whose characteristic IV curve is described by the following formula:" and you can patent that transistor.
You cannot patent the formula itself that describes the operation of the transistor. Because that is math.
Software is math. It is itself nothing more than a description of mathematical operations. Not a physical entity that can be described by math, like a circuit or a machine. It is the description itself.
Here's another way of looking at it. Say I designed a computer whose ISA was standard mathematical expressions in ASCII code. The equation "x = a + b" could be directly input into the computer and the operation performed. Hopefully you can see that "x = a + b" is math. If so, then it is no different in a traditional computer, where the same math equation is converted into a machine-readable binary format. It's still just math.
I seriously doubt computing has been advanced primarily due to patents.
That's nice, because I'm saying exactly the opposite of that. I'm saying computing advanced so quickly because there weren't any software patents. I said if there had been software patents, then all of those things you studied in school would have been covered by patents, and unavailable for use by free software. Fortunately, this is not the case. Yet some people think they should have the right to patent their own software, software that wouldn't exist if they hadn't ridden on the backs of those who worked in the software patent-free era.
That is like saying a nut and bolt is physics. You can't patent physics. A refrigerater using a compressor, a gas, an expansion valve, and a condenser is just physics.
No it isn't. A refrigerator can be described by physics, but it is not physics. The physics-based description is, by definition, physics.
Or to use the example from my first post -- a ball thrown in the air follows a parabola. The ball's motion can be described by math. But the ball isn't math. The description of its path, h = -9.8t^2 + vt + c, is math. And you can convert that description into any equivalent language, and it will still be math. Machine language is just another language for describing math.
Software is the description. It is literally a language that describes mathematical actions. It is not the actions themselves. It is as if each byte of software was a description of the physics of nuts and bolts. It requires a computer to take that description and perform actions based on it. The computer is the refrigerator. You can patent the computer. Software is the description of how the compressor, condesor, etc should work. Software is not the compressor. It's the math behind it. Software is math. Saying software isn't math is like saying the parabolic equation above isn't math, because it describes a ball's motion.
Math, can represent what is happening, and it can be used to determine what will happen, but software isn't math.
Yes it is. Software is nothing but a series of mathematical operations expressions. It's in a binary format a computer can read, but it is, literally, actually, and only, a series of mathematical statements. It starts as a series of human-readable mathematical statements, and is translated into machine-readable mathematical statements, yet the resulting binary remains nothing more than a series of mathematical statements. The ASCII code that you see here: "x:= a + b" is no different in any way from the ASCII CODE: "add r1, r2, r3" is no different in any way than the binary equivalent of that instruction for a given ISA. What's the difference between the same statement, one expressed in ASCII and one in MIPS? Nothing. They're exactly the same math statement. They're both math. One cannot be math, yet the other not, because they are the same statement.
You liken it to a car engine, the behavior of which is described by physics, but which isn't itself physics. The car engine here is the computer which is capable of reading the binary math statements, and controls millions of tiny electrical switches based on that input. The operation of that computer can be described by math, but the computer isn't math.
The instructions that the computer reads? Those ARE math, literally. They are literally a language that expresses mathematical operations. Not math as embodied in the behavior of a physical entity. Math itself.
(And, IMO, shouldn't be patentable. But of course, it's easy for me to say that because I don't hold any patents, least of all a software patent.)
Sure, but for anyone coming from the other side, who does have software patents and is thus in favor of keeping them, all I can say is this: You would be nowhere and have nothing if patents had been allowed in the first thirty years of electronic computing. All the sorting algorithms, all the OS scheduler algorithms, all the compiler technology, all the things you take for granted every day, would have been locked up and all the amazing development that required freely taking these basic ideas as building blocks for more ideas would have faced repeated decade-long roadblocks. The environment in which you are creating your software patents would not exist if they had been able to place those roadblocks to progress just as you are doing today.
So sucks to be you, Mr. Software Patent Holder, but the health and development of the industry requires you to take down your toll booth.
Patenting software is like patenting a math equation.
It's not even "like", it is patenting math. Software is math. Someone might say that everything can be reduced to math, but the fact is that a ball tossed in the air may follow a parabola, but the ball isn't math, it is just described by math. Whereas software is math, as surely as "y = ax^2 + bx + c" is math. One is a human-readable representation of a pure mathematical concept, and software is a machine-readable representation of a pure mathematical concept. You can't patent the human-readable form of math, you should not be able to patent the machine-readable form of the exact same math.
You can patent the machine that is capable of reading and acting on the mathematical operations described by the software. But not the software itself, because that is, literally, no metaphor at all, patenting math.
I've seen private inventors being run over by big business, who has a tendency to totally ignore patents that isn't owned by themselves
The sad part is that if Big N is like many other tech companies, they are literally ignoring patents in the sense that they explicitly tell their engineers not to do patent searches or otherwise try to figure out if any of the things they create in the course of doing their jobs are covered by a patent.
If patents were land mines, and technology were a country, it would be Afghanistan. Or maybe the Korean DMZ. There's so many patents that it's next to impossible not to violate at least one in any non-trivial piece of technology. Even if you do a patent search, you aren't guaranteed to find every potentially applicable patent, nor be able to sort out which do and don't apply in precisely the same way a hypothetical judge would. Yet if you are aware of the existence of a potentially applicable patent, and are found to be in violation, then that's treble damages. Even just doing the search to begin with could imply that you knew of the patent and knowingly violated it.
Thus, they ignore the patents, and hope for the best. When they violate another tech company's patent, then hopefully their own pile of patents gives them leverage. If it's a small inventor, they can either settle or hope the inventor can't afford the legal battle. If it's a patent troll, then they're basically screwed.
I don't know about this case in detail, but it certainly seems plausible to me that Nintendo engineers, deliberately ignorant of any patents and given the concept for a controller with analog triggers that "click" when fully depressed, came up with an invention very similar to the one in the patent.
Private inventors certainly get screwed by this setup. The big tech companies whose engineers are actually making things get screwed too. The system is broken. The only people it is working for are people who do nothing but buy up other peoples' patents, and then sue other companies for violating them, never inventing nor creating anything themselves except obstacles to progress. This is the opposite of the intention of the patent system. It's broken.
I haven't read the patent either, but I have a hard time imagining how something superficially described as a conductance sensor would in the details turn out to be a pwm signal. I mean conductance sensor pretty strongly implies it's the conductance that changes. Says pot to me.
That's a great question. I saw a report on TV not long ago which sought to address this question. The report attempted to look at all factors including costs and environmental impact associated with batteries and the additional electronics/motors, etc. According to the report, only two or maybe three hybrids in current production are actually improvements over ICE. Two of which are made by Toyota. I forget what the questionable third one was.
Okay, let's assume I don't give a rats ass about cost (I do, that's why I own an ultra compact gas burner instead of a hybrid, but lets just say), and only care about environmental impact. Assume that the batteries will be fully recycled (seems likely as Toyota is paying people $200 to bring their batteries back). How many of the hybrids come out ahead in this regard?
That's 40 miles on stored electricity and then the gasoline engine kicks in and it acts pretty much like a regular hybrid.
Except for one important difference. In a regular hybrid, both the ICE and the electric motor are connected to the drive train through the transmission, and one the other or both apply power to the wheels depending on the situation. So the ICE has to more or less be designed like a normal car engine. It can slouch on the low end where the electric motor does the majority of the work, but still needs to operate across a wide range of rpms, and like all ICEs this means it is sometimes running in its optimal band, and other times not.
In the Chevy Volt, only the electric motor is connected to the transmission, and is always what supplies power to the wheels via electricity from the batteries. The ICE exists only to serve as a generator to recharge the batteries. What this means is that the ICE only ever needs to run at the specific optimal rpm for which it was designed. Which means it can be smaller and more efficient at its job than a regular hybrid's ICE.
That's the beauty of the plug in hybrid concept: pure electric for short trips and no range limitations if you want to go across country using gasoline. I'd probably only need the gas engine 10 to 20 percent of the time, myself.
I think it really is a beautiful design. The gas engine is truly a backup for the electric engine, and optimized for that task. For a guy like me who mostly drives to work and back and other local destinations, I can envision myself filling up the gasoline tank "just in case", and by the time I finally need it discovering that it's been so long that the gas has all evaporated and escaped. Of course if that's really the case then the gas is just extra weight and I should probably just fill up the tank when I know I'll need it. But I'm a "Be Prepared" kind of guy; you never know when you might have to jump in the car and drive across the Mexican border.;)
Cars are some of the most completely-recycled things on the planet. I have no doubt that the batteries will be recycled as a matter of course when electric cars become more common. Lead-acid batteries are already recycled.
Yeah, lead-acid batteries are recycled, even though there's no compelling economic reason for them to be. It's mostly because the batteries are really nasty if simply tossed into a dump.
Whereas with NiMH or LiIon batteries, the metals contained therein are actually valuable enough that it's worth it economically for the battery manufacturer to recycle them. They actually save money recycling batteries versus making new ones. Plus neither of these batteries are as bad for the environment as lead-acid, but the point is that they will be recycled even more readily than lead-acid because companies like Toyota will pay you to bring them your old batteries.
So now I am talking about a much lesser goal : robots sophisticated enough that they can do every manual task a human can do, and factories on the moon that can manufacture almost every part that the factory uses.
Oh yeah, that falls within the realm of "weak" AI which we already have many practical uses for. I was only commenting on the AI problem; I agree completely that self-replicating machines will be here soon-ish. It's a matter of practical implementation at this point, mostly.
Sure you can hit # to get right ion to voice mail, but you have to be fast otherwise you might have to talk to an actual person and we can't have that now, can we?
If I don't want to talk to someone, I call them and let it ring and let them pick up. Then I just start screaming "I'm gonna cut off your head and shit down your neck!" over and over until they hang up, and then I never have to worry about talking to them again. Sometimes I have to talk to the police, but hey, who ever said you could reach never-talking-to-anyone nirvana without a price?
So are you saying our "robots" are actually going to be people? Actually, this makes a lot of sense.
Or are you saying we're going build some simple self-replicating nano-robots with some randomization occurring during replication, and hopefully if we're lucky over the course of millions of generations they'll evolve sentience?
Go open a history book to 1908. Tell me I'm wrong.
Okay, I'm looking at 1908. What am I supposed to see? That there's been a lot of technological progress since then? Yeah, that's great. I also see a ton of predictions of technological developments that have never come to pass. Great technological progress does not mean it will necessarily continue down any particular line that you hypothesize. We might become masters of genetic engineering such that we can modify our own bodies to be able to eat grass or bark and regrow missing body parts, yet never master the secrets of machine intelligence beyond the practical 'weak' AI that we use today. We don't know what breakthroughs will be made.
See the difference between the computer revolution and AI is that long before said revolution, decades before 1908 when Babbage and Bool were working, we already had the groundwork. Binary logic was understood, machine-based computation already had a practical example. It would be a hundred years before the transistor would be invented, allowing the amazing growth in power we've seen, but send it back in time to them and Babbage would have at least had a good idea of how to put it together to make a vastly more powerful Difference Engine.
What fantastical device are you imagining will be invented that were we to receive it through the Temporal UPS we would be able to see how to build a working machine intelligence? We have no idea what intelligence would look like! We lack the analog to boolean logic that would inform us of what to do with the magical device from the future.
My point is not that 'strong' AI is impossible. My point is that our technological and scientific progress, amazing as it is, in no way guarantees that solutions to arbitrary problems will be found. It's akin to trying to predict the discovery of quantum mechanics a hundred years before hand, when those words would have been meaningless. It's the futurist equivalent of "and then a miracle occurs". Maybe, maybe not.
I'll believe that strong AI is 100 years away when we acquire the language to even describe what such a thing would look like and we merely lack the tools to build a sufficiently advanced model.
I seriously think we should have a -1, Whoosh moderation option.
I agree, but only for the comedic possibilities of using it in other situations. E.g. the post "My experiences working with wind tunnels (Score: 0, Whoosh)" and so forth.
If only CO2 actually was the cause for global warming! Every ice core sample taken shows that CO2's only relation to warming is that as sea water gets warmer, it releases more CO2 into the atmosphere. CO2 rises lag behind temp rises by decades/centuries in all samples taken.
Yes, and then the increased CO2 causes increased warming, resulting in more CO2. It's a feedback cycle, and just because CO2 isn't the initial driver in historical cases does not mean it doesn't cause warming. It's just that in the past, it was always something else that caused the increase in temperature with the CO2 increase following.
If you were to directly introduce CO2 into the atmosphere before any other warming occurred, then it could become the driving force for the feedback cycle.
The ice cores are also unanimous in showing that CO2 levels have not been higher than they are now for hundreds of thousands of years, and that the change has occurred rapidly since the industrial revolution. So while in natural cases of warming, CO2 levels were not the initial impetus, our current situation is anything but natural. The ice cores do not imply in any way that the Greenhouse Effect doesn't work, so unless you have some other reason to think it doesn't, then this is cause for concern.
Slashdot Mirror
You can patent circuits can't you? Why not software?
Because a circuit isn't math. It can be described by math, but a circuit isn't math. You can say "I have invented a type of semiconductor-based transistor whose characteristic IV curve is described by the following formula:" and you can patent that transistor.
You cannot patent the formula itself that describes the operation of the transistor. Because that is math.
Software is math. It is itself nothing more than a description of mathematical operations. Not a physical entity that can be described by math, like a circuit or a machine. It is the description itself.
Here's another way of looking at it. Say I designed a computer whose ISA was standard mathematical expressions in ASCII code. The equation "x = a + b" could be directly input into the computer and the operation performed. Hopefully you can see that "x = a + b" is math. If so, then it is no different in a traditional computer, where the same math equation is converted into a machine-readable binary format. It's still just math.
I seriously doubt computing has been advanced primarily due to patents.
That's nice, because I'm saying exactly the opposite of that. I'm saying computing advanced so quickly because there weren't any software patents. I said if there had been software patents, then all of those things you studied in school would have been covered by patents, and unavailable for use by free software. Fortunately, this is not the case. Yet some people think they should have the right to patent their own software, software that wouldn't exist if they hadn't ridden on the backs of those who worked in the software patent-free era.
Hope that makes more sense.
That is like saying a nut and bolt is physics. You can't patent physics. A refrigerater using a compressor, a gas, an expansion valve, and a condenser is just physics.
No it isn't. A refrigerator can be described by physics, but it is not physics. The physics-based description is, by definition, physics.
Or to use the example from my first post -- a ball thrown in the air follows a parabola. The ball's motion can be described by math. But the ball isn't math. The description of its path, h = -9.8t^2 + vt + c, is math. And you can convert that description into any equivalent language, and it will still be math. Machine language is just another language for describing math.
Software is the description. It is literally a language that describes mathematical actions. It is not the actions themselves. It is as if each byte of software was a description of the physics of nuts and bolts. It requires a computer to take that description and perform actions based on it. The computer is the refrigerator. You can patent the computer. Software is the description of how the compressor, condesor, etc should work. Software is not the compressor. It's the math behind it. Software is math. Saying software isn't math is like saying the parabolic equation above isn't math, because it describes a ball's motion.
It's not "akin" to anything. Software IS math. Math is not patentable. Software is math. Not 'akin', not 'analogous', not 'similar'. It IS math.
Math, can represent what is happening, and it can be used to determine what will happen, but software isn't math.
Yes it is. Software is nothing but a series of mathematical operations expressions. It's in a binary format a computer can read, but it is, literally, actually, and only, a series of mathematical statements. It starts as a series of human-readable mathematical statements, and is translated into machine-readable mathematical statements, yet the resulting binary remains nothing more than a series of mathematical statements. The ASCII code that you see here: "x := a + b" is no different in any way from the ASCII CODE: "add r1, r2, r3" is no different in any way than the binary equivalent of that instruction for a given ISA. What's the difference between the same statement, one expressed in ASCII and one in MIPS? Nothing. They're exactly the same math statement. They're both math. One cannot be math, yet the other not, because they are the same statement.
You liken it to a car engine, the behavior of which is described by physics, but which isn't itself physics. The car engine here is the computer which is capable of reading the binary math statements, and controls millions of tiny electrical switches based on that input. The operation of that computer can be described by math, but the computer isn't math.
The instructions that the computer reads? Those ARE math, literally. They are literally a language that expresses mathematical operations. Not math as embodied in the behavior of a physical entity. Math itself.
No - this guy gets in a car with his wife, drives off and changes into a fresh set of civvies.
In the security guards' defense, he did say he was just going to grab some smokes and would be right back.
(And, IMO, shouldn't be patentable. But of course, it's easy for me to say that because I don't hold any patents, least of all a software patent.)
Sure, but for anyone coming from the other side, who does have software patents and is thus in favor of keeping them, all I can say is this: You would be nowhere and have nothing if patents had been allowed in the first thirty years of electronic computing. All the sorting algorithms, all the OS scheduler algorithms, all the compiler technology, all the things you take for granted every day, would have been locked up and all the amazing development that required freely taking these basic ideas as building blocks for more ideas would have faced repeated decade-long roadblocks. The environment in which you are creating your software patents would not exist if they had been able to place those roadblocks to progress just as you are doing today.
So sucks to be you, Mr. Software Patent Holder, but the health and development of the industry requires you to take down your toll booth.
Patenting software is like patenting a math equation.
It's not even "like", it is patenting math. Software is math. Someone might say that everything can be reduced to math, but the fact is that a ball tossed in the air may follow a parabola, but the ball isn't math, it is just described by math. Whereas software is math, as surely as "y = ax^2 + bx + c" is math. One is a human-readable representation of a pure mathematical concept, and software is a machine-readable representation of a pure mathematical concept. You can't patent the human-readable form of math, you should not be able to patent the machine-readable form of the exact same math.
You can patent the machine that is capable of reading and acting on the mathematical operations described by the software. But not the software itself, because that is, literally, no metaphor at all, patenting math.
Side note: He also declared that north is no longer a direction, blue is no longer a color, and your sister is no longer a virgin.
Well one out of three ain't bad.
The roof is the outside part on top of the house that doesn't get plastered and painted.
Seriously? Damn, I'm never using that contractor again.
I've seen private inventors being run over by big business, who has a tendency to totally ignore patents that isn't owned by themselves
The sad part is that if Big N is like many other tech companies, they are literally ignoring patents in the sense that they explicitly tell their engineers not to do patent searches or otherwise try to figure out if any of the things they create in the course of doing their jobs are covered by a patent.
If patents were land mines, and technology were a country, it would be Afghanistan. Or maybe the Korean DMZ. There's so many patents that it's next to impossible not to violate at least one in any non-trivial piece of technology. Even if you do a patent search, you aren't guaranteed to find every potentially applicable patent, nor be able to sort out which do and don't apply in precisely the same way a hypothetical judge would. Yet if you are aware of the existence of a potentially applicable patent, and are found to be in violation, then that's treble damages. Even just doing the search to begin with could imply that you knew of the patent and knowingly violated it.
Thus, they ignore the patents, and hope for the best. When they violate another tech company's patent, then hopefully their own pile of patents gives them leverage. If it's a small inventor, they can either settle or hope the inventor can't afford the legal battle. If it's a patent troll, then they're basically screwed.
I don't know about this case in detail, but it certainly seems plausible to me that Nintendo engineers, deliberately ignorant of any patents and given the concept for a controller with analog triggers that "click" when fully depressed, came up with an invention very similar to the one in the patent.
Private inventors certainly get screwed by this setup. The big tech companies whose engineers are actually making things get screwed too. The system is broken. The only people it is working for are people who do nothing but buy up other peoples' patents, and then sue other companies for violating them, never inventing nor creating anything themselves except obstacles to progress. This is the opposite of the intention of the patent system. It's broken.
I haven't read the patent either, but I have a hard time imagining how something superficially described as a conductance sensor would in the details turn out to be a pwm signal. I mean conductance sensor pretty strongly implies it's the conductance that changes. Says pot to me.
Imagine every congressperson getting a strike when a law that he/she passed was found to be unconstitutional.
Oh man, you think people get upset over "Judicial Activism"? Wait until "Judicial Assassination" enters the American lexicon!
That's a great question. I saw a report on TV not long ago which sought to address this question. The report attempted to look at all factors including costs and environmental impact associated with batteries and the additional electronics/motors, etc. According to the report, only two or maybe three hybrids in current production are actually improvements over ICE. Two of which are made by Toyota. I forget what the questionable third one was.
Okay, let's assume I don't give a rats ass about cost (I do, that's why I own an ultra compact gas burner instead of a hybrid, but lets just say), and only care about environmental impact. Assume that the batteries will be fully recycled (seems likely as Toyota is paying people $200 to bring their batteries back). How many of the hybrids come out ahead in this regard?
That's 40 miles on stored electricity and then the gasoline engine kicks in and it acts pretty much like a regular hybrid.
Except for one important difference. In a regular hybrid, both the ICE and the electric motor are connected to the drive train through the transmission, and one the other or both apply power to the wheels depending on the situation. So the ICE has to more or less be designed like a normal car engine. It can slouch on the low end where the electric motor does the majority of the work, but still needs to operate across a wide range of rpms, and like all ICEs this means it is sometimes running in its optimal band, and other times not.
In the Chevy Volt, only the electric motor is connected to the transmission, and is always what supplies power to the wheels via electricity from the batteries. The ICE exists only to serve as a generator to recharge the batteries. What this means is that the ICE only ever needs to run at the specific optimal rpm for which it was designed. Which means it can be smaller and more efficient at its job than a regular hybrid's ICE.
That's the beauty of the plug in hybrid concept: pure electric for short trips and no range limitations if you want to go across country using gasoline. I'd probably only need the gas engine 10 to 20 percent of the time, myself.
I think it really is a beautiful design. The gas engine is truly a backup for the electric engine, and optimized for that task. For a guy like me who mostly drives to work and back and other local destinations, I can envision myself filling up the gasoline tank "just in case", and by the time I finally need it discovering that it's been so long that the gas has all evaporated and escaped. Of course if that's really the case then the gas is just extra weight and I should probably just fill up the tank when I know I'll need it. But I'm a "Be Prepared" kind of guy; you never know when you might have to jump in the car and drive across the Mexican border. ;)
Cars are some of the most completely-recycled things on the planet. I have no doubt that the batteries will be recycled as a matter of course when electric cars become more common. Lead-acid batteries are already recycled.
Yeah, lead-acid batteries are recycled, even though there's no compelling economic reason for them to be. It's mostly because the batteries are really nasty if simply tossed into a dump.
Whereas with NiMH or LiIon batteries, the metals contained therein are actually valuable enough that it's worth it economically for the battery manufacturer to recycle them. They actually save money recycling batteries versus making new ones. Plus neither of these batteries are as bad for the environment as lead-acid, but the point is that they will be recycled even more readily than lead-acid because companies like Toyota will pay you to bring them your old batteries.
So now I am talking about a much lesser goal : robots sophisticated enough that they can do every manual task a human can do, and factories on the moon that can manufacture almost every part that the factory uses.
Oh yeah, that falls within the realm of "weak" AI which we already have many practical uses for. I was only commenting on the AI problem; I agree completely that self-replicating machines will be here soon-ish. It's a matter of practical implementation at this point, mostly.
Sure you can hit # to get right ion to voice mail, but you have to be fast otherwise you might have to talk to an actual person and we can't have that now, can we?
If I don't want to talk to someone, I call them and let it ring and let them pick up. Then I just start screaming "I'm gonna cut off your head and shit down your neck!" over and over until they hang up, and then I never have to worry about talking to them again. Sometimes I have to talk to the police, but hey, who ever said you could reach never-talking-to-anyone nirvana without a price?
Sentient, self replicating robots exist.
So are you saying our "robots" are actually going to be people? Actually, this makes a lot of sense.
Or are you saying we're going build some simple self-replicating nano-robots with some randomization occurring during replication, and hopefully if we're lucky over the course of millions of generations they'll evolve sentience?
Go open a history book to 1908. Tell me I'm wrong.
Okay, I'm looking at 1908. What am I supposed to see? That there's been a lot of technological progress since then? Yeah, that's great. I also see a ton of predictions of technological developments that have never come to pass. Great technological progress does not mean it will necessarily continue down any particular line that you hypothesize. We might become masters of genetic engineering such that we can modify our own bodies to be able to eat grass or bark and regrow missing body parts, yet never master the secrets of machine intelligence beyond the practical 'weak' AI that we use today. We don't know what breakthroughs will be made.
See the difference between the computer revolution and AI is that long before said revolution, decades before 1908 when Babbage and Bool were working, we already had the groundwork. Binary logic was understood, machine-based computation already had a practical example. It would be a hundred years before the transistor would be invented, allowing the amazing growth in power we've seen, but send it back in time to them and Babbage would have at least had a good idea of how to put it together to make a vastly more powerful Difference Engine.
What fantastical device are you imagining will be invented that were we to receive it through the Temporal UPS we would be able to see how to build a working machine intelligence? We have no idea what intelligence would look like! We lack the analog to boolean logic that would inform us of what to do with the magical device from the future.
My point is not that 'strong' AI is impossible. My point is that our technological and scientific progress, amazing as it is, in no way guarantees that solutions to arbitrary problems will be found. It's akin to trying to predict the discovery of quantum mechanics a hundred years before hand, when those words would have been meaningless. It's the futurist equivalent of "and then a miracle occurs". Maybe, maybe not.
I'll believe that strong AI is 100 years away when we acquire the language to even describe what such a thing would look like and we merely lack the tools to build a sufficiently advanced model.
Well step one would be to gain an understanding of the science. Then feel free to question it.
Hey now. Read the comic, otherwise you may actually watch the movie without a sense of bitterness and outrage. :)
That's never been necessary in the past so I don't see how it would be now.
I seriously think we should have a -1, Whoosh moderation option.
I agree, but only for the comedic possibilities of using it in other situations. E.g. the post "My experiences working with wind tunnels (Score: 0, Whoosh)" and so forth.
*woosh*
(The joke was about calling the movie "The Dark Night" "The Death Knight"... not a very good joke but hey)
If only CO2 actually was the cause for global warming! Every ice core sample taken shows that CO2's only relation to warming is that as sea water gets warmer, it releases more CO2 into the atmosphere. CO2 rises lag behind temp rises by decades/centuries in all samples taken.
Yes, and then the increased CO2 causes increased warming, resulting in more CO2. It's a feedback cycle, and just because CO2 isn't the initial driver in historical cases does not mean it doesn't cause warming. It's just that in the past, it was always something else that caused the increase in temperature with the CO2 increase following.
If you were to directly introduce CO2 into the atmosphere before any other warming occurred, then it could become the driving force for the feedback cycle.
The ice cores are also unanimous in showing that CO2 levels have not been higher than they are now for hundreds of thousands of years, and that the change has occurred rapidly since the industrial revolution. So while in natural cases of warming, CO2 levels were not the initial impetus, our current situation is anything but natural. The ice cores do not imply in any way that the Greenhouse Effect doesn't work, so unless you have some other reason to think it doesn't, then this is cause for concern.
Such propoganda posters are often artistic works, not photographs.
Wait, are you saying Jesus didn't pose for the Buddy Christ?