...of their claim that copious amounts of hydrogen must be water, why don't they try this experiment on Earth. NASA did this with the Galileo space probe. It was equipped with some kind of spectrometer that was supposed to detect particular elements.
We're talking two completely different kinds of instruments here.
What this article is referring to (though not explicitly) are measurements taken with neutron detectors. As the spacecraft fly (at relatively low altitude) over the planet, they are bombarded by neutrons that can be assumed to come uniformly from the top N meters of the soil (don't know what N is exactly, might be on the order of 10). When the craft detect a significant drop in the number of neutron hits, it can be assumed that the neutrons are being absorbed by something in the soil. As hydrogen is the best neutron absorber among the most likely elements in the soil, the absorber can be assumed to be a bunch of hydrogen -- which can in turn be assumed to be a part of a bunch of water/ice. If there's a big dip in the neutron levels, then there's probably a lot of water down there. The trick is calibrating the measurements just right to get an accurate measure of how much water there is.
A spectrometer, on the other hand, measures a broad spectrum of light frequencies. When there are spikes or dips at particular frequequencies that correspond to known absorption or emission wavelengths of various elements, then the instrument has detected that element. But it pretty much only works for a gas. Absorption patterns in reflected light from a solid surface can give some info about the minerals on the surface, but it's not as clear-cut a signal as you get from a gas.
So... uh, er, now that I look at your post again, I see you are probably not actually confusing these two instruments... but then, some of the other respondents to your post are, so I will continue...:)
Anyways, there'd be little point in running this experiment with Eath, in terms of answering the question of whether the hydrogen is really water. We already *know* that the hydrogen on earth is mostly in water, the fact that we could detect that hydrogen with an orbiting neutron detector really wouldn't tell us much about the likelihood of detected hydrogen on Mars being water.
Besides, as you can see from my description, there are already a number of assumptions being made in order to get at the "it's hydrogen" result in the first place. For example, a dip in neutron readings could also come from a simple lack of radioactive elements in that portion of the crust, though this is unlikely. Basically, the best probability for an explanation of these results lies with subsurface water. The only real confirmation will come when we go down there and dig it up.:)
Oh, and a spectrometer won't be able to do the confirmation; it can't see below the surface.
What if every time someone here posted a negative remark about M$, either in a comment or a journal, Slashdot was forced to post M$'s rebuttal?
This is already provided for, if you think about it: slashdot has the policy of accepting/archiving every comment that anyone wants to post (even if it gets modded down, it's still there). If MS wanted to rebut any slashdot comments, they would merely need to post a reply. Hell, if it was convincing that it was indeed from MS, it'd be modded +5 real quick.
If they decided to be dicks about it and have their lawyers send a "you must include this rebuttal or we'll sue your ass" letter, the reply would be simple: "post it yourself"!
You might be able to make a case for the communications infrastructure being a natural monopoly that could be regulated. Oh wait, we tried that already...
One difference between this proposal and the old telephone monopoly is that the direct link to the individual user is missing. In the days of Ma Bell (was that the term?), you had one big beauraucracy to deal with whenever you wanted any service for your individual phone connection. With this proposal, the last mile is a free-for-all, and any individual can get on or off the network as (s)he pleases, if they just buy the right equipment. Ideally, the big switches and long-haul fiber lines etc. run by the government would be redundant/overlapping, so that the rollout or repair of individual nodes or links would be largely transparent. The only differences people would notice would be average delay times.
One key requirement with this idea, though, is that it assumes a stable, mature technology. Technology for road construction is pretty much constant, at least on the scale of decades. That's plenty of time for govt. resources to keep up. The speed of innovation in the networking sector (at least, once the economy picks up again) will far outstrip what a government-run system would be able to keep up with.
So IMO, this is a good idea for the long term, for a time when networking technology has reached a major plateau (and is no longer a big profit-generator), and is also so ubiquitous and neccessary that it naturally becomes a national-infrastructure kind of thing. But that won't be for some time, I think.
The reason speeding is banned in the U.S. (of course, not every country has speed limits) is for safety reasons. If there were a solid safety argument for banning porn, there'd already be laws on the books, and the commercial carriers would have to follow. Since it hasn't gone that way, it stands to reason that this would not change just because the govt. runs the backbones.
On the other hand, a setup where a government is in control of all these hard lines does carry some risk, as with any monopoly -- if a government that is not sufficiently transparent (or is dictatorial etc.) is doing this, then things can start to be banned. Perhaps this particular monopoly would carry a special risk, because it would become that much easier to impact free speech. Of course, a govt. inclined to do that would have many other ways to limit speech as well, so it may not make much difference.
Aw, crap! I was kinda hoping you'd say "what carpal tunnel syndrome?". Sorry dude!
For me, I have not carpal tunnel (well I didn't until recently), but rather some sort of general finger-hurtingness, due to a series of sports injuries over time. It's caused me to re-map the way I type a bit -- for example, I almost always use Ctrl-H insted of reaching for the backspace key, because my right pinkie finger is the weakest. Also ctrl-j instead of hitting return. That's when the software allows it (yes, I do most of my work on unix xterms). I also use a text editor (vim) that has a word-completion feature -- type the first few letters and, if it's a word I've typed already somewhere above, I hit ctrl-k (which I remapped from ctrl-p) and it finds/finishes the word for me. That actually messed me up a bit when I tried to time myself typing just now; I kept tripping up on the urge to auto-complete a word rather than actually typing it.
So good luck with yours! BTW, I'm almost positive that it was when I did a lot of typing in *overly cold air* that triggered actual carpal tunnel for me. I've managed to keep it from getting worse by wearing glove-like things and long-sleeve shirts (they keep it too cold in my building at work).
By the time I'd reached high school I had given up writing in cursive. Too many loops, too messy, too hard to read. I didn't see the point
Wow, it's surprising to me how many other people actually went through this also. I stopped cursive-writing in my first year of high school, and never went back. This was in the late 80's. I hadn't heard of anyone else in the same situation until now.
For me, it was not only messy and hard to read, it was much harder to write. Remember, cursive writing (and Western handwriting in general) was created by and for right-handed people. As a lefty, connected-letter writing doesn't buy me a damn thing (and is in fact a negative), because I'm always pushing the pen(cil) into the paper instead of pulling it across, thereby increasing the chances of foulups, and just generally making it more awkward. Printing, on the other hand, is slightly more non-handed, so I can deal with it better.
my signature diminished to my first and last initials with little squiggly lines after each....
Yeah, for a few years I signed with every letter enumerated, then it eventually flattened out into what you're describing... then continued to degenerate into a very fragmentary approximation of my initials, with a straight line after each.
Last year when I was signing papers to buy my house, I signed the first page and the notary almost had a fit.
My wife recently had the same experience, only with an INS officer (probably much more scary). She (my wife) has a similarly-illegible signature (for completely different reasons, involving English being her 3rd language). When the lady at the counter for getting my wife's work-permit card saw her signature, she wouldn't accept it, explaining: "that's not an American signature!"
I almost wanted to punch that powermad little bitch in the face.
Well ok, I wasn't quite that angry, but you get the point.
... counter-suing, then, to recoup that $20,000, plus legal fees.... [he] would have needed to not only argue for his innocence, but also that the RIAA was sufficiently innapropriate in suing him that they were responsible for both his legal fees (which could exceed several thousand dollars, most likely) and also his lost $20,000 from school
And think about this too: even if he won on all this, the RIAA would have still accomplished the mission of achieving a Chilling Effect in the community. If he countersued and won, the court process would still have been long, full of stress, and with terrible financial risk to himself personally. If he wins anything short of multimillion-dollar punitive damages, the RIAA's perspective is just "Ok, so it cost us a little more to do our damage. Whatever."
I'd add SAP to the list, at least from an end-user perspective.
It runs only on windows, which is a real pain for those of us in my company with the good fortune of using linux/unix systems. It took me literally half a day's worth of time, spread over 3-4 days, on the phone with various support people just to get my account actually working. And it's also amazingly slow, at least for me. I mean seriously -- after pointing IE to the correct page and waiting the 5-10 minutes for SAP to come up, it takes another 5 minutes to respond to anything I click on, every time.
*sigh*
Ok, venting over.:) But still, I have to wonder if *any* 3rd-party solution can really do the trick. Most likely they're trying to cover all possible concievable business setups, which of course increases the complexity dramatically. Seems to me like a few in-house, specially-tailored java or perl scripts combined with the right DB would be quite sufficient for a given company. And it could evolve over time along with your business.
Which would really be less expensive -- hiring a few skilled programmers to set it up and maintain the system, or paying for a legion of in-house support personnel to help everyone cope with the level of complexity and bugginess of a 3rd party system (which is what they do at my company).
"I feel like I am being pecked apart by one of those earth creatures...large bill...webbed feet...goes quack....ahhh...what are they called?" "cats?"....."CATS...yes.....CATS"
Which is even funnier.
It's definitely funnier when you actually see it played out. A text rendition can't do it justice. Which is why I just went for the line after that, when he summed it up -- more succinct and so better for a sig too. Also, half of my intent was use a reference that only the "true" B5'ers would get -- hence the "L." instead of "Londo".
I may need to go back and review, but I am pretty sure he said "nibbled" instead of "pecked" -- which is part of the joke; he got it wrong in *two* places!
It's always so entertaining to me when one of these things starts spreading around. I use a text-only email client (mutt) on a linux system. True, I do have to explicitly save attachments to files and then go view them with the appropriate separate program, but that's actually a rare occurence. 99% of the time it's bare text anyways, and mutt is a really fast way to scan through them all -- no slogging around with a mouse. And I don't have to worry about looking at an email that might be spam either.
Of course, I know the majority of people will never want to do this. Which means I can maintain my air of smug superiority indefinitely. Ha!
And speaking of which: I gotta run now; Dog Eat Dog is on...
Ha! Technical advances, my foot -- where's your TiVo, man?
(or other equivalent PVR):)
Re:Well, what's good for the goose...
on
Copyright Defeats?
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· Score: 1
I'm thinking that the MPAA is infringing on my copyrights on their web site
The reason that the MPAA can get away with jerking you around that way is that you can't afford to hire a stable of lawyers to stand up for your rights.
They can.
...
Hmmm. One of the basic components of the notion of freedom is that someone can't come and abuse you, and get away with it. The U.S. is supposed to be built to accomodate this -- i.e. to make sure everyone's rights are respected, up to the point that those rights would interfere with someone else's.
Now that's all fine and good, until money enters the picture. Money can be seen as a storage medium for work; the more money you have, the more work you can "do". What we seem to have today are situations where the legal system is requiring more and more work to operate, especially in disputes involving technical matters. We're at the point where an average, individual person *cannot* do the amount of work required to protect his or her freedoms, without incurring significant hardship.
I wonder, does the definition of freedom need to be updated somehow, to accomodate the "amount of work to enforce" factor? Or is it just that people are losing sight of what the legal system is supposed to be for, being too caught up in the machinations of the particular system we have at the moment?
Sorry, I was hoping to go somewhere more useful with this, but I just ended up with questions.
It's easy to predict how much radiation will penetrate how much ground, so bury it deep and job done.
This is something I thought of a while ago: if you bury it really deep -- I'm talking deep enough to be below the water table -- then that really is job done, isn't it? No chance at all that it'll contaminate the groundwater, because the water can't even get to it!
And I just thought of this: there's a way proposed to send a probe to the center of the earth, covered here.
Basically it involves drilling a deep hole, blasting at the bottom to make a big crack, then pouring a big blob of molten iron down it. The weight of the iron should keep opening the crack below it, and will eventually slip through the crust and into the mantle, eventually settling down onto the core. The idea was to have a probe in with the iron, that would send data back up. But why not a bunch of nuclear waste? In fact, you may *need* radioactive material in with the iron, to keep it from solidifying before it gets deep enough to stay liquid just due to the earth's internal heat.
You just need to take it a bit further...
Supposed you have a game & server concept similar to this, but programmed in a way to not take game security dead-serious. In fact, as the cheats, etc. came out this would not be shunned, but instead part of the game....
Or even make it more proper -- pick one evening a month to be set aside for this madness, then have a lottery to see who the lucky N winners will be who will get GOD status. Fully publicize it in advance, so no one gets pissed off, and those who want to see it happen can be ready. And of course, make sure to back up everyone's status just before it starts, and roll it all back to that point when it's over and done with.
937 boxes of court-ordered documents on the wall, 937 boxes of court-ordered documents!
Take one down, shred it around,
936 boxes of court-ordered documents on the wall!
936 boxes of court-ordered documents on the wall, 936 boxes of court-ordered documents!
Take one down, ***AGGGMMMPHHPHHH*** [wad of toilet paper shoved in mouth]
Re:What use is AI without an operating platform
on
AI Going Nowhere?
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· Score: 1
I still got the sources in CVS for part of the framework, but with the (dis)encouragement I got, its painful to look at the sources without remebering all those disapointments...
*Hello* -- this is Slashdot! Give us a link!;)
Seriously, if the "true" academics are too focused on their own theories to want to deal with you, let the hobbyists take over! Open-source it!
Re:physicists studied flying - mechanics flew !
on
AI Going Nowhere?
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· Score: 1
Did it ever occur to you that some of the main contributors to the fledling field of flying were bicycle manufacturers, such as the Wright brothers...
I heard a bit about the Wright brothers on the radio the other day. A historian was giving an account of how it happened, and emphasized the fact that they were not tinkering; they were in fact taking a highly scientific approach -- developing a theory, or a refinement to a theory, designing a test setup, and then implementing and executing it. Kitty Hawk was really just one of their experiments. The older brother was actually doing this instead of pursuing a degree only because of an illness that derailed his educational career.
The historian also mentioned another guy -- was it the Lilienthal you mentioned? -- who actually got big-time grants for doing work to create the first flying machine, got a lot of press attention, etc. But he took much more of a tinkering approach, and ended up losing the race.
So, what I'm getting at is that while tinkering is fun, and *can* lead to serrendipitous discoveries, real success is more likely to come from a disciplined, scientific approach. That's the beauty and power of human intelligence -- the formation of fundamental ideas that can then inform our actions; it's why we can change the world so much faster than the forces of evolution ever did.
So working on the fundamental theories of AI with a simulator of some kind is more likely to get the core problem solved -- the essence of what will make a machine intelligent. As progress is made on that end, then other teams can take that knowledge and go and solve all the little interface-with-the-real-world problems, and start creating the final implementations.
Taking the opposite approach -- trying to solve all the little problems and hoping it will somewhow mush together to create AI -- is not as likely to get anywhere. Of course, if your project is just to find good abstraction mechanisms to feed into a core program, then that's fine -- there's a clear goal, and it can be approached methodically; its a sub-field that will definitely have to be well-explored. But to tinker with robots and think that you can shoot the moon and get a whole system working intelligently is almost assuredly going to lead to a lot of disappointment.
Just thought of this. If you're prepared to buy a TiVo and have it dedicated for this task (for the duration of your conversion), I think it can be done.
1. There's a way to set up the tivo to make it take in an auxiliary input, but you have to do something with the channel setup. I don't remember what that is right now, but it is possible. You won't be able to record from the outside world while you have it set up like this, though.
2. Hack the tivo to let you grab files off it over a network. I don't know the details, but it involves buying/installing some kind of special network card ($70?), and getting the right software to run on another computer to grab the right files from the tivo and convert them to VCD or Divix.
3. Then you're set. Record a batch of tapes tapes to the TiVo, then go to your other computer to grab the files off the tivo, and convert it into VCD or Divix or whatever, then archive the data as you see fit.
Since the tivo is already pretty well-optimized for getting a good quality sampling of a TV signal, all you need is a good-quality VCR to play the tapes on, and you've got the A-->D portion taken care of. Plus, you can use the Tivo afterwards. An added bonus.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Ahem. That's veracity :) :) ...
We're talking two completely different kinds of instruments here.
What this article is referring to (though not explicitly) are measurements taken with neutron detectors. As the spacecraft fly (at relatively low altitude) over the planet, they are bombarded by neutrons that can be assumed to come uniformly from the top N meters of the soil (don't know what N is exactly, might be on the order of 10). When the craft detect a significant drop in the number of neutron hits, it can be assumed that the neutrons are being absorbed by something in the soil. As hydrogen is the best neutron absorber among the most likely elements in the soil, the absorber can be assumed to be a bunch of hydrogen -- which can in turn be assumed to be a part of a bunch of water/ice. If there's a big dip in the neutron levels, then there's probably a lot of water down there. The trick is calibrating the measurements just right to get an accurate measure of how much water there is.
A spectrometer, on the other hand, measures a broad spectrum of light frequencies. When there are spikes or dips at particular frequequencies that correspond to known absorption or emission wavelengths of various elements, then the instrument has detected that element. But it pretty much only works for a gas. Absorption patterns in reflected light from a solid surface can give some info about the minerals on the surface, but it's not as clear-cut a signal as you get from a gas.
So... uh, er, now that I look at your post again, I see you are probably not actually confusing these two instruments... but then, some of the other respondents to your post are, so I will continue... :)
Anyways, there'd be little point in running this experiment with Eath, in terms of answering the question of whether the hydrogen is really water. We already *know* that the hydrogen on earth is mostly in water, the fact that we could detect that hydrogen with an orbiting neutron detector really wouldn't tell us much about the likelihood of detected hydrogen on Mars being water.
Besides, as you can see from my description, there are already a number of assumptions being made in order to get at the "it's hydrogen" result in the first place. For example, a dip in neutron readings could also come from a simple lack of radioactive elements in that portion of the crust, though this is unlikely. Basically, the best probability for an explanation of these results lies with subsurface water. The only real confirmation will come when we go down there and dig it up. :)
Oh, and a spectrometer won't be able to do the confirmation; it can't see below the surface.
... ... could be sunny too...
We don't need recession...
Or means of repression...
Just give us some MONEY,
our lives
ooohh...
- Frankie Goes To Hollywood
This is already provided for, if you think about it: slashdot has the policy of accepting/archiving every comment that anyone wants to post (even if it gets modded down, it's still there). If MS wanted to rebut any slashdot comments, they would merely need to post a reply. Hell, if it was convincing that it was indeed from MS, it'd be modded +5 real quick.
If they decided to be dicks about it and have their lawyers send a "you must include this rebuttal or we'll sue your ass" letter, the reply would be simple: "post it yourself"!
One difference between this proposal and the old telephone monopoly is that the direct link to the individual user is missing. In the days of Ma Bell (was that the term?), you had one big beauraucracy to deal with whenever you wanted any service for your individual phone connection. With this proposal, the last mile is a free-for-all, and any individual can get on or off the network as (s)he pleases, if they just buy the right equipment. Ideally, the big switches and long-haul fiber lines etc. run by the government would be redundant/overlapping, so that the rollout or repair of individual nodes or links would be largely transparent. The only differences people would notice would be average delay times.
One key requirement with this idea, though, is that it assumes a stable, mature technology. Technology for road construction is pretty much constant, at least on the scale of decades. That's plenty of time for govt. resources to keep up. The speed of innovation in the networking sector (at least, once the economy picks up again) will far outstrip what a government-run system would be able to keep up with.
So IMO, this is a good idea for the long term, for a time when networking technology has reached a major plateau (and is no longer a big profit-generator), and is also so ubiquitous and neccessary that it naturally becomes a national-infrastructure kind of thing. But that won't be for some time, I think.
The reason speeding is banned in the U.S. (of course, not every country has speed limits) is for safety reasons. If there were a solid safety argument for banning porn, there'd already be laws on the books, and the commercial carriers would have to follow. Since it hasn't gone that way, it stands to reason that this would not change just because the govt. runs the backbones.
On the other hand, a setup where a government is in control of all these hard lines does carry some risk, as with any monopoly -- if a government that is not sufficiently transparent (or is dictatorial etc.) is doing this, then things can start to be banned. Perhaps this particular monopoly would carry a special risk, because it would become that much easier to impact free speech. Of course, a govt. inclined to do that would have many other ways to limit speech as well, so it may not make much difference.
*sigh*... if only Larry Ellison knew how to direct his energies productively.
Aw, crap! I was kinda hoping you'd say "what carpal tunnel syndrome?". Sorry dude!
For me, I have not carpal tunnel (well I didn't until recently), but rather some sort of general finger-hurtingness, due to a series of sports injuries over time. It's caused me to re-map the way I type a bit -- for example, I almost always use Ctrl-H insted of reaching for the backspace key, because my right pinkie finger is the weakest. Also ctrl-j instead of hitting return. That's when the software allows it (yes, I do most of my work on unix xterms). I also use a text editor (vim) that has a word-completion feature -- type the first few letters and, if it's a word I've typed already somewhere above, I hit ctrl-k (which I remapped from ctrl-p) and it finds/finishes the word for me. That actually messed me up a bit when I tried to time myself typing just now; I kept tripping up on the urge to auto-complete a word rather than actually typing it.
So good luck with yours! BTW, I'm almost positive that it was when I did a lot of typing in *overly cold air* that triggered actual carpal tunnel for me. I've managed to keep it from getting worse by wearing glove-like things and long-sleeve shirts (they keep it too cold in my building at work).
So, how's the carpal tunnel syndrome?
Wow, it's surprising to me how many other people actually went through this also. I stopped cursive-writing in my first year of high school, and never went back. This was in the late 80's. I hadn't heard of anyone else in the same situation until now.
For me, it was not only messy and hard to read, it was much harder to write. Remember, cursive writing (and Western handwriting in general) was created by and for right-handed people. As a lefty, connected-letter writing doesn't buy me a damn thing (and is in fact a negative), because I'm always pushing the pen(cil) into the paper instead of pulling it across, thereby increasing the chances of foulups, and just generally making it more awkward. Printing, on the other hand, is slightly more non-handed, so I can deal with it better.
my signature diminished to my first and last initials with little squiggly lines after each. ...
Yeah, for a few years I signed with every letter enumerated, then it eventually flattened out into what you're describing... then continued to degenerate into a very fragmentary approximation of my initials, with a straight line after each.
Last year when I was signing papers to buy my house, I signed the first page and the notary almost had a fit.
My wife recently had the same experience, only with an INS officer (probably much more scary). She (my wife) has a similarly-illegible signature (for completely different reasons, involving English being her 3rd language). When the lady at the counter for getting my wife's work-permit card saw her signature, she wouldn't accept it, explaining: "that's not an American signature!"
I almost wanted to punch that powermad little bitch in the face.
Well ok, I wasn't quite that angry, but you get the point.
Ahh, so take it to a different branch of Mail Boxes Etc. or whatever. And complain to her manager too. ;)
And think about this too: even if he won on all this, the RIAA would have still accomplished the mission of achieving a Chilling Effect in the community. If he countersued and won, the court process would still have been long, full of stress, and with terrible financial risk to himself personally. If he wins anything short of multimillion-dollar punitive damages, the RIAA's perspective is just "Ok, so it cost us a little more to do our damage. Whatever."
I guess we can expect to see more of these.
It runs only on windows, which is a real pain for those of us in my company with the good fortune of using linux/unix systems. It took me literally half a day's worth of time, spread over 3-4 days, on the phone with various support people just to get my account actually working. And it's also amazingly slow, at least for me. I mean seriously -- after pointing IE to the correct page and waiting the 5-10 minutes for SAP to come up, it takes another 5 minutes to respond to anything I click on, every time.
*sigh*
Ok, venting over. :) But still, I have to wonder if *any* 3rd-party solution can really do the trick. Most likely they're trying to cover all possible concievable business setups, which of course increases the complexity dramatically. Seems to me like a few in-house, specially-tailored java or perl scripts combined with the right DB would be quite sufficient for a given company. And it could evolve over time along with your business.
Which would really be less expensive -- hiring a few skilled programmers to set it up and maintain the system, or paying for a legion of in-house support personnel to help everyone cope with the level of complexity and bugginess of a 3rd party system (which is what they do at my company).
And Buffalo buffaloes buffalo Buffalo buffaloes.
Which is even funnier.
It's definitely funnier when you actually see it played out. A text rendition can't do it justice. Which is why I just went for the line after that, when he summed it up -- more succinct and so better for a sig too. Also, half of my intent was use a reference that only the "true" B5'ers would get -- hence the "L." instead of "Londo".
I may need to go back and review, but I am pretty sure he said "nibbled" instead of "pecked" -- which is part of the joke; he got it wrong in *two* places!
Of course, I know the majority of people will never want to do this. Which means I can maintain my air of smug superiority indefinitely. Ha!
I have an easier solution for you:
There ya go, same result. Much better compression ratio, too.Ha! Technical advances, my foot -- where's your TiVo, man?
(or other equivalent PVR) :)
They can.
...
Hmmm. One of the basic components of the notion of freedom is that someone can't come and abuse you, and get away with it. The U.S. is supposed to be built to accomodate this -- i.e. to make sure everyone's rights are respected, up to the point that those rights would interfere with someone else's.
Now that's all fine and good, until money enters the picture. Money can be seen as a storage medium for work; the more money you have, the more work you can "do". What we seem to have today are situations where the legal system is requiring more and more work to operate, especially in disputes involving technical matters. We're at the point where an average, individual person *cannot* do the amount of work required to protect his or her freedoms, without incurring significant hardship.
I wonder, does the definition of freedom need to be updated somehow, to accomodate the "amount of work to enforce" factor? Or is it just that people are losing sight of what the legal system is supposed to be for, being too caught up in the machinations of the particular system we have at the moment?
Sorry, I was hoping to go somewhere more useful with this, but I just ended up with questions.
This is something I thought of a while ago: if you bury it really deep -- I'm talking deep enough to be below the water table -- then that really is job done, isn't it? No chance at all that it'll contaminate the groundwater, because the water can't even get to it!
And I just thought of this: there's a way proposed to send a probe to the center of the earth, covered here. Basically it involves drilling a deep hole, blasting at the bottom to make a big crack, then pouring a big blob of molten iron down it. The weight of the iron should keep opening the crack below it, and will eventually slip through the crust and into the mantle, eventually settling down onto the core. The idea was to have a probe in with the iron, that would send data back up. But why not a bunch of nuclear waste? In fact, you may *need* radioactive material in with the iron, to keep it from solidifying before it gets deep enough to stay liquid just due to the earth's internal heat.
Do not taunt Bugzilla.
Do not use Bugzilla on concrete.
Bugzilla may stick to certain types of skin.
Caution: Bugzilla may suddenly accelerate to dangerous speeds.
Warning: Pregnant women, the elderly, and children should avoid prolonged exposure to Bugzilla.
Discontinue use of Bugzilla if any of the following occurs:
Bugzilla comes with a lifetime guarantee.Bugzilla! Accept no substitutes!
Or even make it more proper -- pick one evening a month to be set aside for this madness, then have a lottery to see who the lucky N winners will be who will get GOD status. Fully publicize it in advance, so no one gets pissed off, and those who want to see it happen can be ready. And of course, make sure to back up everyone's status just before it starts, and roll it all back to that point when it's over and done with.
> The 937 boxes of court-ordered documents .
>
Ok everyone, sing along:
937 boxes of court-ordered documents on the wall,
937 boxes of court-ordered documents!
Take one down, shred it around,
936 boxes of court-ordered documents on the wall!
936 boxes of court-ordered documents on the wall,
936 boxes of court-ordered documents!
Take one down, ***AGGGMMMPHHPHHH*** [wad of toilet paper shoved in mouth]
*Hello* -- this is Slashdot! Give us a link! ;)
Seriously, if the "true" academics are too focused on their own theories to want to deal with you, let the hobbyists take over! Open-source it!
I heard a bit about the Wright brothers on the radio the other day. A historian was giving an account of how it happened, and emphasized the fact that they were not tinkering; they were in fact taking a highly scientific approach -- developing a theory, or a refinement to a theory, designing a test setup, and then implementing and executing it. Kitty Hawk was really just one of their experiments. The older brother was actually doing this instead of pursuing a degree only because of an illness that derailed his educational career.
The historian also mentioned another guy -- was it the Lilienthal you mentioned? -- who actually got big-time grants for doing work to create the first flying machine, got a lot of press attention, etc. But he took much more of a tinkering approach, and ended up losing the race.
So, what I'm getting at is that while tinkering is fun, and *can* lead to serrendipitous discoveries, real success is more likely to come from a disciplined, scientific approach. That's the beauty and power of human intelligence -- the formation of fundamental ideas that can then inform our actions; it's why we can change the world so much faster than the forces of evolution ever did.
So working on the fundamental theories of AI with a simulator of some kind is more likely to get the core problem solved -- the essence of what will make a machine intelligent. As progress is made on that end, then other teams can take that knowledge and go and solve all the little interface-with-the-real-world problems, and start creating the final implementations.
Taking the opposite approach -- trying to solve all the little problems and hoping it will somewhow mush together to create AI -- is not as likely to get anywhere. Of course, if your project is just to find good abstraction mechanisms to feed into a core program, then that's fine -- there's a clear goal, and it can be approached methodically; its a sub-field that will definitely have to be well-explored. But to tinker with robots and think that you can shoot the moon and get a whole system working intelligently is almost assuredly going to lead to a lot of disappointment.