Since Fox News created a walled off echo chamber (not just saying "listen to us" but actively inculating the idea among their listeners, the GOP, that every other outlet is the Debbil), that's all that's necessary.
And can we please stop with the "left wing media" nonsense? As Bill Kristol admitted, "The whole idea of the 'liberal media' was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.’” Are we talking about the same CNN that positively jizzed themselves with excitement in the runup to Iraq War 2.0? Is there any media outlet in the US that treated the "death panels" lie with the scorn it deserved? Is there one that doesn't concede every debate to the Republicans before it begins, by using their terms?
The economy was better off in the early 1930s, when the grandparents and great-grandparents best known for the practice grew up? In the 1800s, when times cycled from boom to depression (as in Great Depression depths) and back every generation?
True it's not the only thing, but remember that interest rates are quite correlated with inflation.
One must also be very careful comparing economic conditions of the 19th century with those of the present, or any time since the abandonment of the gold standard. During the 1800s, the gold standard combined with the grip of the Industrial Revolution meant that the money supply was relatively fixed while the number of goods and services diverged, creating a strongly deflationary condition. Side effects of the Revolution are what enabled it to escape the "stuff money in the mattress, it'll be worth more later" trap. The 1800s were a time of wild economic instability; the lack of central regulation and damping meant the economy cycled from boom to depression every 15-20 years, marked by regular bank panics. By the 1900s the extremeness of the instability had reached the point that there were 6 banking panics in the span of 1890-1910, which originally motivated the creation of the Fed. This wild unpredictability, combined with highly depressed wages during the Guilded Age, effectively prevented most people from saving, thereby negating the savings trap.
The situation today is very different. Wages are not so depressed that people can't possibly save money (though many choose not to - witness the insane negative savings rate in the years leading up to 2008), and many people are vested in the stock market. In 1929 when overextension of credit caused a crash, the sudden destruction of wealth caused prices to deflate. This, an abruptly bleak economic outlook, and the sudden unavailability of credit triggered a "don't spend now, it'll be worth more later" feedback loop - a deflationary spiral - and the resulting massive negative feedback imploded the economy. The same confluence of events occurred in 2008, and if it weren't for federal action (the bank bailouts, disgusting as they were, and exercising control over interest rates) we'd be trapped in the same negative feedback loop.
I'll summarize it thus: A deflationary death spiral occurs when a major economic contraction causes deflation, and the combination induces mass withdrawl from the normal investment cycle. If it weren't for actions to ward deflation off, we'd be in that spiral now.
All we have to do to solve the problem is stop going further into debt and stabilize economic growth. Inflation will depreciate the relative value of the debt for us.
Steady 5% inflation for 10 years (a bit high, but not entirely intolerable) would "pay off" 40% of the debt by reducing its relative import to 60% of what it is now. Combined with steady payments of $500B/annum over that time the debt could be reduced to 1/3 of its present value by 2020 if both events were to occur and be maintained immediately [insert laugh track here].
I just saying, it's a problem but it's not insoluble. Nor, unfortunately, is it the most proximate problem facing the US - an economy that is seemingly trapped in a new, lower equilibrium is. Attention CEOs: If you fire everyone they won't be able to buy your stupid products any more!
Ummm, yes, a lowish steady inflation IS a good thing. Without it, there's no incentive to continue investing money in the economy instead of under your mattress.
Would you prefer deflation? The last time that was arranged we called it The Great Depression.
If anyone thinks the Democrats are going to show a spine now or ever, I've got a slightly used bridge for sale in Brooklyn.
And we're not talking regular invertebrate here. I mean, sweet Baby Jesus on a pogo stick - how can you walk into something where eighty percent of the public supports your position that there should be revenue increases and come away with nothing whatsoever? And not only that, leave having proven that you will negotiate with hostage takers when the "hostage" is the entire nation's economy...
Just in case anyone believes this, federal taxes in the US are at their lowest point in living memory, and the US's social safety net would be considered a sad joke almost anywhere else in the developed world (The fact that its for-profit healthcare system is allowed to hang the most expensive medical millstone in the world around the neck of every business here, and that Americans routinely go bankrupt because they have the temerity to get seriously ill and not be rich doesn't help).
The money supply inflates exponentially, so yes every debt ceiling raise will tend towards being the biggest ever. Let's see them on a dimensionless scale by dividing by something of equal measure, say GDP.
Dimensional analysis should be required learning in high school:/
I'd be more careful about this "we" you are throwing around so freely.
"We" the people have for many years supported the existence of social security, medicare, public schooling, and other such programs which provide a pale imitation of the social net found in other developed nations.
And what else can it be called but a religious article when you have people like Grover Norquist, famous for saying he wanted to shrink government with the objective of "drowning it in the bathtub," getting congressional Republicans signing pledges that they will never, ever allow any form of revenue increase ever? When Boehner walked out of negotiations because Obama refused to offer a deal consisting of nothing but spending cuts?
What we are seeing here is the long-term Republican strategy of destroying the New Deal and everything that's come since by forcing the US into insolvency.
Are you sure it wasn't Reagan's Star Wars?
Are you sure it wasn't Bush's decision to slash taxes when we were running a surplus for the first time in modern history and on course to pay down the deficit?
Or his decision to not only not impose a war tax to pay for his overseas adventures, but for the first time ever cut taxes during a war?
We are buried in debt that was created almost entirely by Republican administrations, due to Republican policies. Federal taxes are at their lowest point in living memory, federal revenue as a fraction of GDP is 20% below where it was in 1980, and we are facing a deficit that will never be closed unless that circumstance is changed. Taxes go up or our deficit continues to accumulate - your choice.
It's not acceptable if you're an Evil Tax And Spend Democrat tasked with fixing the problem.
It's OK to run a massive deficit, or reduce taxes during a war, or create massive unfunded programs like Medicare D, if you're a Fiscally Responsible Republican however.
That this viewpoint (or at least the first half of it) is unquestioningly repeated by nearly the entire media is the problem. The Republican party's slow descent into insanity began when they realized that the media would unquestioningly repeat absolutely anything they said, no matter how ludicrous or patently false...
Because Obama was the one who took the debt ceiling hostage in order to force people to accede to his nearly religious-cult-obsession with never raising taxes to pay for anything, ever.
If you're going to thank him sarcastically for something, it should be for teaching the Republicans that hostage-taking works. Enjoy this bullshiat happening again in 6 months. Yes, McConnell outright said that: The debt ceiling is "a hostage worth ransoming."
If today's Republican party were described to someone even 5 years ago, they'd assume you were talking about a cartoon villain, with a tophat and monocle, twirling his moustache as he cackles about the latest despicable thing he did just because he could.
Of all the arguments I've ever seen against nuclear power, "Durr, it was invented 50 years ago" is quite possibly the stupidest. In most cases the claims involved at least make some connection to reality if you interpert generously. But there's just no way to read this retarded appeal to novelty, however favorably or disfavorably, that even makes sense.
Yes, nuclear power was commercialized in the 1960s... And? So were integrated circuits and color TV, dumbass.
Except that a total of a few hundred people - those working directly on the site to deal with the disaster - have been exposed amounts of radiation associated with anything whatsoever, and that only when received at once instead of over months. A grand total of 400-500 square km northwest of Fukushima continues to have radiation levels meaningfully above background levels; The cleanup will not be cheap, but it will be done eventually. They've already begun testing pressure washing of exterior surfaces as a means of removing contamination from buildings. Nature herself has already begun doing some of the work, flushing contamination downriver and out to sea (or sedimentation plant as the case may be).
It's becoming painfully obvious that the doomsayers blew their wads over nothing yet again, and as more and more time passes the margin for effects shrinks more and more.
So I assume you can provide some form of evidence that anyone in Japan is dying as a result of Fukushima? Other than the guy who died of heatstroke, and the couple of guys in reactor 1 during the first hydrogen explosion, that is.
Please note that heart attacks and strokes due to fearmongering hysteria don't count.
To say one cannot plan for failure is absurd. That's like saying that we should never build cars because we can never build one that will save you from all possible failure modes. No, we design them to alert you to non-disaster failures (warning lights) and implement means of dealing with disastrous failure, both expected and unexpected (airbags in collision zones, seat belts, crush zones).
In reality, you look at the system and determine how it can fail: Collisions {read ended, head-on, t-boned, sideswiped,...}, mechanical failure {pump failures, belt failures, tire failure}, electrical failure {bad battery, bad alternator, blown fuses}, etc. Then determine a set of precautions that will mitigate these failures (crumple zones, warning lights, roll cages, etc). It's the same way with nuclear power. There's only so many ways a reactor system can malfunction and a whole lot of smart people spend a lot of time thinking about them, and in the event something completely unexpected happens the containment dome/building is the last ditch means of stopping the large-scale release of radioactivity.
As to Fukushima: There have been about 5 fatalities, none of them relating to radiation. Two operators received a radiation dose (entirely their own fault for not following safety procedures) at the lowest end of that which causes any actual biological effects if given all at once.
You think the metal detectors and x-ray scanners are at the entrances to court buildings because they think every citizen is an enemy? Did it occur to you it's perhaps because of the very real threats involved when a building is in the business of confining and pronouncing sentences upon a set of people which includes large numbers of vicious criminals with vicious criminal friends on the outside?
If you want to complain about "treating everyone like a criminal" bullshit, start with the Transportation "Safety" Administration.
Your post is what's called for when someone trivializes an engineering or scientific problem. In your haste, you failed to realize that the physics and engineering behind fuel reprocessing were necessarily solved during the Manhattan Project seventy years ago.
What we have here is something far more inimical and insidious - a myopic dumbass politicians problem, compounded by an even greater dumbass population problem.
You realize that fossil fuel power is only cheap because no one's paying for the massive externalities it brings, and we're basically using up the world's inertial tendency to keep going as it was as a crutch? And there's the whole "using up within a few centuries what took a quarter billion years to make" aspect.
Or did you really think we can dump a thousand billion tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, 3/4 of which then go to acidifying the oceans, without consequence? Sure, it won't have immediate kick-in-the-crotch consequences, but nor will slowly pouring sand onto the top of a large skyscraper. But boy are you people going to be sad when we tip out of the quasi-stable point we're in. And the scientists who will by then have spent a century trying to stop you will be too busy trying to pick up the pieces to say "Told you."
And how, pray tell, does your thesis account for the fact that most western governments pay a great fraction of the cost of installing renewable power at a local level, and actively fund renewable energy startups, and are themselves installing renewable power? Is this some sort of "Anything they appear to do that's decent is actually a mask for an even deeper malice and evil" theory?
If you let everybody speak, and let everybody listen, the truth will be known.
To the tiny minority both smart enough to see through the bullshit and astroturfed lies and willing to spend the effort to do so. Remember the healthcare "debate" in the US?
As another saying goes, the best argument against democracy is a 5 minute conversation with the average voter. Also, "You'll have the vote of every thinking man, Adlai." Adlai Stevenson: "Thank you, but I need a majority."
Re:Each major release is taking longer
on
KDE 4.7.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Personally I'm stuck on the unbelievably, mind-warpingly horrible performance.
Half a minute to generate a few thousand.jpg thumbnails in konqueror? Dragon player sputtering and dropping frames on a 640x480 video? It doesn't even seem to be exclusive to multimedia. The entire qt4 framework is so shockingly slow it's unbelievable... Every damned release they keep saying "performance is even better" and yet the instant I moved any window, the screen slowed to a slideshow for an appreciable fraction of a second while it apparently dug something out of cache.
I've since installed xfce4 and never looked back. KDE is basically unusable on a 2.7Ghz dual core Athlon2 and has been since 4.x came out... I'm not joking when I say that xfce4 is more responsive on a 15 year old SGI Indy on than KDE is on my normal desktop, despite having 1/50 the CPU power, 1/30 the memory and a 2MB framebuffer graphics card.
The only part of kde4 that I've ever missed is the "mouse mark" applet.
Indeed. Humans are born with certain boundaries of potential. Athletes have always gone up to the physical ones and started pushing. The smart have always gone up to the intellectual ones and started pushing. AI isn't going to change that.
I can see a use for AIs to help us acquire full educations faster since they can move as fast as the individual using them. This is actually a problem in physics today; Most people in physics who have something named after them made the discovery/discoveries when they were in their early 20s. Now it takes until your mid 20s just to finish learning all the physics needed to even begin contributing! It's getting to the point where it literally takes longer than your brain's childlike plasticity lasts to learn enough.
I have a hard time imagining how much more I'd know right now if the TLC and MECC games I spent my childhood on had increased their difficulty at rates appropriate for me instead of rates appropriate for some test group. Or rather, if they'd been able to keep going. Math munchers, reading blaster, math blaster, gizmos & gadgets, operation neptune, it was the same story every time... progress to max difficulty, get bored.
What we need is a Math Munchers that doesn't stop until you're solving partial differential equations... A Reading Blaster that keeps going until you can not only read the words, but gain insight from them and recognize the overarching meaning and truly understand the written word. A Gizmos and Gadgets that doesn't stop until it's taught you quantum mechanics... In short, the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.
The first person to create and distribute such a Primer will forever change the world.
Intelligence is not the ability of an expert system to do what it was programmed to do well, it's... well it's many things.
It's the ability to apply things from one problem domain to another via analogical reasoning. The ability to apply induction and deduction to identify new problems. The ability to identify correlations between things. To then test them and prune the meaningless junk from the correlation matrix (This is what crackpots and conspiracy theorists fail at). It's the ability to identify specific problems and generate expert programs to solve them, which then become integrated into the brain until you don't know they're there. And a lot of other cerebral things, all (in the only known case) driven and profoundly manipulated by an underlying primitive mind that seeks food, shelter and sex.
AI hasn't been created because we don't even known what natural intelligence is, beyond the Supreme Court's famous "I know it when I see it."
You know, every thread we have about HPC/parallel computing this comes up:
"We just need a compiler that magically autoparallelizes well."
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to write parallel code for any non-trivial application? It's hard enough to get the openmp/openmpi "magic parallel" options to work worth a damn when compiling Fortran or C. I've spent _months_ getting about 10 pages of code to not only run CFD/MHD on nVidia GPUs, but actually reach a sizable fraction of theoretical performance.
Nvcc can't even figure out that px[x]*px[x] doesn't require two memory reads without me saying to store it in a register first. You volunteering to not only write the compiler that will do that for Nvidia's architecture, but point out to me where the speedups are, instead of me painstakingly explaining them as if to a particularly slow child? And make sure it can do the same for AMD, and Cell, and MPI machines, and hierarchial systems with multi-GPU nodes on a larger MPI network? No such compiler exists and it's not for lack of trying.
Slashdot Mirror
Since Fox News created a walled off echo chamber (not just saying "listen to us" but actively inculating the idea among their listeners, the GOP, that every other outlet is the Debbil), that's all that's necessary.
And can we please stop with the "left wing media" nonsense? As Bill Kristol admitted, "The whole idea of the 'liberal media' was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.’” Are we talking about the same CNN that positively jizzed themselves with excitement in the runup to Iraq War 2.0? Is there any media outlet in the US that treated the "death panels" lie with the scorn it deserved? Is there one that doesn't concede every debate to the Republicans before it begins, by using their terms?
The economy was better off in the early 1930s, when the grandparents and great-grandparents best known for the practice grew up? In the 1800s, when times cycled from boom to depression (as in Great Depression depths) and back every generation?
True it's not the only thing, but remember that interest rates are quite correlated with inflation.
One must also be very careful comparing economic conditions of the 19th century with those of the present, or any time since the abandonment of the gold standard. During the 1800s, the gold standard combined with the grip of the Industrial Revolution meant that the money supply was relatively fixed while the number of goods and services diverged, creating a strongly deflationary condition. Side effects of the Revolution are what enabled it to escape the "stuff money in the mattress, it'll be worth more later" trap. The 1800s were a time of wild economic instability; the lack of central regulation and damping meant the economy cycled from boom to depression every 15-20 years, marked by regular bank panics. By the 1900s the extremeness of the instability had reached the point that there were 6 banking panics in the span of 1890-1910, which originally motivated the creation of the Fed. This wild unpredictability, combined with highly depressed wages during the Guilded Age, effectively prevented most people from saving, thereby negating the savings trap.
The situation today is very different. Wages are not so depressed that people can't possibly save money (though many choose not to - witness the insane negative savings rate in the years leading up to 2008), and many people are vested in the stock market. In 1929 when overextension of credit caused a crash, the sudden destruction of wealth caused prices to deflate. This, an abruptly bleak economic outlook, and the sudden unavailability of credit triggered a "don't spend now, it'll be worth more later" feedback loop - a deflationary spiral - and the resulting massive negative feedback imploded the economy. The same confluence of events occurred in 2008, and if it weren't for federal action (the bank bailouts, disgusting as they were, and exercising control over interest rates) we'd be trapped in the same negative feedback loop.
I'll summarize it thus: A deflationary death spiral occurs when a major economic contraction causes deflation, and the combination induces mass withdrawl from the normal investment cycle. If it weren't for actions to ward deflation off, we'd be in that spiral now.
All we have to do to solve the problem is stop going further into debt and stabilize economic growth. Inflation will depreciate the relative value of the debt for us.
Steady 5% inflation for 10 years (a bit high, but not entirely intolerable) would "pay off" 40% of the debt by reducing its relative import to 60% of what it is now. Combined with steady payments of $500B/annum over that time the debt could be reduced to 1/3 of its present value by 2020 if both events were to occur and be maintained immediately [insert laugh track here].
I just saying, it's a problem but it's not insoluble. Nor, unfortunately, is it the most proximate problem facing the US - an economy that is seemingly trapped in a new, lower equilibrium is. Attention CEOs: If you fire everyone they won't be able to buy your stupid products any more!
Ummm, yes, a lowish steady inflation IS a good thing. Without it, there's no incentive to continue investing money in the economy instead of under your mattress.
Would you prefer deflation? The last time that was arranged we called it The Great Depression.
Hehehe.
If anyone thinks the Democrats are going to show a spine now or ever, I've got a slightly used bridge for sale in Brooklyn.
And we're not talking regular invertebrate here. I mean, sweet Baby Jesus on a pogo stick - how can you walk into something where eighty percent of the public supports your position that there should be revenue increases and come away with nothing whatsoever? And not only that, leave having proven that you will negotiate with hostage takers when the "hostage" is the entire nation's economy...
Just in case anyone believes this, federal taxes in the US are at their lowest point in living memory, and the US's social safety net would be considered a sad joke almost anywhere else in the developed world (The fact that its for-profit healthcare system is allowed to hang the most expensive medical millstone in the world around the neck of every business here, and that Americans routinely go bankrupt because they have the temerity to get seriously ill and not be rich doesn't help).
The money supply inflates exponentially, so yes every debt ceiling raise will tend towards being the biggest ever. Let's see them on a dimensionless scale by dividing by something of equal measure, say GDP.
:/
Dimensional analysis should be required learning in high school
I'd be more careful about this "we" you are throwing around so freely.
"We" the people have for many years supported the existence of social security, medicare, public schooling, and other such programs which provide a pale imitation of the social net found in other developed nations.
And what else can it be called but a religious article when you have people like Grover Norquist, famous for saying he wanted to shrink government with the objective of "drowning it in the bathtub," getting congressional Republicans signing pledges that they will never, ever allow any form of revenue increase ever? When Boehner walked out of negotiations because Obama refused to offer a deal consisting of nothing but spending cuts?
What we are seeing here is the long-term Republican strategy of destroying the New Deal and everything that's come since by forcing the US into insolvency.
Are you sure it was Obama who indebted us?
Are you sure it wasn't Reagan's Star Wars?
Are you sure it wasn't Bush's decision to slash taxes when we were running a surplus for the first time in modern history and on course to pay down the deficit?
Or his decision to not only not impose a war tax to pay for his overseas adventures, but for the first time ever cut taxes during a war?
We are buried in debt that was created almost entirely by Republican administrations, due to Republican policies. Federal taxes are at their lowest point in living memory, federal revenue as a fraction of GDP is 20% below where it was in 1980, and we are facing a deficit that will never be closed unless that circumstance is changed. Taxes go up or our deficit continues to accumulate - your choice.
It's not acceptable if you're an Evil Tax And Spend Democrat tasked with fixing the problem.
It's OK to run a massive deficit, or reduce taxes during a war, or create massive unfunded programs like Medicare D, if you're a Fiscally Responsible Republican however.
That this viewpoint (or at least the first half of it) is unquestioningly repeated by nearly the entire media is the problem. The Republican party's slow descent into insanity began when they realized that the media would unquestioningly repeat absolutely anything they said, no matter how ludicrous or patently false...
Because Obama was the one who took the debt ceiling hostage in order to force people to accede to his nearly religious-cult-obsession with never raising taxes to pay for anything, ever.
If you're going to thank him sarcastically for something, it should be for teaching the Republicans that hostage-taking works. Enjoy this bullshiat happening again in 6 months. Yes, McConnell outright said that: The debt ceiling is "a hostage worth ransoming."
If today's Republican party were described to someone even 5 years ago, they'd assume you were talking about a cartoon villain, with a tophat and monocle, twirling his moustache as he cackles about the latest despicable thing he did just because he could.
If its name means "bastard" I suppose it's intentionally written the way it is... No wonder I want to stab someone every time I have to use it.
Of all the arguments I've ever seen against nuclear power, "Durr, it was invented 50 years ago" is quite possibly the stupidest. In most cases the claims involved at least make some connection to reality if you interpert generously. But there's just no way to read this retarded appeal to novelty, however favorably or disfavorably, that even makes sense.
Yes, nuclear power was commercialized in the 1960s... And? So were integrated circuits and color TV, dumbass.
Except that a total of a few hundred people - those working directly on the site to deal with the disaster - have been exposed amounts of radiation associated with anything whatsoever, and that only when received at once instead of over months. A grand total of 400-500 square km northwest of Fukushima continues to have radiation levels meaningfully above background levels; The cleanup will not be cheap, but it will be done eventually. They've already begun testing pressure washing of exterior surfaces as a means of removing contamination from buildings. Nature herself has already begun doing some of the work, flushing contamination downriver and out to sea (or sedimentation plant as the case may be).
It's becoming painfully obvious that the doomsayers blew their wads over nothing yet again, and as more and more time passes the margin for effects shrinks more and more.
So I assume you can provide some form of evidence that anyone in Japan is dying as a result of Fukushima? Other than the guy who died of heatstroke, and the couple of guys in reactor 1 during the first hydrogen explosion, that is.
Please note that heart attacks and strokes due to fearmongering hysteria don't count.
To say one cannot plan for failure is absurd. That's like saying that we should never build cars because we can never build one that will save you from all possible failure modes. No, we design them to alert you to non-disaster failures (warning lights) and implement means of dealing with disastrous failure, both expected and unexpected (airbags in collision zones, seat belts, crush zones).
...}, mechanical failure {pump failures, belt failures, tire failure}, electrical failure {bad battery, bad alternator, blown fuses}, etc. Then determine a set of precautions that will mitigate these failures (crumple zones, warning lights, roll cages, etc). It's the same way with nuclear power. There's only so many ways a reactor system can malfunction and a whole lot of smart people spend a lot of time thinking about them, and in the event something completely unexpected happens the containment dome/building is the last ditch means of stopping the large-scale release of radioactivity.
In reality, you look at the system and determine how it can fail: Collisions {read ended, head-on, t-boned, sideswiped,
As to Fukushima: There have been about 5 fatalities, none of them relating to radiation. Two operators received a radiation dose (entirely their own fault for not following safety procedures) at the lowest end of that which causes any actual biological effects if given all at once.
You think the metal detectors and x-ray scanners are at the entrances to court buildings because they think every citizen is an enemy? Did it occur to you it's perhaps because of the very real threats involved when a building is in the business of confining and pronouncing sentences upon a set of people which includes large numbers of vicious criminals with vicious criminal friends on the outside?
If you want to complain about "treating everyone like a criminal" bullshit, start with the Transportation "Safety" Administration.
Your post is what's called for when someone trivializes an engineering or scientific problem. In your haste, you failed to realize that the physics and engineering behind fuel reprocessing were necessarily solved during the Manhattan Project seventy years ago.
What we have here is something far more inimical and insidious - a myopic dumbass politicians problem, compounded by an even greater dumbass population problem.
You realize that fossil fuel power is only cheap because no one's paying for the massive externalities it brings, and we're basically using up the world's inertial tendency to keep going as it was as a crutch? And there's the whole "using up within a few centuries what took a quarter billion years to make" aspect.
Or did you really think we can dump a thousand billion tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, 3/4 of which then go to acidifying the oceans, without consequence? Sure, it won't have immediate kick-in-the-crotch consequences, but nor will slowly pouring sand onto the top of a large skyscraper. But boy are you people going to be sad when we tip out of the quasi-stable point we're in. And the scientists who will by then have spent a century trying to stop you will be too busy trying to pick up the pieces to say "Told you."
And how, pray tell, does your thesis account for the fact that most western governments pay a great fraction of the cost of installing renewable power at a local level, and actively fund renewable energy startups, and are themselves installing renewable power? Is this some sort of "Anything they appear to do that's decent is actually a mask for an even deeper malice and evil" theory?
To the tiny minority both smart enough to see through the bullshit and astroturfed lies and willing to spend the effort to do so. Remember the healthcare "debate" in the US?
As another saying goes, the best argument against democracy is a 5 minute conversation with the average voter. Also, "You'll have the vote of every thinking man, Adlai." Adlai Stevenson: "Thank you, but I need a majority."
Personally I'm stuck on the unbelievably, mind-warpingly horrible performance.
.jpg thumbnails in konqueror? Dragon player sputtering and dropping frames on a 640x480 video? It doesn't even seem to be exclusive to multimedia. The entire qt4 framework is so shockingly slow it's unbelievable... Every damned release they keep saying "performance is even better" and yet the instant I moved any window, the screen slowed to a slideshow for an appreciable fraction of a second while it apparently dug something out of cache.
Half a minute to generate a few thousand
I've since installed xfce4 and never looked back. KDE is basically unusable on a 2.7Ghz dual core Athlon2 and has been since 4.x came out... I'm not joking when I say that xfce4 is more responsive on a 15 year old SGI Indy on than KDE is on my normal desktop, despite having 1/50 the CPU power, 1/30 the memory and a 2MB framebuffer graphics card.
The only part of kde4 that I've ever missed is the "mouse mark" applet.
Indeed. Humans are born with certain boundaries of potential. Athletes have always gone up to the physical ones and started pushing. The smart have always gone up to the intellectual ones and started pushing. AI isn't going to change that.
I can see a use for AIs to help us acquire full educations faster since they can move as fast as the individual using them. This is actually a problem in physics today; Most people in physics who have something named after them made the discovery/discoveries when they were in their early 20s. Now it takes until your mid 20s just to finish learning all the physics needed to even begin contributing! It's getting to the point where it literally takes longer than your brain's childlike plasticity lasts to learn enough.
I have a hard time imagining how much more I'd know right now if the TLC and MECC games I spent my childhood on had increased their difficulty at rates appropriate for me instead of rates appropriate for some test group. Or rather, if they'd been able to keep going. Math munchers, reading blaster, math blaster, gizmos & gadgets, operation neptune, it was the same story every time... progress to max difficulty, get bored.
What we need is a Math Munchers that doesn't stop until you're solving partial differential equations... A Reading Blaster that keeps going until you can not only read the words, but gain insight from them and recognize the overarching meaning and truly understand the written word. A Gizmos and Gadgets that doesn't stop until it's taught you quantum mechanics... In short, the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer.
The first person to create and distribute such a Primer will forever change the world.
Intelligence is not the ability of an expert system to do what it was programmed to do well, it's... well it's many things.
It's the ability to apply things from one problem domain to another via analogical reasoning. The ability to apply induction and deduction to identify new problems. The ability to identify correlations between things. To then test them and prune the meaningless junk from the correlation matrix (This is what crackpots and conspiracy theorists fail at). It's the ability to identify specific problems and generate expert programs to solve them, which then become integrated into the brain until you don't know they're there. And a lot of other cerebral things, all (in the only known case) driven and profoundly manipulated by an underlying primitive mind that seeks food, shelter and sex.
AI hasn't been created because we don't even known what natural intelligence is, beyond the Supreme Court's famous "I know it when I see it."
You know, every thread we have about HPC/parallel computing this comes up:
"We just need a compiler that magically autoparallelizes well."
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to write parallel code for any non-trivial application? It's hard enough to get the openmp/openmpi "magic parallel" options to work worth a damn when compiling Fortran or C. I've spent _months_ getting about 10 pages of code to not only run CFD/MHD on nVidia GPUs, but actually reach a sizable fraction of theoretical performance.
Nvcc can't even figure out that px[x]*px[x] doesn't require two memory reads without me saying to store it in a register first. You volunteering to not only write the compiler that will do that for Nvidia's architecture, but point out to me where the speedups are, instead of me painstakingly explaining them as if to a particularly slow child? And make sure it can do the same for AMD, and Cell, and MPI machines, and hierarchial systems with multi-GPU nodes on a larger MPI network? No such compiler exists and it's not for lack of trying.