They don't consider computational efficiencies due to complexity. For instance, if you count items by marking tally marks on sticks, then to count something into the billions, you run out of trees in the world to make those sticks. However, if you use indian-arabic notation, marking down 9 billion 500 thousand 201 takes up this much room: 9,000,500,201. That's it. This is the kind of computational efficiency that cannot be predicted. The human brain is a pretty fast computer and visual/audio singal analyzer, plus social nuance analyzer, etc, probably running around roughly 5 to 70 Hz semianalog. Though there are quite a few braincells, building supercomputers with equivalent number of transistors would most likely not give the same computational performance. There is a guess that the interconnectivity, the synapse density between the neurons is what makes the difference. The computational efficiency comes from complexity. In this sense, a neuron, like a notation number, instead of representing a single tally mark, can represent something like the 5 in the 9,000,500,201 billion. Its function and performance is super-enhanced by increased complexity of what it can do - it can be a number from 0 to 9, and it can be a placeholder. Such things can create an order of magnitude increase in efficiency, that Moore's Law analyses cannot predict. The move to multicore processors is most likely the only way to keep up with Moore's law, and currently this move is in its infancies. We know the brain is multicore-like, "interconnectedness" based. When eventually we have a few trillion cores interacting on a cpu, we might discover, by trial and error, methods of increased efficiency. We might even understand how our own brain works from playing with chips, as opposed to understanding it from brain research, since the ethical issues coming from the machine direction are much easier to deal with (or are they?) Low intelligence automation and robotization is an easy ethical question, and it will be welcome thing for humanity, but the big problem with increased supercomputing power and understanding how the brain works is the problem of artificial intelligence.
Currently we know of no other beings smarter than us, humans, in the universe. That's a big deal. Silicon based solar-robotic lifeforms might be able to spread through the vacuum of interstellar universe, they would not be interdependent on chemical lifeforms like those on planet Earth. Where would that leave hydrocarbon-water-chemical life as we know it? We love and care about nature around us, and even if we don't, we ultimately have to act as if we did. The interdependence of life eating life, plants being the photosynthesists, sort of holds the collective interests together, and makes all Life function as one. Though this rule of interdependence is not explicitly expressed in the behavior of lifeforms - and I wonder if some of the prehistoric mass-extinction events were not simply caused by the appearance of a new predator/virus/bacterial disease and the level of life activity simply reduced and reset to a new lower level balance being able to deal with that predator/virus/bacteria - currently all ecosystems function as a ecosystem, with no predators being "super successful", in a selfish, survival of me without the survival of everything around me attitude, the simplistic Darwinistic principle. Predators currently have an interest in the ecosystem beneath them functioning at a high level.
Even space stations based on solar panel derived artificial-light using water-hydrocarbon-photosynthetic life farming would still be an ecosystem like ours. Solar panel derived fat/sugar/protein chemical synthesis in metal pots may be easier to deal with in a space station than a full scale ecosystem and farming, where only humans exist, and maybe just a very few species of plants and animals. Compare the farm to a jungle. All humans really need is the farm to survive, land with a few species of crops and few species of animals, or even just the cement/metal/glass city, and the jungle
Eventually there will be space reality shows, and docking meet ups and game contests between various space stations, such as space boxing, or even undocked who can grow food better, and everyone down on Terra will be watching. A 1.2 second ping will be tolerable for things that really matter.
Have you noticed how Nobel prizes are going back to inventions done in the 60's, 70's? Maybe they wanna catch these people while they are alive. Or maybe not that much truly groundbreaking and noteworthy under the Sun since the turn of the millenium?
One of the major issues is the availability of the source code. When you have 451 developers talking to each other, and they find something holding them back, being able to do something about it themselves as opposed to begging a vendor and waiting for months because their hands are legally tied having no free access to source code and modify it as they see best fit for their own purpose or their own problems, that makes and breaks everything, when you're trying to squeeze the milliseconds. Off the shelf technologies are good for 1 person quick and dirty nonperformance situations. Unfortunately the performance of dotnet is such a nonperformance crawl on mediocre or low cost hardware, that it turns away even 1 person "teams" because the "quick and dirty" lost the "quick" part, and only retained the "dirty."
But there is enough silicon in the world. It's the most abundant element after hydrogen+oxygen on the Earth's surface. Any solar technology based on exotic materials such as indium (or even Ga or Ge) will simply result in a market supply crunch, where indium's price will go through the roof to the point where it's no longer competitive with silicon technologies. You can probably predict a 2 to 15 year market on CIGS, with an automatic brake on profits, because if it really takes off as a business, you have to automatically stop, because the raw material price shooting for the stars will be instant. Indium has a volatile price reacting very hard to market demand. Moreover we need all the indium we got to make LCD's and flat screen tv's. Per square meter, that's a more valuable use of resources, especially when silicon solar roof tiles work too. Silicon is the shit, dawg. That's why the idea of intelligent design is so spooky. Cuz you can never be sure.
That's why we need to establish O'Neil's cylinders in outer space, that are properly shielded from space radiation. You just can't trust people down here, or keep all your eggs in one basket. It's important to maintain isolated and complete ecosystems that only exchange matter/objects/living things through will, and airlocks. Such space stations could then land on Earth too, or hang around under water. Deep under the oceans it's a pretty protected place from radiation(eventually radioactive solutes might build too high though), or the other side of the moon, It's not only about nuclear, but things such as biotech coming up with a superbug/supervirus that destroys all DNA it sees, including plants/animals/bacteria/viri, you need perfect airtight seal from that. The problem is that Biosphere II was a failure, which is surprising. That experiment needs to be repeated/duplicated, and the reasons for failure found out.
Stuff that needs Linux permissions/features explicitly, such as symlinks, I store on ext3 partitions. If I need to back them up, onto non ext3 partitions, such as when wiping the computer drive completely, I generate a tar.gz or tar.bz2 file on the directory, and back up that file onto an external drive accessible from all OS's.
For a while I tried the ext3/ifs windows driver for 2k/xp, and stored everything in Linux file systems, but I think I was hacked or something, because stuff started disappearing. I try not to use windows much on the net anymore, but for some things, mostly legacy stuff, you simply have to use it. My last version of windows that I can comfortably use is win 2k, which still has some leave you alone professional taste to it. XP has way too much bullshit automatically loaded into it, it looks prettier than 2k, but the trade offs in freedom are grave. Vista - no comment.
Actually, we need to build a Moon base, and put a cannon on it to shoot space station structural pieces into Earth orbit. On the Moon there is no atmosphere to burn up high speed projectiles, like down here on Earth, where asteroids turn into shooting stars. We still don't have an small scale ergonomic and efficient way to extract titanium/aluminum/iron/silicon from lunar materials. NASA used to have a challenge and reward money for oxygen extraction from lunar regolith for 5 kg's O2 in 8 hrs. Nobody won it.
We, in the US, can't do it. Money alone isn't enough. We don't have the technical expertise anymore, and brainpower is getting more difficult to import/adapt, as we are no longer the leader of the free world, but possibly have one of the more oppressive regimes amongst the technically advanced nations. Creative minds are attracted to freedom. Moreover anyone creative here is caught up in mere making ends meet issues, including my engineering college professors considering 5 bux being too steep for a non-profit professional organization dinner, and casually noting that in 2 years we students will all make more then they are making. Something is wrong with that picture. That should not even be on their minds. Having comfortable incomes that allow hobbies passions, such as developing aluminum electrolysis in a backyard in Oberlin, Ohio, or airplanes in a field in Dayton, Ohio by bicycle repair men, are a thing of the past. We don't have backyards anymore, and the DHS descends on you if you try to do anything in it, such as aluminum, or flying. Everything requires a permit anymore. Permit to attempt to fly. Permit to electrolyze aluminum. With police holding a straitjacket at the appeals session in court waiting for the verdict from the jury of twelve deliberating the testimony of psychologist witnesses pushing drug company agenda about mental illnesses. Soon we'll have officially stamped and approved toilet paper tissue slices with expiration dates.
Every penny is ultra important anymore. We no longer have things like Bell Labs, we can't justify Bell Labs anymore on mere financial terms. What's money got to do with it? Unfortunately, everything. We can no longer afford space programs, because we can't afford taxes, car, life, health insurance and credit card fees. And regulation requiring even more mandatory insurance fees is imminent. Space program? What space program? Who cares? We're in dog eats dog fights over who gets what, how we're gonna dice up the pennies of each dollar we make. In the end we end up not making the dollars because we're too busy fighting over how we dice up the ones we did make. Creativity is the only generation of true wealth of a nation. You can only fight over limited resources so much, no matter how good you get at fighting over it, if there is nothing left to fight over. The first rule of any successful parasite is that you don't kill the host, but let it flourish. We can't produce brainpower because we're still fighting a public vs. private education war - can't afford private/religious schools, and public education is, well, something smells fishy there, because a lot of poor countries can do a lot better job at it.
It's gonna be Japanese(expertise, freedom of creativity) and Chinese(resources, chinese-wall-building-like stamina, centrally focused government of the ancient Egyptian type) only in space as far as massive space stations go, unless they end up in a war against each other. We will be watching as bystanders. Like the British empire is today, watching space shuttle launches at Cape Canaveral, reminiscing of old days glory, when half the world's GDP was funneled to London as colonial income. Good old days.
But do we really care these days for space stations? The energy problem is more crucial. But we no longer have backyards of Oberlin to figure it out, and even if we do, people are too busy working too jobs to make ends meet and don't have the time anymore for it. Look at houses built in the US in the 1890-1920 period, and the decorations on them. Compare ones built in 1960-2000. Who had free time on their hands, and extra resources they could turn to creativity? What about education of their children?
Yeah, I had a serial PIC programmer, just to find out that once I stopped using desktops and fully switched to laptops only (for green conscious energy friendliness, if nothing else, I don't like the desktop 300-500W power supply ratings, I much prefer the 30-60W on modern laptops), the laptops either have a serial port with too low a voltage, or they don't have one at all, and then none of the USB/serial controllers have the proper voltage either. But a desktop would. But I don't have one, I don't want one, because of the noise/power/lack of dragging it around into a chair or couch mobility.
I also had a parallel port programmer, and it worked great on a laptop that still had a parallel port, but now my laptop doesn't even have that, and none of the USB/parallel port adapters map the full parallel port pinouts, moreover the USB stack only has a printing only parallel port stack. PCMCIA parallel adapters would be full parallel port adapters, but laptops don't come with PCMCIA either anymore.
So I was partly complaining for USB's lack of proper backward compatibility with the interfaces it was meant to replace. If PCMCIA can do it, USB should have been able to do it too. Someone somewhere wanted to kill the parallel port, but they did it a bit too fast, even if I understand why they did it. The parallel port is a waste on the economy overall, because of the hardware side, even if it's really easy on the programmers. I did work at a wire and cable place, where making a USB-like connector had like 0-1% waste, a 9 pin serial type connector probably 10% waste/in process repair, and a 25pin parallel adaptor with crimping really thin 26 AWG wire, with almost 100% waste/in process repair, and incredible amount of labor. All you need to do is screw up one wire that needs to be recrimped, and if you screw up the second time, and has to be cut again, now the length is too short and out of spec, and there goes 24 good wires down the drain with it, unfixable. If the length is too short and you put the connector together anyway, one wire bears all the tension and will eventually break off/fail at the customer during use. Making a connector with 2 wires like USB almost cannot be messed up, and is easily fixable - just change the other wire. When you have a braided bundle of 25 wires and a sleeve and jacket around it, the situation is a whole lot different - unbraiding, rejacketing, it's crazy amount of work, and it's not done at all.
Still, backward compatibility is backward compatibility. Set the price very high, at the real cost it takes to make the hardware, and let the customer choose between cost of programming software and cost of making the hardware. Eventually the parallel port would have disappeared, but there are all these already existing cables and connectors that could have been used during the transition period, that were forced into waste status instantly. It's not the right way to do it.
By the way it's been a while since I played with PIC's, mostly from giving up - not going through the bother of getting it to work anyway from a laptop. I know all it would really take is a set of properly biased transistors/level shifter chips that up the laptops serial port 5V to the 15V it was meant to be for programming the chips. But I just ordered a USB PIC programmer. There is enough debugging banging your head against a wall that some of the basic stuff you want to and expect to be able to rely on, just to clear some questions. You can waste so much of your time debugging something custom made only made for you, that having an off the shelf item that "just works" out of the box is like a breath of fresh air, saving precious minutes of stress, that work and waste your neurons harder than actually creating something with the microcontrollers, where everything works and chugs along with the little changes you make, as you iterate toward a final goal. One simple detail you get stuck in where things don't work as expected, and you can waste 90% of your total project time simple getting over some minute unexpected hurdle that's vital to the whole thing.
You may not necessarily want to achieve AI.
But even so I think computing has regressed since the days of BASIC. We today lack a general purpose programming language the easily interfaces to the outside world, and is masterable by anyone. Even the interfaces such as the parallel port, that were relatively easy to use to say flip switches in your home, have gone away, without a similarly simple equivalent device. That's the real regression. There are a million things people and businesses could automatically measure, monitor and come up with automatic actions based on them, and overall, make their own lives easier and better. Unfortunately the steep learning curve and expensive expertise to get it done (such as via programming C / USB / microcontrollers compared to printing a set of bits such as 10010110 to a parallel port address, like it used to be done) retard progress. IT is only useful when it's useful to the customer, to the end user. Getting caught up in the abstractions that only matter to IT people, such as the advances that java and dotnet brought, those are not advances, but regressions, from a business perspective - performance dropped through the floor and energy requirements went through the ceiling to get the exact same thing done that was picnic and energy efficient in BASIC. Now to even get a dotnet or java program going to read simple things from a serial port requires tremendous horsepower. That's not progress.
I could see a million places where IT could be made simpler and more accessible, without giving up performance and energy efficiency/speed, such as your own car. Why is it that car computers are not easy to understand, debug and even program? Such as setting cruise control sensors to read speed limits from where you are traveling, or recalibrating your own mph sensors based on officially placed signal points, or even GPS info. All this is doable, but it's not doable by Joe Schmo who'd like to do it. Why can't owners know what their cars are doing, or what's wrong with them? With a nice Solidworks drawing and sensor readouts showing all the details. Kind of like Chemstation shows it on an HPLC. The whole thing running on macros written in guess what, BASIC. Everyone could take one peak at the car computer picture, and tell what's going on. That would eliminate a whole lot of inefficiencies in the economy, a lot less prematurely worn cars, lot less wasted fuel, and just increase overall human happiness. Why is it that some cars can only be serviced by dealers, because of the expensive equipment needed to interface to them?
There are a million other things similar to your car that could use a standard interface to run, be programmed on, and give up info. There are still quite a bit of manufacturing production lines where people do repetitive task that could be automated, only if automation was cheaper, and that means easier.
That was the real progress of the 90's: macros written in basic. Now it takes a hairpulling amount of effort to start anything from scratch, and jump all the hoops that IT purists have shoved onto the computing world.
This is the exact reason we need thermonuclear hydrogen bombs stationed in outer space, ready to shoot: Unlike the dinosaurs, we don't have to be sitting ducks, we have the ability to defend ourselves against incoming comets. The problem with stationing bombs in outer space is an issue of trust: people down here still haven't figured out how to live in peace and leave each other alone, the UN is still not a functioning body of world government, people still play the "I don't trust you, I'll kill you before you kill me"- game, and call it self defense. So there is a distinct possibility that bombs stationed in outer space are directed back at Earth by people who are mad at each other, and can't just take it like a man, or can't stop dishing it out so others have to take it like a man. Possibly the bombs could be stringed out and stationed very far, into solar orbit past Mars near the asteroid belt, and Earth could carry many layers of inner defense shields, that stop any stray bombs that are hijacked, with some finite reaction time still left. The good part about having the bombs(and their observatories) extremely far is that the farther the comet is deterred by a minute angle on its path, the less effort is needed. So the benefit to risk ratio is better, because a bomb hitting Earth would only cause a localized damage, compared to the same force being able to deter an object the size of our moon by that 1 degree on its path to just miss Earth. The downside of going very far, is that it's easy to have stringed out objects in a solar orbit in a plane, as a circle, but it's hard to cover a sphere, like GPS does, because the paths might cross, and minute gravitational fluctuation might cause some of the objects to collide. Maintaining very many bombs that are far, compared to the much fewer required that are very close is also an issue, especially from a hijacking standpoint. A few bombs hijacked and hitting Earth would cause a local catastrophy, but if all the bombs that are very far are hijacked simultaneously, and redirected to Earth, that could be worth than the problem they are meant to defend against. A possible best solution is having habitable outer space stations, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Neill_cylinder, cylinders that provide artificial gravity on the inner surface by rotation/centrifugal force, and are built triple layered gradual vacuum against air diffusion/leaks, and extremely heavy walled to protect from outer space radiation to replace Earth's atmosphere (this means complete artificial lighting/farming/silicon solar panels, except a very few lead glass windows. In such case you don't keep all your eggs in one basket - whether there is a major asteroid hit, or a global nuclear war wiping out all life on the planet, we would still have people and plants and animals, we would still have Life to come back and reseed and repopulate the planet. Life would not die. Such space stations traveling to the region of Mars then could take on the job of watching for comets and taking care of them, and though there is a distinct possibility of interstellar war between such space stations, at least having the technology and ability to live in a space station in pure vacuum/cold/intense radiation, whether that space station is landed on Earth, under water in Earth's oceans, under the clouds of Venus, behind Jupiter, or far past Pluto running on nuclear fuel alone, each of these give Life and humanity a better chance to survive. All it takes is at least a few people to make it after a global catastrophy. The real danger is making robots smarter than us that hunt us down and exterminate us. Back in the old days there was such a thing as defense - walls, trenches, fortifications. These days, because of technology, the only defense is attack: the equilibrium of mutually assured destruction. Yes we did gain the ability to beat the odds that dinosaurs couldn't, but we also gain the ability to destroy all life within a few months. As technology progresses, our ability
But there is 2 elephants worth of air pressure pushing you from below, so it evens out. Plus you don't occupy a whole square meter when you stand up, but when you lie down flat, you get closer to it. But as the elephants worth of air weights accumulate on top, so do the ones pushing up from the bottom.
They are asking about the current state of technology - what is the lightest current practical means for us to store 1 petabyte of information. Theoretical, unpractical or ultra extremely costly does not count - it has to be something readily doable with current technology. For instance there is a world record of smallest engravings at the atomic scale, or even smaller, (standing waves in the electron cloud); writing a petabyte like that is not practical, or off the chart as far as expense goes. They are interested in things like dvd disk pile vs. lightest pocket harddrive pile vs. something esoteric such as 3d optical type storage in the form of holograms. All of these methods would be very expensive when ultralight weight is sought, but at least they would not be off the chart, when compared to the cheapest means of storing 1 petabyte, where weight is not an issue. This is a very meaningful question to ask in 2009, then again in 2019, etc.
Paper currency (or equivalent numbers in a bank account, which is even riskier) is definitely a riskier way to store wealth than gold. However, gold is overrated. Gold is simply a metal that won't rust and it's good for jewelry, and maybe some electrical contacts and lab equipment, but it's really not such a precious metal, at least these days, compared to technological metals, such as nickel, cobalt, tantalum, tungsten, molybdenum, chromium. Those metals even in a rusted form represent value, that carbon steel, in a rusted form never will, simply because iron and carbon are so abundant, and cheap. But if anything, will robot armies of the future be made of gold, or of alloys mentioned above? Future development of titanium technology is the big if here, because titanium is both noble and relatively abundant in the Earth's crust, and future robots might be made from it. But presently most high temperature turbines and military armors use cobalt/nickel etc. type alloys. So someone with a lot of gold might look at the gold market this way, and offload some of their gold reserves unto the public, or whoever will buy it, without dropping the market price too much. Vending machines with a fixed markup are a good way to do this. Gold currency is still universal, anonymous and needs no laundering, and its value does not go up in a flash like paper currency, simply because of limited reserves available. A totalitarian government might not look at the widespread use of gold currency with a good eye, simply because it enables the public to trade and deal without government oversight (including tax oversight), and the public cannot be stripped of their wealth in a flash of inflation.
I for one welcome our swarming miniaturized robot overlords. Not. Do unto others as thou would have them do unto thee. How long until thee be herded around like a slave by one of these little mofos at gunpoint? World dictatorship by one guy, with efficient enforcement. Rebellion impossible.
Most women love having a man stand by them and support them emotionally and in every way through a pregnancy, and to raise a family. It's usually the men who are too scared and run far away when she gets pregnant. It's a story that happens to so many "baby momma's", that the men don't stick around. It's pretty hard or rare for a woman to run away and the father to stick it out with the babies, though it does happen. So 90% of court cases might be about how some dude doesn't want to be shafted for 18 years to pay child support after having fun with a woman, and suing that the judge hand her an abortion order? So what if she doesn't want to have an abortion? Does she lose the right for child support? Is this what you call "fair"?
How about a stop abortion order? How about an unfortunate "accident" that results in miscarriage? Have her locked up in a straightjacket for 9 months because you don't trust her actions with herself? If she's that crazy, the best thing is that you two part anyway. Once a baby has passed through the birth canal, it's a completely different thing, the baby is no longer dependent on the mother for 'life support' for every breath, and now her actions are against another independently living human being. Similar things about gray area late term pregnancies, and now the judges can get involved on a case by case basis, which they can do right now anyway. But in general, the women are more protective of babies than the men, and the men's motivations might be purely financial after breaking up with a woman. She will stick with the baby for 18 years. All he might know is that his paycheck has a deduction for some one night stand he did 18 years ago after getting drunk in a bar, and not even remembering it.
Do you think the female black widow consuming the male after copulating is "fair"? How about bee drones getting thrown out of the hive after fertilizing the queen bee? It's life man, how nature designed things, how much more sacred can things get than that? Life ain't fair, just suck it up man and quit bitchin about it.
I'm a big Basic fan, and love how FreeBasic is like one of the top languages in terseness and execution speed at http://gmarceau.qc.ca/blog/2009/05/speed-size-and-dependability-of-v1.html. (The updated version doesn't even mention the word "basic.") Unfortunately there seems to be a massive campaign against assembler and basic these days in favor of bytecode compiler languages, simply because the heavy extra layers that are placed between the user and the cpu, layers that can be claimed as intellectual property and the whole computing world sort of blackmailed into paying for a rental fee for living on top of it. Assembler is difficult to work with, but cheap. Basic is so simple anyone can do it. The drive towards dotnet/java or other so called "professional" languages is like having to use Latin in the middle ages for both religious ceremony and scientific writing. This kept the bulk of the population who didn't speak latin clueless. These days very little official discourse is in latin, and knowledge is more freely accessible to the general public. You could argue that the general public doesn't know how to write proper programs just like hillbillies don't know how to properly spell and create written text that monks properly trained in Latin would cringe at. So what? That's not a good enough reason to deny them the right to write anyway.
It's been a few years since 2005 when I was looking at a replacement for VB6 to bangup a quick and dirty db interface for SQL Server to manage some lab samples. I simply can't stand dotnet and java bloat and slowness, and even interface reaction time - I can't zip through the menus with the speed of light in the newer Visual Studios, and the test programs were similarly sluggish. I almost settled on programming in C++ and wxWidgets, which had decent speed, it it weren't for the codesize - DevCpp static linking minimal programs were well over 1 MB, for a previous VB exe app that used VBRUN600.dll was less than 64 KB. Win32 C apps were just too verbose to write and debug compared to VB. I ended up sticking with VB6 even to this day, which pretty much has both feet in the grave by now and a few nails driven into the coffin, but I still couldn't find anything better than VB6/Excel VBA that would be officially supported by MS, so my ass is covered when I give it to a large corporation. I'm quite tempted to go for unofficially supported things like sqlite in the future with a simple file access protocol, because even ADO/SQL Server is becoming ridiculous compared to old ADO classic/MS SQL Server 2000 version that was quick and dirty and flying like a breeze. I set up this VB6 frontend/ADO/SQL Server 2000 backend db app in 2002 to replace an old file-access based Foxpro app that was very slow, but the daily security patches sometimes break the whole show, with ADO getting messed up with an MDAC update, and good luck trying to fix that. Going back to a slow file access based db where all the data is pulled across a network to be locally sorted seems retarded, but in view of the heavy layer of moving targets in an officially supported server-client setup, something simple that relies on Win32 API with sqlite and simple file access is starting to seem like a breath of fresh air.
By the way I never really knew what i386 registers were, and these days I'm learning assembler programming, starting with http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html and http://asm.sourceforge.net/intro/hello.html . Jeebus, assembler is hard, but it's so sexy, supersmall, superfast, with all middle man libraries out of the way. Libraries are like having someone else do a repair job on your car that you don't know how to do. Knowing assembler is like knowing how to repair it yourself, and when you take your car in for repair, you don't get shafted, because if t
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Only the mother knows who the real father is. Sometimes even she don't know. Science/DNA testing seems to know, but how do you do a prebirth DNA testing to give full legal rights to a father in the abortion decision making process? Also the raising of a child, inasmuch as breastfeeding is concerned, is the mother's burden. The act of copulation is an act of trust, or should be, and seems to me the guy who made that act had enough trust at that time. The moral of the story: Don't be screwin no bitches u can't trust, mofo!
Rock or UAV? I don't wanna die, but if I had to choose how to die, I'd personally pick a UAV that I didn't even see coming taking me out in under a millisecond, than being stoned to death in a slow grueling agony.
Overwhelming military superiority is no guarantee for anything. Even in WW2 there was underground activity in German occupied territories, and those overwhelmed were always looking for a glimpse of a chance to end the overwhelming. You don't only have to overwhelm and get there, which is easy, like winning the Iraqi war, but then you have to maintain the overwhelming effort precisely and indefinitely with no errors, which is hard, or next to impossible. Unfortunately in the past maintaining overwhelming has been through genocide, or abuse of power very similar to genocide. To say that overwhelming military superiority causes no casualties is way off the mark. Maybe the casualties are more subtle, but in the end there is either genocide, constant tension and low level violence, or things go back to where they were before the military offensive started, and there is peace.
Actually, I take that back, there can be peace even through oppression, but it simply takes a tremendous amount of time to develop. For instance Britain's population is part indigenous, part Roman empire brought mercenaries, part Anglo Saxon, part Norman, etc... with all out war butchering, and direct genocide, or slow overwhelming oppression, all dynamic, a little bit of everything, yet there is relative peace today, with the current population can be said that is "as one", sufficiently blended, and sufficiently free of "past grudges." However if your overwhelming power is robotic, and those overwhelmed are human, blending into one coherent one is kinda hard. Unless the future holds bionic implanted people that are hard to distinguish from pure robots. I think the world is going too fast, and military research is the hardest to hold back in view of the other guy developing it faster who won't hold back. We may end up with artificial intelligence sooner than we want to. You will know it's here when autonomous driving fully based on vision recognition (without other clues such as gps programmed route points) matches or surpasses a human being. I sometimes have trouble identifying something I see in a distance, such as a cloud looking like sheep, until I think some and recognize it as something else. Full vision and world recognition around you is impossible without intelligence, and machine vision/world around you recognition and AI cannot progress without each other.
I cannot imagine successful vision without object recognition, and successful object recognition requires intelligent analysis. At least to the level of a dog. Which is pretty scary for a robot machine, to have that much intelligence, and the advance to something surpassing human intelligence from there may be a day or a year away. Especially for a robot that spits back textual, language based replies. Why is it that dogs are "stupid" (at least we like to say that when we compare them to ourselves), and what's the proper definition of intelligence anyway? I don't think dogs are that stupid, and in some environments they might be better fitted then humans. Perhaps too much success and too much intelligence removes the balance factors in an ecosystem, and devastates everything, including itself. Somehow true intelligence has to go hand in hand with maintaining the ecosystem that supports it. In that case, intelligent robots that cared about the environment, about the Earth's biosphere, may not be such a bad thing. Unfortunately simple silicon solar panels might be enough for robots to survive in the vacuum of outer space, and not need a biosphere or ecosystem at all. In fact I wonder why outer space is not full of such robots from other worlds, or full of such robots in other worlds.
But what about us, humans, where does that leave us, a planet/outer space/everything field with nuclear/solar/etc. robots? I understand a bionic robotic leg and even exoskeleton for the mobility impaired can be miraculous, and robotic vision recognition enabled(able to distinguish a scarecrow from a human) drivers of supply trucks through a roadside bomb infested mine-field can be a g
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They don't consider computational efficiencies due to complexity. For instance, if you count items by marking tally marks on sticks, then to count something into the billions, you run out of trees in the world to make those sticks. However, if you use indian-arabic notation, marking down 9 billion 500 thousand 201 takes up this much room: 9,000,500,201. That's it. This is the kind of computational efficiency that cannot be predicted. The human brain is a pretty fast computer and visual/audio singal analyzer, plus social nuance analyzer, etc, probably running around roughly 5 to 70 Hz semianalog. Though there are quite a few braincells, building supercomputers with equivalent number of transistors would most likely not give the same computational performance. There is a guess that the interconnectivity, the synapse density between the neurons is what makes the difference. The computational efficiency comes from complexity. In this sense, a neuron, like a notation number, instead of representing a single tally mark, can represent something like the 5 in the 9,000,500,201 billion. Its function and performance is super-enhanced by increased complexity of what it can do - it can be a number from 0 to 9, and it can be a placeholder. Such things can create an order of magnitude increase in efficiency, that Moore's Law analyses cannot predict. The move to multicore processors is most likely the only way to keep up with Moore's law, and currently this move is in its infancies. We know the brain is multicore-like, "interconnectedness" based. When eventually we have a few trillion cores interacting on a cpu, we might discover, by trial and error, methods of increased efficiency. We might even understand how our own brain works from playing with chips, as opposed to understanding it from brain research, since the ethical issues coming from the machine direction are much easier to deal with (or are they?) Low intelligence automation and robotization is an easy ethical question, and it will be welcome thing for humanity, but the big problem with increased supercomputing power and understanding how the brain works is the problem of artificial intelligence.
Currently we know of no other beings smarter than us, humans, in the universe. That's a big deal. Silicon based solar-robotic lifeforms might be able to spread through the vacuum of interstellar universe, they would not be interdependent on chemical lifeforms like those on planet Earth. Where would that leave hydrocarbon-water-chemical life as we know it? We love and care about nature around us, and even if we don't, we ultimately have to act as if we did. The interdependence of life eating life, plants being the photosynthesists, sort of holds the collective interests together, and makes all Life function as one. Though this rule of interdependence is not explicitly expressed in the behavior of lifeforms - and I wonder if some of the prehistoric mass-extinction events were not simply caused by the appearance of a new predator/virus/bacterial disease and the level of life activity simply reduced and reset to a new lower level balance being able to deal with that predator/virus/bacteria - currently all ecosystems function as a ecosystem, with no predators being "super successful", in a selfish, survival of me without the survival of everything around me attitude, the simplistic Darwinistic principle. Predators currently have an interest in the ecosystem beneath them functioning at a high level. Even space stations based on solar panel derived artificial-light using water-hydrocarbon-photosynthetic life farming would still be an ecosystem like ours. Solar panel derived fat/sugar/protein chemical synthesis in metal pots may be easier to deal with in a space station than a full scale ecosystem and farming, where only humans exist, and maybe just a very few species of plants and animals. Compare the farm to a jungle. All humans really need is the farm to survive, land with a few species of crops and few species of animals, or even just the cement/metal/glass city, and the jungle
Eventually there will be space reality shows, and docking meet ups and game contests between various space stations, such as space boxing, or even undocked who can grow food better, and everyone down on Terra will be watching. A 1.2 second ping will be tolerable for things that really matter.
Have you noticed how Nobel prizes are going back to inventions done in the 60's, 70's? Maybe they wanna catch these people while they are alive. Or maybe not that much truly groundbreaking and noteworthy under the Sun since the turn of the millenium?
One of the major issues is the availability of the source code. When you have 451 developers talking to each other, and they find something holding them back, being able to do something about it themselves as opposed to begging a vendor and waiting for months because their hands are legally tied having no free access to source code and modify it as they see best fit for their own purpose or their own problems, that makes and breaks everything, when you're trying to squeeze the milliseconds. Off the shelf technologies are good for 1 person quick and dirty nonperformance situations. Unfortunately the performance of dotnet is such a nonperformance crawl on mediocre or low cost hardware, that it turns away even 1 person "teams" because the "quick and dirty" lost the "quick" part, and only retained the "dirty."
But there is enough silicon in the world. It's the most abundant element after hydrogen+oxygen on the Earth's surface. Any solar technology based on exotic materials such as indium (or even Ga or Ge) will simply result in a market supply crunch, where indium's price will go through the roof to the point where it's no longer competitive with silicon technologies. You can probably predict a 2 to 15 year market on CIGS, with an automatic brake on profits, because if it really takes off as a business, you have to automatically stop, because the raw material price shooting for the stars will be instant. Indium has a volatile price reacting very hard to market demand. Moreover we need all the indium we got to make LCD's and flat screen tv's. Per square meter, that's a more valuable use of resources, especially when silicon solar roof tiles work too. Silicon is the shit, dawg. That's why the idea of intelligent design is so spooky. Cuz you can never be sure.
Yeah, at least in that Longman version Be and B (beryllium and boron) are close together, unlike in the table described in the article.
That's why we need to establish O'Neil's cylinders in outer space, that are properly shielded from space radiation. You just can't trust people down here, or keep all your eggs in one basket. It's important to maintain isolated and complete ecosystems that only exchange matter/objects/living things through will, and airlocks. Such space stations could then land on Earth too, or hang around under water. Deep under the oceans it's a pretty protected place from radiation(eventually radioactive solutes might build too high though), or the other side of the moon, It's not only about nuclear, but things such as biotech coming up with a superbug/supervirus that destroys all DNA it sees, including plants/animals/bacteria/viri, you need perfect airtight seal from that. The problem is that Biosphere II was a failure, which is surprising. That experiment needs to be repeated/duplicated, and the reasons for failure found out.
Stuff that needs Linux permissions/features explicitly, such as symlinks, I store on ext3 partitions. If I need to back them up, onto non ext3 partitions, such as when wiping the computer drive completely, I generate a tar.gz or tar.bz2 file on the directory, and back up that file onto an external drive accessible from all OS's.
For a while I tried the ext3/ifs windows driver for 2k/xp, and stored everything in Linux file systems, but I think I was hacked or something, because stuff started disappearing. I try not to use windows much on the net anymore, but for some things, mostly legacy stuff, you simply have to use it. My last version of windows that I can comfortably use is win 2k, which still has some leave you alone professional taste to it. XP has way too much bullshit automatically loaded into it, it looks prettier than 2k, but the trade offs in freedom are grave. Vista - no comment.
Actually, we need to build a Moon base, and put a cannon on it to shoot space station structural pieces into Earth orbit. On the Moon there is no atmosphere to burn up high speed projectiles, like down here on Earth, where asteroids turn into shooting stars. We still don't have an small scale ergonomic and efficient way to extract titanium/aluminum/iron/silicon from lunar materials. NASA used to have a challenge and reward money for oxygen extraction from lunar regolith for 5 kg's O2 in 8 hrs. Nobody won it.
We, in the US, can't do it. Money alone isn't enough. We don't have the technical expertise anymore, and brainpower is getting more difficult to import/adapt, as we are no longer the leader of the free world, but possibly have one of the more oppressive regimes amongst the technically advanced nations. Creative minds are attracted to freedom. Moreover anyone creative here is caught up in mere making ends meet issues, including my engineering college professors considering 5 bux being too steep for a non-profit professional organization dinner, and casually noting that in 2 years we students will all make more then they are making. Something is wrong with that picture. That should not even be on their minds. Having comfortable incomes that allow hobbies passions, such as developing aluminum electrolysis in a backyard in Oberlin, Ohio, or airplanes in a field in Dayton, Ohio by bicycle repair men, are a thing of the past. We don't have backyards anymore, and the DHS descends on you if you try to do anything in it, such as aluminum, or flying. Everything requires a permit anymore. Permit to attempt to fly. Permit to electrolyze aluminum. With police holding a straitjacket at the appeals session in court waiting for the verdict from the jury of twelve deliberating the testimony of psychologist witnesses pushing drug company agenda about mental illnesses. Soon we'll have officially stamped and approved toilet paper tissue slices with expiration dates.
Every penny is ultra important anymore. We no longer have things like Bell Labs, we can't justify Bell Labs anymore on mere financial terms. What's money got to do with it? Unfortunately, everything. We can no longer afford space programs, because we can't afford taxes, car, life, health insurance and credit card fees. And regulation requiring even more mandatory insurance fees is imminent. Space program? What space program? Who cares? We're in dog eats dog fights over who gets what, how we're gonna dice up the pennies of each dollar we make. In the end we end up not making the dollars because we're too busy fighting over how we dice up the ones we did make. Creativity is the only generation of true wealth of a nation. You can only fight over limited resources so much, no matter how good you get at fighting over it, if there is nothing left to fight over. The first rule of any successful parasite is that you don't kill the host, but let it flourish. We can't produce brainpower because we're still fighting a public vs. private education war - can't afford private/religious schools, and public education is, well, something smells fishy there, because a lot of poor countries can do a lot better job at it.
It's gonna be Japanese(expertise, freedom of creativity) and Chinese(resources, chinese-wall-building-like stamina, centrally focused government of the ancient Egyptian type) only in space as far as massive space stations go, unless they end up in a war against each other. We will be watching as bystanders. Like the British empire is today, watching space shuttle launches at Cape Canaveral, reminiscing of old days glory, when half the world's GDP was funneled to London as colonial income. Good old days.
But do we really care these days for space stations? The energy problem is more crucial. But we no longer have backyards of Oberlin to figure it out, and even if we do, people are too busy working too jobs to make ends meet and don't have the time anymore for it. Look at houses built in the US in the 1890-1920 period, and the decorations on them. Compare ones built in 1960-2000. Who had free time on their hands, and extra resources they could turn to creativity? What about education of their children?
Yeah, I had a serial PIC programmer, just to find out that once I stopped using desktops and fully switched to laptops only (for green conscious energy friendliness, if nothing else, I don't like the desktop 300-500W power supply ratings, I much prefer the 30-60W on modern laptops), the laptops either have a serial port with too low a voltage, or they don't have one at all, and then none of the USB/serial controllers have the proper voltage either. But a desktop would. But I don't have one, I don't want one, because of the noise/power/lack of dragging it around into a chair or couch mobility.
I also had a parallel port programmer, and it worked great on a laptop that still had a parallel port, but now my laptop doesn't even have that, and none of the USB/parallel port adapters map the full parallel port pinouts, moreover the USB stack only has a printing only parallel port stack. PCMCIA parallel adapters would be full parallel port adapters, but laptops don't come with PCMCIA either anymore.
So I was partly complaining for USB's lack of proper backward compatibility with the interfaces it was meant to replace. If PCMCIA can do it, USB should have been able to do it too. Someone somewhere wanted to kill the parallel port, but they did it a bit too fast, even if I understand why they did it. The parallel port is a waste on the economy overall, because of the hardware side, even if it's really easy on the programmers. I did work at a wire and cable place, where making a USB-like connector had like 0-1% waste, a 9 pin serial type connector probably 10% waste/in process repair, and a 25pin parallel adaptor with crimping really thin 26 AWG wire, with almost 100% waste/in process repair, and incredible amount of labor. All you need to do is screw up one wire that needs to be recrimped, and if you screw up the second time, and has to be cut again, now the length is too short and out of spec, and there goes 24 good wires down the drain with it, unfixable. If the length is too short and you put the connector together anyway, one wire bears all the tension and will eventually break off/fail at the customer during use. Making a connector with 2 wires like USB almost cannot be messed up, and is easily fixable - just change the other wire. When you have a braided bundle of 25 wires and a sleeve and jacket around it, the situation is a whole lot different - unbraiding, rejacketing, it's crazy amount of work, and it's not done at all.
Still, backward compatibility is backward compatibility. Set the price very high, at the real cost it takes to make the hardware, and let the customer choose between cost of programming software and cost of making the hardware. Eventually the parallel port would have disappeared, but there are all these already existing cables and connectors that could have been used during the transition period, that were forced into waste status instantly. It's not the right way to do it.
By the way it's been a while since I played with PIC's, mostly from giving up - not going through the bother of getting it to work anyway from a laptop. I know all it would really take is a set of properly biased transistors/level shifter chips that up the laptops serial port 5V to the 15V it was meant to be for programming the chips. But I just ordered a USB PIC programmer. There is enough debugging banging your head against a wall that some of the basic stuff you want to and expect to be able to rely on, just to clear some questions. You can waste so much of your time debugging something custom made only made for you, that having an off the shelf item that "just works" out of the box is like a breath of fresh air, saving precious minutes of stress, that work and waste your neurons harder than actually creating something with the microcontrollers, where everything works and chugs along with the little changes you make, as you iterate toward a final goal. One simple detail you get stuck in where things don't work as expected, and you can waste 90% of your total project time simple getting over some minute unexpected hurdle that's vital to the whole thing.
You may not necessarily want to achieve AI.
But even so I think computing has regressed since the days of BASIC. We today lack a general purpose programming language the easily interfaces to the outside world, and is masterable by anyone. Even the interfaces such as the parallel port, that were relatively easy to use to say flip switches in your home, have gone away, without a similarly simple equivalent device. That's the real regression. There are a million things people and businesses could automatically measure, monitor and come up with automatic actions based on them, and overall, make their own lives easier and better. Unfortunately the steep learning curve and expensive expertise to get it done (such as via programming C / USB / microcontrollers compared to printing a set of bits such as 10010110 to a parallel port address, like it used to be done) retard progress. IT is only useful when it's useful to the customer, to the end user. Getting caught up in the abstractions that only matter to IT people, such as the advances that java and dotnet brought, those are not advances, but regressions, from a business perspective - performance dropped through the floor and energy requirements went through the ceiling to get the exact same thing done that was picnic and energy efficient in BASIC. Now to even get a dotnet or java program going to read simple things from a serial port requires tremendous horsepower. That's not progress.
I could see a million places where IT could be made simpler and more accessible, without giving up performance and energy efficiency/speed, such as your own car. Why is it that car computers are not easy to understand, debug and even program? Such as setting cruise control sensors to read speed limits from where you are traveling, or recalibrating your own mph sensors based on officially placed signal points, or even GPS info. All this is doable, but it's not doable by Joe Schmo who'd like to do it. Why can't owners know what their cars are doing, or what's wrong with them? With a nice Solidworks drawing and sensor readouts showing all the details. Kind of like Chemstation shows it on an HPLC. The whole thing running on macros written in guess what, BASIC. Everyone could take one peak at the car computer picture, and tell what's going on. That would eliminate a whole lot of inefficiencies in the economy, a lot less prematurely worn cars, lot less wasted fuel, and just increase overall human happiness. Why is it that some cars can only be serviced by dealers, because of the expensive equipment needed to interface to them?
There are a million other things similar to your car that could use a standard interface to run, be programmed on, and give up info. There are still quite a bit of manufacturing production lines where people do repetitive task that could be automated, only if automation was cheaper, and that means easier.
That was the real progress of the 90's: macros written in basic. Now it takes a hairpulling amount of effort to start anything from scratch, and jump all the hoops that IT purists have shoved onto the computing world.
I forgot to say that some wild westerns do end with the heroes "riding off into the sunset"
This is the exact reason we need thermonuclear hydrogen bombs stationed in outer space, ready to shoot: Unlike the dinosaurs, we don't have to be sitting ducks, we have the ability to defend ourselves against incoming comets. The problem with stationing bombs in outer space is an issue of trust: people down here still haven't figured out how to live in peace and leave each other alone, the UN is still not a functioning body of world government, people still play the "I don't trust you, I'll kill you before you kill me"- game, and call it self defense. So there is a distinct possibility that bombs stationed in outer space are directed back at Earth by people who are mad at each other, and can't just take it like a man, or can't stop dishing it out so others have to take it like a man. Possibly the bombs could be stringed out and stationed very far, into solar orbit past Mars near the asteroid belt, and Earth could carry many layers of inner defense shields, that stop any stray bombs that are hijacked, with some finite reaction time still left. The good part about having the bombs(and their observatories) extremely far is that the farther the comet is deterred by a minute angle on its path, the less effort is needed. So the benefit to risk ratio is better, because a bomb hitting Earth would only cause a localized damage, compared to the same force being able to deter an object the size of our moon by that 1 degree on its path to just miss Earth. The downside of going very far, is that it's easy to have stringed out objects in a solar orbit in a plane, as a circle, but it's hard to cover a sphere, like GPS does, because the paths might cross, and minute gravitational fluctuation might cause some of the objects to collide. Maintaining very many bombs that are far, compared to the much fewer required that are very close is also an issue, especially from a hijacking standpoint. A few bombs hijacked and hitting Earth would cause a local catastrophy, but if all the bombs that are very far are hijacked simultaneously, and redirected to Earth, that could be worth than the problem they are meant to defend against. A possible best solution is having habitable outer space stations, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O'Neill_cylinder, cylinders that provide artificial gravity on the inner surface by rotation/centrifugal force, and are built triple layered gradual vacuum against air diffusion/leaks, and extremely heavy walled to protect from outer space radiation to replace Earth's atmosphere (this means complete artificial lighting/farming/silicon solar panels, except a very few lead glass windows. In such case you don't keep all your eggs in one basket - whether there is a major asteroid hit, or a global nuclear war wiping out all life on the planet, we would still have people and plants and animals, we would still have Life to come back and reseed and repopulate the planet. Life would not die. Such space stations traveling to the region of Mars then could take on the job of watching for comets and taking care of them, and though there is a distinct possibility of interstellar war between such space stations, at least having the technology and ability to live in a space station in pure vacuum/cold/intense radiation, whether that space station is landed on Earth, under water in Earth's oceans, under the clouds of Venus, behind Jupiter, or far past Pluto running on nuclear fuel alone, each of these give Life and humanity a better chance to survive. All it takes is at least a few people to make it after a global catastrophy. The real danger is making robots smarter than us that hunt us down and exterminate us. Back in the old days there was such a thing as defense - walls, trenches, fortifications. These days, because of technology, the only defense is attack: the equilibrium of mutually assured destruction. Yes we did gain the ability to beat the odds that dinosaurs couldn't, but we also gain the ability to destroy all life within a few months. As technology progresses, our ability
We can always replace the word "weight" with "mass" and then your buoyancy-gravity loophole doesn't work. Adding helium adds mass.
But there is 2 elephants worth of air pressure pushing you from below, so it evens out. Plus you don't occupy a whole square meter when you stand up, but when you lie down flat, you get closer to it. But as the elephants worth of air weights accumulate on top, so do the ones pushing up from the bottom.
They are asking about the current state of technology - what is the lightest current practical means for us to store 1 petabyte of information. Theoretical, unpractical or ultra extremely costly does not count - it has to be something readily doable with current technology. For instance there is a world record of smallest engravings at the atomic scale, or even smaller, (standing waves in the electron cloud); writing a petabyte like that is not practical, or off the chart as far as expense goes. They are interested in things like dvd disk pile vs. lightest pocket harddrive pile vs. something esoteric such as 3d optical type storage in the form of holograms. All of these methods would be very expensive when ultralight weight is sought, but at least they would not be off the chart, when compared to the cheapest means of storing 1 petabyte, where weight is not an issue. This is a very meaningful question to ask in 2009, then again in 2019, etc.
Paper currency (or equivalent numbers in a bank account, which is even riskier) is definitely a riskier way to store wealth than gold. However, gold is overrated. Gold is simply a metal that won't rust and it's good for jewelry, and maybe some electrical contacts and lab equipment, but it's really not such a precious metal, at least these days, compared to technological metals, such as nickel, cobalt, tantalum, tungsten, molybdenum, chromium. Those metals even in a rusted form represent value, that carbon steel, in a rusted form never will, simply because iron and carbon are so abundant, and cheap. But if anything, will robot armies of the future be made of gold, or of alloys mentioned above? Future development of titanium technology is the big if here, because titanium is both noble and relatively abundant in the Earth's crust, and future robots might be made from it. But presently most high temperature turbines and military armors use cobalt/nickel etc. type alloys. So someone with a lot of gold might look at the gold market this way, and offload some of their gold reserves unto the public, or whoever will buy it, without dropping the market price too much. Vending machines with a fixed markup are a good way to do this. Gold currency is still universal, anonymous and needs no laundering, and its value does not go up in a flash like paper currency, simply because of limited reserves available. A totalitarian government might not look at the widespread use of gold currency with a good eye, simply because it enables the public to trade and deal without government oversight (including tax oversight), and the public cannot be stripped of their wealth in a flash of inflation.
I for one welcome our swarming miniaturized robot overlords. Not. Do unto others as thou would have them do unto thee. How long until thee be herded around like a slave by one of these little mofos at gunpoint? World dictatorship by one guy, with efficient enforcement. Rebellion impossible.
Most women love having a man stand by them and support them emotionally and in every way through a pregnancy, and to raise a family. It's usually the men who are too scared and run far away when she gets pregnant. It's a story that happens to so many "baby momma's", that the men don't stick around. It's pretty hard or rare for a woman to run away and the father to stick it out with the babies, though it does happen. So 90% of court cases might be about how some dude doesn't want to be shafted for 18 years to pay child support after having fun with a woman, and suing that the judge hand her an abortion order? So what if she doesn't want to have an abortion? Does she lose the right for child support? Is this what you call "fair"?
How about a stop abortion order? How about an unfortunate "accident" that results in miscarriage? Have her locked up in a straightjacket for 9 months because you don't trust her actions with herself? If she's that crazy, the best thing is that you two part anyway. Once a baby has passed through the birth canal, it's a completely different thing, the baby is no longer dependent on the mother for 'life support' for every breath, and now her actions are against another independently living human being. Similar things about gray area late term pregnancies, and now the judges can get involved on a case by case basis, which they can do right now anyway. But in general, the women are more protective of babies than the men, and the men's motivations might be purely financial after breaking up with a woman. She will stick with the baby for 18 years. All he might know is that his paycheck has a deduction for some one night stand he did 18 years ago after getting drunk in a bar, and not even remembering it.
Do you think the female black widow consuming the male after copulating is "fair"? How about bee drones getting thrown out of the hive after fertilizing the queen bee? It's life man, how nature designed things, how much more sacred can things get than that? Life ain't fair, just suck it up man and quit bitchin about it.
I'm a big Basic fan, and love how FreeBasic is like one of the top languages in terseness and execution speed at http://gmarceau.qc.ca/blog/2009/05/speed-size-and-dependability-of-v1.html. (The updated version doesn't even mention the word "basic.") Unfortunately there seems to be a massive campaign against assembler and basic these days in favor of bytecode compiler languages, simply because the heavy extra layers that are placed between the user and the cpu, layers that can be claimed as intellectual property and the whole computing world sort of blackmailed into paying for a rental fee for living on top of it. Assembler is difficult to work with, but cheap. Basic is so simple anyone can do it. The drive towards dotnet/java or other so called "professional" languages is like having to use Latin in the middle ages for both religious ceremony and scientific writing. This kept the bulk of the population who didn't speak latin clueless. These days very little official discourse is in latin, and knowledge is more freely accessible to the general public. You could argue that the general public doesn't know how to write proper programs just like hillbillies don't know how to properly spell and create written text that monks properly trained in Latin would cringe at. So what? That's not a good enough reason to deny them the right to write anyway.
It's been a few years since 2005 when I was looking at a replacement for VB6 to bangup a quick and dirty db interface for SQL Server to manage some lab samples. I simply can't stand dotnet and java bloat and slowness, and even interface reaction time - I can't zip through the menus with the speed of light in the newer Visual Studios, and the test programs were similarly sluggish. I almost settled on programming in C++ and wxWidgets, which had decent speed, it it weren't for the codesize - DevCpp static linking minimal programs were well over 1 MB, for a previous VB exe app that used VBRUN600.dll was less than 64 KB. Win32 C apps were just too verbose to write and debug compared to VB. I ended up sticking with VB6 even to this day, which pretty much has both feet in the grave by now and a few nails driven into the coffin, but I still couldn't find anything better than VB6/Excel VBA that would be officially supported by MS, so my ass is covered when I give it to a large corporation. I'm quite tempted to go for unofficially supported things like sqlite in the future with a simple file access protocol, because even ADO/SQL Server is becoming ridiculous compared to old ADO classic/MS SQL Server 2000 version that was quick and dirty and flying like a breeze. I set up this VB6 frontend/ADO/SQL Server 2000 backend db app in 2002 to replace an old file-access based Foxpro app that was very slow, but the daily security patches sometimes break the whole show, with ADO getting messed up with an MDAC update, and good luck trying to fix that. Going back to a slow file access based db where all the data is pulled across a network to be locally sorted seems retarded, but in view of the heavy layer of moving targets in an officially supported server-client setup, something simple that relies on Win32 API with sqlite and simple file access is starting to seem like a breath of fresh air.
By the way I never really knew what i386 registers were, and these days I'm learning assembler programming, starting with http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html and http://asm.sourceforge.net/intro/hello.html . Jeebus, assembler is hard, but it's so sexy, supersmall, superfast, with all middle man libraries out of the way. Libraries are like having someone else do a repair job on your car that you don't know how to do. Knowing assembler is like knowing how to repair it yourself, and when you take your car in for repair, you don't get shafted, because if t
Only the mother knows who the real father is. Sometimes even she don't know. Science/DNA testing seems to know, but how do you do a prebirth DNA testing to give full legal rights to a father in the abortion decision making process? Also the raising of a child, inasmuch as breastfeeding is concerned, is the mother's burden. The act of copulation is an act of trust, or should be, and seems to me the guy who made that act had enough trust at that time. The moral of the story: Don't be screwin no bitches u can't trust, mofo!
Rock or UAV? I don't wanna die, but if I had to choose how to die, I'd personally pick a UAV that I didn't even see coming taking me out in under a millisecond, than being stoned to death in a slow grueling agony.
Overwhelming military superiority is no guarantee for anything. Even in WW2 there was underground activity in German occupied territories, and those overwhelmed were always looking for a glimpse of a chance to end the overwhelming. You don't only have to overwhelm and get there, which is easy, like winning the Iraqi war, but then you have to maintain the overwhelming effort precisely and indefinitely with no errors, which is hard, or next to impossible. Unfortunately in the past maintaining overwhelming has been through genocide, or abuse of power very similar to genocide. To say that overwhelming military superiority causes no casualties is way off the mark. Maybe the casualties are more subtle, but in the end there is either genocide, constant tension and low level violence, or things go back to where they were before the military offensive started, and there is peace.
Actually, I take that back, there can be peace even through oppression, but it simply takes a tremendous amount of time to develop. For instance Britain's population is part indigenous, part Roman empire brought mercenaries, part Anglo Saxon, part Norman, etc... with all out war butchering, and direct genocide, or slow overwhelming oppression, all dynamic, a little bit of everything, yet there is relative peace today, with the current population can be said that is "as one", sufficiently blended, and sufficiently free of "past grudges." However if your overwhelming power is robotic, and those overwhelmed are human, blending into one coherent one is kinda hard. Unless the future holds bionic implanted people that are hard to distinguish from pure robots. I think the world is going too fast, and military research is the hardest to hold back in view of the other guy developing it faster who won't hold back. We may end up with artificial intelligence sooner than we want to. You will know it's here when autonomous driving fully based on vision recognition (without other clues such as gps programmed route points) matches or surpasses a human being. I sometimes have trouble identifying something I see in a distance, such as a cloud looking like sheep, until I think some and recognize it as something else. Full vision and world recognition around you is impossible without intelligence, and machine vision/world around you recognition and AI cannot progress without each other.
I cannot imagine successful vision without object recognition, and successful object recognition requires intelligent analysis. At least to the level of a dog. Which is pretty scary for a robot machine, to have that much intelligence, and the advance to something surpassing human intelligence from there may be a day or a year away. Especially for a robot that spits back textual, language based replies. Why is it that dogs are "stupid" (at least we like to say that when we compare them to ourselves), and what's the proper definition of intelligence anyway? I don't think dogs are that stupid, and in some environments they might be better fitted then humans. Perhaps too much success and too much intelligence removes the balance factors in an ecosystem, and devastates everything, including itself. Somehow true intelligence has to go hand in hand with maintaining the ecosystem that supports it. In that case, intelligent robots that cared about the environment, about the Earth's biosphere, may not be such a bad thing. Unfortunately simple silicon solar panels might be enough for robots to survive in the vacuum of outer space, and not need a biosphere or ecosystem at all. In fact I wonder why outer space is not full of such robots from other worlds, or full of such robots in other worlds.
But what about us, humans, where does that leave us, a planet/outer space/everything field with nuclear/solar/etc. robots? I understand a bionic robotic leg and even exoskeleton for the mobility impaired can be miraculous, and robotic vision recognition enabled(able to distinguish a scarecrow from a human) drivers of supply trucks through a roadside bomb infested mine-field can be a g