Not correct. American hentai distributors change the age just to be on the safe side. They still can legally sell the games involving sex with 12-year old girls, but they chose to avoid the risk.
Children are bought and sold, gang-raped, and forced to have sex with each other. Acts which absolutely destroy a child. This isn't some victimless crime.
This is a lie. Child pornography is not created this way. Yes, there are some children (double-digits annually AT MOST) who are sold and forced to have sex. But they are a drop in the bucket of crime. Worse things happen to thousands, heck, to millions every year. Hundreds of thousands of kids starve to death every year. Millions are disabled by preventable diseases. Thousands are physically abused by relatives. Hundreds of thousands are grown in opressive traditional cultures, where they are sexually mutilated (circumcision, clitoridectomy), prevented from getting decent education, thousands of children are sold into non-sexual slavery, millions are forced to work.
But you would rather oppose a fantasy, an ugly fantasy created in your sick brain. The non-problem. Well, you are stupid foo, what else can we expect?
If you read up the history of Stalin's purges, you'll realise that this belief in the system is extremely common, to the point of being ridiculous. Many people believed that "the system works", even after being sent to the labour camp for 25 years despite being innocent. They witnessed all the crimes committed by the prosecutors (pressure put on the suspects, torture if they didn't cooperate), but continued to believe that everyone else was guilty, the system didn't make mistakes.
Any government is bad government, any government should not be trusted, should be opposed, should be questioned, should be ridiculed and blamed for every mistake it makes. But tell it to the people and they call you crazy.
This article is a shining example of FUD inspired by moral panic and PR managers willing to score by fighting "teh evul".
pornographers who prey on children and sell their images via the Internet.
These are completely different folks. Those who prey on children are not pornographers, they want to make love, not pix. Real pornographers don't "prey", they simply run child model studios (in poor countries) and have kids come there voluntary and voluntary agree to earn some extra cash (by modelling nude, doing porn or prostituting, whatever they choose).
The FBI has seen a 2,000 percent increase in the number of child pornography images on the Internet since 1996
As opposed to what? Images of puppies that increased 10,000 percent since 1996. Or adult pornography images that probably increased 50,000 percent. The most misleading statistic. Evar!
Canadian police estimate that more than 100,000 Web sites contain images of child sexual abuse.
This is a lie, plain and simple (but the average person/reporter is too scared to check). There are NO websites with child porn, they are too easy to close. There used to be many 5-10 years ago, but today online distribution of child porn happens via FTP, email and P2P.
Experts say at least 95 percent of victims are abused by someone they know, either a relative or neighbor.
Some correct statement for a change. However, this casts some doubt on the usefulness of the program designed "to link information such as credit card purchases, Internet chat room messages and arrest records". It's not like the uncle Bob will be chatting with his niece in a public Internet chatroom and then pay her via a credit card for the sexual services.:)
Hemler said Microsoft committed $4 million toward the program and that the software would be available to any police force at no cost.
And was used to write off some profit to avoid taxes.
several suspected pornographers had already been arrested during testing of the new system. One man was arrested in Toronto last week, after a tip plugged into CETS linked with two previous reports on the suspect.
That's amazing! In other news, anti-terrorist software designed by Microsoft helped arrest several suspected terrorists, including a 90-year old quadriplegic, a 7-year old girl and a nun. That's exactly what we need - data-mining software to produce as many positives as possible, even though many of the results are likely to be randomly caused false positives.
investigating child pornography chat rooms and credit card purchases of the images
BTW, since when you could buy child pornography using your credit card? May be you can also use the same card to buy heroin and weaponised anthrax? The last time I checked, criminals tended to use more anonymous payment methods (such as Western Union, Paypal, various e-cash systems, etc.).
It doesn't add up. I am 90% sure that the whole article is a fabrication. The departments created to combat child porn need to create an illusion of working. The truth is that commercial distribution of child pornography is almost non-existent "The government had shellacked the competition; now law enforcement agencies were the sole reproducers and distributors of child pornography." (R. P. "Toby" Tyler, LAPD, 1990). And the non-commercial exchange doesn't involve "preying" on children, doesn't involve credit cards and arrest record. Just fire up KaZaA and type "preteen lolita porn" or something like that.
It needs to be said again and again - child porn scare is a new moral panic. The danger of child porn is miniscule. Child sexual abuse is rarely related to child pornography. Children have much bigger problems. There is nothing intrinsically wrong about an image of a child in sexual activity. Government needs a scarecrow. The bugaboo of chilf porn can be and is routinely used to limit your rights. If child porn didn't exist, it should have been invented.
There is a mostly informative article on child porn at Wikipedia.
However, we're certainly nowhere near knowing enough to stimulate a portion of the brain to make someone smell chocolate cupcakes or something similar.
Yes, we are. Scientists have already managed (a decade ago, IIRC) to stimulate specific memories using electrodes inserted into the brain. Of course, they currently don't know, which memories will be recalled, they have to try and ask what the patient tells them. But then they can repeatedly produce that sensation.
On the one hand you can't, because there is a lot of prior art already. On the other hand, I don't think prior art has ever deferred anyone from patenting an idea...
You ignored the problem of patents for inventions that do not work that are sufficiently broad to cover others' inventions that DO work. This will allow Sony to sue anyone who comes up with the WORKING device, to the detriment of the public (because these risks actually quell investments in R&D).
I think it's actually better to allow patenting ideas. You see, the patents do expire and there isn't a tradition of extending them into infinity like with copyrights. So, by allowing Sony to patent this in 2005 (they filed in 2003), you guarantee that it will expire in 2023. If you waited until Sony had a device (say, in 2011), they (or someone else, it doesn't matter for the majority of people) could hold the patent until 2031. The earlier the patent is filed, the better off the public is!
Sure it wouldn't mean anything if we were talking about Finland, Belgium or New Zealand. But it's the USA, the largest developer of software in the world, the home to the 90% of world's largest software companies (including the biggest of them all). And the US team places 17th (IIRC). Think about the distribution of programmers' talents - if there are no worthy programmers at the top, then those in the middle must be really bad too. The only other explanation - that best CS students in the US move to other countries instead of continuing the education in their home country - is ridiculous.
Wikipedia sincirelly apologizes for this oversight. The relevant article existed under a different title and the page you visited was missing a redirect. The error was fixed and the people responsible have been reprimanded.
Google combines the mature function of definitions (basically what Onelook does and does better) and the prototype answering function (which doesn't work all that well yet).
I suggest you check out Brain Boost, a real answering system that uses AI to change your question into multiple search engine queries, contacts multiples search engines, processes the results, downloads the most relevant pages, uses AI to analyze their relevance, extracts the answers from the most relevant and presents them on a neat results page with links to get additional information, read the source or rate the quality of answers. It's really amazing and it works for all questions with the whole web, not just with a few encyclopedias or definition lists like Google apparently does.
what is google? - a lot of answers that give in depth overview of all aspects of what Google really is. Actually, to my taste there was a little too much information.
who is jane fonda? - all the information you need, probably not structured very well
The airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow is roughly 11 meters per second, or 24 miles per hour, beating its wings 7 - 9 times per second rather than 43..
I had a prolonged discussion with some friends about when can you claim to know something. I asked a university professor "Is there any area, about which you can say you know?" He couldn't couldn't name anything, caught in the self-created trap. He believes that since you can't know anything 100%, you can't really claim to know something and there are only points of view, all of which are equially valid in some sense. I (not bound by such irrational beliefs) have clearly (but in a polite language) told him that he is a moron for thinking that way.:)
I see the same problem here. You don't need Wikipedia answers to be reliable in order for them to be useful. You don't live in a reliable world, where any mistake is fatal. You live in a world where most people don't really know what they are doing, where about half of Americans believes that Saddam blew up WTC and people used to walk the Earth at the same time that dinosaurs lived.
Heck, do you seriously think that if you needed to know the population of Portugal and some troll modified the Wikipedia page to say "5 million", your life would be utterly and inevitably destroyed? I can create an search engine that would answer 95% of all questions correctly by giving "WHO THE FUCK CARES!" as an answer.:D
Meanwhile, Google had not answered the same question. There were no relevant results on the first page (judging from the summaries), though there was a reference to this Slashdot article.
I don't know how well this Google Q&A thing works in those rare cases when it does work, but Brain Boost told me that the population of Portugal is about 10.5 million people. It has also told me (all on the reults page) that
overall population density of about 113 persons per sq. km
The population of Portugal is ageing, with nearly 3.5 million people over the age of 50 in 2003
almost half of the population is economically active
Brazil has a [portuguese speaking] population of approximately 151 million
I think this is leaps and bounds better than lame half-assed attempt by Google, especially considering that Brain Boost works with ALL questions, doesn't require ANY HUMAN input and is completely and totally AUTONOMOUS.
It's not an ad hominem attack. It's just an old-fashioned insult (and a sincere expression of my attitude). Speaking about your counter-argument, it's silly. The frequency with which people spout it demonstrates it's irrationality. You are not really worried about overpopulation (admit it, you don't really think about demographics all that often in daily life), it's simply that it was programmed into your brain by our deathist society.
I mean, literally everyone does it. It's not even funny anymore. Ask someone if he wants to live forever and he repeats that gibberish about overpopulation, as if he was a card carrying member of Greenpeace or a member of some Gaia cult. It's really odd how people instantly forget all problems (future and present) and act as if we were literally running out of space on this planet right now.
Anyway, for a longer answer look at The Transhumanist FAQ. For a short answer from me, the people will simply stop making more babies, whether you want it or not, whether you like it or not, and whether you think it is feasible or not. But may be you'd like the longer answer better.:)
Great you are paying attention, but it actually wasn't intended as a substitute for an argument. I am simply too tired of people who are too stupid (or uninformed) and that last sentence was just me venting my anger - a more polite version of "if you don't understand it, you're an idiot!" if you wish.
Sorry for the unwarranted conclusion, but the second part of my claim may still be valid. That you have worked in a particular field (AI) doesn't automatically make you qualified to make claims about developments in this field more than a decade in the future.
Going back to your original post, the evidence that faster hardware means human and then more than human AI is as strong as it can be at this stage. We haven't found anything odd in the human brain that can't be simulated (and already simulated some parts). We found that individual neurons works in a rather simple way. We found that the brain is not a mysterious everything-connected-to-everything device, but a modular, rather crude and tolerant device. We also made significant process in brain scanning. All this leads to a conclusion that in a relatively near future (2-3 decades) it will be possible to simulate the human brain in silicon. Add a few more years and we might even simulate a brain that works.
This alone leads to more-than human AI as "an inevitable consequence of continued development of computer hardware". Your comment about "past 50 years" is rather idiotic, because 1) computers basically started 50 years ago and 2) we know for certain that today's computers are very slow compared with a human brain. As for the brilliant techniques, Moravec comments on that. There are, indeed, many techniques that are impractical below a certain speed (as a matter of fact, most of techniques are that way).
It appears to me that you simply have a negative outlook towards technology (not 100% negative, mind you), and so you attempt to fit reality into your narrow beliefs (see your last sentence about "utility gained"). For some irrational reason you don't want progress to work. Well, this is clearly a problem, but one we can't do anything about right now. May be your brain is low on dopamine or something.
In any case, there is basically nothing useful that simple negativism such as expressed by yourself can bring to the discussion. "This won't work" is simply useless, especially when others have reasons to believe that it will. I can't tell you to read up, because you claim you already read enough (didn't do you much good though), but may be you can try improving your outlook on life. Ask your doctor for some anti-depressants. I've also read today that Semen can act as one. Then you might be able to consider our future prospects without your preconceived pessimism.
Thanks for the tip. I googled and here is a bunch of others. DNS server problems are somewhat common at many ISPs, so it's worth having these at least for a backup (although you probably don't need to remember more than 4.2.2.4 - if you can't access Verizon, chances are switching to another DNS server won't help you).
Oh yeah, so just because there are still some retards whose "thinking" is dominated by animal instincts, we should go to Mars? So that their primitive territorial instincts can be satisfied, we should spend untold billions of dollars to go to Mars? Meanwhile hundreds of millions of people die, because the stupid deathist irrational majority is too scared of confronting ageing and funding research in radical life extension.
Your ideas about priorities for humanity are neither noble, nor smart. Though I must admit they are much more comprehensible to the average vulgar illiterate consumerist whore and much more popular therefore.
This is 20th-century thinking. You see, the human history is not an infinite timeline, where nations fight for prestige, where people need to inspire children with flashy projects.
Today we see the future much clearer and it dictates us what is rational to do. It is rational to concentrate on developing the enabling technologies first - nanotech and AI. It doesn't make sense to inspire people with space flight, that time has come and gone. It also makes sense to fight ageing and achieve physical immortality, that's what we should be dreaming about and working on.
Meanwhile the space should not be completely put on hold, but we certainly should not embark on large-scale projects designed primarily to "inspire" and "achieve prestige".
Anyone, who doesn't think so, is uninformed.
Re:Shutting down Bittorrent one site at a time
on
EZTree Shuts Down
·
· Score: 1
Shutting down Bittorrent sites? This only makes the rest stronger. You kill Suprnova, but this only increases the diversity. The RIAA ought to learn its lesson from medicine - if you use antibiotics, you better kill 100% of the bacteria, or the survivors will be invulnerable to the drug and multiply. Unless RIAA can kill P2P lock, stock and the smoking barrel, the remaining sites will flourish and spawn off similar "fit" ones.
Plus, we already have more resistant technologies. Even if all BitTorrent sites and trackers are shut down, eDonkey 2000 network can work with no persistent servers at all. Yes, its releasing performance is not as good, but with a few tweaks it can be fixed.
And the best thing about it that there once again won't be any sites to sue or scare. The RIAA will have to go back to sueing individual users and we have learned that it is not a sufficiently strong deterrent.
Slashdot Mirror
Not correct. American hentai distributors change the age just to be on the safe side. They still can legally sell the games involving sex with 12-year old girls, but they chose to avoid the risk.
Children are bought and sold, gang-raped, and forced to have sex with each other. Acts which absolutely destroy a child. This isn't some victimless crime.
This is a lie. Child pornography is not created this way. Yes, there are some children (double-digits annually AT MOST) who are sold and forced to have sex. But they are a drop in the bucket of crime. Worse things happen to thousands, heck, to millions every year. Hundreds of thousands of kids starve to death every year. Millions are disabled by preventable diseases. Thousands are physically abused by relatives. Hundreds of thousands are grown in opressive traditional cultures, where they are sexually mutilated (circumcision, clitoridectomy), prevented from getting decent education, thousands of children are sold into non-sexual slavery, millions are forced to work.
But you would rather oppose a fantasy, an ugly fantasy created in your sick brain. The non-problem. Well, you are stupid foo, what else can we expect?
If you read up the history of Stalin's purges, you'll realise that this belief in the system is extremely common, to the point of being ridiculous. Many people believed that "the system works", even after being sent to the labour camp for 25 years despite being innocent. They witnessed all the crimes committed by the prosecutors (pressure put on the suspects, torture if they didn't cooperate), but continued to believe that everyone else was guilty, the system didn't make mistakes.
Any government is bad government, any government should not be trusted, should be opposed, should be questioned, should be ridiculed and blamed for every mistake it makes. But tell it to the people and they call you crazy.
To see what the parent is talking about, look at this humourous short. And remember that the real life is not always as funny. :)
P.S. Not that there is anything wrong with distributing child pornography.
This article is a shining example of FUD inspired by moral panic and PR managers willing to score by fighting "teh evul".
:)
pornographers who prey on children and sell their images via the Internet.
These are completely different folks. Those who prey on children are not pornographers, they want to make love, not pix. Real pornographers don't "prey", they simply run child model studios (in poor countries) and have kids come there voluntary and voluntary agree to earn some extra cash (by modelling nude, doing porn or prostituting, whatever they choose).
The FBI has seen a 2,000 percent increase in the number of child pornography images on the Internet since 1996
As opposed to what? Images of puppies that increased 10,000 percent since 1996. Or adult pornography images that probably increased 50,000 percent. The most misleading statistic. Evar!
Canadian police estimate that more than 100,000 Web sites contain images of child sexual abuse.
This is a lie, plain and simple (but the average person/reporter is too scared to check). There are NO websites with child porn, they are too easy to close. There used to be many 5-10 years ago, but today online distribution of child porn happens via FTP, email and P2P.
Experts say at least 95 percent of victims are abused by someone they know, either a relative or neighbor.
Some correct statement for a change. However, this casts some doubt on the usefulness of the program designed "to link information such as credit card purchases, Internet chat room messages and arrest records". It's not like the uncle Bob will be chatting with his niece in a public Internet chatroom and then pay her via a credit card for the sexual services.
Hemler said Microsoft committed $4 million toward the program and that the software would be available to any police force at no cost.
And was used to write off some profit to avoid taxes.
several suspected pornographers had already been arrested during testing of the new system. One man was arrested in Toronto last week, after a tip plugged into CETS linked with two previous reports on the suspect.
That's amazing! In other news, anti-terrorist software designed by Microsoft helped arrest several suspected terrorists, including a 90-year old quadriplegic, a 7-year old girl and a nun. That's exactly what we need - data-mining software to produce as many positives as possible, even though many of the results are likely to be randomly caused false positives.
investigating child pornography chat rooms and credit card purchases of the images
BTW, since when you could buy child pornography using your credit card? May be you can also use the same card to buy heroin and weaponised anthrax? The last time I checked, criminals tended to use more anonymous payment methods (such as Western Union, Paypal, various e-cash systems, etc.).
It doesn't add up. I am 90% sure that the whole article is a fabrication. The departments created to combat child porn need to create an illusion of working. The truth is that commercial distribution of child pornography is almost non-existent "The government had shellacked the competition; now law enforcement agencies were the sole reproducers and distributors of child pornography." (R. P. "Toby" Tyler, LAPD, 1990). And the non-commercial exchange doesn't involve "preying" on children, doesn't involve credit cards and arrest record. Just fire up KaZaA and type "preteen lolita porn" or something like that.
It needs to be said again and again - child porn scare is a new moral panic. The danger of child porn is miniscule. Child sexual abuse is rarely related to child pornography. Children have much bigger problems. There is nothing intrinsically wrong about an image of a child in sexual activity. Government needs a scarecrow. The bugaboo of chilf porn can be and is routinely used to limit your rights. If child porn didn't exist, it should have been invented.
There is a mostly informative article on child porn at Wikipedia.
However, we're certainly nowhere near knowing enough to stimulate a portion of the brain to make someone smell chocolate cupcakes or something similar.
Yes, we are. Scientists have already managed (a decade ago, IIRC) to stimulate specific memories using electrodes inserted into the brain. Of course, they currently don't know, which memories will be recalled, they have to try and ask what the patient tells them. But then they can repeatedly produce that sensation.
You are a Moron.
Have you ever heard about focusing? BTW, ultrasound has already been used in tests to destroy kidney stones.
On the one hand you can't, because there is a lot of prior art already. On the other hand, I don't think prior art has ever deferred anyone from patenting an idea...
You ignored the problem of patents for inventions that do not work that are sufficiently broad to cover others' inventions that DO work. This will allow Sony to sue anyone who comes up with the WORKING device, to the detriment of the public (because these risks actually quell investments in R&D).
I think it's actually better to allow patenting ideas. You see, the patents do expire and there isn't a tradition of extending them into infinity like with copyrights. So, by allowing Sony to patent this in 2005 (they filed in 2003), you guarantee that it will expire in 2023. If you waited until Sony had a device (say, in 2011), they (or someone else, it doesn't matter for the majority of people) could hold the patent until 2031. The earlier the patent is filed, the better off the public is!
Sure it wouldn't mean anything if we were talking about Finland, Belgium or New Zealand. But it's the USA, the largest developer of software in the world, the home to the 90% of world's largest software companies (including the biggest of them all). And the US team places 17th (IIRC). Think about the distribution of programmers' talents - if there are no worthy programmers at the top, then those in the middle must be really bad too. The only other explanation - that best CS students in the US move to other countries instead of continuing the education in their home country - is ridiculous.
Wikipedia sincirelly apologizes for this oversight. The relevant article existed under a different title and the page you visited was missing a redirect. The error was fixed and the people responsible have been reprimanded.
Rebar, you are welcome to our article on Cow manure. Please, enjoy this informative read. You might also be interested in the article on manure in general and the article on bullshit in the more figurative meaning.
Wikipedia appreciates your interest.
Google combines the mature function of definitions (basically what Onelook does and does better) and the prototype answering function (which doesn't work all that well yet).
I suggest you check out Brain Boost, a real answering system that uses AI to change your question into multiple search engine queries, contacts multiples search engines, processes the results, downloads the most relevant pages, uses AI to analyze their relevance, extracts the answers from the most relevant and presents them on a neat results page with links to get additional information, read the source or rate the quality of answers. It's really amazing and it works for all questions with the whole web, not just with a few encyclopedias or definition lists like Google apparently does.
May be you will be more impressed with Brain Boost?
When asked What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?, it answers:
I had a prolonged discussion with some friends about when can you claim to know something. I asked a university professor "Is there any area, about which you can say you know?" He couldn't couldn't name anything, caught in the self-created trap. He believes that since you can't know anything 100%, you can't really claim to know something and there are only points of view, all of which are equially valid in some sense. I (not bound by such irrational beliefs) have clearly (but in a polite language) told him that he is a moron for thinking that way. :)
:D
I see the same problem here. You don't need Wikipedia answers to be reliable in order for them to be useful. You don't live in a reliable world, where any mistake is fatal. You live in a world where most people don't really know what they are doing, where about half of Americans believes that Saddam blew up WTC and people used to walk the Earth at the same time that dinosaurs lived.
Heck, do you seriously think that if you needed to know the population of Portugal and some troll modified the Wikipedia page to say "5 million", your life would be utterly and inevitably destroyed? I can create an search engine that would answer 95% of all questions correctly by giving "WHO THE FUCK CARES!" as an answer.
The reliability and trust are way, way overrated.
As usual, Brain Boost is just as good. :) Here are some nice picks from the result page:
I just tested Brain Boost - an AI-based Internet answering service. I asked it When will Wikipedia DVD be launched? and was told about the German DVD release on April 1. I then refined my question to When will English Wikipedia DVD be launched? and was told that it will happen "later this year".
Meanwhile, Google had not answered the same question. There were no relevant results on the first page (judging from the summaries), though there was a reference to this Slashdot article.
I don't know how well this Google Q&A thing works in those rare cases when it does work, but Brain Boost told me that the population of Portugal is about 10.5 million people. It has also told me (all on the reults page) that
overall population density of about 113 persons per sq. km
The population of Portugal is ageing, with nearly 3.5 million people over the age of 50 in 2003
almost half of the population is economically active
Brazil has a [portuguese speaking] population of approximately 151 million
:)
I think this is leaps and bounds better than lame half-assed attempt by Google, especially considering that Brain Boost works with ALL questions, doesn't require ANY HUMAN input and is completely and totally AUTONOMOUS.
Google sucks, Brain Boost rules! I want a direct interface to Brain Boost, like this guy.
It's not an ad hominem attack. It's just an old-fashioned insult (and a sincere expression of my attitude). Speaking about your counter-argument, it's silly. The frequency with which people spout it demonstrates it's irrationality. You are not really worried about overpopulation (admit it, you don't really think about demographics all that often in daily life), it's simply that it was programmed into your brain by our deathist society.
:)
I mean, literally everyone does it. It's not even funny anymore. Ask someone if he wants to live forever and he repeats that gibberish about overpopulation, as if he was a card carrying member of Greenpeace or a member of some Gaia cult. It's really odd how people instantly forget all problems (future and present) and act as if we were literally running out of space on this planet right now.
Anyway, for a longer answer look at The Transhumanist FAQ. For a short answer from me, the people will simply stop making more babies, whether you want it or not, whether you like it or not, and whether you think it is feasible or not. But may be you'd like the longer answer better.
Great you are paying attention, but it actually wasn't intended as a substitute for an argument. I am simply too tired of people who are too stupid (or uninformed) and that last sentence was just me venting my anger - a more polite version of "if you don't understand it, you're an idiot!" if you wish.
Sorry for the unwarranted conclusion, but the second part of my claim may still be valid. That you have worked in a particular field (AI) doesn't automatically make you qualified to make claims about developments in this field more than a decade in the future.
Going back to your original post, the evidence that faster hardware means human and then more than human AI is as strong as it can be at this stage. We haven't found anything odd in the human brain that can't be simulated (and already simulated some parts). We found that individual neurons works in a rather simple way. We found that the brain is not a mysterious everything-connected-to-everything device, but a modular, rather crude and tolerant device. We also made significant process in brain scanning. All this leads to a conclusion that in a relatively near future (2-3 decades) it will be possible to simulate the human brain in silicon. Add a few more years and we might even simulate a brain that works.
This alone leads to more-than human AI as "an inevitable consequence of continued development of computer hardware". Your comment about "past 50 years" is rather idiotic, because 1) computers basically started 50 years ago and 2) we know for certain that today's computers are very slow compared with a human brain. As for the brilliant techniques, Moravec comments on that. There are, indeed, many techniques that are impractical below a certain speed (as a matter of fact, most of techniques are that way).
It appears to me that you simply have a negative outlook towards technology (not 100% negative, mind you), and so you attempt to fit reality into your narrow beliefs (see your last sentence about "utility gained"). For some irrational reason you don't want progress to work. Well, this is clearly a problem, but one we can't do anything about right now. May be your brain is low on dopamine or something.
In any case, there is basically nothing useful that simple negativism such as expressed by yourself can bring to the discussion. "This won't work" is simply useless, especially when others have reasons to believe that it will. I can't tell you to read up, because you claim you already read enough (didn't do you much good though), but may be you can try improving your outlook on life. Ask your doctor for some anti-depressants. I've also read today that Semen can act as one. Then you might be able to consider our future prospects without your preconceived pessimism.
Thanks for the tip. I googled and here is a bunch of others. DNS server problems are somewhat common at many ISPs, so it's worth having these at least for a backup (although you probably don't need to remember more than 4.2.2.4 - if you can't access Verizon, chances are switching to another DNS server won't help you).
4.2.2.5
. 166.28.102 5
5 .29 .25 9.24 5.2
Verizon (Level3) Nameservers:
4.2.2.1
4.2.2.2
4.2.2.3
4.2.2.4
4.2.2.6
ORSC Public Access DNS Nameservers:
199.166.24.253
199.166.27.253
199
199.166.29.3
199.166.31.3
195.117.6.
204.57.55.100
Sprintlink General DNS:
204.117.214.10
199.2.252.10
204.97.212.10
Cisco
128.107.241.185
192.135.250.69
SpeakEasy Nameservers:
66.93.87.2
216.231.41.2
216.254.9
64.81.45.2
64.81.111.2
64.81.127.2
64.81.7
64.81.159.2
66.92.64.2
66.92.224.2
66.92.1
64.81.79.2
64.81.159.2
64.81.127.2
64.81.
216.27.175.2
66.92.159.2
66.93.87.2
Oh yeah, so just because there are still some retards whose "thinking" is dominated by animal instincts, we should go to Mars? So that their primitive territorial instincts can be satisfied, we should spend untold billions of dollars to go to Mars? Meanwhile hundreds of millions of people die, because the stupid deathist irrational majority is too scared of confronting ageing and funding research in radical life extension.
Your ideas about priorities for humanity are neither noble, nor smart. Though I must admit they are much more comprehensible to the average vulgar illiterate consumerist whore and much more popular therefore.
This is 20th-century thinking. You see, the human history is not an infinite timeline, where nations fight for prestige, where people need to inspire children with flashy projects.
Today we see the future much clearer and it dictates us what is rational to do. It is rational to concentrate on developing the enabling technologies first - nanotech and AI. It doesn't make sense to inspire people with space flight, that time has come and gone. It also makes sense to fight ageing and achieve physical immortality, that's what we should be dreaming about and working on.
Meanwhile the space should not be completely put on hold, but we certainly should not embark on large-scale projects designed primarily to "inspire" and "achieve prestige".
Anyone, who doesn't think so, is uninformed.
Shutting down Bittorrent sites? This only makes the rest stronger. You kill Suprnova, but this only increases the diversity. The RIAA ought to learn its lesson from medicine - if you use antibiotics, you better kill 100% of the bacteria, or the survivors will be invulnerable to the drug and multiply. Unless RIAA can kill P2P lock, stock and the smoking barrel, the remaining sites will flourish and spawn off similar "fit" ones.
Plus, we already have more resistant technologies. Even if all BitTorrent sites and trackers are shut down, eDonkey 2000 network can work with no persistent servers at all. Yes, its releasing performance is not as good, but with a few tweaks it can be fixed.
And the best thing about it that there once again won't be any sites to sue or scare. The RIAA will have to go back to sueing individual users and we have learned that it is not a sufficiently strong deterrent.
Grow up, kiddo.