China's a decently big and powerful country right now. Also, they're getting more powerful. We sort of don't like their style of government, and they sort of don't care for ours. They have rampant human rights issues, and execute thousands of political prisoners a year. (Mind you, execute - not just arrest, certainly not just say "you protestors keep back from the podium while the Prez is giving his speech at this-here event"; these people wind up dead.) If they decided to get upset and start a war with the US, they're one of the few places that could hope to seriously conquer or destroy it.
Not that they have any concrete plans to do so (though I'm sure they have plans on paper somewhere, just like we have plans on paper for invading everywhere from Sweden to Antarctica), but if you're not at least slightly vaguely a little concerned, then you're just being oblivious. Of course they're the default vaguely-sorta-threatening entity.
I have little doubt we already have the components necessary to simulate a human-like brain, one way or another, right now. But I that's not enough. You need to know how to put it together, how to set it up to be educated somewhat-like-a-human, how to get it some semblance of human-like sensory input (at least for vision/hearing centers, if you're interested in either of those things) and then you need to train it for years and years. So, 21-years-off is too optimistic, I think, by at least an order of magnitude, and possibly two or even three.
The "intelligent nanobot" bit is complete and utter garbage, though. Especially by 2029. I don't think you can even begin to fit something "intelligent" in a package about the size of a cell. Even if it's theoretically possible, our technology can currently construct nano-gears one atom at a time.
Still pictures are allowed as long as they do not show Olympic events Who copyrighted the Olympics?!? The IOC. Then they sell out the rights for a massive profit.
They can't keep people from modifying the content and redistributing it. However, they are in no way obligated to keep people from modifying the local copy of the content on their own servers. You can publish Wikipedia content on something that's not a wiki, in other words.
Maybe instead they should just find a way to push the satellites out of orbit into space maybe even toward to sun for future disposals? Otherwise we're gonna need to come up with either much stronger material to not get damaged by space debris, or make some big magnet that can scoop it up out of orbit. It's a lot easier to drag a satellite down to Earth (and have it burn up in the atmosphere) than it is to fling it into the Sun. It's called "delta-V" (the V stands for Velocity).
I have an idea for you! Instead of taking your trash out to the curb, where enterprising raccoons can knock it over and make a mess, why don't you drag all your garbage off to the Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii and dump it in?
Yo. My old buddy Einstein called. Turns out: Gravity? Acceleration? Almost the exact same thing, as far as the Physics is concerned. Kinda zany, huh?
Without looking at the objects around you, there's no way to tell the difference between 1 G sitting on Earth and 1G of force from being propelled by a rocket through space.
Not too long ago (less than 4 years) my university's network still gave everyone Real IP Addresses accessible from the Internet anywhere, without much (if any) firewalling. They've since cracked down and NATted, but before that point, apparently, one of the big laser printers was compromised and turned into a warez FTP server.
I dunno. IBM isn't really in the OS market anymore, at least, not the regular mass-produced OS market - the big-machine Z/OS UNIX mainframe stuff and the like is an entirely different matter altogether (and probably wouldn't be substantially affected by such an offering anyway). Giving something like this to Linux+friends, if it helped, could boost Linux and be seriously annoying to Microsoft. And IBM likes Linux - certainly a lot more than they like Microsoft. It could happen. Maybe.
The point of studying the alternate methods of ethanol production is that they might actually be energy positive. It's not a bad idea to try and grow our oil, but it requies a process that works and can fill our demands without making food massively expensive. This is a point indeed. But giving midwestern agribusiness (like Archer-Daniels-Midland) $7 billion (in 2006) a year in subsidies to grow ethanol is largely unrelated to 'research' (unless you want to research politics and corruption).
Yes, corn ethanol has a very low yield and has no business being used for fuel - this is very well known. As the article states, "Searchinger said the only possible exception he could see for now was sugar cane grown in Brazil, which takes relatively little energy to grow and is readily refined into fuel." which is entirely unsurprising to anyone who's looked at this stuff before. Corn is only popular in the US, and only because it's subsidized.
How about a discussion on SVO (Straight Vegetable Oil) from crops like Chinese Tallow, and the newer algae production processed instead. Maybe because corn is used for ethanol in the United States, and it's a bigger more subsidized business than ever, and it's still clamoring for more money, and there are still assorted groups pushing for more of it used as fuel?
Anything that moves can produce energy. The point is how much and at what cost to capture and reuse or store. I can solar panels on my roof for about 15K that averages about $120 a month. About a 10 year payback. Yeah, about that. Does that include your opportunity cost, where you could put that $15k in a very very safe FDIC-insured 4% savings account / CD / money market account, and make $50 a month off it? Then that's more of a... 18-year payback. (Longer if you can get a better return off of riskier investments. Like stocks, and bonds, and such.)
I think that many casual uses of profanity are what they like to call "POV", an adjectiv-ified abbreviation meaning that they promote a particular point of view. Wikipedia is trying to be neutral in itself (and merely report on the points of view which exist in the world). An adjective like "fucking" in front of something is generally taken as some form of denigration.
Furthermore, Wikipedia is trying to be an Encyclopedia. It's trying to be mildly formal, not casual (profane or otherwise). Those cases where profanities do not implicitly endorse one point of view or another still generally are Not Formal, nor do they enhance the clarity of the article.
OK, so rather than pollute the air as we burn fossil fuels, we'll fill up landfills with bazillions of batteries. Electric cars might not be as "green" and wonderful as people like to think. Oh, it's worse than all that. You're still going to get that electricity for the batteries from mostly-coal.
I'm not into beleiving in an AI taking over the world if we rely ever more on centralised computing. I'm more into the idea of a powerful AI that we rely on deciding it doesn't want to do what we fancy, and deciding to leave (you can go a long way if you don't need oxygen). If that happened, we'd be fucked. Eh, you can go a long way without oxygen, but you can't go quite so far without a really nice power supply. Also, most large computers are housed in some sort of data center tied into a lot of infrastructure so they can do their jobs, behind a few good security doors... and having them move from a data center to a rocket of some sort against the rest of the world's wishes, secretly or overtly, sounds iffy. (Especially since you can't move independently very much without legs.)
Get the computing done in a convenient mainframe and transmit input and instructions wirelessly. A cell's about 10 micrometers. Consider the problem of fitting an antenna to it and powering it to send signals that your base station can pick up. Consider the portion of the spectrum you'd need to work in (probably about that of visible light, not known for its ability to penetrate the body). I mean, alternatively, you could just invent Magic and transmit your data wirelessly with that, I suppose.
(On that note, maybe counterfactual quantum measurement is the way forward for scanning inside the body. That's some freakish stuff, and about as close to practical magic as I've heard of...)
Cure for common cold - Why bother with *just* the cold? Why not think big - mechanical immune replacement. Just build a tiny robot with a white list of what not to kill. Shape it like some really successful predator that's been around for a hundred million years. Right. Because sharks are widely known for their successes at destroying viruses, bacteria, cancer, and other dangerous oceanic life forms.
I did a robot project once, a little one. It was supposed to follow a dark black printed line around a racetrack, run three laps (the start/finish line marked by a line perpendicular to the track) and then stop. The hardest part of the darned project was getting it to recognize when to stop; it only had two little infrared sensors.
Your little nano-robot toy is going to have to deal not only with power supply issues, durability issues, and how-do-you-actually-destroy-this-thing issues, but it also needs to tackle Recognition issues. This Recognition, besides needing to be near-perfect (at least as far as false positives are concerned) needs to run through a very narrow sensory interface, and proceed with very little computational power (as much as you can fit into a cell, basically). And it's just fundamentally impossible to do that with anything that even resembles 'mechanical'. You need something else, something optimized down for size to make the most of every atom. You need to build it all off of Chemistry. It'd be the most fantastic masterpiece of chemical interaction - of anything - that mankind has created.
Or just settle for stimulating existing immune mechanisms (with boosts, and some way to make them fight certain things, or not fight others if it's an autoimmune problem). That's actually downright Feasible as such things go. You can put real Hope into that one.
The difference between the USSR and a bunch of terrorists is that we knew where the USSR was, where its population centers were, where its seat of government was located, and we were able to keep some sort of track of a significant portion of their army and navy, because they were Big. And they didn't lob nukes at us (or even send in lots of spies to blow up important infrastructure and spread panic) because, among other reasons, we knew where they slept, and we had nukes too.
The terrorists don't need to worry about us lobbing nukes at the Kremlin. They don't even need to worry about us lobbing nukes at Mecca. Whatever level of threat they do or do not pose, it is an entirely different sort of threat than the one posed by the USSR.
Isn't the war in Iraq great? A project goes $800,000,000 over budget and it's all fine and dandy and, to the Slashdot crowd, it gets a free pass because the war in Iraq costs more. Can't we at least give a nod to the fact that they're absurdly over budget, and entertain the possibility that they're just frittering away money wastefully?
Yeah, so the funds are going to the iraq war and we all looooove to hate it. But here's some news for you: money's fungible; it'd all have to come out of the same taxes anyway. (From a quick glance at the numbers, $1.8 billion is somewhere between $3 and $6 out of my pocket. That's as much as whole bag of grapefruit, you know. And I like grapefruit.)
Having more people in an area will result in more cars on the road.
See Manhattan Island for counterargument. Once you get a high enough population density -- especially with mixed zoning -- cars just aren't needed. People walk to the grocery store [or eat out]. They take mass transit to/fro work. Once you get that critical mass, the number of cars per capita, and perhaps even the aggregate number of cars, can decrease.
Making changes to society to encourage auto alternatives will have a greater influence in, say, Greensboro than in SF Bay where they've already got fairly good transit. The point about Manhattan is true. However, in Greensboro, you can easily find an average one-bedroom apartment for about $500/mo. In places like San Francisco (and presumably Manhattan), you can find a slightly-small one-bedroom apartment for closer to $1500/mo. (Like mine. Actually, I could have gone a little more suburban and less public-transit-y/more car-y for $1300ish, but I didn't.) I'm not sure that most people in Greensboro would appreciate that sort of price differential very much, Public Transport and corner groceries and spiffy eateries available or otherwise.
(Also, some people enjoy having a yard. Lawns. grass. gardens! nice pretty leafy greeny stuff. Kids love 'em. Check 'em out sometime.)
As long as you're building capacity, though, shouldn't you try to optimize your network to be as effectively used as possible?
Making it more convenient/cheaper to drive a car will always result in more cars on the road, not fewer. Having more people in an area will result in more cars on the road. In many areas not struggling with their own success, and in which public transportation availability is very poor and limited, making it convenient and cheaper to drive a car just makes it more convenient/cheaper to live life. So, the SF Bay Area won't see the end of their woes with this, but you might have better luck in, say, Greensboro, NC.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that they have any concrete plans to do so (though I'm sure they have plans on paper somewhere, just like we have plans on paper for invading everywhere from Sweden to Antarctica), but if you're not at least slightly vaguely a little concerned, then you're just being oblivious. Of course they're the default vaguely-sorta-threatening entity.
The "intelligent nanobot" bit is complete and utter garbage, though. Especially by 2029. I don't think you can even begin to fit something "intelligent" in a package about the size of a cell. Even if it's theoretically possible, our technology can currently construct nano-gears one atom at a time.
It's also trademarked to Hell and back.
Hey. I for one am enjoying my three-day weekend.
They can't keep people from modifying the content and redistributing it. However, they are in no way obligated to keep people from modifying the local copy of the content on their own servers. You can publish Wikipedia content on something that's not a wiki, in other words.
I have an idea for you! Instead of taking your trash out to the curb, where enterprising raccoons can knock it over and make a mess, why don't you drag all your garbage off to the Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii and dump it in?
Without looking at the objects around you, there's no way to tell the difference between 1 G sitting on Earth and 1G of force from being propelled by a rocket through space.
This is the UK. I have three letters for you, and they don't stand for Individual Retirement Account.
Mind you, it still printed.
This is just the technology filtering down. :)
Can we do live recordings of Woody Guthrie concerts with these nano-wires?
I dunno. IBM isn't really in the OS market anymore, at least, not the regular mass-produced OS market - the big-machine Z/OS UNIX mainframe stuff and the like is an entirely different matter altogether (and probably wouldn't be substantially affected by such an offering anyway). Giving something like this to Linux+friends, if it helped, could boost Linux and be seriously annoying to Microsoft. And IBM likes Linux - certainly a lot more than they like Microsoft. It could happen. Maybe.
How about a discussion on SVO (Straight Vegetable Oil) from crops like Chinese Tallow, and the newer algae production processed instead. Maybe because corn is used for ethanol in the United States, and it's a bigger more subsidized business than ever, and it's still clamoring for more money, and there are still assorted groups pushing for more of it used as fuel?
I think that's worth a good chunk of criticism.
(Well, I can appreciate your angle on 'ballroom dancing to rap' but aside from that....)
Furthermore, Wikipedia is trying to be an Encyclopedia. It's trying to be mildly formal, not casual (profane or otherwise). Those cases where profanities do not implicitly endorse one point of view or another still generally are Not Formal, nor do they enhance the clarity of the article.
(On that note, maybe counterfactual quantum measurement is the way forward for scanning inside the body. That's some freakish stuff, and about as close to practical magic as I've heard of...)
Right. Because sharks are widely known for their successes at destroying viruses, bacteria, cancer, and other dangerous oceanic life forms.
I did a robot project once, a little one. It was supposed to follow a dark black printed line around a racetrack, run three laps (the start/finish line marked by a line perpendicular to the track) and then stop. The hardest part of the darned project was getting it to recognize when to stop; it only had two little infrared sensors.
Your little nano-robot toy is going to have to deal not only with power supply issues, durability issues, and how-do-you-actually-destroy-this-thing issues, but it also needs to tackle Recognition issues. This Recognition, besides needing to be near-perfect (at least as far as false positives are concerned) needs to run through a very narrow sensory interface, and proceed with very little computational power (as much as you can fit into a cell, basically). And it's just fundamentally impossible to do that with anything that even resembles 'mechanical'. You need something else, something optimized down for size to make the most of every atom. You need to build it all off of Chemistry. It'd be the most fantastic masterpiece of chemical interaction - of anything - that mankind has created.
Or just settle for stimulating existing immune mechanisms (with boosts, and some way to make them fight certain things, or not fight others if it's an autoimmune problem). That's actually downright Feasible as such things go. You can put real Hope into that one.
The terrorists don't need to worry about us lobbing nukes at the Kremlin. They don't even need to worry about us lobbing nukes at Mecca. Whatever level of threat they do or do not pose, it is an entirely different sort of threat than the one posed by the USSR.
Isn't the war in Iraq great? A project goes $800,000,000 over budget and it's all fine and dandy and, to the Slashdot crowd, it gets a free pass because the war in Iraq costs more. Can't we at least give a nod to the fact that they're absurdly over budget, and entertain the possibility that they're just frittering away money wastefully?
Yeah, so the funds are going to the iraq war and we all looooove to hate it. But here's some news for you: money's fungible; it'd all have to come out of the same taxes anyway. (From a quick glance at the numbers, $1.8 billion is somewhere between $3 and $6 out of my pocket. That's as much as whole bag of grapefruit, you know. And I like grapefruit.)
Too many NIMBY and "nukes are bad, evil monsters who will eat your babies" weenies in the way of nuclear power.
See Manhattan Island for counterargument. Once you get a high enough population density -- especially with mixed zoning -- cars just aren't needed. People walk to the grocery store [or eat out]. They take mass transit to/fro work. Once you get that critical mass, the number of cars per capita, and perhaps even the aggregate number of cars, can decrease.
Making changes to society to encourage auto alternatives will have a greater influence in, say, Greensboro than in SF Bay where they've already got fairly good transit. The point about Manhattan is true. However, in Greensboro, you can easily find an average one-bedroom apartment for about $500/mo. In places like San Francisco (and presumably Manhattan), you can find a slightly-small one-bedroom apartment for closer to $1500/mo. (Like mine. Actually, I could have gone a little more suburban and less public-transit-y/more car-y for $1300ish, but I didn't.) I'm not sure that most people in Greensboro would appreciate that sort of price differential very much, Public Transport and corner groceries and spiffy eateries available or otherwise.
(Also, some people enjoy having a yard. Lawns. grass. gardens! nice pretty leafy greeny stuff. Kids love 'em. Check 'em out sometime.)