I thought the whole point was to make it customizable. Does the definition of "customizable" say "except for closed source"?
It seems that the "purists" referred to are open source purists, not Linux purists. That being the case, why pick on Linux? I can see no reason beyond cheap journalistic flammability.
Pretty much all Hienlien's earlier stuff is what I call "boy scout" stories. I developed the term from his Sunjammer solar sail story that premiered in the boy scout magazine "Boys Life".
And every kid of any age should read everything from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. Besides 36 novels, he's written some books specific to younger readers (and won awards for same) and there's been both animated and live versions of some of the Discowrld books made. The Discowrld stories are much like the old Bugs Bunny cartoons -- well done for and received by kids, but some more esoteric pieces inserted specifically for those who can find them -- mostly for adults, sometimes for specialists (like the details of the "clacks" being there for techheads).
Asimov's collections of short stories are good for kids and he puts in well explained details of the science involved. And if you can interest them in these, then you can give them his collections of science essays, which are equally entertaining but even more educational. By the time they catch on to the latter, they'll be more interested in learning more, and that's the best thing that can happen from all this.
"...a damned scary ray gun that uses the 'microwave audio effect' to implant sounds and perhaps even specific messages inside people's heads."
A little late to be crying "damned scary" wolf. The effects was proven about 25 years ago.
Yes, specific messages. In the original research the test was to beam spoken numbers (one at a time, 1 through 20) at the subject and have them guess which number it was. Results were 80% to 100% correct.
It's not subliminal in the denotation of 'below the level of conscious awareness'. The perception is that of a "heard" sound.
I'm surprised it took this long for someone to come out with this. The original works was, after all, done on commercially technology of the time.
"...via direct communication between, say, synapse and prosthetic."
No, don't say 'between synapse and prosthetic' because that's definitely not going to provide the information necessary to send a command of any kind. Synapses do not represent qualia (the 'quantum of thought'). Neurons don't either. It requires a softwired network of neurons to contain a single element of thought. Softwaired because all neurons are hard wired to all others with a maximum separation of 6 synapses, the average being 3. The neurons not required for a particular qualia are prevented from participating in synchronized firing. The result is 10^3 to 10^5 neurons firing together. All those neurons participate in other of such functional networks at other times, the difference being the addition of some neurons that weren't in the first network. Sometimes many of the neurons in one functional network participate together in another but the second collection represents a very different thought, feeling, etc.
The interested can read up on it in "The Organization of Behavior" by Donald O. Hebb (for which those functional networks are named: Hebbian cellular assemblies). Just the first chapter. Hebb himself said everything necessary is there, and all the subsequent chapters expand on it. I'm taking potshots at Popular Mechanics not for being a poor source of informed neuroscience, but because they've had plenty of time to do their background research but obviously didn't. Hebb's book came out in 1949.
It's not that he's selling his vote, it's that as an individual citizen's electoral vote it's pretty much worthless. Now, if it were worth something, such as what lobbyists and industry can offer politicians, instead of being arrested he's be rewarded with, say, being allowed to deduct cost of getting his vote sold from his taxes as a business expense.
Real people can't compete with the artificial people known as corporations because the corporations can mount a tough defense. To do so they'll call on the watch dogs they've already purchased in the form of the existing politicians and laws.
That said "I was only kidding" is a terrible defense that nobody should be expected to believe. If one is to attempt this, it is best done in the form of verifiable protected speech: parody. That requires being able to site specific things one is parodying (web sites, TV ads, etc.).
I've been dealing with "clueless" law enforcement on online law breaking for 15 years. When it comes to breaking a law, ignorance is no excuse. Same with enforcing it. As much as you'll let them, law enforcement will drag its feet when it comes to things they're not comfortable with. Tough shit. Provide them with what they need as far as the laws broken, and the summary of what they need that they don't understand (what's an IP and how do I know it's at X location, etc.) and tell them to do the job. Let them know that police departments don't exist in a vacuum, and that states attorneys offices oversee both online law breaking and police activities. If they don't know something they need to know in order to do their job, it's their responsibility to learn it or obtain the information and have it verified. Their states attorney's office will get it verified it for them as well tell them to get off their ass and do their jobs. Note this is a summary of long experience phrased in terms easy to grasp. Handling the cops in such a way that they don't drag their feet even more requires approaching them in a more politic manner, although the substance of the approach outlines above should remain intact. An alternative to states attorneys is the FBI's and similar electronic crimes departments, who are glad to "assist" (read: educate) the "sadly underfunded and therefore unable to obtain the training necessary for the modern world" (there's a nice, politic phrase as an example). It's half politic and half pressure, though thoroughly proper, to ask the foot dragger for their "chain of command" (up to, say, state command level) so that the concern can be raised in proper form as far up their food chain as necessary to get the job done. Simply asking for this does wonders. Even if they are well meaning and entirely blameless for the cluelessness, they can and should pursue their own chain of command assistance, and will if given sufficient cause. Being brought to the attention if superiors for less than stellar performance is usually sufficient cause.
"They are well known to science fiction readers, otherwise not so much."
They are well known to those familiar with space history. We learned how to build these sails from Echo 1A and Echo 2, launched back in the 60s. Both were aluminized mylar balloons, used as passive microwave reflecting communications satellites. Both were "blown" off orbit by solar pressure. Analysis of the orbital data told us the why and the how much, so now we can do it accurately.
As for "a previous attempt blew up", the same thing happened to Echo 1. Echo 1A was a backup. Luckily the design was dirt cheap, making that possible. Sadly, then as now, the failures were in the expensive parts -- the boosters.
Consider: Fox News is "breaking" this. If that doesn't peg your BS meter, check your wiring.
A NASA analyst is not necessarily someone who works for NASA doing analyses, it can also be someone who analyzes things having to do NASA. James Oberg is a NASA analyst, probably one of the best, and doesn't work for them. Still, even if the talking head was a NASA employee, even as some kind of analyst, chances are they have nothing directly to do with the project.
The only reason Fox is running this and no one else is, is because everyone else knows there's very little to say about it at this point besides "golly gee whiz!" which is all Fox did. When they take it for a real (declassified) spin, we'll all hear about it in words with multiple syllables.
Nice looking bird. But I think the Boeing Bird Of Prey still gets the prize for looking like evil in flight.
Science Weekly's list of "The 100 Best Reads" includes not one single piece of popular culture fluff. Nor does it only go back 25 years, which is about how long people with no other useful purpose have been making money by turning information about entertainment (as opposed to entertainment itself) into a money making venture.
When EW's history goes back far enough and has enough quality material listed that they can claim to have their equivalent to Principia Mathematia, then they'll have something significant to say about their own field. And they will probably still have no background from which to judge science literature.
I read an entertaining and educational science book once a week whether I need to or not. Anyone wanting some suggestions along these lines, go read Alan Boyle's "Cosmic Log" on MSNBC and look up the archives of his Used Book Of The Month Club. Those who already read such things should keep an eye out for his next request for suggestions, and submit one. If it gets used, you get a prize -- usually another good science book he'd recently reviewed or otherwise acquired.
There are as many cells in the brain as there are stars in the galaxy (roughly, 100 billion). There are around 100,000 receptors on each neuron, most from different cells, making the brain so interconnected that nothing is ever more than the famed "6 degrees of freedom" from anything else, the average being 3. There are dozens of neurotransmitters involved in intercellular communication and even more neuromodulators within the cells to handle processing. There is also indirect electrical communication between neurons where their overlapping dendritic trees detect the electrical fields of nearby but non-connected cells, and processing depends on those too. All these processes are interdependent -- virtually none of them happen without affecting and being affected by, the others. The numbers, amounts and even fractional dimensions of the interactions' variables involved are just one of the fields that spawned experimental mathematics, a field that even mathematicians have trouble wrapping their heads around. That's enough for the purpose of my conclusion, though I could go on.
This is the subject matter of my profession. I have no problem dealing with petabytes of data because I know what to look for. Nobody collects that kind of data throughs it in a pile and stares at it. We collect that much because we know that's how much we need and know how to find our answers in it. Just because some places (there have been many of them for years) let you throw your raw petabytes into a pile doesn't mean science itself changes. Anyone who tries to data mine petabytes withouth being intimately involved in the collection might as well start at any random place on earth and start mining for gold.
So, Chris Anderson can peta-bite my ass. Science survived a far more revolutionary fundamental change than this and did quite well since. That invention was the zero. It will always be more important than any order-of-magnitude milestone.
Ask a scientist that uses that much data if there's anything significant about it, leave science writing to them and to the decent science writers (like Alan Boyle), and keep the editors busy at their desks editing. If the editors are not so busy that they can waste time making up this pseudo-FUD out of barely understood buzzphrases, it's time to trim the budget at Wired.
Between the rods and cones of the retina and the optic nerve are four layers/types of retinal processing cells. Unlike most neurons these operate entirely on inhibitory processing (rather than 85% excitatory and 15% inhibitory) and entirely on slow voltage gradient (rather than store up charge to a threshold and then fire a burst). How this accomplishes visual processing is a mystery to those of us to who understand real meatware processing. It is not likely a bunch of high powered supercomputer geeks even know this is how the visual system operates much less how to simulate it.
They way well use their XYZflops to develop a visual processing system of some sort, but it will NOT be a simulation of something that those who understand it far better than they understand it hardly at all.
If and when they get to actually trying to match the human visual system in operation (though by different processing) they'll have to figure out of to get their system to consistently guess with fairly good accuracy what it's going to be seeing 0.1 to 0.3 seconds in the future. Proof of that long suspected technique was just forthcoming in the last week or so.
There is nothing at all "intelligent" about this. It is all automated processing. Level of "intelligence" has nothing to to with visual proceses' efficacy. Anytime anyone inserts the "I" word into anything regarding computers, particulary when comparing with the human brain, they need to define their terms. Almost certainly those of us who have struggled for years with the insufficient and contradictory proposed definitions of "intelligence" in the human mind will be more than happy to fill them in on why their definitions have already been proven to be failures in humans, and why anything derived from those will not apply to system designed to provide human-looking output via entirely different means of processing.
The human body isn't built to sit in one single position for as long as we try to make it. One chair isn't a solution. I use four. I use a cheap steel folding chair a plain wooden kitchen table chair and a cheap roll around computer chair, and switch between them. Bought the thirst for $30, the other two were laying around. The fourth configuration is the one I can take the longest: a high stool with the keyboard and monitor set up on the counter. The half-standing position remains comfortable two to three times longer than the others (but the others are easier to switch betweem). If I had to stick with one, I'd stick with #4, because I can do it half-standing or completely standing, entirely eliminating the over-sitting discomfort. And yes, I've had some very good, ergonomic and otherwise hyper-comfy chairs to work in. They didn't do any better than my combination arrangement.
Also, get one of the old Jet Blue in-flight pamphlets or other source of "exercise while sitting" instructions. The problem is as much the body trying to stay in the chair as it is the chair itself. This may require setting an alarm for him to remind him to do it on a rough schedule until he gets used to it and sees the benefit.
Bullshit. They've had the skills for years. They've had the skills to do so stealthily for fewer years, but still years. They're just not so good as to not to be able to go undetected very often for very long. We're better at that.
And it's still a bullshit story. It's not even newsworthy, it happens so often (from both sides). It only gets dragged out and waved around when there's something else going on they want to detract attention from. China isn't responding in order to deny. They're participating in perpetuating a ruse for The US's benefit that will cost them nothing at home because it won't make the news there. That suggests the story being passed by may involve both, though I still lean towards this serving to deflect people from the impeachment articles against Bush. My money says that when that story dies down in the lesser media, the Chinese hacking stories will disappear from the larger media without any resolution at all or very little impression or memory in most peoples minds.
This has been happening since China first got IP space. Their defense department was the origin of their first (very amateurish) hacks, those against pro-Tibet web sites. Thousands have happened since and have been reported, and it's no more likely to end than any other intrusions.
If the US wanted it to stop they'd put up honey pots with credible but artificial data and then wait for it to get used. This is how you catch the intruder and protect the real data at the same time. And the US knows this. This is first semester psyops. Fact is, they're almost certainly doing it, making this announcement utterly meaningless. And it is, unless you stick around for second semester psyops. That's when they teach you how to craft a story that makes such a big splash that something more important but entirely unrelated gets missed.
The present administration rarely hides its efforts along these lines, or Jon Stewart wouldn't have nearly as much material to work with. It's when something is really threatening to them that they work in the grey. Just as a possible for instance, in how many sources can you find this story, and in how many can you find the story of Kucinich's reading of articles of impeachment? And which is the more important story?
When something gets way too much coverage than it deserves, look around and see what's not getting enough. It'll be there because they can't make it go away. All they can do is tie a bell around the media's neck and wait for the sheeple to follow it.
If they need to program to do their work, they need to learn to program. If they don't, well then, they don't.
If they need to know the conceptual basis, they can get that from math (which physics students get plenty of) or in a more explicit form, from a course in logic. These prepare one for programming by teaching those concepts and so already serve the purposes of background material. If the students needs training in the thinking process, these should do, or else they're not doing their jobs.
Teaching them to program without an explicit need for it is just putting up hoops for them to jump through. I hate hoops. I always hated them as a student, as most I'm sure most students also do, and I hate them as an educator as a waste of time better spent in more profitable work.
Another source of training in the orderly thinking required comes from teaching/learning methodology. What math doesn't cover, language does, and this is where it happens. Experiment design is programming of laboratory methods, including choice of the necessary math involved. If they graduate without being able to do this, they're much farther behind the curve than if they simply can't write a computer program. And if they can, then they know the thinking process.
People used to complain that handheld calculators would cause a loss of mathematical ability because people wouldn't bother to learn what button pressing could accomplish. Asimov rightly replied that the math would still be required to know what buttons to push. I reply that the complainers, Asimov, myself and virtually all reading this can't calculate things like the 7th root of a 9 digit number with arbitrary decimal place without very easily a calculator, yet virtually no one can write a program on a calculator to do these things which are already built in. And still no one decries the lack of programming education for handheld calculators.
"I wonder what definition of "obscene" the FCC would like to use."
Probably the one they already use to charge violators such as Howard Stern, as well as the violators' station of origin, up to US$250K per incident. I'm not sure where it is in their regs (which I do know are online) but I recall quite clearly the sign in the studio booth at WUVT that reminded me constantly of the sword hanging over me.
What's always bothered me about the regs is the relaxation of the rules after 10 PM. When I was broadcasting, I had simultaneous netcast. After 10 PM where the station is (Blacksburg VA, eastern time) is only after 7 PM on the Left Coast (ie. pacific time). After 10 PM where? Was I simultaneously legal in Virginia but breaking the law in California?
Apply that now to on-demand, statically stored material which may or may not be infringing depending on the material and time of request. It's always before 10 PM someplace, so the owner may be liable according to the location of the requester. You can bet this is the way things would fall, because the alternative is to say 'it's AFTER 10 PM someplace', making the regs moot and removing a potential source of enforcement as well as income.
Oh yeah, and the context of the offending material matters. You can play hip hop and rap on air after 10 PM local and get away with broadcasting 2 "motherfuckers" and 5 "niggers" per minute, but try to say one of either yourself and see what it costs you. In the case of the latter, that may include body parts depending on your own color. The context of your reception can also matter, hence a "researcher" is supposed to be able to access an "obscene" web site for academic purposes without fear of reprisal. Yeah, right.
Personally I prefer Larry Flint's editorialized definition of "obscene" which puts murder and such well before sex in terms of badness. If that were used, you'd never be able to access most commercial news outlets, or much common TV or theatrical material. So sad that killing is not just accepted but expected, and fucking is outlawed.
OOPS, I think I just made it impossible for you to access this in the archives should the regulation of the proposed bandwidth go through. We'll see.
"The sad thing about the articles is that the beauty of the mathematics used to create and train the models is totally ignored."
The sadder thing is that the discovery of response patterns of amputated limbs being mapped to other parts of the body is totally ignored.
A man had his arm removed. A psychiatrist attending happened to note that the man claimed to "feel" things in his missing hand when other parts of his body were touched. After careful mapping, three different response maps were found -- one each on his arm, chest and back. Each was so sensitive that individual fingers could be stimulated and he could correctly tell which.
This major discovery in neural plasticity makes it totally unnecessary to try to decode signals from electrode either drilled through the skull, or else placed on the surface and reading signals though the scalp, skull and dura mater, which reduces the signal by 3 orders of magnitude. Either way, these signals require some massive processing because a significant command/response signal (ie. an electrical response representing a single Hebbian cellular assembly that can be clearly decoded to an intent as stated in the article) comes from 0.3% to 3% of the neurons in the region being detected, the vast majority of the signal needing rejection as false positive or noise. Using the mapped response regions allows for signal analysis based on EMG patterns that are not expected at all in the area under the electrodes, making detection and analysis trivial.
TFA and most such research is not about giving amputees mobility. It is about decoding and using neural signals. If it were about the former, easier ways would have been used and the job already accomplished. It is about the latter because such things make more news, get more recognition, and therefore result in more grant application success.
The resulting technology will only be applied to prosthetics as a secondary result. Its primary use will be in such as hands-off controls for fighter pilots (see Clint Eastwood's "Firefox" for your obligatory Slashdot sci-fi/movie reference), tank crews and mobile missile launchers. Maybe this is the saddest part of all, but ignoring a more certain path to success as far as prosthetics is a sad piece.
Also sad, with a touch of irony, is the fact that the weaponry applications will be untenable because of the heuristic nature of neural processing -- getting it close but error prone will be fast, getting it right will be no faster or require less effort than hand operated controls. The slow speed and so the ability to use real-time perceptual feedback with prosthetics will make that far more successful. It remains to be seen whether after the war applications fail the research continues (ie. there is adequate funding offered) with respect to prosthetics. If someone like the US Veterans Administration picks it up when DARPA drops it, it might. I'm not hopeful.
The portion of the above that's assertion or opinion is based on the same professional experience as the portion that's not. That experience includes development of some of the "beautiful" maths decried as being ignored. Having been prosthetic-wrist deep in the research and from both directions, I find that a minor point to consider as "sad".
What sense is there in trying to encapsulate "concepts" particularly when phrased in language? Both of these are fluid and evolving. Attempting to archive a particular static state is at best a waste. Ontologists above all should know this.
And maybe that's the point. For centuries ontology has existed primarly to serve itself and secondarily to trade favors with other branches of philosophy. The proposed project has the primary result of providing gainful employment outside the halls of academic philosophy for the first time. It has the secondary result of allowing ontologists to get their revenge for centuries of being ignored by getting us to pay them for something that had we only listened to them we'd know to be a monstrous leg-pull.
Let them have their fun and their Venn diagrams. Cognitive science already knows better, and is better suited to conceptual mapping with its cognitive mapping in conceptual space.
It may be the visible portion of a security system, it may be a visible representation of a similar system, it may be a visible deflection from a different system, or it may be a complete fabrication meant to fool you into thinking there's a system in place.
Only in the first case does the theater and the actuality coincide. In the second, it is theater designed to allow the system to "hide in plain sight". The third is the "card game", with the false front often being designed as a "straw man" that can fall without the actual system failing. The article implies the last of these in its use of the term, but all are "theater" in that public perception matters.
In any case, a real security system operates unseen, because its own security system is the visible portion, whether real, constructed or imagined.
BTW, one can easily and with equal validity substitute "authority" for "security".
No, you don't get Nobels for publishing Japanese cold fusion work in Italian economics journals. You don't get them from publishing any cold fusion work in any peer reviewed physics journal because they don't get published as such, for much the same reasons that make people claim absence of evidence is evidence of absence even though the evidence was only absent in some of the replications. You do, however, publish articles about Japanese cold fusion work in an Italian economics journal when a Japanese company is building cold fusion equipment in an Italian factory purchased from Fiat, said company having hired Pons and Fleischmann as design consultants.
Neutron flux is a sign of some fusion reactions, but not all. 2 * (1p + 1n) --> (2p + 2n): two deuterium go to one helium. The energy released is from the conversion of mass of two deuterium (2 * 2.014 = 4.028) into one helium (4.002). The difference (.026) is is given off as energy measured in ergs, calculated from the amount of mass "lost" in grams times the speed of light in a vacuum in centimeters per second times itself. The source of the energy is the release of binding energy in the nuclei; the binding energy required grows at a lesser rate than the number of nucleons. This is the mass difference stated in another way. The energy is this particular reaction comes.
And if cold fusion were as much a hoax as those educated by hearsay rather than science would have you believe, then you wouldn't have symposia on the subject at scientific conferences hosted by the selfsame journals that refuse the publish such articles unless they're written so speculatively as to seem almost fiction, and the phenonemon examined is called something else.
Regardless of the barriers caused by pathological disbelief masquerading as skepticism, or worse, education at the hands of the pathological disbelievers, over 3,000 articles peer reviewed articles on cold fusion have been published. Enough evidence has been accumulated to convince both the US Many and the US Dept. of Energy that the phenonenon is real, though inadequately understood, and deserved more investigation and funding.
Those who are so certain that cold fusion is bogus would probably be glad to know that once the bogus cold fusion reactors built at the bogus Fiat plant are primed they crank out 270 kiloboguswatts over 90 bogusdays with no additional input of energy.
Answer for yourself: if you had something important, but the mention of it made those who were the supposed experts in the field run screaming, just how would you go about bringing the knowledge out into the open without getting quashed? Through many different kinds of channels, a tiny bit at a time, which would by necessity mean some of the announcements would be of results and discoveries from some considerable time prior. The SETI people assert this is how alien contact and/or news of such would proceed and nobody blinks at that. Claim that this same process of being used on news of replicable tabletop physics and their eyes get stuck wide shut.
To first address the comments regarding number of digits in working memory: the "magic number" is 7 plus or minus 2, the variance being context dependent. To hold more items in memory, which people obviously do, they employ "chunking", or grouping them together and remembering the chunks in the necessary sequence. The 7 digit phone number was based on the original 7 digit idea, the grouping of area code XXX, prefix YYY, and last 4 ZZZZ was based on chunking. Since this chunking is a major action of attention and memory, simply adding a single digit to a single chunk is a weird way to claim improvement.
Yet once again an article on cognition enhancement fails to note its origins and long standing history. The first nootropic, hydergine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydergine , was developed by Albert Hoffmann of Sandoz. While he is best known for LSD, his "problem child", he considered hydergine to be his most important discovery. He credited his longentivity (he died recently at age 102) to using hydergine regularly.
"What we need are a few good old fashioned hangings." -- FTC Commissioner Orson Swindel; at the 2003 FTC Spam Conference.
"REMAIN CALM" -- Afterburner; professional sysadmin and member of Subgenius Police, Usenet Tactical Units, Mobile (SPUTUM) who provided documented evidence used to sink Spamford and Picklejar's boat last time they got uppity. (Winner of the Golden Mallet award, as was Bill Mattocks).
"There Is No Cabal, and we will KICK ASS." -- Doug Mackall (dec. 1999); Cabal organizer and another Golden Mallet recipient. Through his organizing efforts, about a dozen people took on such as Netcom and Worldcom/UUNet and made them stop spam coming from their customers.
It may take a village to raise a child, but it doesn't take near that many to raze a spammer. Who would you like to LART today?
Welcome to 1995. That's when the Office of Commercial Space Transportation was placed with NASA. It was formed in 1984, under the Department of Transportation, but you specified NASA's role so we'll go with that. NASA has been reversing its policy of relying solely on BigAero ever since OCST came under their umbrella. Sadly, it was too late and too inbred with the industry to take advantage of the previous efforts to produce more efficient launch systems such as Truax's designs, said efforts being as numerous if not as far developed as the present crop of aerospace start-ups. NASA never completely ignored those efforts -- they must have paid some attention in order to reject them. Rejecting less is the only thing that's changed, and that's been changing in this direction for years. Just because Griffin et al. has talked about it recently doesn't mean it's a recent development. Should you ever want to pretend you're actually doing journalism, consider doing the sort of research journalism requires, which would have produced much the same details I've related. Of course being way behind the time curve doesn't make for headlines and so doesn't sell magazines. Do yourselves and us a favor, and stick to cars, power tools and inventions that never get produced, and leave the things you're not going to bother to understand alone.
The variance in quality of search results is noted elsewhere. I'm more interested in the fallacy of the claim of "understanding". That, as well as its synonym "comprehension" require metacognition, that is, knowing that you know. It is the basis of self-awareness. this program doesn't even pretend to give evidence of this, it simply return search results. Pretending to be self-aware was accomplised by CYC when it claimed to graps the fact that it was a computer program. For anyone interested in seeing the arguments about understanding and self-awareness, see Searle's "Chinese Room" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room . As far as I can see, only the hype from the company, including the restatements of same in the referenced articles, make any claims as to "understanding". If there were any evidence of that beyond the hype, I have no doubt those in the field of consciousness studies would tear it apart, if they even bothered to waste their attention on it. If in being bashed it then produced a statement equivalent to "I can feel it, Dave" without being programmed to respond in that way, then I'll give it a look see. Until then it's simply a semantic parser (something already done) attached to a search engine.
Go ahead and develop a bunch of "space lawyers". Just keep them back here on the ground. Try to send them up with us and we'll make them all airlock integrity inpectors. We'd use them for reaction mass but the large proportion of hot air reduces their density.
Maybe we can use them as Reaver bait, or chest-burster incubators. Perhaps they'll be able to make friends.
Slashdot Mirror
"Linux" "should"
I thought the whole point was to make it customizable. Does the definition of "customizable" say "except for closed source"?
It seems that the "purists" referred to are open source purists, not Linux purists. That being the case, why pick on Linux? I can see no reason beyond cheap journalistic flammability.
Pretty much all Hienlien's earlier stuff is what I call "boy scout" stories. I developed the term from his Sunjammer solar sail story that premiered in the boy scout magazine "Boys Life".
And every kid of any age should read everything from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. Besides 36 novels, he's written some books specific to younger readers (and won awards for same) and there's been both animated and live versions of some of the Discowrld books made. The Discowrld stories are much like the old Bugs Bunny cartoons -- well done for and received by kids, but some more esoteric pieces inserted specifically for those who can find them -- mostly for adults, sometimes for specialists (like the details of the "clacks" being there for techheads).
Asimov's collections of short stories are good for kids and he puts in well explained details of the science involved. And if you can interest them in these, then you can give them his collections of science essays, which are equally entertaining but even more educational. By the time they catch on to the latter, they'll be more interested in learning more, and that's the best thing that can happen from all this.
"...a damned scary ray gun that uses the 'microwave audio effect' to implant sounds and perhaps even specific messages inside people's heads."
A little late to be crying "damned scary" wolf. The effects was proven about 25 years ago.
Yes, specific messages. In the original research the test was to beam spoken numbers (one at a time, 1 through 20) at the subject and have them guess which number it was. Results were 80% to 100% correct.
It's not subliminal in the denotation of 'below the level of conscious awareness'. The perception is that of a "heard" sound.
I'm surprised it took this long for someone to come out with this. The original works was, after all, done on commercially technology of the time.
"...via direct communication between, say, synapse and prosthetic."
No, don't say 'between synapse and prosthetic' because that's definitely not going to provide the information necessary to send a command of any kind. Synapses do not represent qualia (the 'quantum of thought'). Neurons don't either. It requires a softwired network of neurons to contain a single element of thought. Softwaired because all neurons are hard wired to all others with a maximum separation of 6 synapses, the average being 3. The neurons not required for a particular qualia are prevented from participating in synchronized firing. The result is 10^3 to 10^5 neurons firing together. All those neurons participate in other of such functional networks at other times, the difference being the addition of some neurons that weren't in the first network. Sometimes many of the neurons in one functional network participate together in another but the second collection represents a very different thought, feeling, etc.
The interested can read up on it in "The Organization of Behavior" by Donald O. Hebb (for which those functional networks are named: Hebbian cellular assemblies). Just the first chapter. Hebb himself said everything necessary is there, and all the subsequent chapters expand on it. I'm taking potshots at Popular Mechanics not for being a poor source of informed neuroscience, but because they've had plenty of time to do their background research but obviously didn't. Hebb's book came out in 1949.
It's not that he's selling his vote, it's that as an individual citizen's electoral vote it's pretty much worthless. Now, if it were worth something, such as what lobbyists and industry can offer politicians, instead of being arrested he's be rewarded with, say, being allowed to deduct cost of getting his vote sold from his taxes as a business expense.
Real people can't compete with the artificial people known as corporations because the corporations can mount a tough defense. To do so they'll call on the watch dogs they've already purchased in the form of the existing politicians and laws.
That said "I was only kidding" is a terrible defense that nobody should be expected to believe. If one is to attempt this, it is best done in the form of verifiable protected speech: parody. That requires being able to site specific things one is parodying (web sites, TV ads, etc.).
I've been dealing with "clueless" law enforcement on online law breaking for 15 years. When it comes to breaking a law, ignorance is no excuse. Same with enforcing it. As much as you'll let them, law enforcement will drag its feet when it comes to things they're not comfortable with. Tough shit. Provide them with what they need as far as the laws broken, and the summary of what they need that they don't understand (what's an IP and how do I know it's at X location, etc.) and tell them to do the job. Let them know that police departments don't exist in a vacuum, and that states attorneys offices oversee both online law breaking and police activities. If they don't know something they need to know in order to do their job, it's their responsibility to learn it or obtain the information and have it verified. Their states attorney's office will get it verified it for them as well tell them to get off their ass and do their jobs. Note this is a summary of long experience phrased in terms easy to grasp. Handling the cops in such a way that they don't drag their feet even more requires approaching them in a more politic manner, although the substance of the approach outlines above should remain intact. An alternative to states attorneys is the FBI's and similar electronic crimes departments, who are glad to "assist" (read: educate) the "sadly underfunded and therefore unable to obtain the training necessary for the modern world" (there's a nice, politic phrase as an example). It's half politic and half pressure, though thoroughly proper, to ask the foot dragger for their "chain of command" (up to, say, state command level) so that the concern can be raised in proper form as far up their food chain as necessary to get the job done. Simply asking for this does wonders. Even if they are well meaning and entirely blameless for the cluelessness, they can and should pursue their own chain of command assistance, and will if given sufficient cause. Being brought to the attention if superiors for less than stellar performance is usually sufficient cause.
"They are well known to science fiction readers, otherwise not so much."
They are well known to those familiar with space history. We learned how to build these sails from Echo 1A and Echo 2, launched back in the 60s. Both were aluminized mylar balloons, used as passive microwave reflecting communications satellites. Both were "blown" off orbit by solar pressure. Analysis of the orbital data told us the why and the how much, so now we can do it accurately.
As for "a previous attempt blew up", the same thing happened to Echo 1. Echo 1A was a backup. Luckily the design was dirt cheap, making that possible. Sadly, then as now, the failures were in the expensive parts -- the boosters.
Consider: Fox News is "breaking" this. If that doesn't peg your BS meter, check your wiring.
A NASA analyst is not necessarily someone who works for NASA doing analyses, it can also be someone who analyzes things having to do NASA. James Oberg is a NASA analyst, probably one of the best, and doesn't work for them. Still, even if the talking head was a NASA employee, even as some kind of analyst, chances are they have nothing directly to do with the project.
DARPA released footage of this thing months ago. Here's a still of it taken from Aviation Week's photo stores. I found it on Defence Pakistan. http://sitelife.aviationweek.com/ver1.0/Content/images/store/11/8/ab8c59d3-5d59-43c2-8806-e75d8adfd82d.Large.jpg
The only reason Fox is running this and no one else is, is because everyone else knows there's very little to say about it at this point besides "golly gee whiz!" which is all Fox did. When they take it for a real (declassified) spin, we'll all hear about it in words with multiple syllables.
Nice looking bird. But I think the Boeing Bird Of Prey still gets the prize for looking like evil in flight.
Science Weekly's list of "The 100 Best Reads" includes not one single piece of popular culture fluff. Nor does it only go back 25 years, which is about how long people with no other useful purpose have been making money by turning information about entertainment (as opposed to entertainment itself) into a money making venture.
When EW's history goes back far enough and has enough quality material listed that they can claim to have their equivalent to Principia Mathematia, then they'll have something significant to say about their own field. And they will probably still have no background from which to judge science literature.
I read an entertaining and educational science book once a week whether I need to or not. Anyone wanting some suggestions along these lines, go read Alan Boyle's "Cosmic Log" on MSNBC and look up the archives of his Used Book Of The Month Club. Those who already read such things should keep an eye out for his next request for suggestions, and submit one. If it gets used, you get a prize -- usually another good science book he'd recently reviewed or otherwise acquired.
There are as many cells in the brain as there are stars in the galaxy (roughly, 100 billion). There are around 100,000 receptors on each neuron, most from different cells, making the brain so interconnected that nothing is ever more than the famed "6 degrees of freedom" from anything else, the average being 3. There are dozens of neurotransmitters involved in intercellular communication and even more neuromodulators within the cells to handle processing. There is also indirect electrical communication between neurons where their overlapping dendritic trees detect the electrical fields of nearby but non-connected cells, and processing depends on those too. All these processes are interdependent -- virtually none of them happen without affecting and being affected by, the others. The numbers, amounts and even fractional dimensions of the interactions' variables involved are just one of the fields that spawned experimental mathematics, a field that even mathematicians have trouble wrapping their heads around. That's enough for the purpose of my conclusion, though I could go on.
This is the subject matter of my profession. I have no problem dealing with petabytes of data because I know what to look for. Nobody collects that kind of data throughs it in a pile and stares at it. We collect that much because we know that's how much we need and know how to find our answers in it. Just because some places (there have been many of them for years) let you throw your raw petabytes into a pile doesn't mean science itself changes. Anyone who tries to data mine petabytes withouth being intimately involved in the collection might as well start at any random place on earth and start mining for gold.
So, Chris Anderson can peta-bite my ass. Science survived a far more revolutionary fundamental change than this and did quite well since. That invention was the zero. It will always be more important than any order-of-magnitude milestone.
Ask a scientist that uses that much data if there's anything significant about it, leave science writing to them and to the decent science writers (like Alan Boyle), and keep the editors busy at their desks editing. If the editors are not so busy that they can waste time making up this pseudo-FUD out of barely understood buzzphrases, it's time to trim the budget at Wired.
Between the rods and cones of the retina and the optic nerve are four layers/types of retinal processing cells. Unlike most neurons these operate entirely on inhibitory processing (rather than 85% excitatory and 15% inhibitory) and entirely on slow voltage gradient (rather than store up charge to a threshold and then fire a burst). How this accomplishes visual processing is a mystery to those of us to who understand real meatware processing. It is not likely a bunch of high powered supercomputer geeks even know this is how the visual system operates much less how to simulate it.
They way well use their XYZflops to develop a visual processing system of some sort, but it will NOT be a simulation of something that those who understand it far better than they understand it hardly at all.
If and when they get to actually trying to match the human visual system in operation (though by different processing) they'll have to figure out of to get their system to consistently guess with fairly good accuracy what it's going to be seeing 0.1 to 0.3 seconds in the future. Proof of that long suspected technique was just forthcoming in the last week or so.
There is nothing at all "intelligent" about this. It is all automated processing. Level of "intelligence" has nothing to to with visual proceses' efficacy. Anytime anyone inserts the "I" word into anything regarding computers, particulary when comparing with the human brain, they need to define their terms. Almost certainly those of us who have struggled for years with the insufficient and contradictory proposed definitions of "intelligence" in the human mind will be more than happy to fill them in on why their definitions have already been proven to be failures in humans, and why anything derived from those will not apply to system designed to provide human-looking output via entirely different means of processing.
The human body isn't built to sit in one single position for as long as we try to make it. One chair isn't a solution. I use four. I use a cheap steel folding chair a plain wooden kitchen table chair and a cheap roll around computer chair, and switch between them. Bought the thirst for $30, the other two were laying around. The fourth configuration is the one I can take the longest: a high stool with the keyboard and monitor set up on the counter. The half-standing position remains comfortable two to three times longer than the others (but the others are easier to switch betweem). If I had to stick with one, I'd stick with #4, because I can do it half-standing or completely standing, entirely eliminating the over-sitting discomfort. And yes, I've had some very good, ergonomic and otherwise hyper-comfy chairs to work in. They didn't do any better than my combination arrangement.
Also, get one of the old Jet Blue in-flight pamphlets or other source of "exercise while sitting" instructions. The problem is as much the body trying to stay in the chair as it is the chair itself. This may require setting an alarm for him to remind him to do it on a rough schedule until he gets used to it and sees the benefit.
Bullshit. They've had the skills for years. They've had the skills to do so stealthily for fewer years, but still years. They're just not so good as to not to be able to go undetected very often for very long. We're better at that.
And it's still a bullshit story. It's not even newsworthy, it happens so often (from both sides). It only gets dragged out and waved around when there's something else going on they want to detract attention from. China isn't responding in order to deny. They're participating in perpetuating a ruse for The US's benefit that will cost them nothing at home because it won't make the news there. That suggests the story being passed by may involve both, though I still lean towards this serving to deflect people from the impeachment articles against Bush. My money says that when that story dies down in the lesser media, the Chinese hacking stories will disappear from the larger media without any resolution at all or very little impression or memory in most peoples minds.
This has been happening since China first got IP space. Their defense department was the origin of their first (very amateurish) hacks, those against pro-Tibet web sites. Thousands have happened since and have been reported, and it's no more likely to end than any other intrusions.
If the US wanted it to stop they'd put up honey pots with credible but artificial data and then wait for it to get used. This is how you catch the intruder and protect the real data at the same time. And the US knows this. This is first semester psyops. Fact is, they're almost certainly doing it, making this announcement utterly meaningless. And it is, unless you stick around for second semester psyops. That's when they teach you how to craft a story that makes such a big splash that something more important but entirely unrelated gets missed.
The present administration rarely hides its efforts along these lines, or Jon Stewart wouldn't have nearly as much material to work with. It's when something is really threatening to them that they work in the grey. Just as a possible for instance, in how many sources can you find this story, and in how many can you find the story of Kucinich's reading of articles of impeachment? And which is the more important story?
When something gets way too much coverage than it deserves, look around and see what's not getting enough. It'll be there because they can't make it go away. All they can do is tie a bell around the media's neck and wait for the sheeple to follow it.
If they need to program to do their work, they need to learn to program. If they don't, well then, they don't.
If they need to know the conceptual basis, they can get that from math (which physics students get plenty of) or in a more explicit form, from a course in logic. These prepare one for programming by teaching those concepts and so already serve the purposes of background material. If the students needs training in the thinking process, these should do, or else they're not doing their jobs.
Teaching them to program without an explicit need for it is just putting up hoops for them to jump through. I hate hoops. I always hated them as a student, as most I'm sure most students also do, and I hate them as an educator as a waste of time better spent in more profitable work.
Another source of training in the orderly thinking required comes from teaching/learning methodology. What math doesn't cover, language does, and this is where it happens. Experiment design is programming of laboratory methods, including choice of the necessary math involved. If they graduate without being able to do this, they're much farther behind the curve than if they simply can't write a computer program. And if they can, then they know the thinking process.
People used to complain that handheld calculators would cause a loss of mathematical ability because people wouldn't bother to learn what button pressing could accomplish. Asimov rightly replied that the math would still be required to know what buttons to push. I reply that the complainers, Asimov, myself and virtually all reading this can't calculate things like the 7th root of a 9 digit number with arbitrary decimal place without very easily a calculator, yet virtually no one can write a program on a calculator to do these things which are already built in. And still no one decries the lack of programming education for handheld calculators.
"I wonder what definition of "obscene" the FCC would like to use."
Probably the one they already use to charge violators such as Howard Stern, as well as the violators' station of origin, up to US$250K per incident. I'm not sure where it is in their regs (which I do know are online) but I recall quite clearly the sign in the studio booth at WUVT that reminded me constantly of the sword hanging over me.
What's always bothered me about the regs is the relaxation of the rules after 10 PM. When I was broadcasting, I had simultaneous netcast. After 10 PM where the station is (Blacksburg VA, eastern time) is only after 7 PM on the Left Coast (ie. pacific time). After 10 PM where? Was I simultaneously legal in Virginia but breaking the law in California?
Apply that now to on-demand, statically stored material which may or may not be infringing depending on the material and time of request. It's always before 10 PM someplace, so the owner may be liable according to the location of the requester. You can bet this is the way things would fall, because the alternative is to say 'it's AFTER 10 PM someplace', making the regs moot and removing a potential source of enforcement as well as income.
Oh yeah, and the context of the offending material matters. You can play hip hop and rap on air after 10 PM local and get away with broadcasting 2 "motherfuckers" and 5 "niggers" per minute, but try to say one of either yourself and see what it costs you. In the case of the latter, that may include body parts depending on your own color. The context of your reception can also matter, hence a "researcher" is supposed to be able to access an "obscene" web site for academic purposes without fear of reprisal. Yeah, right.
Personally I prefer Larry Flint's editorialized definition of "obscene" which puts murder and such well before sex in terms of badness. If that were used, you'd never be able to access most commercial news outlets, or much common TV or theatrical material. So sad that killing is not just accepted but expected, and fucking is outlawed.
OOPS, I think I just made it impossible for you to access this in the archives should the regulation of the proposed bandwidth go through. We'll see.
"The sad thing about the articles is that the beauty of the mathematics used to create and train the models is totally ignored."
The sadder thing is that the discovery of response patterns of amputated limbs being mapped to other parts of the body is totally ignored.
A man had his arm removed. A psychiatrist attending happened to note that the man claimed to "feel" things in his missing hand when other parts of his body were touched. After careful mapping, three different response maps were found -- one each on his arm, chest and back. Each was so sensitive that individual fingers could be stimulated and he could correctly tell which.
This major discovery in neural plasticity makes it totally unnecessary to try to decode signals from electrode either drilled through the skull, or else placed on the surface and reading signals though the scalp, skull and dura mater, which reduces the signal by 3 orders of magnitude. Either way, these signals require some massive processing because a significant command/response signal (ie. an electrical response representing a single Hebbian cellular assembly that can be clearly decoded to an intent as stated in the article) comes from 0.3% to 3% of the neurons in the region being detected, the vast majority of the signal needing rejection as false positive or noise. Using the mapped response regions allows for signal analysis based on EMG patterns that are not expected at all in the area under the electrodes, making detection and analysis trivial.
TFA and most such research is not about giving amputees mobility. It is about decoding and using neural signals. If it were about the former, easier ways would have been used and the job already accomplished. It is about the latter because such things make more news, get more recognition, and therefore result in more grant application success.
The resulting technology will only be applied to prosthetics as a secondary result. Its primary use will be in such as hands-off controls for fighter pilots (see Clint Eastwood's "Firefox" for your obligatory Slashdot sci-fi/movie reference), tank crews and mobile missile launchers. Maybe this is the saddest part of all, but ignoring a more certain path to success as far as prosthetics is a sad piece.
Also sad, with a touch of irony, is the fact that the weaponry applications will be untenable because of the heuristic nature of neural processing -- getting it close but error prone will be fast, getting it right will be no faster or require less effort than hand operated controls. The slow speed and so the ability to use real-time perceptual feedback with prosthetics will make that far more successful. It remains to be seen whether after the war applications fail the research continues (ie. there is adequate funding offered) with respect to prosthetics. If someone like the US Veterans Administration picks it up when DARPA drops it, it might. I'm not hopeful.
The portion of the above that's assertion or opinion is based on the same professional experience as the portion that's not. That experience includes development of some of the "beautiful" maths decried as being ignored. Having been prosthetic-wrist deep in the research and from both directions, I find that a minor point to consider as "sad".
What sense is there in trying to encapsulate "concepts" particularly when phrased in language? Both of these are fluid and evolving. Attempting to archive a particular static state is at best a waste. Ontologists above all should know this.
And maybe that's the point. For centuries ontology has existed primarly to serve itself and secondarily to trade favors with other branches of philosophy. The proposed project has the primary result of providing gainful employment outside the halls of academic philosophy for the first time. It has the secondary result of allowing ontologists to get their revenge for centuries of being ignored by getting us to pay them for something that had we only listened to them we'd know to be a monstrous leg-pull.
Let them have their fun and their Venn diagrams. Cognitive science already knows better, and is better suited to conceptual mapping with its cognitive mapping in conceptual space.
... it's "theater".
It may be the visible portion of a security system, it may be a visible representation of a similar system, it may be a visible deflection from a different system, or it may be a complete fabrication meant to fool you into thinking there's a system in place.
Only in the first case does the theater and the actuality coincide. In the second, it is theater designed to allow the system to "hide in plain sight". The third is the "card game", with the false front often being designed as a "straw man" that can fall without the actual system failing. The article implies the last of these in its use of the term, but all are "theater" in that public perception matters.
In any case, a real security system operates unseen, because its own security system is the visible portion, whether real, constructed or imagined.
BTW, one can easily and with equal validity substitute "authority" for "security".
... not the opinions.
No, you don't get Nobels for publishing Japanese cold fusion work in Italian economics journals. You don't get them from publishing any cold fusion work in any peer reviewed physics journal because they don't get published as such, for much the same reasons that make people claim absence of evidence is evidence of absence even though the evidence was only absent in some of the replications. You do, however, publish articles about Japanese cold fusion work in an Italian economics journal when a Japanese company is building cold fusion equipment in an Italian factory purchased from Fiat, said company having hired Pons and Fleischmann as design consultants.
Neutron flux is a sign of some fusion reactions, but not all. 2 * (1p + 1n) --> (2p + 2n): two deuterium go to one helium. The energy released is from the conversion of mass of two deuterium (2 * 2.014 = 4.028) into one helium (4.002). The difference (.026) is is given off as energy measured in ergs, calculated from the amount of mass "lost" in grams times the speed of light in a vacuum in centimeters per second times itself. The source of the energy is the release of binding energy in the nuclei; the binding energy required grows at a lesser rate than the number of nucleons. This is the mass difference stated in another way. The energy is this particular reaction comes.
And if cold fusion were as much a hoax as those educated by hearsay rather than science would have you believe, then you wouldn't have symposia on the subject at scientific conferences hosted by the selfsame journals that refuse the publish such articles unless they're written so speculatively as to seem almost fiction, and the phenonemon examined is called something else.
Regardless of the barriers caused by pathological disbelief masquerading as skepticism, or worse, education at the hands of the pathological disbelievers, over 3,000 articles peer reviewed articles on cold fusion have been published. Enough evidence has been accumulated to convince both the US Many and the US Dept. of Energy that the phenonenon is real, though inadequately understood, and deserved more investigation and funding.
Those who are so certain that cold fusion is bogus would probably be glad to know that once the bogus cold fusion reactors built at the bogus Fiat plant are primed they crank out 270 kiloboguswatts over 90 bogusdays with no additional input of energy.
Answer for yourself: if you had something important, but the mention of it made those who were the supposed experts in the field run screaming, just how would you go about bringing the knowledge out into the open without getting quashed? Through many different kinds of channels, a tiny bit at a time, which would by necessity mean some of the announcements would be of results and discoveries from some considerable time prior. The SETI people assert this is how alien contact and/or news of such would proceed and nobody blinks at that. Claim that this same process of being used on news of replicable tabletop physics and their eyes get stuck wide shut.
To first address the comments regarding number of digits in working memory: the "magic number" is 7 plus or minus 2, the variance being context dependent. To hold more items in memory, which people obviously do, they employ "chunking", or grouping them together and remembering the chunks in the necessary sequence. The 7 digit phone number was based on the original 7 digit idea, the grouping of area code XXX, prefix YYY, and last 4 ZZZZ was based on chunking. Since this chunking is a major action of attention and memory, simply adding a single digit to a single chunk is a weird way to claim improvement.
Yet once again an article on cognition enhancement fails to note its origins and long standing history. The first nootropic, hydergine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydergine , was developed by Albert Hoffmann of Sandoz. While he is best known for LSD, his "problem child", he considered hydergine to be his most important discovery. He credited his longentivity (he died recently at age 102) to using hydergine regularly.
"What we need are a few good old fashioned hangings." -- FTC Commissioner Orson Swindel; at the 2003 FTC Spam Conference.
"REMAIN CALM" -- Afterburner; professional sysadmin and member of Subgenius Police, Usenet Tactical Units, Mobile (SPUTUM) who provided documented evidence used to sink Spamford and Picklejar's boat last time they got uppity. (Winner of the Golden Mallet award, as was Bill Mattocks).
"There Is No Cabal, and we will KICK ASS." -- Doug Mackall (dec. 1999); Cabal organizer and another Golden Mallet recipient. Through his organizing efforts, about a dozen people took on such as Netcom and Worldcom/UUNet and made them stop spam coming from their customers.
It may take a village to raise a child, but it doesn't take near that many to raze a spammer. Who would you like to LART today?
Dear Popular Mechanics,
Welcome to 1995. That's when the Office of Commercial Space Transportation was placed with NASA. It was formed in 1984, under the Department of Transportation, but you specified NASA's role so we'll go with that. NASA has been reversing its policy of relying solely on BigAero ever since OCST came under their umbrella. Sadly, it was too late and too inbred with the industry to take advantage of the previous efforts to produce more efficient launch systems such as Truax's designs, said efforts being as numerous if not as far developed as the present crop of aerospace start-ups. NASA never completely ignored those efforts -- they must have paid some attention in order to reject them. Rejecting less is the only thing that's changed, and that's been changing in this direction for years. Just because Griffin et al. has talked about it recently doesn't mean it's a recent development. Should you ever want to pretend you're actually doing journalism, consider doing the sort of research journalism requires, which would have produced much the same details I've related. Of course being way behind the time curve doesn't make for headlines and so doesn't sell magazines. Do yourselves and us a favor, and stick to cars, power tools and inventions that never get produced, and leave the things you're not going to bother to understand alone.
The variance in quality of search results is noted elsewhere. I'm more interested in the fallacy of the claim of "understanding". That, as well as its synonym "comprehension" require metacognition, that is, knowing that you know. It is the basis of self-awareness. this program doesn't even pretend to give evidence of this, it simply return search results. Pretending to be self-aware was accomplised by CYC when it claimed to graps the fact that it was a computer program. For anyone interested in seeing the arguments about understanding and self-awareness, see Searle's "Chinese Room" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room . As far as I can see, only the hype from the company, including the restatements of same in the referenced articles, make any claims as to "understanding". If there were any evidence of that beyond the hype, I have no doubt those in the field of consciousness studies would tear it apart, if they even bothered to waste their attention on it. If in being bashed it then produced a statement equivalent to "I can feel it, Dave" without being programmed to respond in that way, then I'll give it a look see. Until then it's simply a semantic parser (something already done) attached to a search engine.
Go ahead and develop a bunch of "space lawyers". Just keep them back here on the ground. Try to send them up with us and we'll make them all airlock integrity inpectors. We'd use them for reaction mass but the large proportion of hot air reduces their density.
Maybe we can use them as Reaver bait, or chest-burster incubators. Perhaps they'll be able to make friends.