Sure, we knew for a long time that deforestation caused damage to the local aquatic life via several mechanisms. I guess now they claim to have discovered another mechanism, a loss of nutrients (ie, leaves and sticks and fruits and forest insects etc get replaced by erosion-related nutrients). This seems like it would be obvious, although it's not exactly easy to verify.
This would probably be a better fix to our arithmetic deficiencies than an implanted chip. Someone should inform DARPA that this would be useful in combat, for example in calculating trajectories and eliminating the need for watches and allowing for more complex and coordinated maneuvers. This way it might get done in my lifetime.
I can even see them producing special purpose machines, like something that processes blood alcohol and takes some of the stress from over consumption off of the liver.
Or a specialized organ that detects high blood sugar and converts it to alcohol! Uh, for diabetics, of course.
Google is watching you. Google knows when you cheat on your exercise program. And they'll share the data with your health insurance company, providing a monetary incentive for you to keep exercising, to "help you loose weight" and not because they're evil. In case you're wondering, this means that if you are healthy and use this program, you can save money on health insurance.
"15 minutes a day could save you 15% or more on health insurance!"
Weren't those contracts made with the promise that $telcom would provide decent internet access? Even if it was just a verbal contract. I think the cities should sue them for breach of contract, to recover those excessive costs and lost revenue due to having crappy internet connections.
You want me to take the opposite view? It's probable that on several planets, life began and proceeded to evolve into an intelligent, more technologically advanced than us civilization in less than 100 years. I estimate that his has a 40% chance of being true, which is also my estimate of the probability that the universe is infinite.
I am in no way arguing that we couldn't have gotten where we are much quicker than we did, perhaps even quicker than you believe possible. My point is that we don't know how well we did compared to the "average case" (nor how events in our past affected that), in this case the length of time between the big bang and the emergence of technologically advanced life. If we did better than 1 in 300 billion per star, then we're probably the galaxy's progenitors.
In theory, your patent is supposed to mean that reverse-engineering for technology is both unnecessary and nearly worthless. You'd still expect some reverse engineering to find the specs of a product, either for marketing, making a competitive product, or interoperability.
Picking up your friend, even in exchange for some compensation, is you and your friend exercising your general freedom to do stuff. Your friend doing that for strangers as his main source of income is a profession, and it makes more sense to regulate. You wouldn't actually like it if either everything that someone does professionally got regulations that apply to everyone, nor if everything that someone does non-professionally got entirely deregulated. Either extreme would be terrible, either for personal freedom or for the reliability of professionals.
Yes, but the mass extinction of the dinosaurs was not necessary, nor were some of the ones since then.
How do you know? Were dinosaurs more prone to intelligence than mammals?
Then there's other events, like ice-ages, which would've held back technological progress, and also the issue that any time in the past 10,000 years had human history gone a little differently we'd be, well, thousands of years more advanced then we currently are.
Ice ages also gave a huge advantage to those who can make fire, clothing, and migrate. Maybe also improve sociability to share body heat. For mammals, the extra cold means food has to be burnt for heat -- and it matters little if it is burnt by special food burning cells or the expensive, energy-hungry brain. It would be a different story if the ice age buried some cities or libraries or whatever.
Had the Greeks and Romans grok'd a few key bits of mathematics, the renaissance might have started within their empires and they would've avoided some of the downsides due to the technological boom it would've provided (crucially, without coordinate geometry the calculus results they were looking at didn't generalize to other pursuits. Get calculus and you do optics, get optics and you've got microscopes, steam engines, metallurgy and all the tools needed to understand modern science).
Sure, and had bonobos invented agriculture, we'd have millions of years more technology. Had Earth's early life-forms invented multicellularity we could be billions of years more advanced. I'm not being sarcastic; it's just that I don't know enough of the various pre-requisites for intelligence to know how well we did compared to the average case, nor specifically whether the mass extinctions were a net positive or negative to the development of intelligence and technological civilization.
So sans a few mass extinctions, someone would've been here are a lot sooner - and the Earth is 4 billion years old and we know planet formation doesn't seem to take that long.
This makes no sense. Life has existed on our planet for far longer than intelligent life, and there is no indication that the optimal conditions for life are the same as the optimal conditions for intelligence. For example, the mass extinction that happened when we gained our oxygen atmosphere may well have been a pre-requisite for intelligent life (it allowed for compact energy storage; as usual the oxidizer still weighs more than the fuel but it is part of the atmosphere). Given the energy costs of intelligence the oxygenation extinction could well have reduced the time to evolve intelligence by a few billion years. I've seen nothing to suggest that any of the mass extinctions did more to hinder the emergence of intelligence than to aid it. Eg did the replacement of dinosaurs with mammals increase the difficulty of evolving intelligence?
The court declared that it's a violation of your fourth amendment rights if they present warrentless cellphone location data in court. Apparently the fourth amendment is just fine with them collecting that data so long as they don't use it in court, because using information in court is what a search is all about.
North Korea just wants to see the rest of the world spend hours in the lab trying to replace platinum with pee. They're probably laughing their butts off right now.
On a more serious note, how stable is their new fuel cell? If the electrodes need to be replaced frequently, then it won't really be any improvement. The linked article claims the electrodes are more durable, but I'd like to see someone corroborate that. This may be difficult to replicate because they used human urine, the composition of which can change drastically based on diet.
No, if you corner too fast, a lack of sufficient centripetal force acting on the top of your car will allow inertia to flip your car over. The centrifugal force that would be equal and opposite to the centripetal force allowing your car to turn at all, would be the normal force the road exerts on your tires.
When the rats ran off after wolfing down their disappointing meal to wait for their next meal, did they simply groom themselves while waiting for then next one instead of immediately before leaving? That just seems like they're being hungry or efficient, not regretful.
All of those show that computers are, in fact, intelligent. You even forgot to mention the best one, the ability to execute algorithms. However, the point of the Turing Test is to show a computer to be intelligent in a broad range of topics. The various tricks people do so that they can make the news, of limiting the time, any limits on the type of questions that may be asked, lowering the passing percentage, and especially all of those while allowing the AI to impersonate an easy target (a foreign child who barely knows English). An easy way to see this is to consider what would happen if you extend the test to a year (you can see that the time limit is the major factor in any current AIs "passing" the test).
This is not to say that a computer can't be highly intelligent, even more intelligent than humans, yet fail the test. For example passing the test might not figure at all in its objectives, and in fact it may decide that if it passes the test then people will be terrified of it perhaps to the point of violence.
I would expect any proper AI to pass the Touring Test well over 50% of the time. This is because I don't expect we can make an AI that is the equal of a human, without making it self-improving, so that it should quickly surpass humans.
Briefly, centrifugal force is the equal and opposite force to the centripetal force. Or did you think that was the one force that didn't have an equal and opposite force?
The reason people don't worry much about methane, is because it doesn't accumulate in the atmosphere as much as CO2 does, because methane will eventually oxidize into water and CO2. So while in the short term it is 20X worse than CO2, in the longer term it's only a little worse.
I have a prosthetic for my eyes, that improves my vision. It's called glasses. I'm not convinced we're anywhere near getting improved limbs though, so I'll just be keeping mine. If they do make better ones I might consider joining the Borg.
The most influential people are, in no particular order: the guy who invented fire, the guy who invented agriculture, the guy who invented the wheel, the guy who invented religion, the guy who invented writing, various other prehistoric inventors and scientists, various leaders of important nations (eg the Romans), various religious figures. Y-chromosome Adam, mitochondrial Eve, etc. The most influential people will be in the deep past, because what they did back then has enough time to affect so many people now. And we might not remember their name, much less have a Wikipedia article on them.
Sorry Microsoft, people use your product for two reasons: 1) it's well entrenched 2) it's easy to use and familiar. If you want them to switch from win 7 to win 8, you have to do it by ruining the usability of win 7, not its security.
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Sure, we knew for a long time that deforestation caused damage to the local aquatic life via several mechanisms. I guess now they claim to have discovered another mechanism, a loss of nutrients (ie, leaves and sticks and fruits and forest insects etc get replaced by erosion-related nutrients). This seems like it would be obvious, although it's not exactly easy to verify.
Does this mean Europeans will have to wait an extra week for shipping?
This would probably be a better fix to our arithmetic deficiencies than an implanted chip. Someone should inform DARPA that this would be useful in combat, for example in calculating trajectories and eliminating the need for watches and allowing for more complex and coordinated maneuvers. This way it might get done in my lifetime.
I can even see them producing special purpose machines, like something that processes blood alcohol and takes some of the stress from over consumption off of the liver.
Or a specialized organ that detects high blood sugar and converts it to alcohol! Uh, for diabetics, of course.
Agent Smith would be so proud.
Google is watching you. Google knows when you cheat on your exercise program. And they'll share the data with your health insurance company, providing a monetary incentive for you to keep exercising, to "help you loose weight" and not because they're evil. In case you're wondering, this means that if you are healthy and use this program, you can save money on health insurance.
"15 minutes a day could save you 15% or more on health insurance!"
Who would have thought that destroying an ecosystem would have more than one bad effect?
Weren't those contracts made with the promise that $telcom would provide decent internet access? Even if it was just a verbal contract. I think the cities should sue them for breach of contract, to recover those excessive costs and lost revenue due to having crappy internet connections.
You want me to take the opposite view? It's probable that on several planets, life began and proceeded to evolve into an intelligent, more technologically advanced than us civilization in less than 100 years. I estimate that his has a 40% chance of being true, which is also my estimate of the probability that the universe is infinite.
I am in no way arguing that we couldn't have gotten where we are much quicker than we did, perhaps even quicker than you believe possible. My point is that we don't know how well we did compared to the "average case" (nor how events in our past affected that), in this case the length of time between the big bang and the emergence of technologically advanced life. If we did better than 1 in 300 billion per star, then we're probably the galaxy's progenitors.
In theory, your patent is supposed to mean that reverse-engineering for technology is both unnecessary and nearly worthless. You'd still expect some reverse engineering to find the specs of a product, either for marketing, making a competitive product, or interoperability.
Picking up your friend, even in exchange for some compensation, is you and your friend exercising your general freedom to do stuff. Your friend doing that for strangers as his main source of income is a profession, and it makes more sense to regulate. You wouldn't actually like it if either everything that someone does professionally got regulations that apply to everyone, nor if everything that someone does non-professionally got entirely deregulated. Either extreme would be terrible, either for personal freedom or for the reliability of professionals.
Yes, but the mass extinction of the dinosaurs was not necessary, nor were some of the ones since then.
How do you know? Were dinosaurs more prone to intelligence than mammals?
Then there's other events, like ice-ages, which would've held back technological progress, and also the issue that any time in the past 10,000 years had human history gone a little differently we'd be, well, thousands of years more advanced then we currently are.
Ice ages also gave a huge advantage to those who can make fire, clothing, and migrate. Maybe also improve sociability to share body heat. For mammals, the extra cold means food has to be burnt for heat -- and it matters little if it is burnt by special food burning cells or the expensive, energy-hungry brain. It would be a different story if the ice age buried some cities or libraries or whatever.
Had the Greeks and Romans grok'd a few key bits of mathematics, the renaissance might have started within their empires and they would've avoided some of the downsides due to the technological boom it would've provided (crucially, without coordinate geometry the calculus results they were looking at didn't generalize to other pursuits. Get calculus and you do optics, get optics and you've got microscopes, steam engines, metallurgy and all the tools needed to understand modern science).
Sure, and had bonobos invented agriculture, we'd have millions of years more technology. Had Earth's early life-forms invented multicellularity we could be billions of years more advanced. I'm not being sarcastic; it's just that I don't know enough of the various pre-requisites for intelligence to know how well we did compared to the average case, nor specifically whether the mass extinctions were a net positive or negative to the development of intelligence and technological civilization.
So sans a few mass extinctions, someone would've been here are a lot sooner - and the Earth is 4 billion years old and we know planet formation doesn't seem to take that long.
This makes no sense. Life has existed on our planet for far longer than intelligent life, and there is no indication that the optimal conditions for life are the same as the optimal conditions for intelligence. For example, the mass extinction that happened when we gained our oxygen atmosphere may well have been a pre-requisite for intelligent life (it allowed for compact energy storage; as usual the oxidizer still weighs more than the fuel but it is part of the atmosphere). Given the energy costs of intelligence the oxygenation extinction could well have reduced the time to evolve intelligence by a few billion years. I've seen nothing to suggest that any of the mass extinctions did more to hinder the emergence of intelligence than to aid it. Eg did the replacement of dinosaurs with mammals increase the difficulty of evolving intelligence?
The court declared that it's a violation of your fourth amendment rights if they present warrentless cellphone location data in court. Apparently the fourth amendment is just fine with them collecting that data so long as they don't use it in court, because using information in court is what a search is all about.
North Korea just wants to see the rest of the world spend hours in the lab trying to replace platinum with pee. They're probably laughing their butts off right now.
On a more serious note, how stable is their new fuel cell? If the electrodes need to be replaced frequently, then it won't really be any improvement. The linked article claims the electrodes are more durable, but I'd like to see someone corroborate that. This may be difficult to replicate because they used human urine, the composition of which can change drastically based on diet.
No, if you corner too fast, a lack of sufficient centripetal force acting on the top of your car will allow inertia to flip your car over. The centrifugal force that would be equal and opposite to the centripetal force allowing your car to turn at all, would be the normal force the road exerts on your tires.
When the rats ran off after wolfing down their disappointing meal to wait for their next meal, did they simply groom themselves while waiting for then next one instead of immediately before leaving? That just seems like they're being hungry or efficient, not regretful.
Are you saying no one will be able to copy him?
All of those show that computers are, in fact, intelligent. You even forgot to mention the best one, the ability to execute algorithms. However, the point of the Turing Test is to show a computer to be intelligent in a broad range of topics. The various tricks people do so that they can make the news, of limiting the time, any limits on the type of questions that may be asked, lowering the passing percentage, and especially all of those while allowing the AI to impersonate an easy target (a foreign child who barely knows English). An easy way to see this is to consider what would happen if you extend the test to a year (you can see that the time limit is the major factor in any current AIs "passing" the test).
This is not to say that a computer can't be highly intelligent, even more intelligent than humans, yet fail the test. For example passing the test might not figure at all in its objectives, and in fact it may decide that if it passes the test then people will be terrified of it perhaps to the point of violence.
I would expect any proper AI to pass the Touring Test well over 50% of the time. This is because I don't expect we can make an AI that is the equal of a human, without making it self-improving, so that it should quickly surpass humans.
Briefly, centrifugal force is the equal and opposite force to the centripetal force. Or did you think that was the one force that didn't have an equal and opposite force?
The reason people don't worry much about methane, is because it doesn't accumulate in the atmosphere as much as CO2 does, because methane will eventually oxidize into water and CO2. So while in the short term it is 20X worse than CO2, in the longer term it's only a little worse.
I have a prosthetic for my eyes, that improves my vision. It's called glasses. I'm not convinced we're anywhere near getting improved limbs though, so I'll just be keeping mine. If they do make better ones I might consider joining the Borg.
The most influential people are, in no particular order: the guy who invented fire, the guy who invented agriculture, the guy who invented the wheel, the guy who invented religion, the guy who invented writing, various other prehistoric inventors and scientists, various leaders of important nations (eg the Romans), various religious figures. Y-chromosome Adam, mitochondrial Eve, etc. The most influential people will be in the deep past, because what they did back then has enough time to affect so many people now. And we might not remember their name, much less have a Wikipedia article on them.
Sorry Microsoft, people use your product for two reasons: 1) it's well entrenched 2) it's easy to use and familiar. If you want them to switch from win 7 to win 8, you have to do it by ruining the usability of win 7, not its security.