Factor in Moore's Law and the speed of bureaucracy. This will take a year or two to become a law. By then, the idea of at least logging all requested URLs and the headers of every email may not be unreasonable. Also remember the general belief that intelligence agencies have computing power and new tricks well in excess of what we common slobs may do (although that does seem a bit strange, given the pace of Silicon Valley innovation). Also consider the fact that Echelon apparently works and is useful enough for the UKUSA folks to keep it running.
It makes me wonder if one could push this through in the US. My thought has always been that one couldn't get sufficiently Big Brother here, mainly because the populace has guns, unlike most of Europe. Were I the government, I'd see an armed populace as something much more likely to start an active and effective revolt, and therefore be more scared of trying to abuse it. On the other hand, the same portion of the populace which owns those guns is the one that thinks the Internet is full of evil hacker pedophile terrorists.
I'm also wondering if there's anything beyond encryption that will help. On the one hand, there's the possibility of private networking, but this couldn't go over existing wires. Given that most of us can't afford to lay fiber or cable, that means wireless, which in turn means that anyone who cares about snooping can just grab packets from the air.
Perhaps there'll be a market for personal browsers... people who'll sit at the computer for you and read the subversive stuff that you want to read but can't because of a reputation.
1) Impartiality != inability to judge merit. Judges are in theory impartial, but their very job is to discriminate true from false, legal from illegal.
2).health != censorship. Still plenty of room for.med. Or.medicine. Or www.realtruemedicalfactsIswear.org. If the WHO doesn't do a good job with their resource, nobody will use it, at which point they'll have economic incentive to give it back and let someone else have a go.
3) People *are* too dumb to decide for themselves when specific expertise outside of their domain of knowledge is required. There are many things which each of us is too dumb to handle. I should not be allowed to make design decisions for particle accelerators. A nuclear physicist should not be allowed to set himself up as an authority in treating disease. If there are regulations on who can bill themselves as an MD and hand out medical advice in meatspace, why should the same rules not apply in cyberspace? The information doesn't gain extra validity from being on the Web.
4) The WHO is probably as qualified as any organization to set up a global database of summarized and easily-digestible medical knowledge. They're one of the biggest names in international medicine. I certainly wouldn't want something like this limited to just the AMA.
5) If not them, then who else? What would you use.health for?.xxx? Somebody's got to run it. Why not have people actually exercise a bit of discretion over what goes in what TLD, so that.orgs really are non-profit and.coms are only companies and.nets are only ISPs and so on? (And I personally still don't see.xxx as censorship; I see it as an excellent way for people who want porn to get porn and people who hate porn to avoid porn.)
Assuming that the WHO takes the time to be impartial about stuff at the edges of knowledge (as in "we have no clue why this works, and we haven't entirely proven that it *does* work, but we're pretty sure it's not going to hurt you"), this would be a Very Good Thing. There is an ungodly large amount of health misinformation on the net, and most of the sites that have true scientific data force you to pay or be affiliated with an institution to access it.
Being able to simply look at a domain name and know "this is solid peer-reviewed stuff" would be great, and it'd be even better to be able to tell patients "If it comes from.health, it's probably right; with other stuff, be careful." It'll probably be turned down, following the same precedent as.xxx, but I wish it wouldn't be.
I'm not whining, but one's advisor *is* the standard first resource, and he wasn't mentioned in your original question. Unfortunately, sounds like you're taking all the necessary steps.
If you're doing a thesis, you should have an advisor. This sort of thing is exactly what advisors are for --- you find who has the stuff you need and your advisor kicks ass until you get it. This is one of your basic perqs in a mentoring relationship. I ran into a not-quite-as-bad situation when doing my thesis in CS, and my advisor hassled department and campus admins to get the data I needed into our machines.
Failing that, search the web for places that have the necessary machine type and beg. Try the comp.* newsgroups. Ask the librarians --- their job is to get you your data. Move your damn ass instead of whining to Slashdot.
You do have a point that intelligence has subcomponents, and that the drive to survive is one of those. OTOH, given that it's impossible to for anything to exist without somehow being designed to persist, I'm not sure that it's exactly a scientific discovery. (Lifeforms adapt to their environments! The sky is blue! Slashdot has trolls! Film at 11!)
I'm impressed by the design of life in general. A cell is a pretty complex little machine. Whether or not this lends the watchmaker argument credence, I'm not sure. It's more that this mold is somehow being touted as special that bugs me. That, and the fact that when I see animal or software intelligence written about in the popular press, there are always implications of some kind of sentience or human-level ability. Basically, I'm reacting to what I perceive as fluffy hype.
AFAIK (can't find a specific citation right now), yes, they have pondered it. It is a source of great debate among those who mess with exobiology (which IMHO can't be said to really exist yet as a field).
The trick here is the difference between a probe going to Mars and a panel going to Mir. A Mars probe may be hermetically sealed inside a capsule and sterilized with ungodly amounts of heat. That capsule may then be launched and the probe deployed. On its descent to the surface, the probe gets to undergo re-entry, which forms (at least in an Earth atmosphere --- I don't know if this is true of Mars as well, but it probably is) a superheated plasma around the craft. (There are some things not even bacteria can survive, and ionized particle bombardment is one.) I believe that probes were also designed to be able to sterilize their internal sample containers and their gathering equipment.
Now compare this to a bit of Mir. It's loaded in a shuttle bay, and spends a few days in there with sweaty astronauts. They handle it. It is never sterilized or sealed away. Humans have ungodly amounts of organisms on us. Contamination is inevitable.
You want a sterile station? Sterilize and seal each piece, sterilize and seal the transport bay, and do not let humans anywhere near it, not even in space suits (the outside of the suit gets contaminated by shuttle air). Touch it only with sterilized and isolated robot arms. In short, take all the same precautions that a Class 4 virology lab does, and perhaps more.
Of course, how you're going to get all the necessary equipment onto an orbiter is your engineering problem, not mine.:-)
But that's really all it is --- a few closed-loop systems. It is my personal belief (and a requirement before I grant another organism the status of "fellow intelligent life-form") that you at least need to have some kind of generalized cognitive process going on. (See further downthread for a rough definition of what I'm looking for.)
Self-reconfiguration as a response to stimuli can't be intelligence, because if it is, every single living thing on the planet displays rudimentary intelligence. (I make the assumption that most things are not intelligent. If you don't like that assumption, you are free not to use it, but I'll think you're being silly.)
Hofstader is quite correct. You are also probably correct that intelligence exists because it improves survival. However, this does not imply that anything which survives and reproduces more is more intelligent; it is merely well-adapted. Consider the amoeba. It constantly reflows to engulf food and reproduce. Will we now say that ameobas also are intelligent, since you could do the exact same experiment with an amoeba (and get the same results, AFAIK) if you could build a small-enough maze?
Yes, I do tend to hold to the idea that there is some magic thing called "self-awareness" which "true intelligence" requires. Don't ask me what it is --- I don't know yet. Humans have it. Humans can probably create it in computational systems. However (and IMHO), if it can't produce "cogito ergo sum", it ain't intelligence.
So this thing has demonstrated intelligence because it reshaped its body to move most of its bulk as close to the nutrient source as possible? I'm not mad at the BBC or Slashdot, but I can't believe the scientists who call this intelligence. You could do the same thing with a single neuron and the appropriate mix of growth factors. (At least, given that both axon growth cones and slime mold food-seeking work on a sense-molecule-grow-tubules model, it seems pretty likely to me that you could achieve the same with a single cell.) This doesn't mean that those cells are intelligent.
I'll grant the idea that you could somehow do computation using a mobile mold as your switching unit. I fail to see why anyone would bother (especially given that slime molds are icky:-) but you could do it. That still doesn't mean it's intelligent. (I'm not even sure one could say that the mold itself is really *computing*, but I suppose the network of cells and integrated signal cascasdes does encode some function.)
Yes, I'm one of those biased morons who thinks that you've got to demonstrate something like a sense of self or use of language to qualify for intelligence. Then again, given the human race, perhaps the bar's been lowered.:-)
"Know my stuff"? Maybe. I know bio and I'm trying to become a decent engineer. I work on MEMS, but I'm not good at it; I'm theoretically as good at manual lithography as anyone in the lab, and I get crap for fabrication yields.
Anyway, you're absolutely right, a bacterium or virus is a nanite. OTOH (and IMHO), it's not what people are thinking of when they think of nanites --- they're thinking of things that are basically a robot made really small.
Actually, I need to revise my prior statement again. If we can actually make them, there may indeed be a role for mostly-nonbiological nanites. Since most biological stuff is really working on a statistical basis, it always gets a few false positives and negatives. There might be tasks (not medical so much, but perhaps industrial) where absolute 100% precision is required, and then you might need the digital paradigm. Maybe. I can't think of such an application offhand (even an advanced material can be made to self-assemble if you're clever), but I'm a lousy futurist.
Teeny little problem there --- the only "biopolymer" I can think of offhand that does direct chemical->mechanical would be a cellular contractile/walking protein. Every such system I know of requires a fairly complicated array of tubules and filaments, which in turn requires a whole buttload of stuff to keep it organized and working. Moreoever, any system like that is in constant need of renewal and repair; tubules turn over very fast.
Sure, you could do it. But if you've got the machinery to be continually synthesizing and maintaining a tubular network, plus the machinery to turn glucose into ATP for the motors, you're getting damn close to being a muscle cell. Seems to me you'd be better off skipping the robot arms, engineering an antigen-based targeting system for whatever you want to kill, and packing the whole thing up into a little proliferating purely biological bundle of joy. (This is, IMHO, why we may never see nanites at all --- it may turn out to be always easier to just design a bacterium.)
If you want to keep the patient inside a constantly varying magnetic field for a long time, maybe, but that doesn't strike me as a particularly sound idea. Even a low-amplitude pulsed field has effects on cells --- not carcinogenic, but it messes with the electrical balance. You could charge the batteries this way (brief exposure to the field every day or so), but I personally wouldn't volunteer to have it going constantly.
There *is* another option I forgot, though... have them feed off the blood glucose or better yet, from the stuff they're destroying. Of course, the efficiency of taking chemical energy and turning that into electrical energy and turning that into mechanical energy is really poor. However, that might actually be beneficial --- most patients could stand to be using their energy reserves less efficiently.
I saw the article when it was first printed this summer, and this thing is indeed cool. However, don't fool yourself into thinking that you're going to see arterial plaque-scrapers or tumor hunter-killers anytime soon. There would be two major problems with having something like this living inside the body: power and control. It may only draw a volt, but we still don't have small batteries. Along the same lines, you need to be able to hit the target, which means you're going to need sensors and either a transceiver or an onboard processor; none of those is even remotely cell-sized yet. There might be a use for it in microsurgery, if they can come up with something that lets the surgeon control an array of arms fairly naturally.
Still pretty neat, though. My lab does MEMS work, but we don't have the lithography capabilities to build something like this.
However, that makes by definition the American media & Hollywood the #1 social power on the planet, not those sites.
Last I heard, Hollywood was completely eclipsed by the production and exportation capacity of India's movie studios, though. We don't see it from here because the entertainment tastes of Asia seem to be very different. Also, given the relative land areas and population densities, I believe there are more easterners than westerners.
In other words, if we *are* heading for a mediocracy (all sorts of fun wordplay there), America might actually be screwed. (We do have those nifty DNS servers under our thumb and that there Bill Gates guy, but how long can that last?)
I'd downloaded and am evaluating Afterburner; it does seem to speed things up a little, although the batteries also seem to drain quite quickly. The obvious thought is that if one can overclock from 16 MHz to 30, one could overclock 30 to at least 40.
Of course, the *other* real question is how much I care to trust a vaporware rumor.
I happen to have just purchased a Visor Deluxe two weeks ago. That leaves me another two weeks on my 30-day money back guarantee. Therefore, I wish to know: should I sync this thing one last time, toss it back to Handspring, suffer one more PDAless month, and end up with the bestest new technology?
I don't want color --- it drains power. A monochrome screen is fine by me. What I want to know about are this new processor and the new OS. What does PalmOS 3.5 give me? How fast is the existing Visor processor?
While they did not cite any studies, I have had Biochem profs and Human Phys profs scoff at these oral supplements.
So have I, but OTOH, my rheumatology profs said they looked promising, and there have been RCTs for osteo and rheumatoid arthritis. I'm personally not 100% convinced, but if someone asked me about it for arthritis, I'd tell them to try it if they could afford it.
I've seen a release done... it's amazing that something so simple actually works and leaves you with good function. I figured that losing a wide, strong ligament would give you tendon bowstringing or something.
Anyone who would say that is clearly infested by demons. Fortunately, although I am not an MD, I am a fully qualified witch doctor. Come see me; you need emergency trepannation.
I am a medical student. Not a doctor. By law, I can't prescribe jack shit and I am no more qualified to give medical advice than an aborginal tribesman.
I *can*, however, tell you that carpal tunnel as suffered by geeks is usually a stress injury, not a degenerative or autoimmune cartilage disease as found in arthritis. What's the difference? Use good ergonomics and geek carpal tunnel often goes away, never to return. Arthritis can be relieved, but is currently always progressive. Stress injuries can be healed. Degenerative processes generally can't.
That means that you definitely don't *need* glucosamine; you can heal just fine without it. However, there's still the question of whether or not it'll help you heal. The literature, at least as far as I can see right now, doesn't contain any data on glucosamine for acute injuries like this; the studies are all for arthritis. In arthritis, it does seem to help, though that's not proven. If taken in reasonable doses, it should not harm you.
It is worth considering the placebo effect, which is really very powerful. If you think glucosamine will help you, you are very likely to experience some improvement. Therefore, if you have the money to spend and you truly believe it might help, it may well be worth your while to try it. (The best part about the placebo effect is that it'll work even if the supplement you end up buying isn't really glucosamine (which is a big problem with most natural medicines, BTW)).
I have also done you the courtesy of looking up some existing non-surgical therapies for CTS; you may wish to ask a doctor about them. Steroid injections have been indicated to help reduce the inflammation where aspirin and ibuprofen can't, although some studies indicate that this is only temporary relief. At least one clinical trial has shown that certain yoga postures can have a beneficial effect. (The postures are in JAMA, November 11th 1998. The AMA may still have that issue available online.) There is weak anecdotal evidence for vitamin B6 helping; could take that along with the glucosamine. (Again, assuming you don't start taking massive doses and assuming you use good biomechanics, this can't hurt.)
Executive Summary: Can't hurt, small chance of helping, here's some other stuff to check out, try not to get scammed, and USE BETTER ERGONOMICS!
Who thought this up? Why do they think it would sell? Everyone I know with a palmtop is practically grafted to the thing; they'd have it surgically implanted if they could. The only situations I can imagine not taking the Palm along are the same situations where you're not going to have a phone. (And even if you *do* happen to just forget it before you leave for work, what are the chances that it's in the cradle instead of lying on the table in the hall?)
Not so much from free speech, but from resource issues. I didn't need CNN to tell me there are more people using the service --- I can see it every time I try to get anything done using the Net. Whenever I want to use one of the public terminals, there's at least one which is taken up by some guy burning another full CD. (Thankfully, they kick you off if you're doing those things when the lab is crowded and somebody needs to type a paper.) Over the past two weeks, the network has gone from slow-but-functional to five-minute-latency, and that's *after* they fixed the outages. (I am not making this up.) I'm not at all comfortable with the ethical implications of the service to begin with, and now it's also getting in my way when I want to read news or look up information.
There was a guy yesterday who mentioned that the University of Tennessee (I think) was going to put the dorms on one outgoing connection and everything else on a different connection. I hope that experiment works, because if the trend continues, you can expect MP3 sharing (at universities, anyway) to be killed on technological rather than legal grounds.
1) Price. Looking Here, Microsoft® Visual Basic® for Windows® Learning Edition is $109.00. Thier cheapest, lowest-power version of this programming language is over A HUNDRED DOLLARS. That's out of reach for a lot of home users.
True. OTOH, software pricing is pretty much artificial. For example, if MS wanted to, they could offer the same sorts of OEM pricing they do for Office. The last time I shopped for a computer, Office was a standard no-cost option from most OEMs. (I also actually happen to get Visual Studio Professional for free, because Pitt has brokered a deal for the souls of the student body. Wouldn't be surprised to see that other universities (where the users of tomorrow are getting their expectations) have similar deals.)
3) Intelligence. Don't overestimate the inteligence of the general population. If you think everyone could learn to program, next time there is professional wrestling on TV, take a look at the crowd shots and ask yourself: Could these people program a computer? The answer is most likely no. Half the population has an IQ of less that 100.
I question the implied assumption that one requires an IQ of 100 or more to program a computer, given the quality of software floating around these days.:-) Think about the software that comes with a Mindstorms set --- it's supposed to let a child create functional robot control programs by stringing together pretty pictures. Programming via point-and-drool won't be very powerful, but I believe that was the original poster's whole idea --- you start with something that doesn't give you quite enough power, which urges you to learn epsilon more, and you keep going in that model.
I agree with your statement about varying levels of complexity. To some degree, I think we have this, but the problem is that there are deliberate barriers placed in the way of the user's transition to the more complex interface. It takes significant work to go from a default Win98 installation to something that doesn't keep trying to hide my files and options.
But isn't that exactly what Visual Studio does? You drag-n-drop to create your GUI, and you can start with wizards to make simple apps. If you need more complex apps, you get to learn C or Java or whatever. Now, there must be a catch here, because I don't see most users playing around with VB. OTOH, they may not know it's available to them, since it's not exactly free or marketed to the standard user.
AppleScript does something similar; it tries to create an English-like structured syntax, with each program supporting a "dictionary" of commands and also being able to tell you what commands it supports when queried. The main problem with AS (at least, from my experience)is that they haven't gotten the syntax to be intuitive yet.
As far as the Church-Turing thing... you don't *want* the full capabilities of the computer available at any given moment, because many of them don't apply to the task at hand. What most people need, from the perspective of maximum power, is a set of useful abstractions which can be easily interfaced together. Hence, I have an abstraction which is good for writing documents, and one which is good for moving documents around, and one which is good for talking to other people, and so on. The problem is that I keep getting into situations where I can't effectively move data between applications. The solution to this is emerging, since OSes seem to be moving towards a component-based all-XML model.
Slashdot Mirror
Factor in Moore's Law and the speed of bureaucracy. This will take a year or two to become a law. By then, the idea of at least logging all requested URLs and the headers of every email may not be unreasonable. Also remember the general belief that intelligence agencies have computing power and new tricks well in excess of what we common slobs may do (although that does seem a bit strange, given the pace of Silicon Valley innovation). Also consider the fact that Echelon apparently works and is useful enough for the UKUSA folks to keep it running.
It makes me wonder if one could push this through in the US. My thought has always been that one couldn't get sufficiently Big Brother here, mainly because the populace has guns, unlike most of Europe. Were I the government, I'd see an armed populace as something much more likely to start an active and effective revolt, and therefore be more scared of trying to abuse it. On the other hand, the same portion of the populace which owns those guns is the one that thinks the Internet is full of evil hacker pedophile terrorists.
I'm also wondering if there's anything beyond encryption that will help. On the one hand, there's the possibility of private networking, but this couldn't go over existing wires. Given that most of us can't afford to lay fiber or cable, that means wireless, which in turn means that anyone who cares about snooping can just grab packets from the air.
Perhaps there'll be a market for personal browsers... people who'll sit at the computer for you and read the subversive stuff that you want to read but can't because of a reputation.
I'm consolidating replies. Deal.
.health != censorship. Still plenty of room for .med. Or .medicine. Or www.realtruemedicalfactsIswear.org. If the WHO doesn't do a good job with their resource, nobody will use it, at which point they'll have economic incentive to give it back and let someone else have a go.
.health for? .xxx? Somebody's got to run it. Why not have people actually exercise a bit of discretion over what goes in what TLD, so that .orgs really are non-profit and .coms are only companies and .nets are only ISPs and so on? (And I personally still don't see .xxx as censorship; I see it as an excellent way for people who want porn to get porn and people who hate porn to avoid porn.)
1) Impartiality != inability to judge merit. Judges are in theory impartial, but their very job is to discriminate true from false, legal from illegal.
2)
3) People *are* too dumb to decide for themselves when specific expertise outside of their domain of knowledge is required. There are many things which each of us is too dumb to handle. I should not be allowed to make design decisions for particle accelerators. A nuclear physicist should not be allowed to set himself up as an authority in treating disease. If there are regulations on who can bill themselves as an MD and hand out medical advice in meatspace, why should the same rules not apply in cyberspace? The information doesn't gain extra validity from being on the Web.
4) The WHO is probably as qualified as any organization to set up a global database of summarized and easily-digestible medical knowledge. They're one of the biggest names in international medicine. I certainly wouldn't want something like this limited to just the AMA.
5) If not them, then who else? What would you use
Assuming that the WHO takes the time to be impartial about stuff at the edges of knowledge (as in "we have no clue why this works, and we haven't entirely proven that it *does* work, but we're pretty sure it's not going to hurt you"), this would be a Very Good Thing. There is an ungodly large amount of health misinformation on the net, and most of the sites that have true scientific data force you to pay or be affiliated with an institution to access it.
.health, it's probably right; with other stuff, be careful." It'll probably be turned down, following the same precedent as .xxx, but I wish it wouldn't be.
Being able to simply look at a domain name and know "this is solid peer-reviewed stuff" would be great, and it'd be even better to be able to tell patients "If it comes from
I'm not whining, but one's advisor *is* the standard first resource, and he wasn't mentioned in your original question. Unfortunately, sounds like you're taking all the necessary steps.
If you're doing a thesis, you should have an advisor. This sort of thing is exactly what advisors are for --- you find who has the stuff you need and your advisor kicks ass until you get it. This is one of your basic perqs in a mentoring relationship. I ran into a not-quite-as-bad situation when doing my thesis in CS, and my advisor hassled department and campus admins to get the data I needed into our machines.
Failing that, search the web for places that have the necessary machine type and beg. Try the comp.* newsgroups. Ask the librarians --- their job is to get you your data. Move your damn ass instead of whining to Slashdot.
You do have a point that intelligence has subcomponents, and that the drive to survive is one of those. OTOH, given that it's impossible to for anything to exist without somehow being designed to persist, I'm not sure that it's exactly a scientific discovery. (Lifeforms adapt to their environments! The sky is blue! Slashdot has trolls! Film at 11!)
I'm impressed by the design of life in general. A cell is a pretty complex little machine. Whether or not this lends the watchmaker argument credence, I'm not sure. It's more that this mold is somehow being touted as special that bugs me. That, and the fact that when I see animal or software intelligence written about in the popular press, there are always implications of some kind of sentience or human-level ability. Basically, I'm reacting to what I perceive as fluffy hype.
AFAIK (can't find a specific citation right now), yes, they have pondered it. It is a source of great debate among those who mess with exobiology (which IMHO can't be said to really exist yet as a field).
:-)
The trick here is the difference between a probe going to Mars and a panel going to Mir. A Mars probe may be hermetically sealed inside a capsule and sterilized with ungodly amounts of heat. That capsule may then be launched and the probe deployed. On its descent to the surface, the probe gets to undergo re-entry, which forms (at least in an Earth atmosphere --- I don't know if this is true of Mars as well, but it probably is) a superheated plasma around the craft. (There are some things not even bacteria can survive, and ionized particle bombardment is one.) I believe that probes were also designed to be able to sterilize their internal sample containers and their gathering equipment.
Now compare this to a bit of Mir. It's loaded in a shuttle bay, and spends a few days in there with sweaty astronauts. They handle it. It is never sterilized or sealed away. Humans have ungodly amounts of organisms on us. Contamination is inevitable.
You want a sterile station? Sterilize and seal each piece, sterilize and seal the transport bay, and do not let humans anywhere near it, not even in space suits (the outside of the suit gets contaminated by shuttle air). Touch it only with sterilized and isolated robot arms. In short, take all the same precautions that a Class 4 virology lab does, and perhaps more.
Of course, how you're going to get all the necessary equipment onto an orbiter is your engineering problem, not mine.
But that's really all it is --- a few closed-loop systems. It is my personal belief (and a requirement before I grant another organism the status of "fellow intelligent life-form") that you at least need to have some kind of generalized cognitive process going on. (See further downthread for a rough definition of what I'm looking for.)
Self-reconfiguration as a response to stimuli can't be intelligence, because if it is, every single living thing on the planet displays rudimentary intelligence. (I make the assumption that most things are not intelligent. If you don't like that assumption, you are free not to use it, but I'll think you're being silly.)
Hofstader is quite correct. You are also probably correct that intelligence exists because it improves survival. However, this does not imply that anything which survives and reproduces more is more intelligent; it is merely well-adapted. Consider the amoeba. It constantly reflows to engulf food and reproduce. Will we now say that ameobas also are intelligent, since you could do the exact same experiment with an amoeba (and get the same results, AFAIK) if you could build a small-enough maze?
Yes, I do tend to hold to the idea that there is some magic thing called "self-awareness" which "true intelligence" requires. Don't ask me what it is --- I don't know yet. Humans have it. Humans can probably create it in computational systems. However (and IMHO), if it can't produce "cogito ergo sum", it ain't intelligence.
So this thing has demonstrated intelligence because it reshaped its body to move most of its bulk as close to the nutrient source as possible? I'm not mad at the BBC or Slashdot, but I can't believe the scientists who call this intelligence. You could do the same thing with a single neuron and the appropriate mix of growth factors. (At least, given that both axon growth cones and slime mold food-seeking work on a sense-molecule-grow-tubules model, it seems pretty likely to me that you could achieve the same with a single cell.) This doesn't mean that those cells are intelligent.
:-) but you could do it. That still doesn't mean it's intelligent. (I'm not even sure one could say that the mold itself is really *computing*, but I suppose the network of cells and integrated signal cascasdes does encode some function.)
:-)
I'll grant the idea that you could somehow do computation using a mobile mold as your switching unit. I fail to see why anyone would bother (especially given that slime molds are icky
Yes, I'm one of those biased morons who thinks that you've got to demonstrate something like a sense of self or use of language to qualify for intelligence. Then again, given the human race, perhaps the bar's been lowered.
"Know my stuff"? Maybe. I know bio and I'm trying to become a decent engineer. I work on MEMS, but I'm not good at it; I'm theoretically as good at manual lithography as anyone in the lab, and I get crap for fabrication yields.
Anyway, you're absolutely right, a bacterium or virus is a nanite. OTOH (and IMHO), it's not what people are thinking of when they think of nanites --- they're thinking of things that are basically a robot made really small.
Actually, I need to revise my prior statement again. If we can actually make them, there may indeed be a role for mostly-nonbiological nanites. Since most biological stuff is really working on a statistical basis, it always gets a few false positives and negatives. There might be tasks (not medical so much, but perhaps industrial) where absolute 100% precision is required, and then you might need the digital paradigm. Maybe. I can't think of such an application offhand (even an advanced material can be made to self-assemble if you're clever), but I'm a lousy futurist.
Teeny little problem there --- the only "biopolymer" I can think of offhand that does direct chemical->mechanical would be a cellular contractile/walking protein. Every such system I know of requires a fairly complicated array of tubules and filaments, which in turn requires a whole buttload of stuff to keep it organized and working. Moreoever, any system like that is in constant need of renewal and repair; tubules turn over very fast.
Sure, you could do it. But if you've got the machinery to be continually synthesizing and maintaining a tubular network, plus the machinery to turn glucose into ATP for the motors, you're getting damn close to being a muscle cell. Seems to me you'd be better off skipping the robot arms, engineering an antigen-based targeting system for whatever you want to kill, and packing the whole thing up into a little proliferating purely biological bundle of joy. (This is, IMHO, why we may never see nanites at all --- it may turn out to be always easier to just design a bacterium.)
If you want to keep the patient inside a constantly varying magnetic field for a long time, maybe, but that doesn't strike me as a particularly sound idea. Even a low-amplitude pulsed field has effects on cells --- not carcinogenic, but it messes with the electrical balance. You could charge the batteries this way (brief exposure to the field every day or so), but I personally wouldn't volunteer to have it going constantly.
There *is* another option I forgot, though... have them feed off the blood glucose or better yet, from the stuff they're destroying. Of course, the efficiency of taking chemical energy and turning that into electrical energy and turning that into mechanical energy is really poor. However, that might actually be beneficial --- most patients could stand to be using their energy reserves less efficiently.
I saw the article when it was first printed this summer, and this thing is indeed cool. However, don't fool yourself into thinking that you're going to see arterial plaque-scrapers or tumor hunter-killers anytime soon. There would be two major problems with having something like this living inside the body: power and control. It may only draw a volt, but we still don't have small batteries. Along the same lines, you need to be able to hit the target, which means you're going to need sensors and either a transceiver or an onboard processor; none of those is even remotely cell-sized yet. There might be a use for it in microsurgery, if they can come up with something that lets the surgeon control an array of arms fairly naturally.
Still pretty neat, though. My lab does MEMS work, but we don't have the lithography capabilities to build something like this.
However, that makes by definition the American media & Hollywood the #1 social power on the planet, not those sites.
Last I heard, Hollywood was completely eclipsed by the production and exportation capacity of India's movie studios, though. We don't see it from here because the entertainment tastes of Asia seem to be very different. Also, given the relative land areas and population densities, I believe there are more easterners than westerners.
In other words, if we *are* heading for a mediocracy (all sorts of fun wordplay there), America might actually be screwed. (We do have those nifty DNS servers under our thumb and that there Bill Gates guy, but how long can that last?)
Thank you.
I'd downloaded and am evaluating Afterburner; it does seem to speed things up a little, although the batteries also seem to drain quite quickly. The obvious thought is that if one can overclock from 16 MHz to 30, one could overclock 30 to at least 40.
Of course, the *other* real question is how much I care to trust a vaporware rumor.
I did. They have none of the above information, at least not findable within 10-15 minutes.
Thou shalt not tell others to RTFM without having RTFM thyself.
I happen to have just purchased a Visor Deluxe two weeks ago. That leaves me another two weeks on my 30-day money back guarantee. Therefore, I wish to know: should I sync this thing one last time, toss it back to Handspring, suffer one more PDAless month, and end up with the bestest new technology?
I don't want color --- it drains power. A monochrome screen is fine by me. What I want to know about are this new processor and the new OS. What does PalmOS 3.5 give me? How fast is the existing Visor processor?
While they did not cite any studies, I have had Biochem profs and Human Phys profs scoff at these oral supplements.
So have I, but OTOH, my rheumatology profs said they looked promising, and there have been RCTs for osteo and rheumatoid arthritis. I'm personally not 100% convinced, but if someone asked me about it for arthritis, I'd tell them to try it if they could afford it.
I've seen a release done... it's amazing that something so simple actually works and leaves you with good function. I figured that losing a wide, strong ligament would give you tendon bowstringing or something.
Anyone who would say that is clearly infested by demons. Fortunately, although I am not an MD, I am a fully qualified witch doctor. Come see me; you need emergency trepannation.
I am a medical student. Not a doctor. By law, I can't prescribe jack shit and I am no more qualified to give medical advice than an aborginal tribesman.
I *can*, however, tell you that carpal tunnel as suffered by geeks is usually a stress injury, not a degenerative or autoimmune cartilage disease as found in arthritis. What's the difference? Use good ergonomics and geek carpal tunnel often goes away, never to return. Arthritis can be relieved, but is currently always progressive. Stress injuries can be healed. Degenerative processes generally can't.
That means that you definitely don't *need* glucosamine; you can heal just fine without it. However, there's still the question of whether or not it'll help you heal. The literature, at least as far as I can see right now, doesn't contain any data on glucosamine for acute injuries like this; the studies are all for arthritis. In arthritis, it does seem to help, though that's not proven. If taken in reasonable doses, it should not harm you.
It is worth considering the placebo effect, which is really very powerful. If you think glucosamine will help you, you are very likely to experience some improvement. Therefore, if you have the money to spend and you truly believe it might help, it may well be worth your while to try it. (The best part about the placebo effect is that it'll work even if the supplement you end up buying isn't really glucosamine (which is a big problem with most natural medicines, BTW)).
I have also done you the courtesy of looking up some existing non-surgical therapies for CTS; you may wish to ask a doctor about them. Steroid injections have been indicated to help reduce the inflammation where aspirin and ibuprofen can't, although some studies indicate that this is only temporary relief. At least one clinical trial has shown that certain yoga postures can have a beneficial effect. (The postures are in JAMA, November 11th 1998. The AMA may still have that issue available online.) There is weak anecdotal evidence for vitamin B6 helping; could take that along with the glucosamine. (Again, assuming you don't start taking massive doses and assuming you use good biomechanics, this can't hurt.)
Executive Summary: Can't hurt, small chance of helping, here's some other stuff to check out, try not to get scammed, and USE BETTER ERGONOMICS!
Who thought this up? Why do they think it would sell? Everyone I know with a palmtop is practically grafted to the thing; they'd have it surgically implanted if they could. The only situations I can imagine not taking the Palm along are the same situations where you're not going to have a phone. (And even if you *do* happen to just forget it before you leave for work, what are the chances that it's in the cradle instead of lying on the table in the hall?)
Not so much from free speech, but from resource issues. I didn't need CNN to tell me there are more people using the service --- I can see it every time I try to get anything done using the Net. Whenever I want to use one of the public terminals, there's at least one which is taken up by some guy burning another full CD. (Thankfully, they kick you off if you're doing those things when the lab is crowded and somebody needs to type a paper.) Over the past two weeks, the network has gone from slow-but-functional to five-minute-latency, and that's *after* they fixed the outages. (I am not making this up.) I'm not at all comfortable with the ethical implications of the service to begin with, and now it's also getting in my way when I want to read news or look up information.
There was a guy yesterday who mentioned that the University of Tennessee (I think) was going to put the dorms on one outgoing connection and everything else on a different connection. I hope that experiment works, because if the trend continues, you can expect MP3 sharing (at universities, anyway) to be killed on technological rather than legal grounds.
1) Price. Looking Here, Microsoft® Visual Basic® for Windows® Learning Edition is $109.00. Thier cheapest, lowest-power version of this programming language is over A HUNDRED DOLLARS. That's out of reach for a lot of home users.
:-) Think about the software that comes with a Mindstorms set --- it's supposed to let a child create functional robot control programs by stringing together pretty pictures. Programming via point-and-drool won't be very powerful, but I believe that was the original poster's whole idea --- you start with something that doesn't give you quite enough power, which urges you to learn epsilon more, and you keep going in that model.
True. OTOH, software pricing is pretty much artificial. For example, if MS wanted to, they could offer the same sorts of OEM pricing they do for Office. The last time I shopped for a computer, Office was a standard no-cost option from most OEMs. (I also actually happen to get Visual Studio Professional for free, because Pitt has brokered a deal for the souls of the student body. Wouldn't be surprised to see that other universities (where the users of tomorrow are getting their expectations) have similar deals.)
3) Intelligence. Don't overestimate the inteligence of the general population. If you think everyone could learn to program, next time there is professional wrestling on TV, take a look at the crowd shots and ask yourself: Could these people program a computer? The answer is most likely no. Half the population has an IQ of less that 100.
I question the implied assumption that one requires an IQ of 100 or more to program a computer, given the quality of software floating around these days.
I agree with your statement about varying levels of complexity. To some degree, I think we have this, but the problem is that there are deliberate barriers placed in the way of the user's transition to the more complex interface. It takes significant work to go from a default Win98 installation to something that doesn't keep trying to hide my files and options.
But isn't that exactly what Visual Studio does? You drag-n-drop to create your GUI, and you can start with wizards to make simple apps. If you need more complex apps, you get to learn C or Java or whatever. Now, there must be a catch here, because I don't see most users playing around with VB. OTOH, they may not know it's available to them, since it's not exactly free or marketed to the standard user.
AppleScript does something similar; it tries to create an English-like structured syntax, with each program supporting a "dictionary" of commands and also being able to tell you what commands it supports when queried. The main problem with AS (at least, from my experience)is that they haven't gotten the syntax to be intuitive yet.
As far as the Church-Turing thing... you don't *want* the full capabilities of the computer available at any given moment, because many of them don't apply to the task at hand. What most people need, from the perspective of maximum power, is a set of useful abstractions which can be easily interfaced together. Hence, I have an abstraction which is good for writing documents, and one which is good for moving documents around, and one which is good for talking to other people, and so on. The problem is that I keep getting into situations where I can't effectively move data between applications. The solution to this is emerging, since OSes seem to be moving towards a component-based all-XML model.