We have the technology to store and preserve eggs nowadays, so it isn't like, assuming someone was physically sound enough to carry a child at 200 years of age they wouldn't be able to (if there aren't artificial wombs by then).
Or, we may be able to make artificial gametes by then (of course taken from the person's own DNA).
Or, just about any number of things might change by that point to make population issues less of a worry.
- trying to create artificial life - trying to create artificial intelligence - trying to create artificial suns - trying to cure/prevent any and all diseases by modifying our own genome/the genomes of other creatures
And, for that matter, what's wrong with wanting to do things that are typically (in the mind of those who believe in such things) reserved for god? It wasn't so long ago that just using fire would have been thought to be something only a god could do...
Trying to fight the *appearance* of aging with purely cosmetic efforts - yes, THAT is laughable and stupid - but actually trying to prevent actual aging? Not so much.
Don't you run a much higher probability of finding high correlation by chance?
I can expect to find a result that matches my model to 95% certainty about 5% of the time in random data. You can correct for this, but it's against human nature because people like to see the face of Mary in toast.
Learning how to look for correlation in huge uncontrolled data sets will require a new paradigm... or it will ultimately be useless and even perhaps, unsuccessful.
Yes, and that's why you can then go back and design a follow-up experiment to test to see if it's actually chance or something else.
For example: In my current lab, one of the things we're doing is a longitudinal study of certain groups of individuals over the course of 2-3 years, personality traits and risk-taking behaviors as it relates to HIV/AIDS infection. We're taking a shotgun approach, running a huge number of measures for each subject, and just collecting data.
Even in the early stages, we've found some correlations that seemed significant that came out of left-field or that nobody in the research team had anticipated. When we found those, we then added a couple of modifications to our protocols for a subset of our population that were designed to test those correlations (random blip or actual significance?) and were able to determine that it was almost certainly just a fluke. That finding has been borne out by further data collection as the study has continued.
My point with all this is that yes, it certainly is possible to find meaningless seeming correlations by random chance, but it's also possible to assess those findings and put them into perspective. This is incredibly beneficial and has already lead to some findings that so far seem to actually be significant instead of just flukes.
Also, having SO MUCH data available allows us to (easily) explore questions that come up after the fact that we would have to run a follow-up on if we hadn't had so much data. For example, one study in our lab involves interviewing adolescent girls from a specific ethnic group and their mothers about sex. Initially, only female interviewers above the age of 25 and also from that ethnic group were used. However, we were unable to find enough interviewers who matched the requirements, so eventually the same-ethnicity requirement was dropped and then the age requirement. So, I had to run through the data and determine if age of interviewer or ethnicity of the interviewer had any effect on the process, as well as account for potential bias caused by an individual interviewer's style.
When looking at the data I included over 300 factors because I could - computing power is cheap. I didn't find any evidence to support the idea that the age or ethnicity of the interviewer had any impact on the study, but what I *did* find was that subjects interviewed on Tuesdays between 4 and 6 in a particular interview room were more likely to indicate feeling depressed. I looked into it, and it turns out that there is a support group for parents of terminally ill children that meets in the room next to the interview room on that day and time and, while no speech can be made out, there is a lot of crying that can just barely be heard. So, we stopped interviewing people in that room at that time and the measures indicating depression returned to normal. I absolutely wouldn't have found that out if I hadn't decided, just because I could, to add in piles of extraneous data.
The only real downside to getting so much data from so many measures is that it increases the length of each assessment session, has necessitated getting enhanced funding to more appropriately compensate our subjects, and has lead to a slightly more challenging recruitment and retention process. However, those are things we know how to deal with, and their costs are certainly reasonable when compared to the chances of finding things that may be important that we might have overlooked otherwise. Even when they're silly things like one particular interview room has bad sound at one particular time on one particular day.
Because non-computing students aren't the only people who go into IT and, I would say, are probably the students a smart employer might most want to avoid.
Why? Simple: people who have incredibly narrow interests and take a vocational approach to their education are seen as more likely to have a limited angle of approach to any situation. Why take someone who only knows how to write code when I can have someone who knows how to write code AND has demonstrated the ability to learn other things? Anyone who's being interviewed will have the requisite skills to do the job (or be trainable to do the job) so why NOT get the person who's got more abilities?
As someone who used to do an awful lot of hiring of people for IT positions, my experience was that the people who came from eclectic educational and work backgrounds tended to be much, much better hires than the people who were mono-focused on technology. Aside from being able to approach problems from a variety of different angles due to their broader experience, they also were, frankly, MUCH more interesting as individuals and as much as some people here want to say that the social environment at a workplace should not be a relevant factor in hiring, it is. If I spend 8-12 hours a day with people, I want that time to be as pleasant to be around as possible.
IT managers should actually be very concerned about this. The best potential employees are being turned off to the careers, meaning that the people who'll be filling the potential positions are going to be the ones who don't seem to be able or willing to do anything else. Scary!
The best lesson I ever had came from a basic chemistry lab class in highschool.
We were given a packet that contained the whole process for some experiment we were to run that would end up telling us how much of each component was in a mix. It had an exact, step-by-step protocol for the experiment with measures, timing, etc. all spelled out, as well as blanks for us to put our quantities in. At the end, in the analysis section, it had the "right" answers already printed there, along with blanks for our answers.
Our teams began and the teacher and her assistants left the room. A few minutes later, we all started noticing that the results we were getting were not what we "should" be getting, according to the booklet. A few teams decided to have each member (there were 3 per team) run each experiment individually and then checking our results against each other in order to see if we were screwing up in the process. Some of the other teams just decided to keep going, write down the "wrong" answers and hand in those reports. And the rest decided to just ignore the results they got and write in answers that were close to the "right" ones but were completely fabricated.
The teacher and her assistants come back and get everyone to turn in their packets, and are pleasantly surprised that some teams did the whole replication thing (which, it turned out, all of our results agreed with each other and disagreed with the packet). Then they announce: for today's exercise, anyone who submitted answers that agreed with the packet would fail. It was impossible to get the results printed in the packet by any possible iteration of the experiment that was listed, so anyone who claimed results in agreement with the packet was clearly lying. Everyone else - who wrote down the honest results - passed, and we got extra credit for doing the replication test. The lab that day was to show us the importance of honesty in research.
We then spent the remainder of the session discussing what "wrong" answers mean in science, how things that don't match expectations may, at the least, point out a simple mistake in calculations or experimental technique but might, in other cases, point to something wholly new and interesting. "I have found it!" is a nice thing to hear in science, but all the REALLY good stuff comes after, "Huh, that's odd..."
Anyway, I hate chemistry because I'm too much of a fumble-fingers with the equipment, but I'm now a researcher (psychology) and I've taken those lessons to heart. In my lab, we work on several areas that are considered controversial (effects of individual background differences on interactions etc). I spent the last academic year working on a project that wound up yielding a null-result, and so that's what we reported and eventually got published. Was it sexy? No - a validation of the status quo isn't nearly as thrilling as exposing something new. But it was honest, it was "important" in the sense that it lent validation to processes already in place, and that's cool.
I don't know. If you are willing to break into the school's system to improve your grades, and generally compromise their data, I am not sure it is _they_ turning you into a criminal. I think, if you do that, _you_ are already over the line.
Bingo! If the need to break into a building to pull off your plan doesn't deter you, then I'd say that you're already well on the road to criminality.
Perhaps, if he were, I don't know, 5 years old or mentally retarded, then I could understand him not knowing the difference between right and wrong. However, I'm pretty sure that in this case he knew what he was doing was wrong and simply didn't care. Perhaps the temporary removal of his freedoms will teach him to use his freedoms more wisely.
Wake up! Jail time for changing grades, man. Snap out of it.
No, jail time for breaking & entering (burglary) to commit fraud. Repeatedly.
Jail time is not the solution for everything.
I certainly agree. In the case of breaking and entering to commit fraud, however, I think it might not be a bad thing.
He's not going to get 38 years, probably won't get more than 1-2, and I think that is entirely appropriate for something like burglary combined with the other stuff he did. I'm not in favor of absurd penalties, but when your cunning plan involves breaking into a building that you are not authorized to enter, yeah, I'd say you need to learn a lesson in the responsible use of your freedoms, and one that can be well taught by temporarily removing those freedoms.
To be a dick, at the minimum. In some cases, as a prelude to blackmail, but really, being a dick is the most probable situation.
Why do some people spraypaint graffiti on things? Why do some people key cars in parking lots? Why do some people throw rocks through windows? Because they're maladjusted assholes who want to fuck with people and see if they can get away from it. Sometimes they're not aware of the consequences to others, and sometimes they are and just don't give a fuck.
Having the (not necessarily advanced) technical abilities needed to create or deploy basic malware does not somehow suddenly make an individual morally incapable of doing such a thing. I'm going to guess you're not a litigator if you don't understand this very common human trait (and good for you - try to keep a little bit of innocence:)) But really, you can't imagine a bored, socially inept 15 year old thinking it would be funny to use his newfound VB "skills" to fuck with people like this?
And, I certainly can fault the employer. If the technical advice they were getting was so inept that some of the basic forensic stuff was missed (40 websites in a minute in the logs?) then that's really their fault for hiring inept people to do that job. Further, if those same technical people were so inept as to pass on a machine from one user to the next without at least reimaging it, that's on them. And, finally, there's the issue of the benefit of the doubt. Suspend the guy with pay while an investigation is done (by people who are clearly more skilled than whomever they had on staff) rather than fire him and submit charges on trafficking in child porn! I mean, jesus, even though the guy has been cleared, that kind of thing will *ruin* someone's life.
Think of the children, sure, and hang 'em high if someone's found to actually be involved in child porn, but don't go wrecking people's lives (and the lives of their loved ones) on a witch-hunt backed solely on the basis of obviously incompetent technical advice.
I would think it's easier to detect by the current methods - seeing transit across the stellar disc, seeing perturbations/wobbles would be easier if they happen more frequently. I bet, if we had the ability to see them directly we'd probably find a few on much longer periods that are less amenable to the transit/wobble detection method.
Or not. I mean, space is really fucking big. Even locally we have a hard time finding things that are "only" a bit further out than pluto...
I'm a student, too. I also do a LOT of traveling. And I own a Kindle.
I will say this: why would you want paper textbooks when you can have a textbook that allows you to do a full-text search? Also, you can make plenty of "margin" notes. And highlight a row and look up words or Wiki any term you see in there to get a (very rough but generally sufficient) bit of info on anything in a text that makes you curious? Most textbooks are horribly indexed in my experience - full-text search makes that irrelevant.
As for getting books cheap, how does "free" grab ya? I've been downloading tons from gutenberg and other sources like that, there are MANY places that allow you to get a bunch of books for free (legally) and of course, torrents to get them (not as legal) for free as well if you don't have qualms about that. It is trivial to convert from one format to another with free software and, really, the DRM is, as usual, only a minor speedbump for anyone who wants to circumvent it.
I do think the $10 for a "bestseller" type book is way too much for this kind of thing, but I don't really read a lot of those. There are plenty of ebooks available for less, though - $9.99 is the high. I've bought maybe 10-20 books through amazon and spent a total of $15 or so, give or take a few cents. I've used both the amazon paid and free conversion services (the difference is that the paid one takes your document from whatever format to the AZW format and sends it directly to your kindle for ten cents while the free version just emails it back to your address and you have to manually load it onto your kindle) and it has been great.
Would I have bought it if I hadn't been given it as a gift? After using it quite a bit, I can say hell yeah. This is the kind of thing that people need to use for awhile and see how it works before they can see just how useful a tool it is. If they had these available for people to play with at bookstores they'd probably sell quite a few more.
How is it that we can have brain damage and "destroy" some parts of the brain, but the minute we pass something through it physically, the entire thing ceases to function- instantly, instead of certain areas slowly fading away. I'm sure there is a simple answer and this may more than likely be a stupid question, but it has been making me curious.
I don't think the entire thing shuts off like a switch just from physical injury - there's probably a considerable amount of activity that goes on when the shit hits the fan (or a bullet punches through). But, as for why poking a hole in it with a bullet is so incredibly letal: Hydrostatic shock does a LOT of damage to the brain as a whole. Then you have things like bone-fragments, possible ricochet inside the skull, swelling, etc. The fact that it's possible to get shot in the head and survive at all, let alone in some cases recover pretty much full function, is a testament to how connected and resilient the brain is.
They aren't talking about having as many transistors as we have neurons - they are talking about raw processing power.
While I'm sure all of what you said in regards to the density of transistors/neurons is true, that's not where the sticking point would be. The brain is a MASSIVELY parallel system comprised of lots of very slow processors. The storage capacity has been estimated at somewhere between 3 and 3000 terabytes, which is not particularly daunting to duplicate. In any case, there is an upper limit on the number of simultaneous operations the brain does, the overall number of operations in a given time-frame, and storage capacity.
So, the whole "as powerful as a human brain" thing really just means "roughly the same number of operations/time unit, roughly the same storage capacity." Which, yeah, I totally can see that being hit by the 2020s.
However, as we all know, processing capacity is not all. Without some radical advances in software, all we'd have is a set-up that is what we've got today, just a hell of a lot faster. I mean, I am not cutting edge by any means, but I don't think there are tons of things that people are wanting to implement in software that they can't do because the hardware isn't beefy enough to pull it off (except, I guess, for those "hard" math problems or quantum computing stuff).
Personally, I think making a human-like AI would be a waste. I don't want something that thinks like me, I want something that thinks about things in ways I never could. Not necessarily "smarter" - just different. What about something that instead of thinking by rules of logic was able to process things from an ethical standpoint - it could "see" solutions to ethical dilemmas in the same way that we could "see" mathematical solutions. Or perhaps something that experiences time in a much different fashion than we do? I have no idea how that kind of stuff could be implemented, but it would be MUCH more interesting to interact with than just another "human-but-faster" type of intelligence.
Exactly. About 40% of people who vote will vote Republican, even if the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler were the nom, simply because he's a Republican. Ditto for the Democrats - 40% would happily vote for Stalin's ghost because of the D.
About 10% of people will usually vote their party (hold their nose and vote) unless the candidate is a true abortion, in which case they'll stay home. Or, if the other party fields a really great candidate or someone who gets people excited they might cross-over for that election.
And then there's the remaining 10% who look at policies and track-records and generally take all this political stuff really seriously.
I think I'm in that 20%, maybe in that "really independent" 10% - I mean, I find it absurd that in a nation of 300 million people we only have 2 major parties. But, generally, I do feel like any 3rd party candidate will be a total waste of a vote at best. I am so pissed at Perot for doing his on-again off-again run - not because I liked his positions, but because he could have gotten enough of the vote to secure public funds for a 3rd party, which would have opened the door for more diversity in politics, if only he hadn't backed out of the race and then come back into it.
All concerns of security aside, I do think that sophisticated direct brain connections with computers will be coming along pretty soon - think along the lines of what they're doing now with robotic limbs and such. It absolutely won't surprise me if within a few more years (5-10?) that kind of stuff, an artificial limb being controlled by the brain exactly as a natural limb is, is completely commonplace. And direct brain control is the best interface around, really.
For me, the huge thing will be when I'm able to control a computer's inputs directly with my brain to do tasks I currently do now. For instance, while I'm a decent typist, it's still much slower than my thoughts, and I will often race well ahead of what I'm able to type while I'm writing. I'd love it if I could interface directly and just think out what I want to say and then edit out all of the noise. I've got ideas for images I want to create but, unfortunately, I've not got the steady hands necessary to translate those images from my mind to paper or screen. A direct interface might, if advanced enough, allow me to at least put the basics of an idea out there and then repair it later.
I'd love it if I could interact with objects around me as well - for instance, at university I have a swipe card that lets me into the research lab I work in, but it'd be much better if doors and elevators and such could know I'm there, know I'm me, and make a judgment - "Oh, she's alone, she's authorized to enter, open the doors" or "Oh, she's authorized to be here, but she's with someone else, so I will ask her to verify their guest status" or even "She's authorized and not alone, but she's activated a panic button, so I'll alert security, record the scene" or whatever. Basically, a smart environment with my implants acting as the key.
None of that seems particularly unrealistic to me - yes, it'd require a lot of training/calibration to get things working accurately, but it all seems reasonable at this point. I'm not asking for Neuromancer-like "jacking in" or anything - I mean, visual implants would be great, and I can think of thousands of things I'd do with them - but for right now I'd settle for much of what I've described. Heck, I'd settle for implants that'd only let me do what I can already do with a mouse, keyboard, microphone and camera - I can think of lots of neat tricks that could be done to make my life easier like that.
What is "stuff that supports terrorism or undermines [...] national security?" I mean that as a serious question.
Am I "undermining national security" or "supporting terrorism" if I speak out against the invasion of Iraq? According to the President and many of the Republican talking heads, I am. According to John McCain, I'm supporting terrorism because I favor Obama over him. So, a video of me talking about why I support Obama would then be a video supporting terrorism.
What's a "time of war" anyway? Is the "war on terror" considered to be a time of war? Okay then, what's the definition of "winning" that war? How will we know when it's over and we're allowed to speak freely again?
For what it's worth, I do agree that there should be limits to free speech in time of war. The limits should include operational details that, were they made public, could unduly put troops at risk. Heck, we can even have those limits outside of wartime too, I'm feeling generous. But that's it - no other limits save those that have already been decided on (fire in a crowded theater, etc.).
Personally, I think all of the people who are so eager to throw away our freedoms because they believe doing so will somehow protect them are the real risk to national security. Doing so might (probably won't, but I'll allow the benefit of the doubt) make you a little safer from foreign extremists and suicide bombers, but it will DEFINITELY put you at risk of being completely crushed under the boot of your government.
I have no problem with a company VOLUNTARILY enforcing whatever community standards they feel like, but I am absolutely opposed to the government trying to dictate what those standards are. It is impossible for the government to make a "request" that isn't coercive. Lieberman making this request is abhorrent to me. He swore an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, and I'd like to think that a Senator should uphold the spirit, not just the letter. Even though he did not attempt to pass a law in this case abridging free speech, he de facto attempted to use the power of his position to make it so. Absolutely abhorrent.
The $50 is the early adopter tax. Why wouldn't a for-profit corporation take advantage of the market of people willing to pay $50 to play it _NOW_? And then, in 3-6 months or so, the price of the game will likely drop or there will be free trials offered in some way, so that the market of people like you, who don't want to "pay twice" can be covered also.
Gimme a break. Talk about spoiled. You know, there are people who still use dial-up. Does it suck? A little. But talking about political action so rich people can get broadband in the middle of nowhere where they chose their vacation home? Get out of here.
(tanslated) I am poor. It took me 3 hours to type my outraged response to the OP because my sausage-like peasant fingers cannot use keyboards designed around the graceful digits of my social betters.
Okay, so I'm kidding, but really, your response read like a lot of projection. The OP had a question about how to get a service out to an area and put a restriction on it, that the solution had to not mess with the aesthetics of the place being served. They tossed out some of their ideas (and I agree, trying to get the G to foot the bill is pretty goofy) and asked for ideas.
Your brilliant solution to their problem was "Deal with it!" I guess that's one way of addressing it, but it isn't particularly helpful. Why bother?
My suggestion: It is possible to camouflage satellite dishes to make them look pretty much like anything. If the only argument about satellite is the aesthetics, then it's easily fixed.
110% with you on the search functionality, and, in fact, I'm amazed that more people haven't mentioned it already. As to literature, however...
The market for eReaders isn't really "anyone who reads books of whatever sort." If eBooks were MUCH cheaper (like, $3-5 MAX, with most being under a buck, rather than $10 or more for "in demand" books and over a buck for many others), then maybe. But most people don't see the benefit of going digital for reading because there just isn't much financial incentive for them to do so.
The advantage of an eReader is weight. portability and readability. An eBook containing 5000 texts weighs under a pound; according to the movers, my library which contains roughly that many books, weighs several tons. I like to read and I like to travel: I spent the last couple of summers bopping around Asia and I was really hurting for reading material - I did not want to lug around a bunch of books so that I had something to read at night. On top of that, the selection of English language books was paltry unless I wanted romance novels or mystery thrillers, and even then, what was left was 2-3x more expensive it would have been otherwise. And this summer I'm going back, this time to Korea to teach ESL for a year - I'd like to accumulate as little stuff as possible, and books tend to gather quickly around me. So, enter the Kindle, which I got as a graduation present and thousands of texts I've gathered (legally and most for free) - I'm set for a LONG time, and it still weighs under a pound, still takes up the same amount of space, etc. Lasts for about 5-6 days between charges if I don't use the wireless, which, for me, is plenty (cause if I'm away from electricity for 5-6 days at a stretch, either the point is to not have the conveniences of home or things are entirely out of hand and reading isn't an option anyway).
As for readability - last summer I brought my MacBook with me while I travel. It's great, as a laptop - really light weight, etc. Except, compared to something the size and weight of the Kindle, it's really kind of heavy and bulky. I have to close it up when I want to move. It only runs for 3 hours or so on batteries. And the display is nice, but even when I find a power source to plug it in, it's still pretty hard on my eyes after awhile. Not so the Kindle display. I can read it just as easily in direct sunlight as I can in darkness (I have a cheapie LED light-bar that I can attach to it - been using that a lot (a few weeks now of reading at night in a dark room) and it's not needed a new battery yet. I've taken it out to the beach and wasn't worried about getting sand on it, which was a big worry (clumsy me) for my laptop.
If I'm at home, yeah, curling up with a book is great. But I won't be home for a year at least. So, for me, even if I hadn't gotten one as a gift, I'd probably have plonked down the money to get an eReader of some sort. Anyway, gadget fiends and people like me are the market for these kinds of things right now, really.
For a comic book movie, BB was *fantastic*. Personally, I liked the somewhat more realistic approach to Batman much better than the overly stylized Burton version. Which is not to say the first Batman wasn't great fun, but not my cuppa. It always annoyed me that each film had Bruce Wayne with a different woman, no explanation of what happened, just moving on along. No character development at all, unless you count Bats coming out of the closet in "Batman and Robin.":p
In BB they had to re-launch the franchise and set up a larger world - both of which they did well. The super-secret shadow organization is, I suspect, going to be an ongoing thing that Batman has to deal with - and I like that. Putting the one movie into a larger, coherent context is a good thing, IMO. Which is also one of the things I liked about IM: it isn't just a one-off thing, he's been put into a larger framework, making the world more believable and interesting.
Also, Burton bores me. Yeah, goth, creepy-cute, got it. Blah.
Anyway, I had a fantastic time at both IM and BB, and that's really all that matters.:)
I'm a comics fangirl, but never have I been much into Iron Man - generally speaking, I could just never get into the character. However, I do like the Ultimates version of Iron Man and had been hoping that the movie version was more like that and I was not disappointed. Robert Downey, Jr. did a fantastic job. This is easily the best Marvel comic movie that's been put out and is at or near the quality of Batman Begins. Or, this movie is as good as "Fantastic Four 2: What the FUCK were they THINKING?" was bad.
I saw it at 2:30 yesterday, digital theater with stadium seating - the place was packed. The audience was a pretty good mix of various groups, and it seemed like everyone really enjoyed the film. 90% of them took off before the end of the credits, though and missed a scene that personally I thought was great, but I could see how someone less knowledgeable of comic lore might not really care about.
I won't offer any spoilers, save to say that there were numerous little bits that show the direction the (obvious) sequels will follow, and I am completely psyched for those.
Also, the trailers were like a never-ending stream of awesome. Dark Knight, Hulk and Indiana Jones, it's going to be a FANTASTIC movie season for me.
Try Crackdown - it's sort of cyber-punkish and a LOT of fun, especially over Live!
Basically you're a cyber-cop that gets upgrades through game play, and goes from being a bad-ass to essentially being a super-hero. I wouldn't call it a deep story game, but there is a plot, the world is kind of open, and it made me stay up many a night, cackling into my XBL headset as my friends and I would see how long we could keep a corpse in the air with our heat-seeking rocket launchers. Fun and since it's older you can get it for cheap.
And other than to say that you carry around all your music on your iPod is there an actual practical point of this? Do you routinely spend 2+ months away from your computer listening to music 24/7?
No, but I routinely listen to music when I am not at home and often feel like changing what I'm listening to. So why wouldn't I want to have my entire music collection readily available so that I can have music that suits my mood?
I don't know about you, but I am unable to predict with 100% accuracy what I will feel like listening to throughout my day when I leave home in the morning.
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Dude. Eat some fiber or something. If your ass is literally being bathed in shit you have problems far worse than butt-pimples!
We have the technology to store and preserve eggs nowadays, so it isn't like, assuming someone was physically sound enough to carry a child at 200 years of age they wouldn't be able to (if there aren't artificial wombs by then).
Or, we may be able to make artificial gametes by then (of course taken from the person's own DNA).
Or, just about any number of things might change by that point to make population issues less of a worry.
No more god-complex than:
- trying to create artificial life
- trying to create artificial intelligence
- trying to create artificial suns
- trying to cure/prevent any and all diseases by modifying our own genome/the genomes of other creatures
And, for that matter, what's wrong with wanting to do things that are typically (in the mind of those who believe in such things) reserved for god? It wasn't so long ago that just using fire would have been thought to be something only a god could do...
Trying to fight the *appearance* of aging with purely cosmetic efforts - yes, THAT is laughable and stupid - but actually trying to prevent actual aging? Not so much.
Don't you run a much higher probability of finding high correlation by chance?
I can expect to find a result that matches my model to 95% certainty about 5% of the time in random data. You can correct for this, but it's against human nature because people like to see the face of Mary in toast.
Learning how to look for correlation in huge uncontrolled data sets will require a new paradigm... or it will ultimately be useless and even perhaps, unsuccessful.
Yes, and that's why you can then go back and design a follow-up experiment to test to see if it's actually chance or something else.
For example: In my current lab, one of the things we're doing is a longitudinal study of certain groups of individuals over the course of 2-3 years, personality traits and risk-taking behaviors as it relates to HIV/AIDS infection. We're taking a shotgun approach, running a huge number of measures for each subject, and just collecting data.
Even in the early stages, we've found some correlations that seemed significant that came out of left-field or that nobody in the research team had anticipated. When we found those, we then added a couple of modifications to our protocols for a subset of our population that were designed to test those correlations (random blip or actual significance?) and were able to determine that it was almost certainly just a fluke. That finding has been borne out by further data collection as the study has continued.
My point with all this is that yes, it certainly is possible to find meaningless seeming correlations by random chance, but it's also possible to assess those findings and put them into perspective. This is incredibly beneficial and has already lead to some findings that so far seem to actually be significant instead of just flukes.
Also, having SO MUCH data available allows us to (easily) explore questions that come up after the fact that we would have to run a follow-up on if we hadn't had so much data. For example, one study in our lab involves interviewing adolescent girls from a specific ethnic group and their mothers about sex. Initially, only female interviewers above the age of 25 and also from that ethnic group were used. However, we were unable to find enough interviewers who matched the requirements, so eventually the same-ethnicity requirement was dropped and then the age requirement. So, I had to run through the data and determine if age of interviewer or ethnicity of the interviewer had any effect on the process, as well as account for potential bias caused by an individual interviewer's style.
When looking at the data I included over 300 factors because I could - computing power is cheap. I didn't find any evidence to support the idea that the age or ethnicity of the interviewer had any impact on the study, but what I *did* find was that subjects interviewed on Tuesdays between 4 and 6 in a particular interview room were more likely to indicate feeling depressed. I looked into it, and it turns out that there is a support group for parents of terminally ill children that meets in the room next to the interview room on that day and time and, while no speech can be made out, there is a lot of crying that can just barely be heard. So, we stopped interviewing people in that room at that time and the measures indicating depression returned to normal. I absolutely wouldn't have found that out if I hadn't decided, just because I could, to add in piles of extraneous data.
The only real downside to getting so much data from so many measures is that it increases the length of each assessment session, has necessitated getting enhanced funding to more appropriately compensate our subjects, and has lead to a slightly more challenging recruitment and retention process. However, those are things we know how to deal with, and their costs are certainly reasonable when compared to the chances of finding things that may be important that we might have overlooked otherwise. Even when they're silly things like one particular interview room has bad sound at one particular time on one particular day.
Because non-computing students aren't the only people who go into IT and, I would say, are probably the students a smart employer might most want to avoid.
Why? Simple: people who have incredibly narrow interests and take a vocational approach to their education are seen as more likely to have a limited angle of approach to any situation. Why take someone who only knows how to write code when I can have someone who knows how to write code AND has demonstrated the ability to learn other things? Anyone who's being interviewed will have the requisite skills to do the job (or be trainable to do the job) so why NOT get the person who's got more abilities?
As someone who used to do an awful lot of hiring of people for IT positions, my experience was that the people who came from eclectic educational and work backgrounds tended to be much, much better hires than the people who were mono-focused on technology. Aside from being able to approach problems from a variety of different angles due to their broader experience, they also were, frankly, MUCH more interesting as individuals and as much as some people here want to say that the social environment at a workplace should not be a relevant factor in hiring, it is. If I spend 8-12 hours a day with people, I want that time to be as pleasant to be around as possible.
IT managers should actually be very concerned about this. The best potential employees are being turned off to the careers, meaning that the people who'll be filling the potential positions are going to be the ones who don't seem to be able or willing to do anything else. Scary!
The best lesson I ever had came from a basic chemistry lab class in highschool.
We were given a packet that contained the whole process for some experiment we were to run that would end up telling us how much of each component was in a mix. It had an exact, step-by-step protocol for the experiment with measures, timing, etc. all spelled out, as well as blanks for us to put our quantities in. At the end, in the analysis section, it had the "right" answers already printed there, along with blanks for our answers.
Our teams began and the teacher and her assistants left the room. A few minutes later, we all started noticing that the results we were getting were not what we "should" be getting, according to the booklet. A few teams decided to have each member (there were 3 per team) run each experiment individually and then checking our results against each other in order to see if we were screwing up in the process. Some of the other teams just decided to keep going, write down the "wrong" answers and hand in those reports. And the rest decided to just ignore the results they got and write in answers that were close to the "right" ones but were completely fabricated.
The teacher and her assistants come back and get everyone to turn in their packets, and are pleasantly surprised that some teams did the whole replication thing (which, it turned out, all of our results agreed with each other and disagreed with the packet). Then they announce: for today's exercise, anyone who submitted answers that agreed with the packet would fail. It was impossible to get the results printed in the packet by any possible iteration of the experiment that was listed, so anyone who claimed results in agreement with the packet was clearly lying. Everyone else - who wrote down the honest results - passed, and we got extra credit for doing the replication test. The lab that day was to show us the importance of honesty in research.
We then spent the remainder of the session discussing what "wrong" answers mean in science, how things that don't match expectations may, at the least, point out a simple mistake in calculations or experimental technique but might, in other cases, point to something wholly new and interesting. "I have found it!" is a nice thing to hear in science, but all the REALLY good stuff comes after, "Huh, that's odd..."
Anyway, I hate chemistry because I'm too much of a fumble-fingers with the equipment, but I'm now a researcher (psychology) and I've taken those lessons to heart. In my lab, we work on several areas that are considered controversial (effects of individual background differences on interactions etc). I spent the last academic year working on a project that wound up yielding a null-result, and so that's what we reported and eventually got published. Was it sexy? No - a validation of the status quo isn't nearly as thrilling as exposing something new. But it was honest, it was "important" in the sense that it lent validation to processes already in place, and that's cool.
I don't know. If you are willing to break into the school's system to improve your grades, and generally compromise their data, I am not sure it is _they_ turning you into a criminal. I think, if you do that, _you_ are already over the line.
Bingo! If the need to break into a building to pull off your plan doesn't deter you, then I'd say that you're already well on the road to criminality.
Perhaps, if he were, I don't know, 5 years old or mentally retarded, then I could understand him not knowing the difference between right and wrong. However, I'm pretty sure that in this case he knew what he was doing was wrong and simply didn't care. Perhaps the temporary removal of his freedoms will teach him to use his freedoms more wisely.
Wake up! Jail time for changing grades, man. Snap out of it.
No, jail time for breaking & entering (burglary) to commit fraud. Repeatedly.
Jail time is not the solution for everything.
I certainly agree. In the case of breaking and entering to commit fraud, however, I think it might not be a bad thing.
He's not going to get 38 years, probably won't get more than 1-2, and I think that is entirely appropriate for something like burglary combined with the other stuff he did. I'm not in favor of absurd penalties, but when your cunning plan involves breaking into a building that you are not authorized to enter, yeah, I'd say you need to learn a lesson in the responsible use of your freedoms, and one that can be well taught by temporarily removing those freedoms.
Why would the malware developer do this? Easy:
:)) But really, you can't imagine a bored, socially inept 15 year old thinking it would be funny to use his newfound VB "skills" to fuck with people like this?
To be a dick, at the minimum. In some cases, as a prelude to blackmail, but really, being a dick is the most probable situation.
Why do some people spraypaint graffiti on things? Why do some people key cars in parking lots? Why do some people throw rocks through windows? Because they're maladjusted assholes who want to fuck with people and see if they can get away from it. Sometimes they're not aware of the consequences to others, and sometimes they are and just don't give a fuck.
Having the (not necessarily advanced) technical abilities needed to create or deploy basic malware does not somehow suddenly make an individual morally incapable of doing such a thing. I'm going to guess you're not a litigator if you don't understand this very common human trait (and good for you - try to keep a little bit of innocence
And, I certainly can fault the employer. If the technical advice they were getting was so inept that some of the basic forensic stuff was missed (40 websites in a minute in the logs?) then that's really their fault for hiring inept people to do that job. Further, if those same technical people were so inept as to pass on a machine from one user to the next without at least reimaging it, that's on them. And, finally, there's the issue of the benefit of the doubt. Suspend the guy with pay while an investigation is done (by people who are clearly more skilled than whomever they had on staff) rather than fire him and submit charges on trafficking in child porn! I mean, jesus, even though the guy has been cleared, that kind of thing will *ruin* someone's life.
Think of the children, sure, and hang 'em high if someone's found to actually be involved in child porn, but don't go wrecking people's lives (and the lives of their loved ones) on a witch-hunt backed solely on the basis of obviously incompetent technical advice.
I would think it's easier to detect by the current methods - seeing transit across the stellar disc, seeing perturbations/wobbles would be easier if they happen more frequently. I bet, if we had the ability to see them directly we'd probably find a few on much longer periods that are less amenable to the transit/wobble detection method.
Or not. I mean, space is really fucking big. Even locally we have a hard time finding things that are "only" a bit further out than pluto...
I'm a student, too. I also do a LOT of traveling. And I own a Kindle.
I will say this: why would you want paper textbooks when you can have a textbook that allows you to do a full-text search? Also, you can make plenty of "margin" notes. And highlight a row and look up words or Wiki any term you see in there to get a (very rough but generally sufficient) bit of info on anything in a text that makes you curious? Most textbooks are horribly indexed in my experience - full-text search makes that irrelevant.
As for getting books cheap, how does "free" grab ya? I've been downloading tons from gutenberg and other sources like that, there are MANY places that allow you to get a bunch of books for free (legally) and of course, torrents to get them (not as legal) for free as well if you don't have qualms about that. It is trivial to convert from one format to another with free software and, really, the DRM is, as usual, only a minor speedbump for anyone who wants to circumvent it.
I do think the $10 for a "bestseller" type book is way too much for this kind of thing, but I don't really read a lot of those. There are plenty of ebooks available for less, though - $9.99 is the high. I've bought maybe 10-20 books through amazon and spent a total of $15 or so, give or take a few cents. I've used both the amazon paid and free conversion services (the difference is that the paid one takes your document from whatever format to the AZW format and sends it directly to your kindle for ten cents while the free version just emails it back to your address and you have to manually load it onto your kindle) and it has been great.
Would I have bought it if I hadn't been given it as a gift? After using it quite a bit, I can say hell yeah. This is the kind of thing that people need to use for awhile and see how it works before they can see just how useful a tool it is. If they had these available for people to play with at bookstores they'd probably sell quite a few more.
How is it that we can have brain damage and "destroy" some parts of the brain, but the minute we pass something through it physically, the entire thing ceases to function- instantly, instead of certain areas slowly fading away. I'm sure there is a simple answer and this may more than likely be a stupid question, but it has been making me curious.
I don't think the entire thing shuts off like a switch just from physical injury - there's probably a considerable amount of activity that goes on when the shit hits the fan (or a bullet punches through). But, as for why poking a hole in it with a bullet is so incredibly letal: Hydrostatic shock does a LOT of damage to the brain as a whole. Then you have things like bone-fragments, possible ricochet inside the skull, swelling, etc. The fact that it's possible to get shot in the head and survive at all, let alone in some cases recover pretty much full function, is a testament to how connected and resilient the brain is.
They aren't talking about having as many transistors as we have neurons - they are talking about raw processing power.
While I'm sure all of what you said in regards to the density of transistors/neurons is true, that's not where the sticking point would be. The brain is a MASSIVELY parallel system comprised of lots of very slow processors. The storage capacity has been estimated at somewhere between 3 and 3000 terabytes, which is not particularly daunting to duplicate. In any case, there is an upper limit on the number of simultaneous operations the brain does, the overall number of operations in a given time-frame, and storage capacity.
So, the whole "as powerful as a human brain" thing really just means "roughly the same number of operations/time unit, roughly the same storage capacity." Which, yeah, I totally can see that being hit by the 2020s.
However, as we all know, processing capacity is not all. Without some radical advances in software, all we'd have is a set-up that is what we've got today, just a hell of a lot faster. I mean, I am not cutting edge by any means, but I don't think there are tons of things that people are wanting to implement in software that they can't do because the hardware isn't beefy enough to pull it off (except, I guess, for those "hard" math problems or quantum computing stuff).
Personally, I think making a human-like AI would be a waste. I don't want something that thinks like me, I want something that thinks about things in ways I never could. Not necessarily "smarter" - just different. What about something that instead of thinking by rules of logic was able to process things from an ethical standpoint - it could "see" solutions to ethical dilemmas in the same way that we could "see" mathematical solutions. Or perhaps something that experiences time in a much different fashion than we do? I have no idea how that kind of stuff could be implemented, but it would be MUCH more interesting to interact with than just another "human-but-faster" type of intelligence.
Exactly. About 40% of people who vote will vote Republican, even if the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler were the nom, simply because he's a Republican. Ditto for the Democrats - 40% would happily vote for Stalin's ghost because of the D.
About 10% of people will usually vote their party (hold their nose and vote) unless the candidate is a true abortion, in which case they'll stay home. Or, if the other party fields a really great candidate or someone who gets people excited they might cross-over for that election.
And then there's the remaining 10% who look at policies and track-records and generally take all this political stuff really seriously.
I think I'm in that 20%, maybe in that "really independent" 10% - I mean, I find it absurd that in a nation of 300 million people we only have 2 major parties. But, generally, I do feel like any 3rd party candidate will be a total waste of a vote at best. I am so pissed at Perot for doing his on-again off-again run - not because I liked his positions, but because he could have gotten enough of the vote to secure public funds for a 3rd party, which would have opened the door for more diversity in politics, if only he hadn't backed out of the race and then come back into it.
All concerns of security aside, I do think that sophisticated direct brain connections with computers will be coming along pretty soon - think along the lines of what they're doing now with robotic limbs and such. It absolutely won't surprise me if within a few more years (5-10?) that kind of stuff, an artificial limb being controlled by the brain exactly as a natural limb is, is completely commonplace. And direct brain control is the best interface around, really.
For me, the huge thing will be when I'm able to control a computer's inputs directly with my brain to do tasks I currently do now. For instance, while I'm a decent typist, it's still much slower than my thoughts, and I will often race well ahead of what I'm able to type while I'm writing. I'd love it if I could interface directly and just think out what I want to say and then edit out all of the noise. I've got ideas for images I want to create but, unfortunately, I've not got the steady hands necessary to translate those images from my mind to paper or screen. A direct interface might, if advanced enough, allow me to at least put the basics of an idea out there and then repair it later.
I'd love it if I could interact with objects around me as well - for instance, at university I have a swipe card that lets me into the research lab I work in, but it'd be much better if doors and elevators and such could know I'm there, know I'm me, and make a judgment - "Oh, she's alone, she's authorized to enter, open the doors" or "Oh, she's authorized to be here, but she's with someone else, so I will ask her to verify their guest status" or even "She's authorized and not alone, but she's activated a panic button, so I'll alert security, record the scene" or whatever. Basically, a smart environment with my implants acting as the key.
None of that seems particularly unrealistic to me - yes, it'd require a lot of training/calibration to get things working accurately, but it all seems reasonable at this point. I'm not asking for Neuromancer-like "jacking in" or anything - I mean, visual implants would be great, and I can think of thousands of things I'd do with them - but for right now I'd settle for much of what I've described. Heck, I'd settle for implants that'd only let me do what I can already do with a mouse, keyboard, microphone and camera - I can think of lots of neat tricks that could be done to make my life easier like that.
What is "stuff that supports terrorism or undermines [...] national security?" I mean that as a serious question.
Am I "undermining national security" or "supporting terrorism" if I speak out against the invasion of Iraq? According to the President and many of the Republican talking heads, I am. According to John McCain, I'm supporting terrorism because I favor Obama over him. So, a video of me talking about why I support Obama would then be a video supporting terrorism.
What's a "time of war" anyway? Is the "war on terror" considered to be a time of war? Okay then, what's the definition of "winning" that war? How will we know when it's over and we're allowed to speak freely again?
For what it's worth, I do agree that there should be limits to free speech in time of war. The limits should include operational details that, were they made public, could unduly put troops at risk. Heck, we can even have those limits outside of wartime too, I'm feeling generous. But that's it - no other limits save those that have already been decided on (fire in a crowded theater, etc.).
Personally, I think all of the people who are so eager to throw away our freedoms because they believe doing so will somehow protect them are the real risk to national security. Doing so might (probably won't, but I'll allow the benefit of the doubt) make you a little safer from foreign extremists and suicide bombers, but it will DEFINITELY put you at risk of being completely crushed under the boot of your government.
I have no problem with a company VOLUNTARILY enforcing whatever community standards they feel like, but I am absolutely opposed to the government trying to dictate what those standards are. It is impossible for the government to make a "request" that isn't coercive. Lieberman making this request is abhorrent to me. He swore an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, and I'd like to think that a Senator should uphold the spirit, not just the letter. Even though he did not attempt to pass a law in this case abridging free speech, he de facto attempted to use the power of his position to make it so. Absolutely abhorrent.
The $50 is the early adopter tax. Why wouldn't a for-profit corporation take advantage of the market of people willing to pay $50 to play it _NOW_? And then, in 3-6 months or so, the price of the game will likely drop or there will be free trials offered in some way, so that the market of people like you, who don't want to "pay twice" can be covered also.
Jesus, it's like I can hear your 5 chins slapping back and forth in outrage as your Cheeto-stained fingers pound at your keyboard.
Gimme a break. Talk about spoiled. You know, there are people who still use dial-up. Does it suck? A little. But talking about political action so rich people can get broadband in the middle of nowhere where they chose their vacation home? Get out of here.
(tanslated) I am poor. It took me 3 hours to type my outraged response to the OP because my sausage-like peasant fingers cannot use keyboards designed around the graceful digits of my social betters.
Okay, so I'm kidding, but really, your response read like a lot of projection. The OP had a question about how to get a service out to an area and put a restriction on it, that the solution had to not mess with the aesthetics of the place being served. They tossed out some of their ideas (and I agree, trying to get the G to foot the bill is pretty goofy) and asked for ideas.
Your brilliant solution to their problem was "Deal with it!" I guess that's one way of addressing it, but it isn't particularly helpful. Why bother?
My suggestion: It is possible to camouflage satellite dishes to make them look pretty much like anything. If the only argument about satellite is the aesthetics, then it's easily fixed.
110% with you on the search functionality, and, in fact, I'm amazed that more people haven't mentioned it already. As to literature, however...
The market for eReaders isn't really "anyone who reads books of whatever sort." If eBooks were MUCH cheaper (like, $3-5 MAX, with most being under a buck, rather than $10 or more for "in demand" books and over a buck for many others), then maybe. But most people don't see the benefit of going digital for reading because there just isn't much financial incentive for them to do so.
The advantage of an eReader is weight. portability and readability. An eBook containing 5000 texts weighs under a pound; according to the movers, my library which contains roughly that many books, weighs several tons. I like to read and I like to travel: I spent the last couple of summers bopping around Asia and I was really hurting for reading material - I did not want to lug around a bunch of books so that I had something to read at night. On top of that, the selection of English language books was paltry unless I wanted romance novels or mystery thrillers, and even then, what was left was 2-3x more expensive it would have been otherwise. And this summer I'm going back, this time to Korea to teach ESL for a year - I'd like to accumulate as little stuff as possible, and books tend to gather quickly around me. So, enter the Kindle, which I got as a graduation present and thousands of texts I've gathered (legally and most for free) - I'm set for a LONG time, and it still weighs under a pound, still takes up the same amount of space, etc. Lasts for about 5-6 days between charges if I don't use the wireless, which, for me, is plenty (cause if I'm away from electricity for 5-6 days at a stretch, either the point is to not have the conveniences of home or things are entirely out of hand and reading isn't an option anyway).
As for readability - last summer I brought my MacBook with me while I travel. It's great, as a laptop - really light weight, etc. Except, compared to something the size and weight of the Kindle, it's really kind of heavy and bulky. I have to close it up when I want to move. It only runs for 3 hours or so on batteries. And the display is nice, but even when I find a power source to plug it in, it's still pretty hard on my eyes after awhile. Not so the Kindle display. I can read it just as easily in direct sunlight as I can in darkness (I have a cheapie LED light-bar that I can attach to it - been using that a lot (a few weeks now of reading at night in a dark room) and it's not needed a new battery yet. I've taken it out to the beach and wasn't worried about getting sand on it, which was a big worry (clumsy me) for my laptop.
If I'm at home, yeah, curling up with a book is great. But I won't be home for a year at least. So, for me, even if I hadn't gotten one as a gift, I'd probably have plonked down the money to get an eReader of some sort. Anyway, gadget fiends and people like me are the market for these kinds of things right now, really.
For a comic book movie, BB was *fantastic*. Personally, I liked the somewhat more realistic approach to Batman much better than the overly stylized Burton version. Which is not to say the first Batman wasn't great fun, but not my cuppa. It always annoyed me that each film had Bruce Wayne with a different woman, no explanation of what happened, just moving on along. No character development at all, unless you count Bats coming out of the closet in "Batman and Robin." :p
:)
In BB they had to re-launch the franchise and set up a larger world - both of which they did well. The super-secret shadow organization is, I suspect, going to be an ongoing thing that Batman has to deal with - and I like that. Putting the one movie into a larger, coherent context is a good thing, IMO. Which is also one of the things I liked about IM: it isn't just a one-off thing, he's been put into a larger framework, making the world more believable and interesting.
Also, Burton bores me. Yeah, goth, creepy-cute, got it. Blah.
Anyway, I had a fantastic time at both IM and BB, and that's really all that matters.
Alas, I use OSX, so I guess I'll just get a lot of attention from gay men.
More like, TOTALLY FREAKIN' AWESOME, MAN!
I'm a comics fangirl, but never have I been much into Iron Man - generally speaking, I could just never get into the character. However, I do like the Ultimates version of Iron Man and had been hoping that the movie version was more like that and I was not disappointed. Robert Downey, Jr. did a fantastic job. This is easily the best Marvel comic movie that's been put out and is at or near the quality of Batman Begins. Or, this movie is as good as "Fantastic Four 2: What the FUCK were they THINKING?" was bad.
I saw it at 2:30 yesterday, digital theater with stadium seating - the place was packed. The audience was a pretty good mix of various groups, and it seemed like everyone really enjoyed the film. 90% of them took off before the end of the credits, though and missed a scene that personally I thought was great, but I could see how someone less knowledgeable of comic lore might not really care about.
I won't offer any spoilers, save to say that there were numerous little bits that show the direction the (obvious) sequels will follow, and I am completely psyched for those.
Also, the trailers were like a never-ending stream of awesome. Dark Knight, Hulk and Indiana Jones, it's going to be a FANTASTIC movie season for me.
Try Crackdown - it's sort of cyber-punkish and a LOT of fun, especially over Live!
Basically you're a cyber-cop that gets upgrades through game play, and goes from being a bad-ass to essentially being a super-hero. I wouldn't call it a deep story game, but there is a plot, the world is kind of open, and it made me stay up many a night, cackling into my XBL headset as my friends and I would see how long we could keep a corpse in the air with our heat-seeking rocket launchers. Fun and since it's older you can get it for cheap.
And other than to say that you carry around all your music on your iPod is there an actual practical point of this? Do you routinely spend 2+ months away from your computer listening to music 24/7?
No, but I routinely listen to music when I am not at home and often feel like changing what I'm listening to. So why wouldn't I want to have my entire music collection readily available so that I can have music that suits my mood?
I don't know about you, but I am unable to predict with 100% accuracy what I will feel like listening to throughout my day when I leave home in the morning.