It sounds like the EEE would do everything you're asking for. My brother owns a 1005 HE and it has Flash, a camera (mediocre picture quality, but sufficient for video conferencing), Bluetooth, WiFi, and enough hard drive space to store a hundred ripped movies (speakers are mediocre quality, use headphones when watching movies on it). Ubuntu Netbook Remix was easy to install, and provides simple games (follow this exactly. Battery life is great. 8 hours web surfing in real world usage (the 10.5 hour claim on the package is, of course, crap).
The only downsides I know of are the tiny keyboard and the small screen. I could not stand to write more than a couple of pages on the keyboard, and the screen is, well, small. If you can try using a friends to get a feel for the keyboard and screen, and you think you could live with them, it's certainly worth it. IMHO, a tablet is just asking to get broken, and you're better off spending $350 on a netbook than twice that on a first generation novelty device. The EEE is stable, mature, and, most importantly, not locked into a proprietary OS.
These are my sentiments exactly, but remember that you and I are not the target audience here. Apple sells fashion accessories, not electronics. People will buy one of these (the most expensive one no doubt), just to impress their friends. Yes, there may be some people who genuinely need the features offered by this (although I cannot think what features these are off the top of my head), but the majority will be buying just for the sake of owning the latest and greatest.
P.S. If you ever build a time machine and happen to run into me circa 2001 deciding not to buy Apple stock because the iPod is an overpriced, locked down piece of crap that no one will ever buy, slap me. Hard.
I've heard this a lot on Slashdot, and, frankly, it makes a bit of sense. Space is expensive, hostile, and shows no payoffs.
The thing is, inevitably, we are going to need to get off this rock if we are to survive as a species. The sooner the better; some gamma rays could come and kill us all before I click submit.
There is no reason we shouldn't dump as much cash as possible into space exploration, particularly manned space exploration. There's no downside except for money lost, and I've yet to see that cash spent bailing out banks or building missiles is any better than cash spent on space. Actually it's worse: cash spent to take us to the moon doesn't simply vanish, it goes into the pockets of hard working people whilst teaching us how to survive in space. Cash spent on missiles accomplishes the same thing [cash spent on bailouts goes into the pockets of the rich], except that instead of advancing science, it advances hatred for America.
Lack of money spent on NASA does not appear to equate to lower taxes, better schools, or anything else with real benefit. So what exactly are we gaining from cutting this program? Let's hope Russia, China or India can pick up where we dropped the ball and
I thought part of meningitis was often the breakdown of the blood brain barrier, thus allowing the immune system in. If the blood brain barrier is still active (as it should be in prion diseases, unless they specifically target astrocytes), shouldn't it be impossible for the immune system to enter the brain?
GP is not saying society as a whole can't do impressive things (for ancient cultures religions like animism were able to bind people together to accomplish e.g. Stonehenge or Easter Island), as an anthropologist you know a lot more than I, the ignorant layman, do about that.
I believe what the GP was referring to was the inability of the individual to form cohesive, specific, long-term plans. This is pretty much the domain of the human pre-frontal cortex - not many other species evolved to have the types of planning seen there. The PFC integrates information from our environments and tries to make the best decision possible based on that information. But, being a new evolutionary development, there are still lots of bugs to work out. Advertisements, propaganda, and their ilk are able to trick the PFC into thinking that a decision is the "best" one, when it is in fact terrible.
Our failure to deal with collective problems is, likely a collective one, but our failure to deal with specific individual problems is a "failure" of our PFC. The classic case study for this is Phineas Gage, who decided to experiment with blasting power and iron rods. After he suffered PFC damage, he lacked the planning skills to lead a normal life, instead "living for the moment". It's an extreme case, but I suspect that the "failure of our biological circuitry" really is behind a lot of people's inability to plan 10 years ahead (note that "failure of our biological environment" may also play a pretty big role).
No. They are action-RPGs. Vampire - Bloodlines, Deus Ex, Diablo, Defense of the Ancients. These are action RPGs. The very best (the first two I listed) allow you to change the story, and have loads of dialogue to back up the action. A different type (also good, but not to my tastes so much) eschews story for pure stat-based combat. These tend to have superior combat systems, but lack decent dialogue and interesting characters.
I concur with the GP that an RTS-RPG would be awesome. Dawn of War II had a fairly solid single player campaign, and it could have been truly spectacular if it had contained interactive dialogue, quests, and the ability for player choices to impact the story. Think Planescape - Torment with a cover system, suppression, the need to flank, build defenses, and the freedom to solve situations multiple ways (will I use dialogue, bribe the guard, kill him, or try to micromanage my stealth units past him?). That would be one hell of a game.
I am obviously not willing to rule out the possibility that an AI could emerge from genetically programmed botnets.
All I'm saying is that by comparing the closest analogue that I'm familiar with - biological systems - things look strongly against anything sentient. Look how many species there are. How many do we consider sapient? 5? 6? All closely related. Combine this with much stricter short-term selection pressures (shorter generation time) on at botnet than exist in the biological world (where the timescale is much, much longer, allowing things like culture, mating rituals, and sexual selection (you know, the thing that selects for smarter people; there's no discernible biological advantage to being smart) to develop), and I'm looking at a picture that screams "no AI".
The direct analogues we use are very likely not too limiting - there's no reason to believe that Spiking NNs in particular aren't good enough to serve as AIs - we just have no idea of what how to put them together. To put it another way, we don't know the evolutionary selection pressure for intelligence.
Two points: First, the biomass of ants (limited intelligence) is much, much greater than that of humans, monkeys, or pretty much anything else. No virus has ever become self aware. Or even gotten up to the point of having neurons. There's just no need for it. Sure, I could be wrong, but even if I was, an AI is still not going to be smart enough to do anything besides crack vulnerabilities (if it wastes the resources trying, it will be out-competed by other AIs that don't contemplate the meaning of their existence, but rather crack for cracking's sake).
Second, an AI that is any less intelligent than a monkey isn't going to be much of a strong AI. Even a monkey-level intelligence requires more computing power than we have available today. Therefore, no botnet in the next few years will become a strong AI. QED.
OK, ABP has 11 million users. That's great. Can we compare to another open source project? VLC has a few more downloads than that. (I know I can't compare downloads to users, so I won't).
Let's try this instead: 1.7 billion people running web browsers, 47% running Firefox (815 million FF users), and only 11 million people choose to install ABP? That's 1.35%. Most of those are tech savvy people who are harder to brainwash with ads anyway. It's noise.
It's simple, really. Wikipedia is a little lacking on this subject, but the basic idea is that you have botnets trying bruteforce attacks to find every possible vulnerability. Those that are good at cracking into systems will propagate, those that fail will not. It'll be sort-of the system that biological viruses use. Actually, exactly the same, except digital instead of physical. I predict that, similar to real viruses, malware that doesn't slow down the PC will have the highest "fitness" and propagate more widely, just like viruses today that kill the victim are not as common as, say, the common cold.
To the wiseass who will respond with a Skynet joke: No, there is no danger of that at all. These bots are looking for security loopholes, not the meaning of life, and are running on computers that are nowhere near powerful enough to emulate a human-like mind (I suspect that this isn't the issue at any rate, but we'll know in 10 years when the hardware is better).
You will have to give me a reference for Science or Nature where they said the debate was over. I can't seem to find it. However, some researchers publishing a paper calling for political action to prevent a problem doesn't "sound like the scientific method" because its not strictly science. They reviewed a bunch of other people's work and said "Things are happening, we should do something". That's not proposing a hypothesis, it's looking at many, many supported hypotheses and saying that they probably have real-world implications. (Without seeing the original paper, I'm guessing as to what they said.)
Now, if you read the Nature piece, which has been linked to several times on Slashdot before, you'd see that there is no violation in the scientific method there. They said, simply, "there does not appear to be any falsified data in these leaked emails." If you'd like to publish a paper to the contrary, you're more than welcome to replicate their methods (read the emails), draw your own conclusions, and submit it to Nature. Of course, you'll have to cite the actual emails where the researchers talked about falsifying data.
If they said, "the ends justify the means", even between the lines, I can't find it. In fact, they criticized the scientists for not releasing data in the last paragraph.
No, actually both were the same: H.M. had anterograde amnesia (everything after his surgery he can't recall). The doctor that worked with him had to introduce herself every time she walked into the room with him, just like the guy from Memento.
It would be nice if it was just a repository. But, it's supported by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think-tank organization. Libertarianism is fine, however, getting large chunks of cash from Exxon et al. leads me to be just a little skeptical when I read that stuff (citation).
And what, precisely, was wrong with the Nature editorial linked to above?
Someone's pushing an agenda here, and it's not chillax137.
Sure, maybe realclimate.org is "not to be trusted", but when Nature (investigates separately and) agrees with their conclusions, I'm inclined to agree with them even if climate-gate.org does not. Moreover, is it possible that (even if only going by the name and ignoring the type of content that they post) climate-gate.org might just have an agenda of their own to push?
Nature is one of the top scientific journals (maybe the top journal), the only bias I notice when reading it is a pretty consistent pro-science one.
What would you prefer to call denialists? The majority have no credibility to speak on anything remotely related to science, as such calling them "skeptical scientists" or some politically correct BS just won't cut it. They're just parroting stuff they've heard from others, and only a (very) small step above the evolution denialists.
However, you'll notice that when the article was talking about someone with a papers published in the field (Stephen McIntyre), they said that his paper
question[ed] the uniqueness of recent global warming
Sorry if that is "bias" in your book.
Also, remember that this was an editorial piece. Wanna see what real bias looks like in an editorial piece? Go ahead, click here.That's from the supposedly reputable WSJ.
Besides, I have no desire to get into a flame war (oops, too late) with someone who has already made up his mind about this issue (judging by your comment history), so if you respond, please give me some good, solid [peer-reviewed is best] evidence to back up your claims.
Thank you for the links, best article I've read all day.
A couple of quotes from the Nature editorial for the TL;DR crowd:
A fair reading of the e-mails reveals nothing to support the denialists' conspiracy theories. In one of the more controversial exchanges, UEA scientists sharply criticized the quality of two papers that question the uniqueness of recent global warming (S. McIntyre and R. McKitrick Energy Environ. 14, 751–771; 2003 and W. Soon and S. Baliunas Clim. Res. 23, 89–110; 2003) and vowed to keep at least the first paper out of the upcoming Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one another in (supposed) privacy, however, what matters is how they acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers.
(Emphasis mine).
The stolen e-mails have prompted queries about whether Nature will investigate some of the researchers' own papers. One e-mail talked of displaying the data using a 'trick' — slang for a clever (and legitimate) technique, but a word that denialists have used to accuse the researchers of fabricating their results. It is Nature's policy to investigate such matters if there are substantive reasons for concern, but nothing we have seen so far in the e-mails qualifies.
There is far, far too much politics in science. I don't know why Dr. Jones decided to step down, but I'm inclined to believe (after reading the Nature editorial) that the reasons were almost entirely political.
OK, that full app is perfect. How can I make it so that when I hit Ctrl+Esc it brings up ksysguard instead of the lite app? (It almost seems like that should be the default anyway.)
I don't see I/O in my distro (Kubuntu latest), so I'll wait for the next update.
Also, if it would be possible to display total memory usage, and CPU usage on each core that would be cool. Graphs for CPU and memory usage over time (total) would also be nifty (I know there's a plasma applet for that, but I'd prefer to see it integrated with system activity).
Is there any way to show network and disk usage (read/writes)? IANA programmer, but if that would be possible it would be awesome. I suspect that a lot of the slowdown I'm seeing comes from the hard drive or network, not CPU/RAM.
Although, really, its quite a fine little tool. I use it on occasion, but since KDE has been pretty stable recently, I find myself using it less and less.
RTFA. There are four competitions, and on the only "complete" game, all AIs have the completeMapInformation flag in the Broodwar API disabled. Therefore, fog of war is on.
I think you're underestimating the complexity of the human brain. Neurons come in hundreds of different types, and make synapses with up to 100,000 different neurons. That's so may decades ahead of the nanotech we have today that talking about it is more fiction than science.
The brain doesn't make all the synaptic connections perfectly the first time around, either, and they need to be adjusted when learning - that's why we have stuff like long term potentiation and depression. Oh, and neurotransmitters (more properly neuropeptides) can alter existing functional (metabolic) properties of neurons. So for this type of thing to work, you've got to have nanotechnology that works on a level that is on par with our "crappy human cells". If they're more efficient, they won't be 100% compatible with the existing connections, and therefore nothing will work. So right, we can't use computer-based cells; everything will have to be done in wet-ware. And again, the brain has serious problems integrating new neurons into existing systems unless they evolved specifically to be able to incorporate new neurons, like the olfactory system and hippocampus.
I'm not saying that such a system is impossible, just that it's at least a hundred years off. If you want immortality, you're better off betting on advances in labeling techniques that will allow the mystical "brain-scan and upload" just like Ray Kurtzweil. Yeah, you have the same continuity of consciousness problem that everyone is discussing here, but that's more a philosophical discussion than a scientific one. My real concern is that early transfer techniques will be piss-poor and not copy all synaptic connections, leading to early transfers not being themselves, and people dismissing the whole technology as evil and worthless.
One final point:
We have already made BCIs (brain computer interface) before, we know how it all works.
We do not know very much at all about BCIs (if we did, cochlear implants would be better than regular hearing), and they are not related - not by a long shot - to what you're talking about.
Speaking as someone who has no option of anything other than dial-up, I can tell you that it most certainly is worthless.
Remember back in 1999 how it would take 15 seconds to load a page? Now imagine that every page has flash instead of pictures and most serves will decide to give you a timeout message if you take longer than 45 seconds to respond to a request. Youtube, torrents, the whole digital distribution revolution is totally useless.
I dare you, go back to dial-up for two weeks. Completely worthless Internet. Yeah, I've still got Internet at the library, but that doesn't allow me to get patches for my OS or watch Youtube, now does it?
You're way out of my league on this one, but if I had to guess I'd say that any alteration to an observable property will have a similar effect on the particle as observing the spin. Check the Wikipedia article on quantum entanglement.
Also, you can (probably) get information out of a singularity. See here.
A physicist will be able to explain better than I can why entanglement can't be used for information transfer (such as FTL or what you describe), but my simplistic understanding is that in order to observe the spin on the particle, you have to actually observe it, and by observing, you might alter its spin. You have no way of knowing whether the spin you just observed is a legit signal, or a bunk one induced by your measurement.
Any signal transmitted becomes indistinguishable from a random number generator, and you're back to square one.
On the topic of the linked "paper", this seems like the sort of utterly ridiculous nonsense that Penrose or Novikov would cook up (especially the latter). I'm not going to dignify it with a response other than to predict that Occam's Razor will slice it apart.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like the EEE would do everything you're asking for. My brother owns a 1005 HE and it has Flash, a camera (mediocre picture quality, but sufficient for video conferencing), Bluetooth, WiFi, and enough hard drive space to store a hundred ripped movies (speakers are mediocre quality, use headphones when watching movies on it). Ubuntu Netbook Remix was easy to install, and provides simple games (follow this exactly. Battery life is great. 8 hours web surfing in real world usage (the 10.5 hour claim on the package is, of course, crap).
The only downsides I know of are the tiny keyboard and the small screen. I could not stand to write more than a couple of pages on the keyboard, and the screen is, well, small. If you can try using a friends to get a feel for the keyboard and screen, and you think you could live with them, it's certainly worth it. IMHO, a tablet is just asking to get broken, and you're better off spending $350 on a netbook than twice that on a first generation novelty device. The EEE is stable, mature, and, most importantly, not locked into a proprietary OS.
That makes sense. Thanks for the reply.
These are my sentiments exactly, but remember that you and I are not the target audience here. Apple sells fashion accessories, not electronics. People will buy one of these (the most expensive one no doubt), just to impress their friends. Yes, there may be some people who genuinely need the features offered by this (although I cannot think what features these are off the top of my head), but the majority will be buying just for the sake of owning the latest and greatest.
P.S. If you ever build a time machine and happen to run into me circa 2001 deciding not to buy Apple stock because the iPod is an overpriced, locked down piece of crap that no one will ever buy, slap me. Hard.
I've heard this a lot on Slashdot, and, frankly, it makes a bit of sense. Space is expensive, hostile, and shows no payoffs.
The thing is, inevitably, we are going to need to get off this rock if we are to survive as a species. The sooner the better; some gamma rays could come and kill us all before I click submit.
There is no reason we shouldn't dump as much cash as possible into space exploration, particularly manned space exploration. There's no downside except for money lost, and I've yet to see that cash spent bailing out banks or building missiles is any better than cash spent on space. Actually it's worse: cash spent to take us to the moon doesn't simply vanish, it goes into the pockets of hard working people whilst teaching us how to survive in space. Cash spent on missiles accomplishes the same thing [cash spent on bailouts goes into the pockets of the rich], except that instead of advancing science, it advances hatred for America.
Lack of money spent on NASA does not appear to equate to lower taxes, better schools, or anything else with real benefit. So what exactly are we gaining from cutting this program? Let's hope Russia, China or India can pick up where we dropped the ball and
I thought part of meningitis was often the breakdown of the blood brain barrier, thus allowing the immune system in. If the blood brain barrier is still active (as it should be in prion diseases, unless they specifically target astrocytes), shouldn't it be impossible for the immune system to enter the brain?
GP is not saying society as a whole can't do impressive things (for ancient cultures religions like animism were able to bind people together to accomplish e.g. Stonehenge or Easter Island), as an anthropologist you know a lot more than I, the ignorant layman, do about that.
I believe what the GP was referring to was the inability of the individual to form cohesive, specific, long-term plans. This is pretty much the domain of the human pre-frontal cortex - not many other species evolved to have the types of planning seen there. The PFC integrates information from our environments and tries to make the best decision possible based on that information. But, being a new evolutionary development, there are still lots of bugs to work out. Advertisements, propaganda, and their ilk are able to trick the PFC into thinking that a decision is the "best" one, when it is in fact terrible.
Our failure to deal with collective problems is, likely a collective one, but our failure to deal with specific individual problems is a "failure" of our PFC. The classic case study for this is Phineas Gage, who decided to experiment with blasting power and iron rods. After he suffered PFC damage, he lacked the planning skills to lead a normal life, instead "living for the moment". It's an extreme case, but I suspect that the "failure of our biological circuitry" really is behind a lot of people's inability to plan 10 years ahead (note that "failure of our biological environment" may also play a pretty big role).
No. They are action-RPGs. Vampire - Bloodlines, Deus Ex, Diablo, Defense of the Ancients. These are action RPGs. The very best (the first two I listed) allow you to change the story, and have loads of dialogue to back up the action. A different type (also good, but not to my tastes so much) eschews story for pure stat-based combat. These tend to have superior combat systems, but lack decent dialogue and interesting characters.
I concur with the GP that an RTS-RPG would be awesome. Dawn of War II had a fairly solid single player campaign, and it could have been truly spectacular if it had contained interactive dialogue, quests, and the ability for player choices to impact the story. Think Planescape - Torment with a cover system, suppression, the need to flank, build defenses, and the freedom to solve situations multiple ways (will I use dialogue, bribe the guard, kill him, or try to micromanage my stealth units past him?). That would be one hell of a game.
Who cares, that's the funniest thing I've read in weeks.
I am obviously not willing to rule out the possibility that an AI could emerge from genetically programmed botnets.
All I'm saying is that by comparing the closest analogue that I'm familiar with - biological systems - things look strongly against anything sentient. Look how many species there are. How many do we consider sapient? 5? 6? All closely related. Combine this with much stricter short-term selection pressures (shorter generation time) on at botnet than exist in the biological world (where the timescale is much, much longer, allowing things like culture, mating rituals, and sexual selection (you know, the thing that selects for smarter people; there's no discernible biological advantage to being smart) to develop), and I'm looking at a picture that screams "no AI".
The direct analogues we use are very likely not too limiting - there's no reason to believe that Spiking NNs in particular aren't good enough to serve as AIs - we just have no idea of what how to put them together. To put it another way, we don't know the evolutionary selection pressure for intelligence.
Two points: First, the biomass of ants (limited intelligence) is much, much greater than that of humans, monkeys, or pretty much anything else. No virus has ever become self aware. Or even gotten up to the point of having neurons. There's just no need for it. Sure, I could be wrong, but even if I was, an AI is still not going to be smart enough to do anything besides crack vulnerabilities (if it wastes the resources trying, it will be out-competed by other AIs that don't contemplate the meaning of their existence, but rather crack for cracking's sake).
Second, an AI that is any less intelligent than a monkey isn't going to be much of a strong AI. Even a monkey-level intelligence requires more computing power than we have available today. Therefore, no botnet in the next few years will become a strong AI. QED.
OK, ABP has 11 million users. That's great. Can we compare to another open source project? VLC has a few more downloads than that. (I know I can't compare downloads to users, so I won't).
Let's try this instead: 1.7 billion people running web browsers, 47% running Firefox (815 million FF users), and only 11 million people choose to install ABP? That's 1.35%. Most of those are tech savvy people who are harder to brainwash with ads anyway. It's noise.
Not intelligent, jut autonomous.
It's simple, really. Wikipedia is a little lacking on this subject, but the basic idea is that you have botnets trying bruteforce attacks to find every possible vulnerability. Those that are good at cracking into systems will propagate, those that fail will not. It'll be sort-of the system that biological viruses use. Actually, exactly the same, except digital instead of physical. I predict that, similar to real viruses, malware that doesn't slow down the PC will have the highest "fitness" and propagate more widely, just like viruses today that kill the victim are not as common as, say, the common cold.
To the wiseass who will respond with a Skynet joke: No, there is no danger of that at all. These bots are looking for security loopholes, not the meaning of life, and are running on computers that are nowhere near powerful enough to emulate a human-like mind (I suspect that this isn't the issue at any rate, but we'll know in 10 years when the hardware is better).
You will have to give me a reference for Science or Nature where they said the debate was over. I can't seem to find it. However, some researchers publishing a paper calling for political action to prevent a problem doesn't "sound like the scientific method" because its not strictly science. They reviewed a bunch of other people's work and said "Things are happening, we should do something". That's not proposing a hypothesis, it's looking at many, many supported hypotheses and saying that they probably have real-world implications. (Without seeing the original paper, I'm guessing as to what they said.)
Now, if you read the Nature piece, which has been linked to several times on Slashdot before, you'd see that there is no violation in the scientific method there. They said, simply, "there does not appear to be any falsified data in these leaked emails." If you'd like to publish a paper to the contrary, you're more than welcome to replicate their methods (read the emails), draw your own conclusions, and submit it to Nature. Of course, you'll have to cite the actual emails where the researchers talked about falsifying data.
If they said, "the ends justify the means", even between the lines, I can't find it. In fact, they criticized the scientists for not releasing data in the last paragraph.
I agree with your last point 100%.
No, actually both were the same: H.M. had anterograde amnesia (everything after his surgery he can't recall). The doctor that worked with him had to introduce herself every time she walked into the room with him, just like the guy from Memento.
It would be nice if it was just a repository. But, it's supported by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think-tank organization. Libertarianism is fine, however, getting large chunks of cash from Exxon et al. leads me to be just a little skeptical when I read that stuff (citation).
And what, precisely, was wrong with the Nature editorial linked to above?
Someone's pushing an agenda here, and it's not chillax137.
Sure, maybe realclimate.org is "not to be trusted", but when Nature (investigates separately and) agrees with their conclusions, I'm inclined to agree with them even if climate-gate.org does not. Moreover, is it possible that (even if only going by the name and ignoring the type of content that they post) climate-gate.org might just have an agenda of their own to push?
Nature is one of the top scientific journals (maybe the top journal), the only bias I notice when reading it is a pretty consistent pro-science one.
What would you prefer to call denialists? The majority have no credibility to speak on anything remotely related to science, as such calling them "skeptical scientists" or some politically correct BS just won't cut it. They're just parroting stuff they've heard from others, and only a (very) small step above the evolution denialists.
However, you'll notice that when the article was talking about someone with a papers published in the field (Stephen McIntyre), they said that his paper
Sorry if that is "bias" in your book.
Also, remember that this was an editorial piece. Wanna see what real bias looks like in an editorial piece? Go ahead, click here.That's from the supposedly reputable WSJ.
Besides, I have no desire to get into a flame war (oops, too late) with someone who has already made up his mind about this issue (judging by your comment history), so if you respond, please give me some good, solid [peer-reviewed is best] evidence to back up your claims.
Thank you for the links, best article I've read all day.
A couple of quotes from the Nature editorial for the TL;DR crowd:
(Emphasis mine).
There is far, far too much politics in science. I don't know why Dr. Jones decided to step down, but I'm inclined to believe (after reading the Nature editorial) that the reasons were almost entirely political.
OK, that full app is perfect. How can I make it so that when I hit Ctrl+Esc it brings up ksysguard instead of the lite app? (It almost seems like that should be the default anyway.)
I don't see I/O in my distro (Kubuntu latest), so I'll wait for the next update.
Also, if it would be possible to display total memory usage, and CPU usage on each core that would be cool. Graphs for CPU and memory usage over time (total) would also be nifty (I know there's a plasma applet for that, but I'd prefer to see it integrated with system activity).
Is there any way to show network and disk usage (read/writes)? IANA programmer, but if that would be possible it would be awesome. I suspect that a lot of the slowdown I'm seeing comes from the hard drive or network, not CPU/RAM.
Although, really, its quite a fine little tool. I use it on occasion, but since KDE has been pretty stable recently, I find myself using it less and less.
Seriously, 10/10 good job.
RTFA. There are four competitions, and on the only "complete" game, all AIs have the completeMapInformation flag in the Broodwar API disabled. Therefore, fog of war is on.
I think you're underestimating the complexity of the human brain. Neurons come in hundreds of different types, and make synapses with up to 100,000 different neurons. That's so may decades ahead of the nanotech we have today that talking about it is more fiction than science.
The brain doesn't make all the synaptic connections perfectly the first time around, either, and they need to be adjusted when learning - that's why we have stuff like long term potentiation and depression. Oh, and neurotransmitters (more properly neuropeptides) can alter existing functional (metabolic) properties of neurons. So for this type of thing to work, you've got to have nanotechnology that works on a level that is on par with our "crappy human cells". If they're more efficient, they won't be 100% compatible with the existing connections, and therefore nothing will work. So right, we can't use computer-based cells; everything will have to be done in wet-ware. And again, the brain has serious problems integrating new neurons into existing systems unless they evolved specifically to be able to incorporate new neurons, like the olfactory system and hippocampus.
I'm not saying that such a system is impossible, just that it's at least a hundred years off. If you want immortality, you're better off betting on advances in labeling techniques that will allow the mystical "brain-scan and upload" just like Ray Kurtzweil. Yeah, you have the same continuity of consciousness problem that everyone is discussing here, but that's more a philosophical discussion than a scientific one. My real concern is that early transfer techniques will be piss-poor and not copy all synaptic connections, leading to early transfers not being themselves, and people dismissing the whole technology as evil and worthless.
One final point:
We do not know very much at all about BCIs (if we did, cochlear implants would be better than regular hearing), and they are not related - not by a long shot - to what you're talking about.
Speaking as someone who has no option of anything other than dial-up, I can tell you that it most certainly is worthless.
Remember back in 1999 how it would take 15 seconds to load a page? Now imagine that every page has flash instead of pictures and most serves will decide to give you a timeout message if you take longer than 45 seconds to respond to a request. Youtube, torrents, the whole digital distribution revolution is totally useless.
I dare you, go back to dial-up for two weeks. Completely worthless Internet. Yeah, I've still got Internet at the library, but that doesn't allow me to get patches for my OS or watch Youtube, now does it?
You're way out of my league on this one, but if I had to guess I'd say that any alteration to an observable property will have a similar effect on the particle as observing the spin. Check the Wikipedia article on quantum entanglement.
Also, you can (probably) get information out of a singularity. See here.
A physicist will be able to explain better than I can why entanglement can't be used for information transfer (such as FTL or what you describe), but my simplistic understanding is that in order to observe the spin on the particle, you have to actually observe it, and by observing, you might alter its spin. You have no way of knowing whether the spin you just observed is a legit signal, or a bunk one induced by your measurement.
Any signal transmitted becomes indistinguishable from a random number generator, and you're back to square one.
On the topic of the linked "paper", this seems like the sort of utterly ridiculous nonsense that Penrose or Novikov would cook up (especially the latter). I'm not going to dignify it with a response other than to predict that Occam's Razor will slice it apart.