so are you saying that all internet-based businesses which depend on having a reliable internet connection are just disasters waiting to happen?
i agree with you about the ISP situation, which is why i think municipal wifi initiatives where communities operate their own broadband networks circumventing traditional ISPs are a good idea. but that's part of a much bigger issue that isn't just limited to cloud computing; it is a fundamental problem with our communications infrastructure and corporate culture.
if countries in Europe and Asia can offer cheap, reliable high-speed broadband, then it should be feasible here in the U.S. as well. and the general trend in most areas is a gradual increase in internet speeds and reliability. and even here in the U.S. you can get redundant internet connections in case one goes down. however, WAN lines leased by businesses generally don't go down that often, so it's probably not very cost-effective for most businesses to lease a backup line. worse comes to worst, you use a hybrid setup where your cloud data is occasionally backed up to your local server(s) so that you get the benefits of cloud computing--access to your data everywhere, increased security/reliability/redundancy, etc.--but you can still operate when your connection goes down.
it's a much greater catastrophe to lose all of your data because of natural disaster or human error than to not have access to your data for a few hours because of an internet connection problem. for most businesses, having geographic redundancy and better disaster recovery far outweighs the disadvantages of not hosting your data locally. and if you have customers/clients or partners who also need access to your data, at least they won't be shut down if your network or internet connection goes down.
if you have extremely sensitive data, then yes it's probably a wise move to host the data yourself. however, with the majority of applications out there, so long as you use a reputable cloud service provider, you should be alright. there is reasonable precaution, and then there's being overly paranoid. a company like Google is not going to risk a lawsuit and throw away their reputation by breaking their privacy policy and illegally selling user data to third parties.
think about it this way, when you go in for surgery how do you know that the hospital won't just harvest your organs and dump your body in a ditch somewhere? and when you use your credit card, how do you know your CC info isn't being collected and sold to criminals? how do you know your auto mechanic isn't just taking you for a ride when he sends you that $3000 repair bill? if you want to be paranoid, you can find reasons to not trust anyone. and yes, there are instances where these situations happen, but that's why we regularly perform risk analyses before choosing our actions.
unless you built your computer from scratch and compile all of the programs you run on your computer yourself, you can't be sure that nobody is stealing your data from under your nose. but it's very impractical to live that way. if your data assets are really that sensitive/valuable you should just take an insurance policy out on it. because if a company like Google is willing to risk federal prosecution, their reputation, and their current market dominance just to steal your data then hosting it yourself isn't going to be much of a deterrence for potential data thieves.
while Apple's douchebaggery should definitely be protested, your blanket statement about cloud computing is overgeneralizing a bit. cloud computing has a lot of advantages, and there are many cloud services that do not encroach on the privacy or freedom of users. whether or not a cloud service will take power away from users depends on the type of application, its implementation, and the nature of the company providing the service.
Google's policies have generally been very pro-consumer and do not encroach on the freedom of users. i have no problem using Google's cloud services because they've taken a strong position against vendor lock-in, and they have demonstrated that they believe that it's the user's own data and thus the user should have full control over it. if another company takes the same stance and are respectful of the rights of their users, then why not take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing?
with the growing ubiquity of broadband/WiFi access, it doesn't make sense to limit yourself to the fat client computing paradigm when there are better, more appropriate solutions out there. multitenancy has a lot of advantages particularly for small businesses. cloud storage, for instance, allows small businesses to pool their resources together to obtain much higher levels of reliability/uptime, data redundancy, security, and peak capacity than they would be able to afford on their own.
blindly clinging onto your data out of irrational paranoia is incredibly shortsighted. not all cloud service providers are equal, and not all cloud computing applications are bad. just look at the quality of Gmail's spam filters. such effective spam filtering would not be possible without implementing e-mail as a cloud service shared by 50 million users. and Amazon web services is so popular because it gives small to medium sized businesses affordable access to the same level of application hosting & data storage as major corporations like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc.
it's pretty messed up that the "new" context menu should take so long to pop up on a modern computer. however, i don't think it's really a good benchmark of hardware performance. my 4-5 year old Dell used to take quite a while to display the "new" menu, but now it pops up in less than a second--it takes perhaps half a second the first time, and then it just pops up instantaneously each time after that.
on the other hand, one of the workstations at my office recently had Groove installed (i think it came with Office 2007), and ever since then it takes about 3 seconds for the context menu to pop up whenever you right click on the desktop or in an explorer window. granted, that computer is still using PC133, but it's got a 2.8 GHz P4, plus it's also a fresh install.
there's something seriously amiss when such basic system functions take so long to process. seems like a lot of software developers no longer care about writing efficient code. but perhaps the proliferation of netbooks and low-power desktops will mitigate this trend. i look forward to the day when opening a new browser window does not stress test my system.
considering that FLOPS refers to the number of floating point operations the processor can perform per second, which would be the same regardless of what OS a system is running, i would have to say that your guess is incorrect.
also, considering that most supercomputers are actually supercomputing clusters, the "supercomputer" in question is probably running more than just a single instance of the OS. since the Dawning 5000A uses Quadcore Opteron processors, and is listed as having 30720 cores, it should have 7680 processors. and since Windows Server 2008 can only use 8 processors (i think HPC is limited to 4), the 5000A must have at minimum960 nodes. and since each node would be running its own instance of Windows HPC, the Dawning 5000A must be running at least 960 instances of Windows.
i don't know how Windows HPC compares to Linux or other OSes, but running a bloated OS on a supercomputing cluster would definitely have a large impact on its real world performance.
if anyone is interested, Nova has a pretty good documentary (Nova - Hunting the Hidden Dimension, aired on 2008/10/28) on the history and applications of fractals, which is often used for procedural content. for instance, they frequently use fractal algorithms for movie special effects. in the documentary they talk to a guy at ILM who explains how the lava fight scene between Anakin and Obiwan uses fractals to generate the splashes of lava seen in the background.
they also discussed the first time fractals were used in computer graphics (basically inventing realistic 3D graphics). if i remember correctly, it was a computer scientist at Boeing who wanted to add a nice-looking mountain background to a 3D rendering for one of the company's new jets. since the computers had so little processing power & memory at the time, it would have been impossible to render a realistic hand-drawn 3D mountain range. but the programmer had picked up a book by Benoit Mandelbrot discussing fractal algorithms, and that gave him the idea to using fractals and basically create the 3D mountain range procedurally.
through procedural content generation the computer scientist was able to render incredibly realistic 3D mountain ranges using an almost embarrassingly simple algorithm--you start with a rough landscape constructed of just a few large triangles; then you take each triangle and divide it into 4 separate triangles; then you take those triangles and do the same with them. and after several iterations of this process, a surprisingly realistic mountain landscape starts to materialize. and the documentary illustrates this process with a cool little 3D animation.
after the success of his fractal rendering technique, that computer scientist left Boeing and joined ILM, who used his fractal technique to render the first fully-computer-generated 3D sequence used in a movie--the planet fly-by in Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan.
i think profit is the wrong word here. there's nothing wrong with a company using FOSS for commercial purposes, like running a LAMP server or installing Linux on the systems they sell. however, i don't think it's ethical for a company to sell free software they didn't write or own the rights to. they can sell support for the software, or sell hardware running the software, but they should provide the FOSS for free.
however, when it comes to modified FOSS things become a little more complicated. ideally, all software that incorporates FOSS code should be made FOSS as well. after all, if you want to benefit directly from other people's FOSS code, then you should allow others to do the same with your code. but we live in a capitalist society and in the end this would hamper the adoption of FOSS.
a compromise would be that if someone sells FOSS-based closed software, they should also contribute back to the community in other ways, and they should distribute the FOSS code they used with their proprietary software. all of this, of course, is contingent on the fact that the FOSS code they use is released under a GPL-compatible license. if it's BSD-licensed code then a commercial company can do whatever the hell they want, as that is the author's intent.
what exactly is sensationalized by the BBC? they are the oldest nuclear family to be positively identified. that is a fact, and a significant part of this archaeological find. they were in fact murdered (presumably bears and other native predators did not know how to use stone weapons).
that some people don't know what a "nuclear family" is, or jump to incorrect conclusions about the article before reading it does not mean BBC sensationalized the story.
while i agree with you on the wording, i think Kurzweil's point is that any sufficiently intelligent machine would be just as conscious and self-aware as a human-being. the use of the word "soul" here is referring to the metaphysical quality that many people attribute to living beings as distinct from seemingly conscious behavior.
that is, a lot of people assume that no matter how intelligent a machine is, it can never truly "feel" or possess an inner experience like "real" living entities. basically, Kurzweil is making a case for emergentism and refuting the idea of a "philosophical zombie."
i would tend to agree with Kurzweil since sentience & intelligence appear to be emergent phenomena. there isn't a discrete boundary between a simple/mindless biological machine, such as bacteria or ants, and "true" full-blown consciousness like that possessed by primates and Cetaceans.
[A] management-side attorney... who is defending a half-dozen employers in computer-booting lawsuits... believes that, in most cases, computer booting does not warrant being called work.
most of what high-paid CEOs and upper-management types do does not warrant being called work either, but they get paid for it nonetheless. any time that i spend at the office/workplace is time that i'm denied personal use of, therefore i should be compensated for it.
by their logic a technician who is performing a 2 hr. Windows install should only be paid for the 15 seconds it takes for him to stick the install disc into the CD-ROM drive and hit "y,y,[enter]" since he's not actually physically doing any work the rest of the time. or someone working at an information booth shouldn't be paid for the time they spend waiting for someone to come by.
if an employer doesn't want to pay employees for the time spent waiting for Windows to boot up, then they should have the computers turned on before employees come in. you don't make someone come in to work at 8:00 and then not start paying them until 15 minutes after they've clocked in.
i've never heard of this game, but it looks pretty interesting based on what i gleaned from Wikipedia. however, i have to question how educational this game is. is it just a complex war sim/strategy game that's set in Ancient Rome, or does it have actual educational value to it (like follow actual historic events or relate cultural/technological information about the era)?
also, Rome: Total War seems to be an original title developed independently by a "real" game developer who then lent it to BBC2 and History Channel for animating simulated battles for TV. also, a lot of what History Channel considers "educational" programming is of rather questionable educational value. so their using a game in one of their shows doesn't necessarily mean the game is educational.
having looked at the screen shots for Herod's Lost Tomb, and having played History Channel's Great Battles of Rome, i have to say i'm not too impressed with these TV-based educational games. educational games are simply a bad idea in the first place. aside from Oregon Trail, i can't think of any other educational game that delivers on its promises of making learning fun.
perhaps it would be different if National Geographic established their own internal development studio and actually invests in it by hiring good in-house developers. however, contracting outside developers to create IP-based games will inevitably result in bland and poorly developed shovelware--just like majority of licensed games.
good games have to come from developers who are passionate about the title they're working on. this is much more likely to happen if the game is an original creation of the studio developing it since the developers are given creative input and are free to try out their own ideas. but with IP-based licensed games, developers are simply contracted to implement other people's ideas and are given very little creative control.
at least with something like a comic-book character or famous franchise like Star Wars or Gundam it's still possible for the developers to get excited about their work. but how is any developer supposed to get excited about creating a game based off of a NatGeo TV special? it's such a blatant money grab. the games will no doubt be produced as budget titles aimed at little kids in kindergarten or 1st grade.
as far as i can tell, this technology has nothing to do with Betz' law or the theoretical efficiency of a wind turbine. in fact it has nothing to do with the design of the fan blades or rotor efficiency.
instead, the innovation here is replacing a mechanical transmission with an electric one. this allows the turbine to perform optimally under a wide range of wind speeds. this could just as easily be applied to gasoline engine power generator or other non-turbine/fluid-mechanics-related power generators.
it's like being able to switch out the transmission depending on the wind speed. we already have separate generators that operate optimally at low speeds, medium speeds, and high speeds. this is just a cheap & simple way to incorporate multiple performance ranges into a single electric transmission.
point to either road and ask the man, "if i were to ask you if this road goes to Shelbyville, what would you say?"
if you pointed to the correct road the man will say "yes" regardless of whether he's a habitual truth-teller or a habitual liar. if you pointed to the Ogdenville path, the man will say "no" whether he's a habitual truth-teller or a habitual liar.
it's really not much different from how public oversight usually works. since we can't all be involved in every single government decision as they're being made, public oversight allows the public to correct mistakes made by government officials after the fact. this allows the collective wisdom of a larger group of people to be employed without hampering the day to day operations of government.
however, it's probably better if the USPTO offered these rewards instead of a private company. this way when a bad patent is found they can trace it back to the patent examiner who granted the patent. also, they could track which companies have a habit of submitting bogus patents and integrate this information in the patent approval process. if a company repeated submits bogus patent applications then perhaps they should be banned from applying for any more patents in the future.
critics of this approach are probably right that the USPTO needs to correct its own internal problems, though i'd say they need to improve patent examiner training and raise the hiring standards rather than just increasing the number of patent officers they their employ. and in the end, there's really no substitute for a system of public oversight.
the Chinese were the first to invent rockets, which were later stolen by the Mongols, who then spread it to the Arabs, who eventually spread it to the West. i guess that makes us even now.
most scientific & technological advancements are built on top of the work done by previous scientists/inventors/engineers. and the history of human technological/scientific progress is essentially the story of the spread of knowledge through cultural exchange. the sharing of knowledge and technology between cultures has always been a major stimulus for technological & scientific innovation. that's why non-weapons-related technology export restrictions are kinda silly. no developed nation can say that their technological & scientific achievements are the sole work of their nation, and their nation alone. many IP laws are similarly silly as such jealous guarding of knowledge, or "intellectual property," is not only petty but counter-productive to societal progress.
If the Chinese got ahold of that new laser weapon system from Northrop Grumman, I doubt you would make such a neat little dichotomy there between industrial espionage and national security.
right, but this guy didn't get a hold of a new laser weapon, or any other type of weapon. that's the whole point. what he stole had nothing to do with weapons research and everything to do with manned space flight and other space launch technology:
Shu, 68, pleaded guilty to violating the Arms Export Control Act by helping Chinese officials based at the space facility on southern Hainan island to develop manned space flight and future missions to the Moon.
He also acknowledged he had sent them in December 2003 a specific military document detailing the design of liquid hydrogen tanks crucial to launching vehicles into space, the Justice Department said in a statement.
it's like saying, "well you wouldn't be able to say that he didn't assassinate the president if he had assassinated the president." it's a moot point, because that's not what happened.
besides, i thought we were past racial/gender/religious discrimination in the workplace. do we really want to push America back 40 years and undo all of the social/cultural progress made by the Civl Rights movement?
that's a pretty interesting concept. it seems very far-fetched, but they've obviously put a lot of thought into the technical and logistical problems such a ship would face. here's an excerpt of my favorite part:
Shield Our ship is icy-white in colour for the very excellent reason that its exterior is made of water ice, one of the most abundant substances in the universe. When we travel at extreme velocities, dust particles impact our ship with the energy of a nuclear bomb, and even hydrogen atoms erode her hull. Before embarking on a mission, we re-make the surface of the ship with ice harvested from the abundant comets surrounding the star we're departing. During the mission, self-reproducing robots built with molecular-scale engineering repair damage to the ice shield around our ship. The ice protects us against impacts with interstellar and intergalactic gas and tiny dust particles. If we hit something of tangible size, like a rock, it'll be a really bad day; astronomers on distant planets will catalogue yet another enigmatic gamma ray burst.
hopefully by then we'll have invented deflector shields and inertial dampeners (so that humans can ride on such ships without being liquefied).
um, that's like saying that because occasionally shady companies break FDA regulations that you should grow your own food. the reasn that the consumer lab report is news is because this is not supposed to happen, and indeed it doesn't happen very often.
what is the difference between 10mg of fluoxetine manufactured by one company versus 10mg manufactured by another? if they're both the same chemical compound, they will have the same pharmacological effect on your body. your body doesn't discriminate between name brands and generics.
or you could just use a camera with a Foveon X3 sensor. there's no demosaicing involved since it employs 3 vertically stacked photodiodes (red, green, blue) at each pixel sensor to capture color information.
here is a diagram showing how a multijunction photosensor works. unlike bayer filter sensors, Foveon X3 sensors produce no color artifacts.
what does it matter if we can't communicate back when/if we find a signal? the impact such knowledge would have on human society, on human history, would be tremendous just by the philosophical implications alone.
should we stop all fundamental science research just because they don't have immediate practical or technological applications? there's something to be said for the search of knowledge for its own sake. and not knowing whether or not you will ever find an answer to a particular scientific question, or if you will succeed in a particular objective, is hardly a good reason for not even trying.
do you think the inventor of the first microscope knew beforehand that he was paving the way for the scientific field of microbiology? do you think the first bacteriologists knew that their pioneering work would eventually lead to the discovery of antibiotics and revolutionize modern medicine?
it's impossible to know exactly what consequences will follow the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that, whatever happens, it will have a profound impact on how humanity perceives itself and their relationship with the cosmos. whether we're alone in the universe is one of the fundamental questions of science, philosophy, and theology. just because answering it will not make computers run faster or cure cancer doesn't mean it's not worth asking.
it's not just this site. the maturity level implied by the summary/article bodes poorly for the human race.
it's called the water cycle. any water you consume, no matter where it's from, has been recycled through natural ecological/biochemical processes. in fact every molecule that makes up your body has been "recycled" in countless ways.
there's nothing gross or unsanitary about recycling the waster from urine through proper distillation. there is absolutely no difference between drinking water distilled from urine and water distilled from rain water or river water. that kind of irrational thinking is the reason why people will spend 10x the money to buy name brand drugs rather than the chemically & pharmacologically identical generics.
you should be more grossed out by keeping your toothbrush within 20 ft of your toilet (as most people seem to do) since studies have shown that fecal bacteria can be sprayed up to 20 ft from the toilet each time the toilet is flushed.
that's a pretty shortsighted statement. (and it also happens to be why the SETI project has had such a hard time receiving funding in the past.)
just because it hasn't produced any practical results yet doesn't mean it's not useful. unless you're assuming that we are alone in the universe, which is a pretty big assumption, the SETI project is an incredibly important scientific endeavor. and through SETI@Home, the resource costs of the project has been largely subsidized by volunteers who're contributing their unused CPU cycles.
if everyone shared your attitude, no one would bother searching for a cure for AIDS, and manned flight would have been given up on long before it was even attempted. but i suppose SETI is just one of those things that will continue to draw detractors until we actually do find intelligent extraterrestrial life. but that's never going to happen if don't even both to look.
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so are you saying that all internet-based businesses which depend on having a reliable internet connection are just disasters waiting to happen?
i agree with you about the ISP situation, which is why i think municipal wifi initiatives where communities operate their own broadband networks circumventing traditional ISPs are a good idea. but that's part of a much bigger issue that isn't just limited to cloud computing; it is a fundamental problem with our communications infrastructure and corporate culture.
if countries in Europe and Asia can offer cheap, reliable high-speed broadband, then it should be feasible here in the U.S. as well. and the general trend in most areas is a gradual increase in internet speeds and reliability. and even here in the U.S. you can get redundant internet connections in case one goes down. however, WAN lines leased by businesses generally don't go down that often, so it's probably not very cost-effective for most businesses to lease a backup line. worse comes to worst, you use a hybrid setup where your cloud data is occasionally backed up to your local server(s) so that you get the benefits of cloud computing--access to your data everywhere, increased security/reliability/redundancy, etc.--but you can still operate when your connection goes down.
it's a much greater catastrophe to lose all of your data because of natural disaster or human error than to not have access to your data for a few hours because of an internet connection problem. for most businesses, having geographic redundancy and better disaster recovery far outweighs the disadvantages of not hosting your data locally. and if you have customers/clients or partners who also need access to your data, at least they won't be shut down if your network or internet connection goes down.
if you have extremely sensitive data, then yes it's probably a wise move to host the data yourself. however, with the majority of applications out there, so long as you use a reputable cloud service provider, you should be alright. there is reasonable precaution, and then there's being overly paranoid. a company like Google is not going to risk a lawsuit and throw away their reputation by breaking their privacy policy and illegally selling user data to third parties.
think about it this way, when you go in for surgery how do you know that the hospital won't just harvest your organs and dump your body in a ditch somewhere? and when you use your credit card, how do you know your CC info isn't being collected and sold to criminals? how do you know your auto mechanic isn't just taking you for a ride when he sends you that $3000 repair bill? if you want to be paranoid, you can find reasons to not trust anyone. and yes, there are instances where these situations happen, but that's why we regularly perform risk analyses before choosing our actions.
unless you built your computer from scratch and compile all of the programs you run on your computer yourself, you can't be sure that nobody is stealing your data from under your nose. but it's very impractical to live that way. if your data assets are really that sensitive/valuable you should just take an insurance policy out on it. because if a company like Google is willing to risk federal prosecution, their reputation, and their current market dominance just to steal your data then hosting it yourself isn't going to be much of a deterrence for potential data thieves.
while Apple's douchebaggery should definitely be protested, your blanket statement about cloud computing is overgeneralizing a bit. cloud computing has a lot of advantages, and there are many cloud services that do not encroach on the privacy or freedom of users. whether or not a cloud service will take power away from users depends on the type of application, its implementation, and the nature of the company providing the service.
Google's policies have generally been very pro-consumer and do not encroach on the freedom of users. i have no problem using Google's cloud services because they've taken a strong position against vendor lock-in, and they have demonstrated that they believe that it's the user's own data and thus the user should have full control over it. if another company takes the same stance and are respectful of the rights of their users, then why not take advantage of the benefits of cloud computing?
with the growing ubiquity of broadband/WiFi access, it doesn't make sense to limit yourself to the fat client computing paradigm when there are better, more appropriate solutions out there. multitenancy has a lot of advantages particularly for small businesses. cloud storage, for instance, allows small businesses to pool their resources together to obtain much higher levels of reliability/uptime, data redundancy, security, and peak capacity than they would be able to afford on their own.
blindly clinging onto your data out of irrational paranoia is incredibly shortsighted. not all cloud service providers are equal, and not all cloud computing applications are bad. just look at the quality of Gmail's spam filters. such effective spam filtering would not be possible without implementing e-mail as a cloud service shared by 50 million users. and Amazon web services is so popular because it gives small to medium sized businesses affordable access to the same level of application hosting & data storage as major corporations like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc.
it's pretty messed up that the "new" context menu should take so long to pop up on a modern computer. however, i don't think it's really a good benchmark of hardware performance. my 4-5 year old Dell used to take quite a while to display the "new" menu, but now it pops up in less than a second--it takes perhaps half a second the first time, and then it just pops up instantaneously each time after that.
on the other hand, one of the workstations at my office recently had Groove installed (i think it came with Office 2007), and ever since then it takes about 3 seconds for the context menu to pop up whenever you right click on the desktop or in an explorer window. granted, that computer is still using PC133, but it's got a 2.8 GHz P4, plus it's also a fresh install.
there's something seriously amiss when such basic system functions take so long to process. seems like a lot of software developers no longer care about writing efficient code. but perhaps the proliferation of netbooks and low-power desktops will mitigate this trend. i look forward to the day when opening a new browser window does not stress test my system.
considering that FLOPS refers to the number of floating point operations the processor can perform per second, which would be the same regardless of what OS a system is running, i would have to say that your guess is incorrect.
also, considering that most supercomputers are actually supercomputing clusters, the "supercomputer" in question is probably running more than just a single instance of the OS. since the Dawning 5000A uses Quadcore Opteron processors, and is listed as having 30720 cores, it should have 7680 processors. and since Windows Server 2008 can only use 8 processors (i think HPC is limited to 4), the 5000A must have at minimum 960 nodes. and since each node would be running its own instance of Windows HPC, the Dawning 5000A must be running at least 960 instances of Windows.
i don't know how Windows HPC compares to Linux or other OSes, but running a bloated OS on a supercomputing cluster would definitely have a large impact on its real world performance.
if anyone is interested, Nova has a pretty good documentary (Nova - Hunting the Hidden Dimension, aired on 2008/10/28) on the history and applications of fractals, which is often used for procedural content. for instance, they frequently use fractal algorithms for movie special effects. in the documentary they talk to a guy at ILM who explains how the lava fight scene between Anakin and Obiwan uses fractals to generate the splashes of lava seen in the background.
they also discussed the first time fractals were used in computer graphics (basically inventing realistic 3D graphics). if i remember correctly, it was a computer scientist at Boeing who wanted to add a nice-looking mountain background to a 3D rendering for one of the company's new jets. since the computers had so little processing power & memory at the time, it would have been impossible to render a realistic hand-drawn 3D mountain range. but the programmer had picked up a book by Benoit Mandelbrot discussing fractal algorithms, and that gave him the idea to using fractals and basically create the 3D mountain range procedurally.
through procedural content generation the computer scientist was able to render incredibly realistic 3D mountain ranges using an almost embarrassingly simple algorithm--you start with a rough landscape constructed of just a few large triangles; then you take each triangle and divide it into 4 separate triangles; then you take those triangles and do the same with them. and after several iterations of this process, a surprisingly realistic mountain landscape starts to materialize. and the documentary illustrates this process with a cool little 3D animation.
after the success of his fractal rendering technique, that computer scientist left Boeing and joined ILM, who used his fractal technique to render the first fully-computer-generated 3D sequence used in a movie--the planet fly-by in Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan.
i think profit is the wrong word here. there's nothing wrong with a company using FOSS for commercial purposes, like running a LAMP server or installing Linux on the systems they sell. however, i don't think it's ethical for a company to sell free software they didn't write or own the rights to. they can sell support for the software, or sell hardware running the software, but they should provide the FOSS for free.
however, when it comes to modified FOSS things become a little more complicated. ideally, all software that incorporates FOSS code should be made FOSS as well. after all, if you want to benefit directly from other people's FOSS code, then you should allow others to do the same with your code. but we live in a capitalist society and in the end this would hamper the adoption of FOSS.
a compromise would be that if someone sells FOSS-based closed software, they should also contribute back to the community in other ways, and they should distribute the FOSS code they used with their proprietary software. all of this, of course, is contingent on the fact that the FOSS code they use is released under a GPL-compatible license. if it's BSD-licensed code then a commercial company can do whatever the hell they want, as that is the author's intent.
what exactly is sensationalized by the BBC? they are the oldest nuclear family to be positively identified. that is a fact, and a significant part of this archaeological find. they were in fact murdered (presumably bears and other native predators did not know how to use stone weapons).
that some people don't know what a "nuclear family" is, or jump to incorrect conclusions about the article before reading it does not mean BBC sensationalized the story.
while i agree with you on the wording, i think Kurzweil's point is that any sufficiently intelligent machine would be just as conscious and self-aware as a human-being. the use of the word "soul" here is referring to the metaphysical quality that many people attribute to living beings as distinct from seemingly conscious behavior.
that is, a lot of people assume that no matter how intelligent a machine is, it can never truly "feel" or possess an inner experience like "real" living entities. basically, Kurzweil is making a case for emergentism and refuting the idea of a "philosophical zombie."
i would tend to agree with Kurzweil since sentience & intelligence appear to be emergent phenomena. there isn't a discrete boundary between a simple/mindless biological machine, such as bacteria or ants, and "true" full-blown consciousness like that possessed by primates and Cetaceans.
most of what high-paid CEOs and upper-management types do does not warrant being called work either, but they get paid for it nonetheless. any time that i spend at the office/workplace is time that i'm denied personal use of, therefore i should be compensated for it.
by their logic a technician who is performing a 2 hr. Windows install should only be paid for the 15 seconds it takes for him to stick the install disc into the CD-ROM drive and hit "y,y,[enter]" since he's not actually physically doing any work the rest of the time. or someone working at an information booth shouldn't be paid for the time they spend waiting for someone to come by.
if an employer doesn't want to pay employees for the time spent waiting for Windows to boot up, then they should have the computers turned on before employees come in. you don't make someone come in to work at 8:00 and then not start paying them until 15 minutes after they've clocked in.
i've never heard of this game, but it looks pretty interesting based on what i gleaned from Wikipedia. however, i have to question how educational this game is. is it just a complex war sim/strategy game that's set in Ancient Rome, or does it have actual educational value to it (like follow actual historic events or relate cultural/technological information about the era)?
also, Rome: Total War seems to be an original title developed independently by a "real" game developer who then lent it to BBC2 and History Channel for animating simulated battles for TV. also, a lot of what History Channel considers "educational" programming is of rather questionable educational value. so their using a game in one of their shows doesn't necessarily mean the game is educational.
having looked at the screen shots for Herod's Lost Tomb, and having played History Channel's Great Battles of Rome, i have to say i'm not too impressed with these TV-based educational games. educational games are simply a bad idea in the first place. aside from Oregon Trail, i can't think of any other educational game that delivers on its promises of making learning fun.
perhaps it would be different if National Geographic established their own internal development studio and actually invests in it by hiring good in-house developers. however, contracting outside developers to create IP-based games will inevitably result in bland and poorly developed shovelware--just like majority of licensed games.
good games have to come from developers who are passionate about the title they're working on. this is much more likely to happen if the game is an original creation of the studio developing it since the developers are given creative input and are free to try out their own ideas. but with IP-based licensed games, developers are simply contracted to implement other people's ideas and are given very little creative control.
at least with something like a comic-book character or famous franchise like Star Wars or Gundam it's still possible for the developers to get excited about their work. but how is any developer supposed to get excited about creating a game based off of a NatGeo TV special? it's such a blatant money grab. the games will no doubt be produced as budget titles aimed at little kids in kindergarten or 1st grade.
as far as i can tell, this technology has nothing to do with Betz' law or the theoretical efficiency of a wind turbine. in fact it has nothing to do with the design of the fan blades or rotor efficiency.
instead, the innovation here is replacing a mechanical transmission with an electric one. this allows the turbine to perform optimally under a wide range of wind speeds. this could just as easily be applied to gasoline engine power generator or other non-turbine/fluid-mechanics-related power generators.
it's like being able to switch out the transmission depending on the wind speed. we already have separate generators that operate optimally at low speeds, medium speeds, and high speeds. this is just a cheap & simple way to incorporate multiple performance ranges into a single electric transmission.
point to either road and ask the man, "if i were to ask you if this road goes to Shelbyville, what would you say?"
if you pointed to the correct road the man will say "yes" regardless of whether he's a habitual truth-teller or a habitual liar.
if you pointed to the Ogdenville path, the man will say "no" whether he's a habitual truth-teller or a habitual liar.
you mean your phone doesn't have a "Mark as Telemarketing" button?
it's really not much different from how public oversight usually works. since we can't all be involved in every single government decision as they're being made, public oversight allows the public to correct mistakes made by government officials after the fact. this allows the collective wisdom of a larger group of people to be employed without hampering the day to day operations of government.
however, it's probably better if the USPTO offered these rewards instead of a private company. this way when a bad patent is found they can trace it back to the patent examiner who granted the patent. also, they could track which companies have a habit of submitting bogus patents and integrate this information in the patent approval process. if a company repeated submits bogus patent applications then perhaps they should be banned from applying for any more patents in the future.
critics of this approach are probably right that the USPTO needs to correct its own internal problems, though i'd say they need to improve patent examiner training and raise the hiring standards rather than just increasing the number of patent officers they their employ. and in the end, there's really no substitute for a system of public oversight.
well, even if they are stealing rocket technology from the West, they're just getting us back.
the Chinese were the first to invent rockets, which were later stolen by the Mongols, who then spread it to the Arabs, who eventually spread it to the West. i guess that makes us even now.
most scientific & technological advancements are built on top of the work done by previous scientists/inventors/engineers. and the history of human technological/scientific progress is essentially the story of the spread of knowledge through cultural exchange. the sharing of knowledge and technology between cultures has always been a major stimulus for technological & scientific innovation. that's why non-weapons-related technology export restrictions are kinda silly. no developed nation can say that their technological & scientific achievements are the sole work of their nation, and their nation alone. many IP laws are similarly silly as such jealous guarding of knowledge, or "intellectual property," is not only petty but counter-productive to societal progress.
right, but this guy didn't get a hold of a new laser weapon, or any other type of weapon. that's the whole point. what he stole had nothing to do with weapons research and everything to do with manned space flight and other space launch technology:
it's like saying, "well you wouldn't be able to say that he didn't assassinate the president if he had assassinated the president." it's a moot point, because that's not what happened.
besides, i thought we were past racial/gender/religious discrimination in the workplace. do we really want to push America back 40 years and undo all of the social/cultural progress made by the Civl Rights movement?
xenophobia isn't exactly conducive of societal progress or technological advancement. in fact, it's been shown that cultural diversity promotes innovation and enhances work performance, particularly in the R&D sector.
that's a pretty interesting concept. it seems very far-fetched, but they've obviously put a lot of thought into the technical and logistical problems such a ship would face. here's an excerpt of my favorite part:
hopefully by then we'll have invented deflector shields and inertial dampeners (so that humans can ride on such ships without being liquefied).
what?
um, that's like saying that because occasionally shady companies break FDA regulations that you should grow your own food. the reasn that the consumer lab report is news is because this is not supposed to happen, and indeed it doesn't happen very often.
what is the difference between 10mg of fluoxetine manufactured by one company versus 10mg manufactured by another? if they're both the same chemical compound, they will have the same pharmacological effect on your body. your body doesn't discriminate between name brands and generics.
or you could just use a camera with a Foveon X3 sensor. there's no demosaicing involved since it employs 3 vertically stacked photodiodes (red, green, blue) at each pixel sensor to capture color information.
here is a diagram showing how a multijunction photosensor works. unlike bayer filter sensors, Foveon X3 sensors produce no color artifacts.
what does it matter if we can't communicate back when/if we find a signal? the impact such knowledge would have on human society, on human history, would be tremendous just by the philosophical implications alone.
should we stop all fundamental science research just because they don't have immediate practical or technological applications? there's something to be said for the search of knowledge for its own sake. and not knowing whether or not you will ever find an answer to a particular scientific question, or if you will succeed in a particular objective, is hardly a good reason for not even trying.
do you think the inventor of the first microscope knew beforehand that he was paving the way for the scientific field of microbiology? do you think the first bacteriologists knew that their pioneering work would eventually lead to the discovery of antibiotics and revolutionize modern medicine?
it's impossible to know exactly what consequences will follow the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that, whatever happens, it will have a profound impact on how humanity perceives itself and their relationship with the cosmos. whether we're alone in the universe is one of the fundamental questions of science, philosophy, and theology. just because answering it will not make computers run faster or cure cancer doesn't mean it's not worth asking.
it's not just this site. the maturity level implied by the summary/article bodes poorly for the human race.
it's called the water cycle. any water you consume, no matter where it's from, has been recycled through natural ecological/biochemical processes. in fact every molecule that makes up your body has been "recycled" in countless ways.
there's nothing gross or unsanitary about recycling the waster from urine through proper distillation. there is absolutely no difference between drinking water distilled from urine and water distilled from rain water or river water. that kind of irrational thinking is the reason why people will spend 10x the money to buy name brand drugs rather than the chemically & pharmacologically identical generics.
you should be more grossed out by keeping your toothbrush within 20 ft of your toilet (as most people seem to do) since studies have shown that fecal bacteria can be sprayed up to 20 ft from the toilet each time the toilet is flushed.
that's a pretty shortsighted statement. (and it also happens to be why the SETI project has had such a hard time receiving funding in the past.)
just because it hasn't produced any practical results yet doesn't mean it's not useful. unless you're assuming that we are alone in the universe, which is a pretty big assumption, the SETI project is an incredibly important scientific endeavor. and through SETI@Home, the resource costs of the project has been largely subsidized by volunteers who're contributing their unused CPU cycles.
if everyone shared your attitude, no one would bother searching for a cure for AIDS, and manned flight would have been given up on long before it was even attempted. but i suppose SETI is just one of those things that will continue to draw detractors until we actually do find intelligent extraterrestrial life. but that's never going to happen if don't even both to look.