Since no ones mentioned it yet Kerbal Space Program - a game that's so intellectual its literally for real rocket scientists. A game that can/will teach about real space travel far more effectively than just reading books or documentaries. Just try docking two ships, or even the first stage of putting a ship into orbit. And the best thing? is that once you get hooked its extremely addictive and compulsive.(I had one session where I played continuously for 56 hours..:D)
DropBox "dropped a word" from the title and trampled the existing product with lawyers. First doesn't mean you get the trademark, the one with the most lawyers gets it.
So in cases like this Law does equal Theft... LAW = THEFT.
There's a very simple equation for helicopters- the more powerful the engine(s) the safer the machine is, its only a generalisation but a pretty powerful one. (wind force vs engine power) The same thing applies to planes, and its about the main reason why big jet airliners are massively and inherently safer than small planes. (the same thing even applies to ships and boats as well) - Its the laws of physics.
It really all depends on whether America gets another George W Bush as president. (Why do I think of Slim Pickens riding the bomb down in Dr Strangelove) : )
Sorry AC you're an idiot, that kind of argument might wash in China or North Korea but it shouldn't in the US or UK. What the NSA and GCHQ have done is criminal its as simple as that. Where there were deliberate laws to limit what they were allowed to spy on they used the other agency to do the spying for them to get around those rules. Their methods of spying have done enormous damage to the American public + people around the world + the computing industry, back doors, weakened encryption, and poor security are the cyber criminals friend. - Let me put it simply WHAT THE NSA HAVE DONE HAS AIDED CYBER CRIMINALS AROUND THE WORLD. In fact closer to the truth is that there is very little difference between spies and criminals - in fact some of the most successful spies actually start as criminals. A simple additional reason I don't want the NSA or whoever spying on me (above privacy) is that I don't trust them not to sell it on, or for a lone agent to steal it or lose it, etc etc. At the end of the day though the biggest argument against you is freedom of speech which requires openness, democracy which requires openness, and the basic right to privacy which requires a limit on what intelligence agencies should be allowed to do. Snowden saw that they were breaking those limits and decided to act (on principle) to tell the truth despite that he knew how he would be treated afterwards. - Labelled as a traitor, coward, enemy of America, and so on, threatened with extradition, execution, lifetime in prison, torture, a lifetime on the run, even potential assassination. Sorry but the only word for Snowden is Hero.
In the Star Wars technical books they describe the Death Stars weapon as a "giant hyper-matter laser". Hyper-matter is what they use to go faster than light but I would guess that its not completely totally different to an anti-proton beam. If the physics works a certain way an FTL beam might just be able to disrupt a planets gravity field. That would allow it to destroy a planet with far less energy because the gravity field compresses the planet like an enormous spring and releasing it.... would make the planet tear itself apart. Exotic matter would be a much better bet to do the same thing..
Sounds like someone who's never been there or maybe is part of the 1%. Get outside your gated community and go and look around pretty much any big American city, you'll find plenty of people there who don't have heating, electricity adequate food or clothing and all those other things. People living on the absolute breadline, sleeping on the streets or in missions, eating out of dumpsters or getting food from soup kitchens. Just above them millions more living on slave wages, just clinging on, at the very edges. Heathcare that comes in clinics given one day a month -given by volunteer doctors.. Poor in America, its just like the third world. (I once spent 3 months stranded and homeless in LA and saw it with my own eyes.)
Look to closely at the motivations for things and things can get a bit uncomfortable.
The real reason for 9/11 was quite simple - revenge, America had supplied the Israelis with bombs and other weapons and helped them in their attacks on the Palestinians in Lebanon in the mid 80's. A lot of people died in those attacks, at least several times more than 9/11. Don't worry though 'we' got revenge back, in Afghanistan and Iraq, even if Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
One of the curious things that no one seems to remember now is that the old American patriot movement had identified three primary targets that would get attacked to free America from the 'oppressive' power of the federal government. Guess what they were? The WTC, The White House, and The Pentagon - I've always wondered if Bin Laden chose them as some kind of joke.. It would just figure if Islamic terrorists had more of a sense of humour than our poluticians.. (Interesting aside If your a conspiracy theory nut, one of the signs of heavy brainwashing is a total lack of humour..)
Agree absolutely. I am this type of genius and sometimes one of the best ways of solving a really hard problem is to abandon it for a while and go and do something else.
Actually it isn't so much that geniuses are super intelligent, its a million and one things but it all centres around luck. Actually no its that most people especially 'intelligent' people are actually as dumb as telegraph poles when it comes to thinking outside the box... : ).
You are trying to argue common sense against a tide that has been moving for decades. If you do it on the bare metal then you cant program it in Java or.net etc. My experience of using ATMs is that banks have pretty poor programmers - pretty poor interface programmers at least - they need things to be simple and easy.
If you want to see what this future looks like then look at any third world country. The poor are hungry and uneducated and have no power, the rich sit in their mansions guarded by private bodyguards. Using scientific extrapolations it looks like that's where globalisation is going take us all and put the whole world within about 20 or 30 years. A global third world with a sea of powerless poor the world over ruled over by a tiny super elite of bankers and politicians and other thieves and scumbags.
Actually I don't thinks its going to happen. No maybe what will really happen is that China will be the last remaining superpower and will simply become the one global power we will all get to bow to.
Its like humanity threw away our intelligence and became mindless packrats (consumers (literally 'eaters') ). The thing that really separates/separated us humans from farm animals is the ability at long term planning. - The current elite are doing everything they can to suppress that ability so that the population/we are totally unable to rebel. They don't seem to have much of a plan themselves - other than maybe selling us out. Maybe we should just pray for alien invaders or some cataclysm to sweep them from power, or better get teaching your children Mandarin and hope.:)
Don't blame the programmers, blame the **@"! expletives who control language development and the developer environment. MFC being a prime example - 'hypercomplex', tangled, frequently illogical, often very hard to do things outside the box, very ugly and unreadable code, etc.
So you've already forgotten that 9/11 happened under Bush. As I recall it Bushes tampering with the FBI anti terrorist division was blamed as one of the things that allowed 9/11 to happen. Political correctness is annoying yes but both parties were/are equally guilty surely.
First of all a simple question with a difficult answer is the psychic real? Some parts look real, some look very unlikely, and some look just about impossible. One of the first problems is in separating truth from the rubbish and noise, no subject in the world is more subject to bunk and charlatans.
However there are several ways of really testing the psychic and from what I've seen it passes most of them. Its just that the real thing looks so different from the fake that its hard to recognize. It is such a small and subtle interaction that it is very hard to observe or isolate or study outside the person.
There is another little problem, nothing that science can do is more hated by religion than the study of the psychic. A lot of old military scientific research into the psychic is suppressed because it is deeply anti-religious. If you understand the psychic then you can quantify God and reduce it to factors and equations and answers. Do this and the answer comes back that there is/was probably a 'God', but A its existence ends / ended at the beginning of the universe, B it is literally the energy of the Big Bang, C in our terms it is mindless, D it is utterly ruthless -very like evolution, E it looks nothing like the Christian or any other human God. This 'God' is a force that seeks increasing order (in physics terms), physically it is a quantum 'energy field' with an FTL causality. It jumps backwards and forwards in time creating an evolutionary cycle that eventually creates our universe. The real problem for religious people comes when this is applied to the real world - ie do almost anything which depends on an FTL causality- and you are effectively playing with the creation and use of God as a machine.
Study and dissect FTL models of physics and it becomes clear that certain parts of the psychic are described pretty precisely. It is clear that (if it exists) the 'psychic' is very delicate and is very easily disrupted, and behaves exactly like a quantum state. (A quantum state and an FTL causality are basically identical.) This means that it is virtually impossible to properly scientifically observe psychic phenomena because it is virtually impossible to completely isolate observers from an experiment. Ironically we all almost certainly observe psychic phenomena every day because they are deeply embedded in many aspects of brain operation, and for instance play a pretty dominant role in human psychology or in 'real time' operations like sight or speech or movement. The place where these psychic phenomena (or 'quantum element') would play the most important role is in brain development - and this is already close to being fully provable. A basic experiment requires a way of disrupting the quantum field during gestation which should disrupt an animals development. (designing a way of doing this isn't so simple though - a vacuum or faraday cage can disrupt a direct field but)
Simple point, the reason - or at least one reason - they might lease the batteries is because it makes it much easier to do a hot swap system. It takes hours to fully charge a car battery but one way around this is to remove the battery and replace it with another that has already been charged -say using a an automated mechanical system.
General Relativity says that the event horizon should block gravity so the black hole should appear totally massless and have no external gravity field. Actually it produces different results from different positions. The real truth is that black holes make no sense without an FTL geometry - oh but once you have an FTL geometry General Relativity basically falls to pieces. A new theory is needed.
Of course the other problem is that without a general theory physics is in the dark when it comes to the real properties of (the inside of) black holes.
Funny that, Bin Laden had said 9/11 was a punishment for 'crimes' America had committed in helping the Israelis to kill Palestinian civilians by supplying them with bombs. Every punishment/revenge we commit against them will sooner or later result in another 9/11- after which we will get revenge against them and they will get revenge again and we....
Two points -
1. Iraq took no part in 9/11 and there was no real reason for the invasion - it made America and the UK hated the world over and now even most of our allies hate us.
2. The invasion of Afghanistan was an equal mistake. We should have hit Al Qaeda's camp with a nuke short and simple. The worst thing we have done is to give the repressed and vulnerable factions there hope when we were never going to stay there to defend them forever. (like secularists, pro-democrats, gays, women, Christians,..)
There is a basic problem with space tech that almost all space tech is basically dual use. As a weapon the Shuttle or any large rocket can be used to deliver far larger nuclear weapons over longer range than an ordinary ICBM. In fact given enough mass wrapped in a heat shield you don't really need any explosive payload to flatten a large area in a city.
Future High power interplanetary craft powered by nuclear engines would push weapon lethality to at least nuclear bomb levels. (given the money spent on other things - a few billion dollars - such craft could be built today) - Designed as a weapon an interplanetary craft could drop a whole stream of ultra fast projectiles that could hit targets over a entire hemisphere of the Earth, timed to appear and hit within seconds of each other, and there would be absolutely nothing any current tech could do to stop them. An advanced global asteroid defence program could probably stop it though.
When Picard asks for 'Tea Earl Grey' the replicator probably uses about the same amounts of energy as released in the Hiroshima bomb.
I doubt anyone will read this now but anyway... Those people who were afraid of and attacked the nuclear industry have had a big effect. Switching away from nuclear meant a switch back towards fossil fuels especially coal, not just in America but around the world. Since pollution from burning fossil fuels kills people, the anti-nuclear lobby have actually killed something like 5 million people net around the world since the 1970's, inc maybe 500,000 in the US. How's that for a safety argument?
I have worked in this area for years and must admit that it is one of the 'applications' that had occurred to me. Actually one of the most difficult problems in building real systems is preventing hackers from getting control of the machines control units and doing exactly that. Strong AI needs absolutely watertight security - probably better than on nuclear bombs.
I might describe myself as a near 'Rock Star' - or ex Rock Star type dev. I was about the best in the circles of people I met during training and early work, and when I was at uni I was maybe second or third or fourth out of about 200 people and constantly had people asking me for help. On the other hand I had also tried my hand at games development and it had been a dismal embarrassing failure. - I was both sides of that Rock Star equation - good and bad. Like others have said the coding of 'Rock Star' programmers can be very difficult for others to read or understand, and in my case as I got more proficient I found myself fighting the C++ language itself more and more and I did things that in hindsight could only be described as unbelievably dumb - and almost impossible for others to follow. Both sides contributed to that ego thing, the undermining and needing to prove yourself after failure side was just as powerful as the adulation and joy at creating things that worked side.
I was or probably could have been quite a good programmer or systems analyst if I had had different luck or different circumstances. But I fell into the classic 'Rock Star' hole and got hooked on my own super project which ultimately destroyed me. The project was Strong AI, consciousness driven machine intelligence, and on that 1 to 10 scale above it would be about a 20 - probably the ultimate pinnacle in the whole of programming. The thing could still succeed, and someday soon someone will succeed at it, but I got buried in my own labyrinth and got so deep that I ended up having a nervous breakdown and ending up in a mental hospital. After I recovered I found that ordinary computing had moved on and that I couldn't really program so well anymore, and have since shifted my skill set to new areas - though I still occasionally think about going full stream on restarting my Strong AI project.
( The (first) big problem with strong AI is that the final result promises something worth 100's of billions or trillions but it is totally speculative and always 10+ years away, plus getting there requires huge investment and risk, at least £10 million. Another problem is that the learning curve for working in Strong AI is almost vertical - and even if you can climb that mountain later returning to normal dev work afterwards is likely to be very difficult, so getting people to work on it is not exactly easy. Ultimately though the architecture requires a computer with an absolute OO encapsulation and self complete mathematics, and it requires a complete new design from the ground up - CPU, memory, interfacing, OS, HL language, and the AI itself. Not an easy task even today. )
The lesson is that the people at the top are delicate and fall to pieces, they can drift and become distracted by their own projects, and like anyone can burn out if pushed to hard. They are also often governed by hubris, and if that ego gets too well fed that's the end of everything.
" Hoaxes are much more funny when they are somewhat improbably or ironic in some way. When I first saw this story, I was a bit surprised that Microsoft would come out with this kind of technology considering that Microsoft has not in the past developed any form of physical media - they have mostly been a software company. OTOH, it wasn't that long ago that they got into the hardware business and Microsoft clearly has enough money, industry influence, etc. that they could develop a single play DVD format.
It is not a humorous hoax in any way, nor do I feel bad for having believed it at face value - nor should you. It was clearly a plausible story."
The joke here is that the story is a hoax. Knowing how things like DVD work I think its practically impossible to create a 'one use' disk. The only way to do it is if the DVD player itself deliberately destroys the disk. The problem is the 'one use' disk always fails ahead of the read and becomes a 'zero use' disk!
Environmentally - obviously zero use disks would be a waste to the environment because you could fill an entire landfill with them before you would see the whole movie even once.
Aaggh the first post on a new board and dyslexia strikes again. "(and even that will not be true every time)" - what I really meant was that the software will often crash after the car. Sorry.
If you think I am being cynical ask yourself, 'what is AI?'. Its basically big C programs with lots of really complex pointers. The most difficult part of AI I have seen so far is the memory management in the base layer. Another problem is that it does not enjoy sharing a computer with an operating system, a problem that is almost to obscene to mention. AI is difficult and not very reliable.
Slashdot Mirror
Since no ones mentioned it yet Kerbal Space Program - a game that's so intellectual its literally for real rocket scientists. A game that can/will teach about real space travel far more effectively than just reading books or documentaries. Just try docking two ships, or even the first stage of putting a ship into orbit. :D)
And the best thing? is that once you get hooked its extremely addictive and compulsive.(I had one session where I played continuously for 56 hours..
DropBox "dropped a word" from the title and trampled the existing product with lawyers. First doesn't mean you get the trademark, the one with the most lawyers gets it.
So in cases like this Law does equal Theft... LAW = THEFT.
There's a very simple equation for helicopters- the more powerful the engine(s) the safer the machine is, its only a generalisation but a pretty powerful one. (wind force vs engine power) The same thing applies to planes, and its about the main reason why big jet airliners are massively and inherently safer than small planes. (the same thing even applies to ships and boats as well) - Its the laws of physics.
It really all depends on whether America gets another George W Bush as president. (Why do I think of Slim Pickens riding the bomb down in Dr Strangelove) : )
Sorry AC you're an idiot, that kind of argument might wash in China or North Korea but it shouldn't in the US or UK. What the NSA and GCHQ have done is criminal its as simple as that. Where there were deliberate laws to limit what they were allowed to spy on they used the other agency to do the spying for them to get around those rules. Their methods of spying have done enormous damage to the American public + people around the world + the computing industry, back doors, weakened encryption, and poor security are the cyber criminals friend. - Let me put it simply WHAT THE NSA HAVE DONE HAS AIDED CYBER CRIMINALS AROUND THE WORLD.
In fact closer to the truth is that there is very little difference between spies and criminals - in fact some of the most successful spies actually start as criminals. A simple additional reason I don't want the NSA or whoever spying on me (above privacy) is that I don't trust them not to sell it on, or for a lone agent to steal it or lose it, etc etc.
At the end of the day though the biggest argument against you is freedom of speech which requires openness, democracy which requires openness, and the basic right to privacy which requires a limit on what intelligence agencies should be allowed to do. Snowden saw that they were breaking those limits and decided to act (on principle) to tell the truth despite that he knew how he would be treated afterwards. - Labelled as a traitor, coward, enemy of America, and so on, threatened with extradition, execution, lifetime in prison, torture, a lifetime on the run, even potential assassination. Sorry but the only word for Snowden is Hero.
In the Star Wars technical books they describe the Death Stars weapon as a "giant hyper-matter laser". Hyper-matter is what they use to go faster than light but I would guess that its not completely totally different to an anti-proton beam. .... would make the planet tear itself apart. Exotic matter would be a much better bet to do the same thing..
If the physics works a certain way an FTL beam might just be able to disrupt a planets gravity field. That would allow it to destroy a planet with far less energy because the gravity field compresses the planet like an enormous spring and releasing it
Sounds like someone who's never been there or maybe is part of the 1%. Get outside your gated community and go and look around pretty much any big American city, you'll find plenty of people there who don't have heating, electricity adequate food or clothing and all those other things. People living on the absolute breadline, sleeping on the streets or in missions, eating out of dumpsters or getting food from soup kitchens. Just above them millions more living on slave wages, just clinging on, at the very edges. Heathcare that comes in clinics given one day a month -given by volunteer doctors.. Poor in America, its just like the third world. (I once spent 3 months stranded and homeless in LA and saw it with my own eyes.)
Look to closely at the motivations for things and things can get a bit uncomfortable.
The real reason for 9/11 was quite simple - revenge, America had supplied the Israelis with bombs and other weapons and helped them in their attacks on the Palestinians in Lebanon in the mid 80's. A lot of people died in those attacks, at least several times more than 9/11. Don't worry though 'we' got revenge back, in Afghanistan and Iraq, even if Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
One of the curious things that no one seems to remember now is that the old American patriot movement had identified three primary targets that would get attacked to free America from the 'oppressive' power of the federal government. Guess what they were? The WTC, The White House, and The Pentagon - I've always wondered if Bin Laden chose them as some kind of joke.. It would just figure if Islamic terrorists had more of a sense of humour than our poluticians..
(Interesting aside If your a conspiracy theory nut, one of the signs of heavy brainwashing is a total lack of humour..)
Think I will return to sanity now.. :D
Agree absolutely. I am this type of genius and sometimes one of the best ways of solving a really hard problem is to abandon it for a while and go and do something else.
Actually it isn't so much that geniuses are super intelligent, its a million and one things but it all centres around luck. Actually no its that most people especially 'intelligent' people are actually as dumb as telegraph poles when it comes to thinking outside the box... : ).
You are trying to argue common sense against a tide that has been moving for decades. If you do it on the bare metal then you cant program it in Java or .net etc. My experience of using ATMs is that banks have pretty poor programmers - pretty poor interface programmers at least - they need things to be simple and easy.
If you want to see what this future looks like then look at any third world country. The poor are hungry and uneducated and have no power, the rich sit in their mansions guarded by private bodyguards. Using scientific extrapolations it looks like that's where globalisation is going take us all and put the whole world within about 20 or 30 years. A global third world with a sea of powerless poor the world over ruled over by a tiny super elite of bankers and politicians and other thieves and scumbags.
Actually I don't thinks its going to happen. No maybe what will really happen is that China will be the last remaining superpower and will simply become the one global power we will all get to bow to.
Its like humanity threw away our intelligence and became mindless packrats (consumers (literally 'eaters') ). The thing that really separates/separated us humans from farm animals is the ability at long term planning. - The current elite are doing everything they can to suppress that ability so that the population/we are totally unable to rebel. They don't seem to have much of a plan themselves - other than maybe selling us out. Maybe we should just pray for alien invaders or some cataclysm to sweep them from power, or better get teaching your children Mandarin and hope. :)
Don't blame the programmers, blame the **@"! expletives who control language development and the developer environment. MFC being a prime example - 'hypercomplex', tangled, frequently illogical, often very hard to do things outside the box, very ugly and unreadable code, etc.
So you've already forgotten that 9/11 happened under Bush. As I recall it Bushes tampering with the FBI anti terrorist division was blamed as one of the things that allowed 9/11 to happen. Political correctness is annoying yes but both parties were/are equally guilty surely.
Some of the BBC weather girls .... oh my god!
I saved this a bit early and the editing is a real mess, sorry... : (
First of all a simple question with a difficult answer is the psychic real? Some parts look real, some look very unlikely, and some look just about impossible.
One of the first problems is in separating truth from the rubbish and noise, no subject in the world is more subject to bunk and charlatans.
However there are several ways of really testing the psychic and from what I've seen it passes most of them. Its just that the real thing looks so different from the fake that its hard to recognize. It is such a small and subtle interaction that it is very hard to observe or isolate or study outside the person.
There is another little problem, nothing that science can do is more hated by religion than the study of the psychic. A lot of old military scientific research into the psychic is suppressed because it is deeply anti-religious. If you understand the psychic then you can quantify God and reduce it to factors and equations and answers. Do this and the answer comes back that there is/was probably a 'God', but A its existence ends / ended at the beginning of the universe, B it is literally the energy of the Big Bang, C in our terms it is mindless, D it is utterly ruthless -very like evolution, E it looks nothing like the Christian or any other human God.
This 'God' is a force that seeks increasing order (in physics terms), physically it is a quantum 'energy field' with an FTL causality. It jumps backwards and forwards in time creating an evolutionary cycle that eventually creates our universe. The real problem for religious people comes when this is applied to the real world - ie do almost anything which depends on an FTL causality- and you are effectively playing with the creation and use of God as a machine.
Study and dissect FTL models of physics and it becomes clear that certain parts of the psychic are described pretty precisely. It is clear that (if it exists) the 'psychic' is very delicate and is very easily disrupted, and behaves exactly like a quantum state. (A quantum state and an FTL causality are basically identical.) This means that it is virtually impossible to properly scientifically observe psychic phenomena because it is virtually impossible to completely isolate observers from an experiment.
Ironically we all almost certainly observe psychic phenomena every day because they are deeply embedded in many aspects of brain operation, and for instance play a pretty dominant role in human psychology or in 'real time' operations like sight or speech or movement. The place where these psychic phenomena (or 'quantum element') would play the most important role is in brain development - and this is already close to being fully provable. A basic experiment requires a way of disrupting the quantum field during gestation which should disrupt an animals development. (designing a way of doing this isn't so simple though - a vacuum or faraday cage can disrupt a direct field but)
Simple point, the reason - or at least one reason - they might lease the batteries is because it makes it much easier to do a hot swap system. It takes hours to fully charge a car battery but one way around this is to remove the battery and replace it with another that has already been charged -say using a an automated mechanical system.
General Relativity says that the event horizon should block gravity so the black hole should appear totally massless and have no external gravity field. Actually it produces different results from different positions. The real truth is that black holes make no sense without an FTL geometry - oh but once you have an FTL geometry General Relativity basically falls to pieces. A new theory is needed.
Of course the other problem is that without a general theory physics is in the dark when it comes to the real properties of (the inside of) black holes.
Funny that, Bin Laden had said 9/11 was a punishment for 'crimes' America had committed in helping the Israelis to kill Palestinian civilians by supplying them with bombs. Every punishment /revenge we commit against them will sooner or later result in another 9/11- after which we will get revenge against them and they will get revenge again and we....
Two points -
1. Iraq took no part in 9/11 and there was no real reason for the invasion - it made America and the UK hated the world over and now even most of our allies hate us.
2. The invasion of Afghanistan was an equal mistake. We should have hit Al Qaeda's camp with a nuke short and simple. The worst thing we have done is to give the repressed and vulnerable factions there hope when we were never going to stay there to defend them forever. (like secularists, pro-democrats, gays, women, Christians,..)
There is a basic problem with space tech that almost all space tech is basically dual use. As a weapon the Shuttle or any large rocket can be used to deliver far larger nuclear weapons over longer range than an ordinary ICBM. In fact given enough mass wrapped in a heat shield you don't really need any explosive payload to flatten a large area in a city. Future High power interplanetary craft powered by nuclear engines would push weapon lethality to at least nuclear bomb levels. (given the money spent on other things - a few billion dollars - such craft could be built today) - Designed as a weapon an interplanetary craft could drop a whole stream of ultra fast projectiles that could hit targets over a entire hemisphere of the Earth, timed to appear and hit within seconds of each other, and there would be absolutely nothing any current tech could do to stop them. An advanced global asteroid defence program could probably stop it though. When Picard asks for 'Tea Earl Grey' the replicator probably uses about the same amounts of energy as released in the Hiroshima bomb.
I doubt anyone will read this now but anyway... Those people who were afraid of and attacked the nuclear industry have had a big effect. Switching away from nuclear meant a switch back towards fossil fuels especially coal, not just in America but around the world. Since pollution from burning fossil fuels kills people, the anti-nuclear lobby have actually killed something like 5 million people net around the world since the 1970's, inc maybe 500,000 in the US. How's that for a safety argument?
I have worked in this area for years and must admit that it is one of the 'applications' that had occurred to me. Actually one of the most difficult problems in building real systems is preventing hackers from getting control of the machines control units and doing exactly that. Strong AI needs absolutely watertight security - probably better than on nuclear bombs.
I might describe myself as a near 'Rock Star' - or ex Rock Star type dev. I was about the best in the circles of people I met during training and early work, and when I was at uni I was maybe second or third or fourth out of about 200 people and constantly had people asking me for help. On the other hand I had also tried my hand at games development and it had been a dismal embarrassing failure. - I was both sides of that Rock Star equation - good and bad. Like others have said the coding of 'Rock Star' programmers can be very difficult for others to read or understand, and in my case as I got more proficient I found myself fighting the C++ language itself more and more and I did things that in hindsight could only be described as unbelievably dumb - and almost impossible for others to follow. Both sides contributed to that ego thing, the undermining and needing to prove yourself after failure side was just as powerful as the adulation and joy at creating things that worked side.
I was or probably could have been quite a good programmer or systems analyst if I had had different luck or different circumstances. But I fell into the classic 'Rock Star' hole and got hooked on my own super project which ultimately destroyed me. The project was Strong AI, consciousness driven machine intelligence, and on that 1 to 10 scale above it would be about a 20 - probably the ultimate pinnacle in the whole of programming. The thing could still succeed, and someday soon someone will succeed at it, but I got buried in my own labyrinth and got so deep that I ended up having a nervous breakdown and ending up in a mental hospital. After I recovered I found that ordinary computing had moved on and that I couldn't really program so well anymore, and have since shifted my skill set to new areas - though I still occasionally think about going full stream on restarting my Strong AI project.
( The (first) big problem with strong AI is that the final result promises something worth 100's of billions or trillions but it is totally speculative and always 10+ years away, plus getting there requires huge investment and risk, at least £10 million. Another problem is that the learning curve for working in Strong AI is almost vertical - and even if you can climb that mountain later returning to normal dev work afterwards is likely to be very difficult, so getting people to work on it is not exactly easy. Ultimately though the architecture requires a computer with an absolute OO encapsulation and self complete mathematics, and it requires a complete new design from the ground up - CPU, memory, interfacing, OS, HL language, and the AI itself. Not an easy task even today. )
The lesson is that the people at the top are delicate and fall to pieces, they can drift and become distracted by their own projects, and like anyone can burn out if pushed to hard. They are also often governed by hubris, and if that ego gets too well fed that's the end of everything.
" Hoaxes are much more funny when they are somewhat improbably or ironic in some way. When I first saw this story, I was a bit surprised that Microsoft would come out with this kind of technology considering that Microsoft has not in the past developed any form of physical media - they have mostly been a software company. OTOH, it wasn't that long ago that they got into the hardware business and Microsoft clearly has enough money, industry influence, etc. that they could develop a single play DVD format.
It is not a humorous hoax in any way, nor do I feel bad for having believed it at face value - nor should you. It was clearly a plausible story."
The joke here is that the story is a hoax. Knowing how things like DVD work I think its practically impossible to create a 'one use' disk. The only way to do it is if the DVD player itself deliberately destroys the disk. The problem is the 'one use' disk always fails ahead of the read and becomes a 'zero use' disk!
Environmentally - obviously zero use disks would be a waste to the environment because you could fill an entire landfill with them before you would see the whole movie even once.
Aaggh the first post on a new board and dyslexia strikes again. "(and even that will not be true every time)" - what I really meant was that the software will often crash after the car. Sorry.
If you think I am being cynical ask yourself, 'what is AI?'. Its basically big C programs with lots of really complex pointers. The most difficult part of AI I have seen so far is the memory management in the base layer. Another problem is that it does not enjoy sharing a computer with an operating system, a problem that is almost to obscene to mention. AI is difficult and not very reliable.