I'm trying to avoid the whole "what's natural vs. what's artificial" debate and look at it from a perspective of simply "what's possible". We know sentience is possible, because we're here. We know animals can do advanced optical pattern recognition, navigation, and lots of other "hard AI" problems because they're here. We only understand a fraction of the complex electro-chemical interactions happening within brains to create intelligences. We know a lot of it is analog, and it may not be feasible to map the same processes onto a digital computer. But we do know that our brains contain no magic and no unobtainium. They're incredibly complex machines that we presently understand poorly, but there's no indication we never will
I guess I don't understand your logic that AI might be unsolvable. We have working models to poke and prod and reverse engineer to our heart's content. We may not figure it out in our lifetimes, but given that intelligence has been created before, what could possibly preclude it from being created again?
Your anology to flying is flawed, we knew that things could fly, gliders had been around for ages, all that was needed for a power source that had good enough power to weight ratio. We do NOT have the AI code or any idea how to make it. Compare it to say faster then light travel. We don't know how, so claiming that if only we develop an infinite source of energy we can do it, is flawed.
FTL violates physics as we know it and we've never observed anything indicating it's possible. We *know* sentience is possible and the hardware and code exists. It's right behind our eyeballs. Human-level intelligence can be had in a device smaller than a bowling ball giving off less waste heat than a 100 watt light bulb.
I fully agree that most don't understand the magnitude of the problem and we have a very long way to go, but we know for a fact that it's 100% solvable. Nature already did it.
Building a human-form robot is easy enough. Refine the basic mechanical parts, get a better battery, and work on a better balance system and you're all set. Controlling it is a bit trickier without an AI, but I think we could feasibly build a robo-maid in the next 20 years. Maybe not to the point of affordable mass production. But certainly clever enough to do the laundry, wash the dishes, and make the occasional grilled cheese sandwitch for researchers.
Depends on your definition of "PC" and "Mainframe." All those little devices *are* PCs (and are more powerful than the mainframes of the past!). The only difference is form factor. The "box on a desk" home computer may very well decline (I don't think it'll die any time soon, at least not for geeks). The "fridge-sized cabinets" sitting in datacenters feeding content to the desktop computers and mobile devices won't be going anywhere soon. If history has taught us anything, the more powerful mainframe-class computing becomes, the more stuff we find to throw at it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I assumed only a small fraction of spam came from small operations. Isn't the lion's share believed to be coming from the big guys with massive botnets? And I doubt RIAAesque tactics would scare them. Unless the RIAA managed to lobbby for a few cruise missiles to get fired at overseas targets. (I really wouldn't put it past them)
. . . or it could've rotted in the fields because it was no longer economically feasible to harvest or transport the food to the millions of hungry mouths. Food production is heavily dependent on fossil fuels which are just stored biomass. The more expensive it gets to extract and refine fossil fuels, the more attractive using "fresh" biomass for fuels becomes. We just need to produce more biomass than our machines and bodies consume.
And those returns cost the retailer money--the product was taking up shelf space, the customer went through checkout, the store got charged the transaction fee if they used a credit card . . . and now it's being returned because it wasn't what the customer thought they were buying.
I think the real party at fault here is Wal-Mart. Sure someone made a crappy game device deliberately modeled after the Wiimote. Big deal. Wal-Mart decided to carry this piece of crap so it's taking up space on shelves, causing clueless customers to come back and return it and yell at customer service staff, etc. when they could be helping other customers purchase other cheap plastic crap that won't be returned. It's a waste of Wal-Mart's money. And that's the one thing Wal-Mart *hates* wasting.
It's quite symmetrical. The company produces something of value (a game). A customer (whose day job is as an accountant) produces something of value (accounting work). The customer wants the game, but the company does not need additional accounting services. Fortunately, the customer's accounting job provides him with a quantity of universal value units (money).
It's all well and good they want the game to be affordable for the good folks in Russia while still making nice profit from the US, UK and Europe. This artificially created arbitrage is only possible because the games are DRMed and must phone home to activate--otherwise everyone would just order the game in bulk from Russia and sell it in the US and Europe for a profit. It happens with commodities all the time.
The baloon flies higher than a plane can and is probably much cheaper (think of the fuel costs with keeping a plane in the air for 10+ hours). The purpose is to get above most of the atmospheric turbulance and moisture. Space is even clearer, but this is still much better than looking from the ground.
You're right. Their plane didn't weigh half a ton and have a 133HP engine. It weigned a bit over 600 pounds and had a whopping 12HP.
It also had wings. If the engine died, it still might be possible to land softly enough to not get squished. That helicopter will fall right out of the sky or go twirling/tumbling/spiraling out of control and impact the ground/innocent bystanders/flammable buildings/etc. if the engine stalls, a fuel line clogs, the transmission breaks, a rotor snaps off, etc.
Kudos to this guy for building his own helicopter from found items, but he's going to crash and kill himself and maybe others. If he wants to build helicopters for the government, he should put some of his effort into getting out of Nigeria and getting a job in aerospace. (He's just gotten a lot of free publicity, should be much easier to get someone's attention now).
will the spirit of freedom and idealism remain true or will the ever-present corporate bottom line eventually take over?
Yes and yes (it's already happened). The neat thing is both can happen without being mutually exclusive. Such is the beauty of FOSS. Is Linux suited for big-iron, misssion critical enterprise stuff backed and supported by heavyweights like IBM, Sun, etc? Yup. Can it be tinkered with on cheap commodity hardware for "backyard" projects and hobbyist programming? Yup. And everything else in between.
Perhaps it could change the orbit of each piece of crap - into a decaying orbit?
All orbits are decaying. Some bits might collide and a few bits of metal or flecks of paint might've reached higher orbits or even escape velocity. But most of it will be slowed by the faint friction from the rarified atmosphere to eventually burn up on reentry.
Basically, all that junk will eventually fall on its own. We just keep sending more junk up.
this is the first "synfuel" I've seen that claims a near-zero greenhouse gas emission
Near-zero net emissions. The fuel itself releases CO2 when burned, while the plants from which the fuel is derived pull it right back out of the air for the next batch of fuel.
This is wonderful news! We can finally return to the exciting days of Prodigy, Compuserve, Delphi and AOL-esque walled-garden networks! No more pesky public websites that haven't paid their dues to the gatekeepers! Finally the network operators will have total control over their infrastructure that was built entirely with private funds with all lines running in under and above their own private land.
It did not intend to suggest anything of the sort. MS merely said it would consider buying open source companies. Novell just doesn't make a lot of sense. What does Novell have that Microsoft would want to own, and is it worth the price tag? Netware's not a very valuable brand any more and even if MS wanted to begin selling enterprise Linux (and cannibalize Windows Server sales) they already own the necessary licenses to roll their own version of Novell's Open Enterprise Server and the few trademarks they might get here and there are certainly not worth outright buying Novell.
I just don't see what Microsoft stands to gain from buying Novell (or any Linux company, for that matter--ignoring the obvious 'buy them to shut them down' tactic they might want to pull against Red Hat).
The target Open Source company needs to have its own assets worth buying. Novell would be a regulatory nightmare (even under the present administration) and the trademarks and brand names don't really get Microsoft very much. If MS wanted to create a Linux distro, they could do so easily without buying any companies at all. They could even include their own proprietary Wine-esque compatibility layer with perfect Win32 support.
Of course, I can't think of a good reason why they'd *want* to do this; but they certainly could without buying anybody.
Aftereffects would actually make sense as a web app once the necessary bandwidth is reasonably available. Being able to edit video on a low-powered client machine and having the big iron at Adobe's datacenter do most of the rendering and en/transcoding would be worth a subscription fee, imho.
The problem here is that you trusted government agents to act in your best interests. Never make that mistake again. If *I* came up to you and said my credit card was stolen, and I think the thieves purchased a lot of merchandise from your store and proceeded to ask to rummage through your credit card receipts, would you let me? I hope your answer would be: "Hell no. Take it up with the credit card company."
You have no way of knowing if I'm lying to steal sensitive customer information as I'd just be some random guy who walked in. If my concerns are legitimate, then ensure I go through the proper channels.
The same goes for the FBI. They can flash their badges and make all sorts of demands. Do not comply. Ever. Insist they follow due process and obtain a warrant or subpeona for the specific information they need, and give them that and only that.
Never assume for a second that the ones with the badges are automatically "good guys." Be as suspicious and skeptical as if they were any random person off the streets. Insist they follow proper procedures. Because when you get sued, they won't lift a finger to help. (as you're unfortunately discovering)
Sure, but the recycling process is probably less efficient than starting from raw materials (it is one of the most abundant elements on the Earth's surface.) Semiconductor grade silicon must be highly purified and there's really not that much in a typical computer (only the chip dies themselves, which are relatively tiny).
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I'm trying to avoid the whole "what's natural vs. what's artificial" debate and look at it from a perspective of simply "what's possible". We know sentience is possible, because we're here. We know animals can do advanced optical pattern recognition, navigation, and lots of other "hard AI" problems because they're here. We only understand a fraction of the complex electro-chemical interactions happening within brains to create intelligences. We know a lot of it is analog, and it may not be feasible to map the same processes onto a digital computer. But we do know that our brains contain no magic and no unobtainium. They're incredibly complex machines that we presently understand poorly, but there's no indication we never will
I guess I don't understand your logic that AI might be unsolvable. We have working models to poke and prod and reverse engineer to our heart's content. We may not figure it out in our lifetimes, but given that intelligence has been created before, what could possibly preclude it from being created again?
I agree with you except on one point:
FTL violates physics as we know it and we've never observed anything indicating it's possible. We *know* sentience is possible and the hardware and code exists. It's right behind our eyeballs. Human-level intelligence can be had in a device smaller than a bowling ball giving off less waste heat than a 100 watt light bulb.
I fully agree that most don't understand the magnitude of the problem and we have a very long way to go, but we know for a fact that it's 100% solvable. Nature already did it.
Building a human-form robot is easy enough. Refine the basic mechanical parts, get a better battery, and work on a better balance system and you're all set. Controlling it is a bit trickier without an AI, but I think we could feasibly build a robo-maid in the next 20 years. Maybe not to the point of affordable mass production. But certainly clever enough to do the laundry, wash the dishes, and make the occasional grilled cheese sandwitch for researchers.
Depends on your definition of "PC" and "Mainframe." All those little devices *are* PCs (and are more powerful than the mainframes of the past!). The only difference is form factor. The "box on a desk" home computer may very well decline (I don't think it'll die any time soon, at least not for geeks). The "fridge-sized cabinets" sitting in datacenters feeding content to the desktop computers and mobile devices won't be going anywhere soon. If history has taught us anything, the more powerful mainframe-class computing becomes, the more stuff we find to throw at it.
I think you're referring to the Motofone F3. And it uses a small e-ink display, not OLED.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I assumed only a small fraction of spam came from small operations. Isn't the lion's share believed to be coming from the big guys with massive botnets? And I doubt RIAAesque tactics would scare them. Unless the RIAA managed to lobbby for a few cruise missiles to get fired at overseas targets. (I really wouldn't put it past them)
. . . or it could've rotted in the fields because it was no longer economically feasible to harvest or transport the food to the millions of hungry mouths. Food production is heavily dependent on fossil fuels which are just stored biomass. The more expensive it gets to extract and refine fossil fuels, the more attractive using "fresh" biomass for fuels becomes. We just need to produce more biomass than our machines and bodies consume.
And those returns cost the retailer money--the product was taking up shelf space, the customer went through checkout, the store got charged the transaction fee if they used a credit card . . . and now it's being returned because it wasn't what the customer thought they were buying.
I think the real party at fault here is Wal-Mart. Sure someone made a crappy game device deliberately modeled after the Wiimote. Big deal. Wal-Mart decided to carry this piece of crap so it's taking up space on shelves, causing clueless customers to come back and return it and yell at customer service staff, etc. when they could be helping other customers purchase other cheap plastic crap that won't be returned. It's a waste of Wal-Mart's money. And that's the one thing Wal-Mart *hates* wasting.
It's quite symmetrical. The company produces something of value (a game). A customer (whose day job is as an accountant) produces something of value (accounting work). The customer wants the game, but the company does not need additional accounting services. Fortunately, the customer's accounting job provides him with a quantity of universal value units (money).
It's all well and good they want the game to be affordable for the good folks in Russia while still making nice profit from the US, UK and Europe. This artificially created arbitrage is only possible because the games are DRMed and must phone home to activate--otherwise everyone would just order the game in bulk from Russia and sell it in the US and Europe for a profit. It happens with commodities all the time.
Wouldn't overheating be an even bigger problem on the moon? There's no atmosphere to conduct/convect away waste heat.
The baloon flies higher than a plane can and is probably much cheaper (think of the fuel costs with keeping a plane in the air for 10+ hours). The purpose is to get above most of the atmospheric turbulance and moisture. Space is even clearer, but this is still much better than looking from the ground.
It also had wings. If the engine died, it still might be possible to land softly enough to not get squished. That helicopter will fall right out of the sky or go twirling/tumbling/spiraling out of control and impact the ground/innocent bystanders/flammable buildings/etc. if the engine stalls, a fuel line clogs, the transmission breaks, a rotor snaps off, etc.
Kudos to this guy for building his own helicopter from found items, but he's going to crash and kill himself and maybe others. If he wants to build helicopters for the government, he should put some of his effort into getting out of Nigeria and getting a job in aerospace. (He's just gotten a lot of free publicity, should be much easier to get someone's attention now).
Yes and yes (it's already happened). The neat thing is both can happen without being mutually exclusive. Such is the beauty of FOSS. Is Linux suited for big-iron, misssion critical enterprise stuff backed and supported by heavyweights like IBM, Sun, etc? Yup. Can it be tinkered with on cheap commodity hardware for "backyard" projects and hobbyist programming? Yup. And everything else in between.
All orbits are decaying. Some bits might collide and a few bits of metal or flecks of paint might've reached higher orbits or even escape velocity. But most of it will be slowed by the faint friction from the rarified atmosphere to eventually burn up on reentry.
Basically, all that junk will eventually fall on its own. We just keep sending more junk up.
They probably had to place it in a non interest-bearing account--so the bank probably got to pocket the interest.
I think a better analogy for the shuttle would be a massive cargo ship. In the desert.
Near-zero net emissions. The fuel itself releases CO2 when burned, while the plants from which the fuel is derived pull it right back out of the air for the next batch of fuel.
This is wonderful news! We can finally return to the exciting days of Prodigy, Compuserve, Delphi and AOL-esque walled-garden networks! No more pesky public websites that haven't paid their dues to the gatekeepers! Finally the network operators will have total control over their infrastructure that was built entirely with private funds with all lines running in under and above their own private land.
It did not intend to suggest anything of the sort. MS merely said it would consider buying open source companies. Novell just doesn't make a lot of sense. What does Novell have that Microsoft would want to own, and is it worth the price tag? Netware's not a very valuable brand any more and even if MS wanted to begin selling enterprise Linux (and cannibalize Windows Server sales) they already own the necessary licenses to roll their own version of Novell's Open Enterprise Server and the few trademarks they might get here and there are certainly not worth outright buying Novell.
I just don't see what Microsoft stands to gain from buying Novell (or any Linux company, for that matter--ignoring the obvious 'buy them to shut them down' tactic they might want to pull against Red Hat).
The target Open Source company needs to have its own assets worth buying. Novell would be a regulatory nightmare (even under the present administration) and the trademarks and brand names don't really get Microsoft very much. If MS wanted to create a Linux distro, they could do so easily without buying any companies at all. They could even include their own proprietary Wine-esque compatibility layer with perfect Win32 support.
Of course, I can't think of a good reason why they'd *want* to do this; but they certainly could without buying anybody.
Aftereffects would actually make sense as a web app once the necessary bandwidth is reasonably available. Being able to edit video on a low-powered client machine and having the big iron at Adobe's datacenter do most of the rendering and en/transcoding would be worth a subscription fee, imho.
The problem here is that you trusted government agents to act in your best interests. Never make that mistake again. If *I* came up to you and said my credit card was stolen, and I think the thieves purchased a lot of merchandise from your store and proceeded to ask to rummage through your credit card receipts, would you let me? I hope your answer would be: "Hell no. Take it up with the credit card company."
You have no way of knowing if I'm lying to steal sensitive customer information as I'd just be some random guy who walked in. If my concerns are legitimate, then ensure I go through the proper channels.
The same goes for the FBI. They can flash their badges and make all sorts of demands. Do not comply. Ever. Insist they follow due process and obtain a warrant or subpeona for the specific information they need, and give them that and only that.
Never assume for a second that the ones with the badges are automatically "good guys." Be as suspicious and skeptical as if they were any random person off the streets. Insist they follow proper procedures. Because when you get sued, they won't lift a finger to help. (as you're unfortunately discovering)
Only if they release a version for the Wii. *ducks*
Sure, but the recycling process is probably less efficient than starting from raw materials (it is one of the most abundant elements on the Earth's surface.) Semiconductor grade silicon must be highly purified and there's really not that much in a typical computer (only the chip dies themselves, which are relatively tiny).
Yes, those are the ballots in use in Florida--at least the parts I've voted in, it may vary from county to county.