that's how he gets famous - by taking other people's ideas and regurgitating them as if they were his own.
Like everybody else. Writers are not philosophers or physicists. They are not supposed to come up with new ideas, but to express the old ideas in interesting ways.
The military of the future may not need to put lives on the front-lines.
And that is the problem. If nobody comes back home dead, and if the war are fought outside your territory (they are called liberation wars this days), then a war is just a headline on the news for the people on the country deploying the robots.
That makes engaging in "liberation" wars a much more attractive position for your average politician, especially when you are inside an economic crisis and need some foreign enemy to control your population.
Eventually wars will be a tech show where the country with the biggest toys wins and takes it all. At least the non nuclear wars.
I am really sad saying this. But if I was a third world country with a lot of resources (they are the usual target of "liberation" wars) I would see nuclear weapons as the only chance to achieve real independence as I wouldn't be able to afford high tech defenses.
This is just a diagnostics test. It won't kill anyone. The FDA should let the market sort this things out and not get in the way of progress.
They do enough damage already by setting up a huge entry barrier for startups and new drugs. This only benefits the big Pharmaceutical companies, and I think that is probably the point...
Well, what really happens is that if something can be done, there is always someone willing to do it. This is a consequence of the current diversity in cultures, politics and individual views of the world (which I take to be a good thing overall).
So if information can be shared easily, there is going to be people using P2P. If personal information is easy to record and share, there is going to be people doing it.
At the end of the day, morality is just a set of frozen rules that used to work. But this days our world is changing fast.
Now, what the consequences of this are, we don't know. We are close to the sigularity and things are going to be getting more unpredictable as time goes on.
They need to move fast, clean VP8 up and push it into Chrome, Android and youtube. Firefox and Opera will follow quickly and the attempt to lock web multimedia into propietary formats from Apple and Microsoft will fail.
This move from Apple and the Microsoft's statement about only supporting H.264 are a reaction to Google's purchase of VP8. Both Apple and Microsoft are terrified of Google. They are willing to give up quicktime and wmv as long as Google doesn't succeed in pushing an open source, patent free solution to web video.
It is clear that the move is not against Flash, the Flash plugin will always be there.
It is a preemptive move against Google's VP8 in particular and open source in general. Basically they are creating a problem for Firefox (which has stated that they won't support H.264) and trying to stop Google's VP8 before it can be successful.
Correct me if I am wrong, but in theory, if Firefox uses the google certificate, there is no way the ISP can do man in the middle attacks, that's the whole point of the certificate.
So this is the answer, start using https and certificates for everything.
And on a more general note, all traffic should be encrypted to every web site and for every Internet application.
You are literally asking if the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
My point here is that the needs of the many at this point in humanity's technological development is to advance fast into a new era of medicine where we control cancer, aging, the inmune system and metabolism. The faster we get there the more people we save.
The FDA is in the way of progress. It makes development of new therapies slow and hugely expensive and only big Pharma companies are able to navigate the bureaucracy. They are also able to bend the rules in their favor or rewrite them through lobbying. This companies are interested in keeping start ups and competing companies from entering the market. The FDA is the best tool they have. The result is that in the era of the biotechnology revolution, very few new therapies make it into the clinic.
I think it would be much better to allow people to make their own decisions. At the end of the day, they are quite interested on their own health. The market would sort the good therapies from the bad. The same way I need to learn how to deal with crooked car salesman I can learn to treat with snake oil salesman.
The advantage would be a shortening between the point we are now and the point where we have truly working therapies for the ailments we will all get eventually: cancer or diabetes or circulatory problems or why not, aging. All people that could be saved by this new therapies outweigh the few that would die because of bad decision making.
As usual, the problem with regulation is not what it achieves, but what could have been achieved and the regulation stops from happening.
Asia will soon surpass the US in developing cutting edge new therapies because of this. The US will have lost a great economic opportunity and a lot of people will have gone through pain and death needlessly.
drugs cannot under any circumstances go to large-scale populations because if they are untested, you will end up killing more people than you save
This is where you are wrong. You have one fact. The fact that this drugs cures 1/3 of the people taking it in the tests.
You do not have the fact that it kills any one. You just think it could. If we are talking about terminal cancer patients, they should be given it.
Also, even if the drug do kill people, it can be a risk worth taking. Lets say that this drug is tested in a group of people with late stage cancer and an average six months to die. Even if the drug kills 2 out of 3, but it cures 1 out of 3, it is a risk I would take. I would happily accept the risk of an "early" dead if I would get a chance to get cured.
In my mind it is morally wrong for the government to tell me that I can't make an informed decision with the information at hand and take the drug.
and V8 will likely end up in Google Chrome as well.
Well, V8 will end up in Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Android, Wikimedia and Webkit, that's for sure. Then Apple will need to rip it off Webkit in order to produce safari, and this will produce a fishy smell, so they may be pressured to leave it there.
What we need is companies like Da Vinci making lots of money and evolving the technology into real robots.
The first phase in the evolution path is likely to be first adding tactile sensors, then chemical sensors, and relying all that information to the doctor, processing it before presentation so the doctor can use all that information in an easy way.
Second phase would be to add more autonomy to the tool, so it makes "decisions" like identifying tissues and for example warning before cutting through nerves or scaling the surgeon movements depending on the area and tissue type it is working at that point, as to make it safer.
Third phase would be to add more autonomy and let some of the tools to be moved by the computer in coordination of the surgeon actions, so for example the computer could take care of draining blood without the surgeon intervention. In order to do that, the computer needs to be able to tell one tissue type from another, and understand the organization of the body area it is working in.
Then some stereotypical parts of the operation could be carried on completely automated.
Finally, eventually the full operation would be carried by the computer.
I would really like computers take over. Even if they are worst than actual surgeons. There are two advantages.
The first one is price. A lot of operations are not carried because of economic reasons. People in that situation would prefer even a "bad" robotic surgeon than nothing.
The second would be consistency. There would be no variability between one robot and the next. Now the outcome of your operation depends so much on what surgeon performs it and if he has a good day.
The deep web and its 'darknets' are a new battleground for those who want to uphold the right to privacy online, and those who feel that rights need to be sacrificed for the safety of society
Corporations, wealthy individuals and people in power keep their right to privacy. That's not good for the "safety of society". See the ACTA negotiation. Most of the calls about the future of society are made in a non transparent way, by corporations, the psychopaths that run them and corrupt politicians. If I don't keep my right to privacy ( and this looks like a lost cause) then I want them to lose it as well. I want a full public database with detailed information about every dollar owned and every move made by politicians and members of a corporation board. I want every government contract to be published on an easily searchable database. I want all meetings between corporation boards and/or government officials transcribed and published on another publicly search able database.
we will have better luck waiting for mass adoption of html5 than waiting for a REAL release of the adobe flash plugin. Maybe html5 is whats causing them to wake up
That and Linux popping up into netbooks and phones. If they don't get their act together the only real option will be HTML5 (not that this would be a bad thing).
we WILL use all the resources on this planet at one point. ALL of them. And then we die
Or we just go on. There are more planets and more stars. Soon all we'll need is energy. We'll be able to use it to build anything we need out of the atomic elements very much like in "Diamond Age". At this point we will be going out of the earth's gravity well and harvesting the sun's energy. Then other starts...
Is it just me or the google translation engine is a lot better this days?
AI is improving quickly. Of course someone will answer telling me that this is not real AI. It was considered AI when it couldnt be done and as soon as it can be done, it is just a stupid algorithm.
But if you want to work in any of these environments, you have to go by laws
Well, there are two problems here. The first is that the Chinese government and his state corporations don't obey Chinese law. Isn't it forbidden to hack into other peoples computers in China?
The second is the key difference between Microsoft and Google:
Microsoft is directed by your standard issue marketing drone, Ballmer, and the result is what you usually get from western corporations: mindless search for profits. He may as well be operating a arms dealership.
On the other hand, Google (and many of the internet startups) is directed by people that at least gives some thought to morals and let it "interfere" with business. For them there are some laws that one cannot obey.
On the other hand, Microsoft is quite happy collaborating with the Chinese government in clamping on freedom of expression.
If only for that reason, you'll never catch me using bing.
There are the moral reasons and also the fact that information about you can end up in the hands of Chinese officials. Of course the later is more important for the Chinese population living abroad and for companies competing against Chinese products (most of the big ones if not all)
Forget for a moment the nationalistic and economic competition between USA and China. What this means to me is that with China, Russia, Brazil and India increasing their research output, the rate of scientific progress will probably double from what we had 10 years ago.
That and the fact that I prefer (for moral reasons) a non starving Chinese population, means this is good to me. The current boom in biotechnology together with an aging population, means that scientific knowledge improves quality of life for all of us.
By the way, China is investing heavily and making fast progress in stem cell development, a research area where the religious lobby in the USA has delayed progress. The USA has it's own political problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Amazing. Just five years to go from:
China, they just can make cheap copies of western technology
to
China, they are starting to compete with western products
to
China is ahead on R&D
that's how he gets famous - by taking other people's ideas and regurgitating them as if they were his own.
Like everybody else. Writers are not philosophers or physicists. They are not supposed to come up with new ideas, but to express the old ideas in interesting ways.
The military of the future may not need to put lives on the front-lines.
And that is the problem. If nobody comes back home dead, and if the war are fought outside your territory (they are called liberation wars this days), then a war is just a headline on the news for the people on the country deploying the robots.
That makes engaging in "liberation" wars a much more attractive position for your average politician, especially when you are inside an economic crisis and need some foreign enemy to control your population.
Eventually wars will be a tech show where the country with the biggest toys wins and takes it all. At least the non nuclear wars.
I am really sad saying this. But if I was a third world country with a lot of resources (they are the usual target of "liberation" wars) I would see nuclear weapons as the only chance to achieve real independence as I wouldn't be able to afford high tech defenses.
Well,
Your answer sounds to me like a fear driven marketing campaign.
This is just a diagnostics test. It won't kill anyone. The FDA should let the market sort this things out and not get in the way of progress.
They do enough damage already by setting up a huge entry barrier for startups and new drugs. This only benefits the big Pharmaceutical companies, and I think that is probably the point...
Well, what really happens is that if something can be done, there is always someone willing to do it. This is a consequence of the current diversity in cultures, politics and individual views of the world (which I take to be a good thing overall).
So if information can be shared easily, there is going to be people using P2P. If personal information is easy to record and share, there is going to be people doing it.
At the end of the day, morality is just a set of frozen rules that used to work. But this days our world is changing fast.
Now, what the consequences of this are, we don't know. We are close to the sigularity and things are going to be getting more unpredictable as time goes on.
They need to move fast, clean VP8 up and push it into Chrome, Android and youtube. Firefox and Opera will follow quickly and the attempt to lock web multimedia into propietary formats from Apple and Microsoft will fail.
This move from Apple and the Microsoft's statement about only supporting H.264 are a reaction to Google's purchase of VP8. Both Apple and Microsoft are terrified of Google. They are willing to give up quicktime and wmv as long as Google doesn't succeed in pushing an open source, patent free solution to web video.
It is clear that the move is not against Flash, the Flash plugin will always be there.
It is a preemptive move against Google's VP8 in particular and open source in general. Basically they are creating a problem for Firefox (which has stated that they won't support H.264) and trying to stop Google's VP8 before it can be successful.
Correct me if I am wrong, but in theory, if Firefox uses the google certificate, there is no way the ISP can do man in the middle attacks, that's the whole point of the certificate.
So this is the answer, start using https and certificates for everything.
And on a more general note, all traffic should be encrypted to every web site and for every Internet application.
You are literally asking if the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
My point here is that the needs of the many at this point in humanity's technological development is to advance fast into a new era of medicine where we control cancer, aging, the inmune system and metabolism. The faster we get there the more people we save.
The FDA is in the way of progress. It makes development of new therapies slow and hugely expensive and only big Pharma companies are able to navigate the bureaucracy. They are also able to bend the rules in their favor or rewrite them through lobbying. This companies are interested in keeping start ups and competing companies from entering the market. The FDA is the best tool they have. The result is that in the era of the biotechnology revolution, very few new therapies make it into the clinic.
I think it would be much better to allow people to make their own decisions. At the end of the day, they are quite interested on their own health. The market would sort the good therapies from the bad. The same way I need to learn how to deal with crooked car salesman I can learn to treat with snake oil salesman.
The advantage would be a shortening between the point we are now and the point where we have truly working therapies for the ailments we will all get eventually: cancer or diabetes or circulatory problems or why not, aging. All people that could be saved by this new therapies outweigh the few that would die because of bad decision making.
As usual, the problem with regulation is not what it achieves, but what could have been achieved and the regulation stops from happening.
Asia will soon surpass the US in developing cutting edge new therapies because of this. The US will have lost a great economic opportunity and a lot of people will have gone through pain and death needlessly.
If you are a doctor, you should put the well being of your patient before your ability to get clean data.
drugs cannot under any circumstances go to large-scale populations because if they are untested, you will end up killing more people than you save
This is where you are wrong. You have one fact. The fact that this drugs cures 1/3 of the people taking it in the tests.
You do not have the fact that it kills any one. You just think it could. If we are talking about terminal cancer patients, they should be given it.
Also, even if the drug do kill people, it can be a risk worth taking. Lets say that this drug is tested in a group of people with late stage cancer and an average six months to die. Even if the drug kills 2 out of 3, but it cures 1 out of 3, it is a risk I would take. I would happily accept the risk of an "early" dead if I would get a chance to get cured.
In my mind it is morally wrong for the government to tell me that I can't make an informed decision with the information at hand and take the drug.
and V8 will likely end up in Google Chrome as well.
Well, V8 will end up in Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Android, Wikimedia and Webkit, that's for sure. Then Apple will need to rip it off Webkit in order to produce safari, and this will produce a fishy smell, so they may be pressured to leave it there.
That's a pretty good jumpstart.
If Google would stop censoring search results in China, I would be convinced...
They're remote manipulation systems
What we need is companies like Da Vinci making lots of money and evolving the technology into real robots.
The first phase in the evolution path is likely to be first adding tactile sensors, then chemical sensors, and relying all that information to the doctor, processing it before presentation so the doctor can use all that information in an easy way.
Second phase would be to add more autonomy to the tool, so it makes "decisions" like identifying tissues and for example warning before cutting through nerves or scaling the surgeon movements depending on the area and tissue type it is working at that point, as to make it safer.
Third phase would be to add more autonomy and let some of the tools to be moved by the computer in coordination of the surgeon actions, so for example the computer could take care of draining blood without the surgeon intervention. In order to do that, the computer needs to be able to tell one tissue type from another, and understand the organization of the body area it is working in.
Then some stereotypical parts of the operation could be carried on completely automated.
Finally, eventually the full operation would be carried by the computer.
I would really like computers take over. Even if they are worst than actual surgeons. There are two advantages.
The first one is price. A lot of operations are not carried because of economic reasons. People in that situation would prefer even a "bad" robotic surgeon than nothing.
The second would be consistency. There would be no variability between one robot and the next. Now the outcome of your operation depends so much on what surgeon performs it and if he has a good day.
As soon as the video tag becomes popular implementations using the GPU will appear, and will not only work in Windows. We will be farther better off.
And if Google open sources the VP8 codec the just purchased, it will be even better.
I agree with that, but the message people in power is throwing around is that privacy is a lost cause... for us.
If they realized that in that case we are not willing to allow them to keep their own privacy and anonymity, they may change their minds.
In fact, it may be a good idea to keep individuals privacy, but making institutions and corporations transparent.
The deep web and its 'darknets' are a new battleground for those who want to uphold the right to privacy online, and those who feel that rights need to be sacrificed for the safety of society
Corporations, wealthy individuals and people in power keep their right to privacy. That's not good for the "safety of society". See the ACTA negotiation. Most of the calls about the future of society are made in a non transparent way, by corporations, the psychopaths that run them and corrupt politicians. If I don't keep my right to privacy ( and this looks like a lost cause) then I want them to lose it as well. I want a full public database with detailed information about every dollar owned and every move made by politicians and members of a corporation board. I want every government contract to be published on an easily searchable database. I want all meetings between corporation boards and/or government officials transcribed and published on another publicly search able database.
So maybe the solution is Theora and Vorbis encoded media on a mkv container, right? Pick the best (free software) tool for the job
we will have better luck waiting for mass adoption of html5 than waiting for a REAL release of the adobe flash plugin. Maybe html5 is whats causing them to wake up
That and Linux popping up into netbooks and phones. If they don't get their act together the only real option will be HTML5 (not that this would be a bad thing).
we WILL use all the resources on this planet at one point. ALL of them. And then we die
Or we just go on. There are more planets and more stars. Soon all we'll need is energy. We'll be able to use it to build anything we need out of the atomic elements very much like in "Diamond Age". At this point we will be going out of the earth's gravity well and harvesting the sun's energy. Then other starts...
Is it just me or the google translation engine is a lot better this days?
AI is improving quickly. Of course someone will answer telling me that this is not real AI. It was considered AI when it couldnt be done and as soon as it can be done, it is just a stupid algorithm.
But if you want to work in any of these environments, you have to go by laws
Well, there are two problems here. The first is that the Chinese government and his state corporations don't obey Chinese law. Isn't it forbidden to hack into other peoples computers in China?
The second is the key difference between Microsoft and Google:
Microsoft is directed by your standard issue marketing drone, Ballmer, and the result is what you usually get from western corporations: mindless search for profits. He may as well be operating a arms dealership.
On the other hand, Google (and many of the internet startups) is directed by people that at least gives some thought to morals and let it "interfere" with business. For them there are some laws that one cannot obey.
On the other hand, Microsoft is quite happy collaborating with the Chinese government in clamping on freedom of expression.
If only for that reason, you'll never catch me using bing.
There are the moral reasons and also the fact that information about you can end up in the hands of Chinese officials. Of course the later is more important for the Chinese population living abroad and for companies competing against Chinese products (most of the big ones if not all)
Forget for a moment the nationalistic and economic competition between USA and China. What this means to me is that with China, Russia, Brazil and India increasing their research output, the rate of scientific progress will probably double from what we had 10 years ago.
That and the fact that I prefer (for moral reasons) a non starving Chinese population, means this is good to me. The current boom in biotechnology together with an aging population, means that scientific knowledge improves quality of life for all of us.
By the way, China is investing heavily and making fast progress in stem cell development, a research area where the religious lobby in the USA has delayed progress. The USA has it's own political problems.