Matching the neuron count and connection count of a cat brain is clearly not sufficient to simulate the functionality. Neurons in a mammal brain are not randomly connected. A great level of organization happens during the growth of the brain cells and connections starting from the embryonic stage. Much of the functionality is "hardwired" as result of this organized growth process which has evolved over hundreds of millions of years, and for higher level mammal like a cat a lot of the functionality is wired (learned) during early "kittenhood". Without reverse engineering some of this "schematic diagram", I am not sure how useful it is to simulate a random set of neurons that are wired randomly unless the object is to create a high-grade white noise generator.
I built a single instruction microprocessor at grad school. The only instruction was to move a 32-bit data from one address to another address. All the ALU and I/O functions were memory mapped. For example, you could have an adder where address A was operand #1, address B was operand #2 and address C was the result. Branches were handled through ALU units where the result of the operation changed the instruction pointer for some future instruction. It was very easy to implement and notoriously difficult to program.
Build the FBR on the moon. The amount of fuel that needs to be sent over is not that much, and we don't have to worry about disposing of the nuclear waste or about unfriendlies smuggling the plutonium back to Earth in 18-wheelers...
Of course, you would need some kind of a monster microwave link to carry the energy back to the Earth...
Another MPAA attempt to resuscitate a dying business model through prohibitive legislation. The fundamental source of the piracy problem is economical. Technology has greatly reduced the cost of creation and distribution of content (not including the pay for stars/directors/studio execs), but content owners still want to impose archaic pricing policies on content which clearly is not worth it for many people.
I stopped buying DVDs since renting them (mail or online) through Netflix is much more economical and convenient. I pay my $16.99 monthly content "tax" to Netflix, and I am all set. This is the new model for content use. The solution is to extend the fee based online access to cover all available content. If I can watch any movie I want any time I want for a $20/month subscription fee, why would I bother pirating DVDs?
Trying to fight economics through legislation has never worked, and never will.
Google and all other search engines should immediately start excluding links to Murdoch's web sites from all of their search results. Mr Murdoch should look into other ways of increasing his profits form the content his publications are providing. He should go one step further and make Fox News Channel a premium cable channel that costs $49.95/month...
This way this article is quoted on the Slashdot is nothing but politically motivated propaganda and is full of non-facts. Of course, not many will bother to do a minimal amount of research which would reveal that most ($359.36 million portion) of this loan will be directed to Fisker's Project Nina, an effort by the automaker to develop a lower-cost, higher-volume plug-in hybrid car by late 2012.
Also, many adults are not able to understand the difference between "million" and "billions". The total amount of the government loan (not handout) of given to these two innovative automakers add up to less than a billion dollars. Compared that to nearly a trillion dollars that has been spent over the last year to rescue banks and investment bankers. It is very likely that a lot more than a billion dollars of the government handout to the banks was used to paid "guaranteed bonuses" for the executives who were (ir)responsible for bringing their financial institutions to the brink of bankruptcy. And the "Citizens Against Government Waste" somewhat did not bother to make any comments regarding the $1 Trillion handout to Wall Street...
True. QWERTY is obviously not a very good keyboard layout, but it has been around for a long time simply because people like UIs they are used to, as long as they do the job.
"By the by - the reason this is different from Scientology is because Scientology is a cult. They don't tend to gain membership just from selling people a line of B.S. but rather through indoctrination."
Show me a "real" religion that does not start indoctrinating at a young age?
"They've gained religious status as an organized religion through intimidation and litigation, but having a shit load of money doesn't make them any less of a cult."
Just wind the clock back about 500-600 years and replace "Scientology" with "Catholic Church"...
What is being proposed here is exactly the opposite of one size fits all. Insurance companies already discriminate based on driver's age, gender or marital status. If insurance companies could come up with some actual data that shows some degree of correlation between miles driven and accident or claim rate, it is perfectly reasonable to expect that they will offer insurance rates based on this.
What I am wondering is this: If the data shows that people with a certain age group that drive less than a certain number of miles per year have the highest accident and claim rate, would the insurance rates for that group go up? Will the politicians have the guts to counter the outcry from the AARP?
As the number of chiller-less data centers in the Northern Hemisphere increases, New Zealand may become the ideal location to build alternate climate data center capacity to deal with hot summers in Europe and Northern America...:)
But seriously, flow management/queuing may be useful at the very edge of the network, like a BRAS. But most provider edge products (Juniper, Ericsson/Redback,...) already have similar capabilities. Flow management past the edge of a network is pointless, especially for TCP/IP traffic.
The language projecting the cost savings for this new solar technology is somewhat dubious as usual. Even if the developers of this technology have good reason to think that the cadmium sulfide based solar panel technology will cost 1/10th compared to today's cost of developing silicon based solar panels, what happens between now and when they are able to take this technology to mass production in five or more years?
There is a massive world-wide technology complex driving the optimization of silicon based manufacturing technology. The amount of capital invested into silicon manufacturing process and tools is measured in tens of billions of dollars per year, if not hundreds of billions. If the conventional process improvements is able to achieve 20-25% cost improvement per year, in five years, the cost of panels based on conventional panels would be down to 25-30% of today's cost. A few hickups in the development of the new technology like yield or reliability issues can easily delay the mass deployment by a few years which will negate all cost benefits. Not to mention the possibility of cadmium prices going up if the volumes are picking up...
And don't forget the cost of capital investment, which is already funded due to other "useful" applications in the silicon case. Most other technologies that tried to compete against silicon lost so far, not because of fundamental technical issues but because of the economics involved.
I am not against developing new innovative technologies to achieve substantial improvements in the solar power area. However, it is best to keep the optimism about new and unproven technologies in control until they reach at least beta production stage...
These new 1U/2U servers may appear to be even less interesting than the California (UCS) products that were introduced earlier this year. However, the reality is that Cisco is actually rounding out the lower end of its server product line before they introduce the much more innovative, higher end (higher margin) SMP systems later this year. Intel just announced the new SMP platforms based on 8-core processors that scale to 4 and 8 sockets. Expect Cisco to scale the socket count even further. Going into the server market with some conventional products enables them to build sales channels and ramp up the service organization to get ready for the real stuff.
There is only one reason IBM wants to acquire Sun: If Sun is acquired by Cisco instead, Cisco will instantly become a credible enterprise computing supplier. Cisco is the #1 competitive threat for IBM in the long run...
There is simply not enough data to support this conclusion. Reduced amount of streaming bandwidth could be due a sustained congestion at any point in the network between the Netflix server and your client. A lot of ISPs oversubscribe their access network very heavily based on statistical multiplexing assumptions that simply do not work when even a small percentage of customers on a subnet are streaming video.
If there is any throttling going on, it is more likely that your ISP is responsible for it. Cable companies and DSL providers who are getting into the video on demand business may not like Netflix beating them to market with a more cost effective product...
I am not sure if and when TTS is going to replace human voice. Animated movies have been around for a long time, and computer animated movies have been around for more than a decade. We have yet to see an animated movie with computer generated dialogue. Even the fully animated Pixar feature films have high paid actors/actresses doing all the talking.
I guess Neal Stephenson was able to see this emerging lack of parity between computer generated graphics/video and computer generated audio many years ago in Diamond Age
A book that is read by a competent actor is an "artistic performance", and is subject to copyright as such. In this context, the audio rights for the book used in that performance does not apply to a book that TTS converted by Kindle.
If TTS technology becomes so good as to be comparable to performance by an accomplished actor over the next ten years, it is the Actor's Guild who should be worried instead of Author's Guild.
By the way, the technology to convert plain paper books to speech electronically has existed for some time - even through the resulting form factor is not as convenient as Kindle.
Now that 10GigE runs over cheap copper cables (not the yet expensive and power hungry 10GBase-T but cheap and already widely available 10G serial over twin-axial cable), why not run all the PC peripherals on 10GigE interfaces instead of adding more kludges to the already overburdened USB standard? If the motherboard has an 10G Ethernet hub, peripherals that do not need so much bandwidth can easily auto negotiate down to 1Gb/s or 100Mb/s...
Yes, backward compatibility would be a problem, but I am sure computer and electronic manufacturers won't be disappointed by a mass upgrade cycle driven by a new (and higher performance) peripheral interconnect standard.
Slashdot Mirror
read "Zodiac" by Neal Stephenson...
This region of spacetime has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. All unsaved objects will be lost.
Matching the neuron count and connection count of a cat brain is clearly not sufficient to simulate the functionality. Neurons in a mammal brain are not randomly connected. A great level of organization happens during the growth of the brain cells and connections starting from the embryonic stage. Much of the functionality is "hardwired" as result of this organized growth process which has evolved over hundreds of millions of years, and for higher level mammal like a cat a lot of the functionality is wired (learned) during early "kittenhood". Without reverse engineering some of this "schematic diagram", I am not sure how useful it is to simulate a random set of neurons that are wired randomly unless the object is to create a high-grade white noise generator.
Easy answer: the one with the more accessible back door.
"Hi, I'm a PC"
and then the NSA guy with the latex glove enters the scene...
I built a single instruction microprocessor at grad school. The only instruction was to move a 32-bit data from one address to another address. All the ALU and I/O functions were memory mapped. For example, you could have an adder where address A was operand #1, address B was operand #2 and address C was the result. Branches were handled through ALU units where the result of the operation changed the instruction pointer for some future instruction. It was very easy to implement and notoriously difficult to program.
The first human inter-stellar starship is not that bad of an additional unintended side effect...
Of course, you would need some kind of a monster microwave link to carry the energy back to the Earth...
Low latency, high bandwidth interconnect that can mesh 100 Million cores: The Next Big Problem in computer architecture.
I stopped buying DVDs since renting them (mail or online) through Netflix is much more economical and convenient. I pay my $16.99 monthly content "tax" to Netflix, and I am all set. This is the new model for content use. The solution is to extend the fee based online access to cover all available content. If I can watch any movie I want any time I want for a $20/month subscription fee, why would I bother pirating DVDs?
Trying to fight economics through legislation has never worked, and never will.
Google and all other search engines should immediately start excluding links to Murdoch's web sites from all of their search results. Mr Murdoch should look into other ways of increasing his profits form the content his publications are providing. He should go one step further and make Fox News Channel a premium cable channel that costs $49.95/month...
Also, many adults are not able to understand the difference between "million" and "billions". The total amount of the government loan (not handout) of given to these two innovative automakers add up to less than a billion dollars. Compared that to nearly a trillion dollars that has been spent over the last year to rescue banks and investment bankers. It is very likely that a lot more than a billion dollars of the government handout to the banks was used to paid "guaranteed bonuses" for the executives who were (ir)responsible for bringing their financial institutions to the brink of bankruptcy. And the "Citizens Against Government Waste" somewhat did not bother to make any comments regarding the $1 Trillion handout to Wall Street...
True. QWERTY is obviously not a very good keyboard layout, but it has been around for a long time simply because people like UIs they are used to, as long as they do the job.
Show me a "real" religion that does not start indoctrinating at a young age?
"They've gained religious status as an organized religion through intimidation and litigation, but having a shit load of money doesn't make them any less of a cult."
Just wind the clock back about 500-600 years and replace "Scientology" with "Catholic Church"...
What I am wondering is this: If the data shows that people with a certain age group that drive less than a certain number of miles per year have the highest accident and claim rate, would the insurance rates for that group go up? Will the politicians have the guts to counter the outcry from the AARP?
As the number of chiller-less data centers in the Northern Hemisphere increases, New Zealand may become the ideal location to build alternate climate data center capacity to deal with hot summers in Europe and Northern America... :)
But seriously, flow management/queuing may be useful at the very edge of the network, like a BRAS. But most provider edge products (Juniper, Ericsson/Redback, ...) already have similar capabilities. Flow management past the edge of a network is pointless, especially for TCP/IP traffic.
There is a massive world-wide technology complex driving the optimization of silicon based manufacturing technology. The amount of capital invested into silicon manufacturing process and tools is measured in tens of billions of dollars per year, if not hundreds of billions. If the conventional process improvements is able to achieve 20-25% cost improvement per year, in five years, the cost of panels based on conventional panels would be down to 25-30% of today's cost. A few hickups in the development of the new technology like yield or reliability issues can easily delay the mass deployment by a few years which will negate all cost benefits. Not to mention the possibility of cadmium prices going up if the volumes are picking up...
And don't forget the cost of capital investment, which is already funded due to other "useful" applications in the silicon case. Most other technologies that tried to compete against silicon lost so far, not because of fundamental technical issues but because of the economics involved.
I am not against developing new innovative technologies to achieve substantial improvements in the solar power area. However, it is best to keep the optimism about new and unproven technologies in control until they reach at least beta production stage...
These new 1U/2U servers may appear to be even less interesting than the California (UCS) products that were introduced earlier this year. However, the reality is that Cisco is actually rounding out the lower end of its server product line before they introduce the much more innovative, higher end (higher margin) SMP systems later this year. Intel just announced the new SMP platforms based on 8-core processors that scale to 4 and 8 sockets. Expect Cisco to scale the socket count even further. Going into the server market with some conventional products enables them to build sales channels and ramp up the service organization to get ready for the real stuff.
Welcome to East Germany 2.0!
There is only one reason IBM wants to acquire Sun: If Sun is acquired by Cisco instead, Cisco will instantly become a credible enterprise computing supplier. Cisco is the #1 competitive threat for IBM in the long run...
If there is any throttling going on, it is more likely that your ISP is responsible for it. Cable companies and DSL providers who are getting into the video on demand business may not like Netflix beating them to market with a more cost effective product...
I guess Neal Stephenson was able to see this emerging lack of parity between computer generated graphics/video and computer generated audio many years ago in Diamond Age
A book that is read by a competent actor is an "artistic performance", and is subject to copyright as such. In this context, the audio rights for the book used in that performance does not apply to a book that TTS converted by Kindle.
If TTS technology becomes so good as to be comparable to performance by an accomplished actor over the next ten years, it is the Actor's Guild who should be worried instead of Author's Guild.
By the way, the technology to convert plain paper books to speech electronically has existed for some time - even through the resulting form factor is not as convenient as Kindle.
[...] All he needs now are gills.
And teflon skin...
Yes, backward compatibility would be a problem, but I am sure computer and electronic manufacturers won't be disappointed by a mass upgrade cycle driven by a new (and higher performance) peripheral interconnect standard.