I've seen some of those videos before. I believe the chimp was called betty, but nevertheless, they gave it/her make up and it started drawing on itself using the mirror as a guide. Another clip showed it immitating one of the handlers putting make up on and it started using lipstick on its lip, instead of its face.
1) Wikipedia has far more information than a normal human, thus it would surpass human-level AI.
2) Compressing wikipedia into one persons mind would create a schizophrenic AI that's likely to kill people or die in a fit as its brain has an edit war.
3) It would take a human-level AI to first understand the information and then discard the useless crap and junk people post on wikipedia. I mean can you imagine asking an android what they think about Pamela Anderson's next divorce and having them randomly say "teh big boobs WOOT!1!11!"
Besides, information is redundant in intelligence. A cro-magnon would understand particle physics just as good as any one of us if they knew the information because they're intelligent.
All this shows is that College professors spend an absurd amount of time doing IQ tests compared to Truck drivers.
The scientists who came up with the baseline work to study IQ found that correlating it to intelligence was vehemently disgusting. It was used to test how well young children scored on a school cericulum, not intelligence but learning.
It doesn't surprise me that MD's are at the top of the list as they're basically glorified encylopedias. They're incompitent, they're poor at their job and I've rarely heard people speak well of them. My mum has intermittent hyperthyroidism, it took almost 3 years for them to figure out they had to take a test when it was acting up to get a result. It's an intermittent condition and the morons didn't know what to do. The ironic thing is that she's a nurse and the doctors she works with told her she had it, but they can't give out prescriptions because of ethics so she was stuck with morons who wouldn't listen to what she said.
I saw 3 doctors about 1 skin condition. One said excema, the next said psoriosis and the final said ringworm. Each one had me on different meds for it and none of them worked, the thing that did was going on vacation for two weeks; within the first five days it was gone and hasn't been back since, yet none of them reccomended it and they had me on steroids and antifungals and never even told me that UV would likely clear it up no problem. Not to mention I've had a doctor tell me I'm morbidally obese because of my Body Mass Index when I'm bradycardic, I have perfect blood pressure and low cholesterol; I spent last weekend lifting 120kg wooden beams 2 meters into a roof and didn't even break a sweat. I'd be surprised my MD could lift 10kg, because I've certainly never seen him lift his fat ass out of a chair in 3 years and he has the gall to say I need to lose weight.
It took my girlfriends' aunt over a decade to get her doctor to diagnose her with high blood pressure, because he said she was thin enough that she didn't need her blood pressure to be taken. When she finally found a doctor that would do it, she left with a prescription for strong blood pressure medication because the guy was worried she was going to have a stroke.
IQ is complete bull and the list looks to correlate more with people incapable of listening or understanding than intelligence. I work as an electrician, yet my first job was in the creative group so near 110 at 16 and IQ results grow exponentially on age till about 21 years. Yet I'm a lot more intelligent now I've been working as an electrician than before, and I know a hell of a lot more.
This is inherently useless as people change jobs. My dad went from a milkman to a welder, to an owner/manager of a garage, to a motorbike racer, to an electrical engineer programming the first fuel injection systems in cars, to computer programming when DOS was new and rode that through into .Net and now I'm working with him on property renovation and electrics.
So I would really love someone to prove to me that IQ measures intelligence, cause it just seems to prove stupidity to me. MD's are the dumbest people I've ever met, and I need to meet about 90 more to get proof that all the ones I've met so far are a statistical anomaly occuring in a general local area of the bottom 10th percentile.
I believe that's one of the greatest things of telling Thunderbird just to read the article and not add in any comment feeds. I don't want to read comments, unless I want someone elses opinion.
I read a blog for the writer not the readers, or I would be reading -their- blogs.
Agreed. I have no problem with government subsidising businesses to help get them off the ground, because a lot of the time it helps them grow to the level of competing quite quickly; except French farming.
However, no corporate group can ever perform well. One company running in a form of dictatorship over their product, like Jobs, can react quickly and, even for a large company, remain competative. However, if every decision has to go through multiple screening processes, tests, etc. you end up with a production cycle equivalent of Microsoft.
The Quaero project is doomed to failure. Not only is it going to have corporate bickering, but it's going to be in multiple languages. You can bet a large number of coders will enter from the UK, Netherlands and many other countries.
This means you're going to need translators to get the documents to read correctly in each individual language, or there's going to be many screw ups. Not only that, but you'll be faced with several days delay between project heads to get to a meeting. Bascially for a weekly status update, it would take probably 3 days to get everything translated and checked. So it's a weekly-3 status update, and what you did today is never going to be on the agenda, it's going to be the 3rd day on the next agenda, by which time something important is gone from your focus.
I belive the best words to describe this are, eww, and, no!
I have a simple solution: get a girlfriend. I now wear nice shirts that apparently compliment my skin tone (who knew?), I wear layers (apparently very sexy) and I now have $300 shoes. I've never owned $300 shoes in my life.
Once you have a girlfriend, dressing fashionably is rather easy and mainly because I'm no longer allowed to choose except between Brown Shirt #1 and #2.
NEC also make standard monitors, I really don't think they'd give a crap which one you buy. It isn't a study of NEC performance versus Acer or anything, it's just Standard Vs Widescreen and they make both in the same factories so I don't see the bonus.
Perhaps they make more profit on a widescreen than a standard, but if widescreen sales were actually boosted then market competivity would wipe anything like that out. So I really see no possible benefit from biasing the results.
My Dell's an Inspirion and was top of the line, on par with a MacBook Pro. It weighs like 5kg (vs a 1kg LifeBook) and is anything -BUT- a mobile computer. The battery lasts 2 hours with internet, 3 hours without. Not to mention, with upgraded graphics drivers (which dell won't provide) you only get about 20 minutes before it freaks out and the monitor stops displaying.
I'm travelling in just over two weeks and I have to revert back to old drivers, which don't do onboard T&L but a simple upgrade allows them to perform like a dream. At 1440x900 and the FPS it runs games at, I think it's actually beating the nVidia card the same model came supplied with... when they worked I mean, because they made a recall and switched them to ATI.
Right now I'm looking at a nice refurbished MacBook, or maybe a LifeBook; if I can justify the price for the usability. It's actually spurred arguments between me and my girlfriend, she likes a large screen on her laptop and I've come to disdain it, perhaps two years in college will set her straight.
Desktop = Power. Laptop = Usability. Those are my new golden rules for buying.
From what I've learnt of business in France, it appears to have a lot of anti-competative laws built in. From talk between British Ex-Pats living out there, it appears most see more benefit working outside the law than in it.
I talked to one guy who ended up going out to work on a guys Chateau to get it out of a weird "uninhabitable" status that houses can get. Apparently the owner started out getting legit french workers, except the plasterers doing the walls suddenly refused to work because they needed some old wiring removed and they're not allowed to do it. The guys said this happened so often he fired them all, came back to the UK and found a bunch of contractors, paid them to drive down and then when they'd finished a months work he paid them back in the UK to avoid money trouble crossing the border.
A guy we met out there works as a handyman, apparently the only one in the area because you have to pay multiple taxes or something stupid to do more than one area of work. So he's "based" in the UK and every six months he goes out to see his kids and travels back to his house in the south of France, "on business". The insane thing about it is that it's perfectly legal in France for the guy to spend 50 weeks there a year, and he doesn't even have to pay the French taxes as he's working in a business loop hole.
Essentially he's working under the contract worker laws, that a Brit can work in France as a reporter or specialist or whatever and not pay taxes as he's working for a British company. The thing is, he's the only person employed in his company and he requires himself to work in France. It's just ludicrous. With the EU how it is, the French builders could just start a business in the UK and do the exact same thing and make more money because UK taxes are lower.
That's pretty cool, although the writer pissed me off in the beginning by likening it to Frankenstein, and not his -monster-. A slightly crazed scientist who gets chased to the arctic before his death isn't really much to fear, the big thing that killed people by accident was something to fear... at least if you're a scientist.
I think the point is to be a successful company and not get sued.
Getting sued is patently moronic, and being proud of it is more so. Wal-Mart is being sued for 11 billion (and growing), and they make 11 billion profit. If Wal-Mart doesn't get profit for a year it will have to sacrifice 11 billion of assets and put every company around it into a better position. Thus shareholder/stock decrease and a vast loss of capital meaning it'll be harder to recover from.
Wal-Mart can suffer it, probably with some dire consiquences, but it won't disappear, now YouTube:
So far YouTube isn't worth shit. It is yet to turn a profit, and a $1 billion lawsuit means that around 60% of YouTube's capital has to go. Capital = Equipment. YouTube is gone if it loses 60% of itself, not to mention there'll likely be multiple and far larger suits on the way from Sony, Disney, News Corporation and everyone else who wants a chunk and all of those three have a much bigger grivance than $1 billion; precedent means a Judge basically stamps these approved. I'd say easily it would amount to $20 billion as Sony owns Colombia, Tristar and MGM as well as Sony Pictures; that's easily $8 billion right there.
Now you do the math on that, how can youtube even exist when it's about -$19 billion? I'm serious, where does your belief come from that worst case youtube still won't be killed. It'll be a 404 if it loses.
Whilst merely thinking about the future will get you nowhere, never thinking about the future will jeopordize your company to no end. YouTube should have thought ahead, Wal-Mart shouldn't have been sexist pigs... and perhaps you should worry your ass off about Employee Health Insurance, cause I bet Wal-Mart didn't expect a Class Action worth an entire years profit. I don't think you want to lose an entire years profit either, especially when it's your ownly take home money.
So I'm serious, and I'm not missing any point. Think or your company won't last long. The creators of YouTube likely got lucky... if they're not still with the company. And if they are with the company, well Karma is a bitch now isn't it.
I think the effects must be weighed. Is it wrong for a molecular biologist to take drugs if it means he can invent a cure for cancer in 5 years instead of 20? I believe one person should be allowed to do whatever they want with their body as long as it doesn't negatively effect other people, and in said example he might die younger but he'll have saved around 114 million people from death.
We're not talking about handing someone over to some evil aliens or they'll murder 114 million innocents. We're talking about someone saying, "My death will be worth saving 114 million people from an early death." I can't fault someone choosing to do that.
I completely disagree. It's shoddy and inefficient to wait for a problem to arrive. Imagine if the guys at Google just sat around waiting for their server to kick the bucket before they fixed it; they'd be out of business.
Problems aren't mutually exclusive, I can fix more than one at once. If my server is bust, it doesn't matter if my ISP is cutting me off in a week, but if all it takes is a call to another ISP to get another connection before the deadline then I'm not going to turn 1 week of having a downed server into two weeks with no useable service.
Only solving problems as they arrive is the work of the mediocre, the good fix things before they arrive. By your own example, the YouTube guys -didn't- think of copyrighted videos and they got a $1 billion lawsuit! That isn't a smart thing to allow to happen, if precident gets set against YouTube in one single case, they're broke and gone because they didn't think ahead.
Whilst I think he makes a point that communication differs through the ages. My parents turn their phones off at night, one time when they had to pick me up from the airport they got the date wrong (+1 day on the flight time) and because of the time difference between Canada and the UK my dad was about half-way to the airport before he turned on his phone and got my text message telling him "I fly on the #, I arrive on #+1. I haven't even packed for the flight yet!"
To me cell phones are redundant. I grew up with the internet, and I love wireless networking. I really don't see the point in making a call, when I can just click a button on an IM client and I have video and voice for free.
However, I seriously doubt people will leave calls on perminantly even if they are free unless an automatic hold feature is implemented. I mean what if you talk to your kids before you go to bed, do you really want your conversation in the morning to be, "Wow dad, you -really- satisfied mom last night!"
I can say it right now, 24/7 calls like fuck they're going to happen in my house. We had calls that was I believe $0.05 per call no matter the duration and I was on for up to 5 hours sometimes, but I -always- hung up because it's just damn creepy not to.
If you could mount a powerful cell phone repeater it would be more valuable than an Aerostat as whenever a cell tower is taken down, you simply need to fly one or more over an area to cover it.
They might even be a cheaper more efficient way of covering densely populated areas than paying exorbitant land fees and the constant battle to get them placed. I really don't see how a plane that can fly for 5 years wouldn't benefit the Cellular industry.
It would also help wildlife studies. I mean simply program one to follow a high density of radio transmitters, and tag as many birds as humanly possible before they migrate and then you've got perminant tracking and monitoring of the birds flight positions. The plane could be equipped to transmit the locations through a satellite telephone link or other such device.
I'm sure there are thousands of uses. Terrain mapping, you just strap a camera to the bottom and GPS and you could have it build up a high detailed map of an area. I mean it would be a lot more useful for any industry that requires land surveys as getting a high detailed map with a wide angled lense would allow you to build up a topological map.
Hell you might even be able to spot useful resources, or really anything visible from altitude. Police could use it to find recent graves with infrared and optical sensors and it'd be cheaper and faster in open areas than using people.
As I write this I realise the list is literally nearly endless, so I think I'll save myself the time and STFU now before I get carpel tunnel!
I heard whale song, and ocean sounds now thinking of it, is supposedly good, however I've never bothered to try it. I'll have to find somewhere to get it that doesn't charge $20, it'd be cheaper to go to the ocean myself.
That's one of the newtonian problems yes as time is essentially irrelevant you have one amount of energy 1 second after the big bang as you do 1 second before the end of the universe.
However, you can fix this problem. Causality won't be violated if the area you take the energy from is sufficiently far away from where you're acting. If I take mass from the Alpha Centauri system to solve the energy problem 5 years ago, if I just live out 5 years causality gets violated as our light cones merge.
If I take the energy from a star 6 billion light years away, I can go back in time 5,999,999,999.999 years and causality won't be violated as said star couldn't have had an effect on Earth for me to remove.
Essentially this is like time travel in a bubble.
As for "Back to the Future" style, that's actually between theories. Doc talks about multiple timelines, essentially describing the Multiverse model; I think Biff picks up a gambling book from the future and instead of being Marty's families' stooge, he becomes a rich bastard and like owns the planet or something odd. However, people disappearing from the timeline and Marty getting weak when he was unlikely to be born is more Newtonian as in a multiverse you can't effect your own past.
It's possible it's Quantum Time Travel, as it's predicted some particles act in time loops; essentially they ditch our time and go back a year and then carry on like normal and no one even notices, because they're actually there 1 second after they go back in time but we can't tell they're actually 1 year and 1 second older not just 1 second older. It's very odd.
In Quantum, violating the law of thermodynamics (AFAIK) doesn't seem to have an effect. As far as I understood what I read your latter assumption seems to be on par. However, I think if you sufficiently altered the entropy of a system, that's when causality would kick in. Merely having more mass in a system doesn't make much different, as long as that small amount of mass doesn't start causing asteroids to crash into the planet and black holes to form... or the death of your grandfather. Like the predicted particles, going back in time doesn't cause buildings to collapse or people to die, so the universe lets it slide. I think if we went sending neutron bombs back in time to wipe out Hitler, then there would be major causality problems for multiple reasons namely there'd never have been a Hitler to nuke!
So overall I'd say the BttF style of time travel was obviously the writers' confusion between two distinct theories of time travel. Multiverse fits the universal effects, but quantum fits the characters' effects.
Go for instrumental music, it doesn't activate the part of your verbal part of your brain. Essentially to hear singing (or talking) your brain mimics it, however when you're trying to read/write you've got two processes and only one processor to put it through. You can struggle through, but not nearly as well as running them solo.
Also, just go onto TPB or usenet and download some Beethoven or Wagner. It's 100% legal, no copyrights exist on them and even if they did they're so old it'd be void anyway. Even the BBC offered them up for free at some point, they were surprisingly good quality too.
I learnt this a long time ago when I was working doing reviews. When you spend 10 hours writing reviews, you need something to listen to or you're going to start shooting kids and spearing dogs for making the slightest noise.
As far as I understand, dark matter and dark energy are capable of being explained by us botching our calculations.
You see time in the universe is predicted on an archaic model of the universe where density is equal; this doesn't take into account galaxies or the huge voids that exist. This is inherently wrong and stupidly so as time is controlled by gravity; time around a black hole is so, so, SO far away from time in flat space. 1 billion years near the event horizon of a black hole can be equivalent to a mere second on Earth.
The time difference between a probe between planets and the time we see on Earth is so small I expect no one thinks of it. This is why the archaic model usually works because relativistic effects are exponential. However, even 0.00001 of a second has an effect on what we see, this might be negligable for the probes, but then it might now. The effect could be big enough to predict this, as it's big enough that all dark energy in the universe doesn't exist when this effect is accounted for.
Supernova explosions tell us the universe is much larger than it really is, because we don't calculate that there are huge god damn hills in between us. We live in a 'valley' called the milky way, and we live in a little dip in that called the Sol system. Between us and a distant supernova are 'hills' of empty space and numerous other valleys and hills. It does in fact take 10 billion years for the light to get to us from one, however it doesn't travel 10 billion light years due to these 'valleys' in time.
This is a fundamental prediction of general relativity, and one scientists don't account for. It's pure schmuckery assuming you can average out the differences. If there was nothing between us and a distant supernova explosion it would take (IIRC) only 6 billion years to get here and it would travel 6 billion light years, with things in between it travels slightly further but takes a hell of a lot longer to get here.
If this effect happens in our solar system too, and I don't see why it shouldn't, then it could account for this acceleration. However, it won't be at the 38% predicted for the universe model, but certainly time will deviate through our solar system.
Hopefully this makes sense to people other than me...
Essentially, yes. Dark matter/energy (or the alternatives, like I 'explain' above) are likely the cause, even if they're not on the percieved scale of the universe. Dark matter seems to populate the outer edges of galaxies more than the interior, perhaps our solar systems position only gets a 'light touching' of the WIMP particles or whatever.