human_v2

I work for a web host (not this one). From my experience, this is generally what is going on during downtime (note: times are BEST CASE scenario):

T0: Servers go down T5-15: Someone realizes something is broken. T15-45: Initial someone calls another someone to tell them it's broken because the night guy probably can't fix it all by himself. T60-70: All the engineers are woken up and know OF the problem. T90: Engineers figure out WHAT the problem is. T120: Engineers fix problems. T150: More problems arise. T180: All problems are solved, no more customers are mad.

Moral of the Story: As you can see, it already is a very involved process to get servers running again. Now, as a customer, you want an email to notify you that services are down. First, the admin needs to find out exactly which customers are affected and then write up a nice happy email to you letting you know we're working on it. Do you want a happy email or do you want your servers fixed? Your call. Downtime is chaos. Do not ask to be notified of chaos.

I agree that would disqualify it as a universal language candidate. At the same time though, how often do you wish you'd thought out your next sentence in its entirety when speaking to your girlfriend/boss/mother/etc ?

Lojban: "spelling is phonetic and unambiguous"

They clearly ignored that rule for the name of the language =)

On a more serious note, this is rather exciting. It would make a very good candidate for a universal language. A great deal of time and effort went into making this language. Hopefully this isn't the last time I hear of Lojban.

I'm of the opinion that the LHC will make a great mess of physics. I saw a show on Discovery where most of the physicists at CERN feel there's a 9/10 chance they'll find the Higgs. Just a hunch, but I don't think they'll find it. I think they'll find something that forces them to rethink all of sub-atomic physics, which would be way cooler.

Also, is anyone else tired of every LHC article talking about Earth getting sucked into a black hole? Ludicrous, I tell you...

Because MS is also an advertiser. Bing would become immediately worthless to advertisers if they did. Plus, assuming MS let their ads through and blocked Google's, Google would yell "anti-competition lawsuit" faster than you can say, well, anti-competition.

I don't think advertising is going to be able to sustain Google indefinitely. As more tech-savvy users get on the web, their tolerance for advertisements will dwindle, along with advertisers' return. Google probably knows this, which is why they've moved into other markets like Android and Google's office tools. As far as search goes, I think they're either going to be king forever as we know it, or a 'better' search will come out... though I can't think of what could make search better than what Google has.

I, personally, would like to see Google become their own ISP. When there was news they were buying up 'dark fiber' I thought this might be in their future plans.

Don't let anyone tell you otherwise: golf is about getting trashed and seeing if you can still manage to ever put the ball in the cup. While on a business outing, the object of the game is now to play WORSE than the exec you are there with. Golf is no longer a competition, but a social function. Turns out I don't enjoy social functions OR golf.

What is possible? Everything. It just depends on what level we are able to effectively manipulate the universe. Suppose for a moment that the universe is comprised of 'bits' at the very smallest possible scales. We do not currently have direct (root) access to these bits, so we must manipulate them from within the system. Because our universe is NP-complete, given enough control over these universal bits, anything that is thinkable is possible. Will we ever be able to control these bits? It remains to be seen, but I should think so eventually.

We lack sufficient evidence to prove that we reside in a Matrix-like construct. Pending evidence, we shall continue believing that we do not live in such a construct.... though the line between physical reality and virtual reality become blurrier every day.

The digital divide will not close itself, but rather can only grow larger as time goes on. Technology has been key to human evolution since man learned to create fire and sharp sticks. As such, we are inextricably bound to our technology. Having better tech is most certainly an evolutionary advantage. These days, technology is progressing so fast that it can be difficult to keep up.

What are the repercussions of not keeping up? Well, you've seen what happened to the tribal folk that got owned by Europeans back in the day, right? If you don't keep up with technology, you will fall behind in the evolutionary chain. Just hope those higher on the chain than you have some compassion and lack the desire to conquer/eat you.

The article makes an excellent point that our children need to be computer and technology literate. Those that do not embrace technology will forever be collecting the second-hand table-scrap-tech that we throw out. As any parent, we want our children to have all the opportunities that other kids have. Knowledge is power.

wiki = friend

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_doma...

They're reserved by ICANN

It depends. I don't think a web interface will cut it. Professors will still need office hours or a chat interface. If this was actually the case, don't you think students could just as easily sit at home and read the book instead of going to class? At some point, the lack of teacher-student interaction is going to cause the quality of education to suffer. I imagine this would be unacceptable to universities that take their reputations seriously.

This is what I would do, but you'd need some prerequisite software and information:

1. Get a genome for the simplest bacteria you can find. 2. You'd need molecular simulation software, specifically DNA and cells

After you've gotten this, I would strip out pieces of the genome using the genetic algorithm (oh the irony) and see if you can slim the genome down to a bare-bones replicating cellular machine.

After that, just a little trial and error and you could be making designer organisms.

(Sorry if you wanted something realistic. My brain doesn't work like that =)

One day people might get sick of it. But not before American Idol is over.

Math isn't NOT intuitive as far as math itself goes. It happens to be a very nice language. I tend to think that relativity and quantum mechanics do not mesh well because of the language we use to describe them. While standard maths is NP complete, it does not seem to inherently describe the universe without getting all crazy complex. I encourage you to try and comprehend even some of the simplest M-Theory equations. (not saying I do, but if math was really the language of the universe m-theory equations would be quite simple).

You know how in science and math people describe certain things as 'elegant' ? For example, E=mc^2 is very elegant. If math were elegant, you could get from here (higgs bosons) to there (atoms) with a simple equation which has been recursed x times to produce a mathematical model of an atom.

Math isn't bad, it's quite useful in fact. It's just not the natural language of the universe like everyone thinks it is.

COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS!

I sort of feel like the internet is as close as we get to it now, with Twitter and other microblogging services bringing us a step closer. But really, I want full-on instant telepathic communication with anyone. Cell phones don't cut it. Gone would be the days of humming a tune in your head, whose name you do not know, only to realize you cannot emulate those noises with your mouth. Good luck finding out who plays that song. If everyone could read everyone else's thoughts, you'd just hum the tune in your head and the name would come to you right away.

I don't think we're good enough with gen. prog. right now to do anything useful or safe with it. GM crops seems to have negative health and environment effects. When we can open up notepad and write the ooDNA code for my new pet mini-liger, then we could probably start programming our food.

Also, I kind of think we need a new form of math. While maths currently describe our universe well, I think it is overly complex and non-intuitive. This leads me to believe that we could create a simpler language, one that builds off itself -- like a programming language which is built from AND, NOT, OR -- which is naturally recursive like the universe. These days you have to build an entire framework to encompass your latest quantum theory.

Microsoft got comfortable, bottom line. They made XP (which rocks so hard, btw) and then felt like they won and stopped innovating. The article points out that Ballmer had a blind spot because he wasn't a techie, which I think is very accurate. Once MS was winning, they decided they had XBOX to keep them afloat but didn't really continue innovating. Now they are struggling to catch up with the innovations other made during the MS comfortable-on-top period. Really, imo, they should re-release XP.

I was an early adopter, I pre-ordered a G1 and have had it for about a year now. I really love hardware keyboards, so +1 for the G1 and for the Moto Droid. However, the article talks about a bit of lag here and there, which is quite irritating, probably the thing I hate most about android phones. Though, I do feel like the G1 was a competitor to the iPhone off the bat because it could do everything the iphone did, just a little slower =/

The iPhone is very well done, without lag from what I can tell. I suppose that's easier to do though when you make the hardware and software in the same place.

For now, I say the iPhone is still the best phone out there, but only because of the stuttering issues that Android phones seem to have. In a year or so, phone hardware will catch up with the Android platform and will run smooth as silk.

It depends who you market it to. Seems to me like it would be a great tool for a designer. How do you plan on implementing server side scripts? Hopefully you wouldn't take it as far as needing to install a web server for your editor.

Overall, it's a good idea, but it needs to be done right, or else people will just keep using notepad or eclipse or whathaveyou. You'll need a good plugin engine, preferably one that accepts standard plugins from other editors, as this will further encourage people to use your product. Good luck!

Ok, you've certainly proven your wisdom to me, but I still don't agree. When it comes to most normal computers users - old people like my parents, kids that aren't computer geeks - they want internet and email and word processing. Windows does this. Linux does this. Mac does this. Windows - buy my OS. Mac - buy my shiny computer, we'll give you an OS for cheap. Linux - buy a cheap computer, install this free OS. ... Why on earth would you pay more for something? Any logical person would not. As a web dev, I find that MS does things their own way, regardless of what people want. IE writes their own standards, which is unacceptable. MS doesn't bother fixing things in a timely fashion because their friends at the AV companies like that MS is exploitable (could be FUD, but sounds right to me).

I'm just saying that, all things equal, people will choose the cheapest one, and they aren't doing this because they don't know any alternatives.

... Though I am pretty irritated that Adobe STILL won't make a good flash plugin for linux. sick of choppy video. Windows has me there.

"So are the advances more software or hardware related?"

People don't understand that the difference between the two is irrelevant. Software is a replacement for having to create a computer chip every time you write a program. Software is virtual circuitry.

But about AGI. Dr. Itamar is correct in saying that we don't need anything else to create AI. We have BlueBrain (the supercomputer brain sim in the netherlands, i think). This, to me, is AIG. All we need to do from this point is make it so we can simulate a brain on a small enough chip, which is inevitable. Then stick that chip into an android body and let it do its thing.

We can't create a AGI program that is smart from the get-go. We know neural nets can learn. We just have to find the right way to teach them. If you want human-like intelligence, you have to convince the ANN that it actually is human. This means giving it all the inputs that humans enjoy - sight, sound, touch, etc. It is then that we will have robots with the capabilities of being smarter than we are. But once that happens, in the words of Sam L, "Hold onto your butts"

I'm interested in both. Though I couldn't tell you the tenets of transhumanism, the little I've read leads me to believe I would agree with it. AI, on the other hand, is something I'm very interested in. As a Singularitarian, I believe AI research is the only thing we should be working on. The faster we get AI done, the faster we solve many other problems.

Your questions aren't crazy these days. I've come to realize that nothing at all is impossible. I think people don't dream big enough anymore. Crazy dreams used to be "I want to be a rockstar" or something like that. I want to live forever and travel reality, like the guy in Star Trek: TNG, s1e07

1) sorry, was habit/laziness. I fixed.

2) To each his own, but I think the community support for linux vastly outshines windows support because you're probably talking directly to some sort of developer on *nix forums. Also, I prefer linux from an ideological standpoint. If the machine on my desk is doing something, I want to know exactly why it's doing it. Attempts to do that in windows violate your EULA.

Maybe it's a moot point by now, but before facebook was around, there was i2hub and connectU. The rumor was that Mark was a dev for the i2hub/connectu team and he took the idea and made facebook. Because of the RIAA assault of i2hub, connectU died with it, leaving Facebook to take all the fame and glory. I also vaguely remember that this was settled quietly out of court. Regardless, I think it's pretty shady. Maybe it was all just a rumor though.

When are people going to realize that you can't (shouldn't be able to) sue people like Google. The internet is a virtual reality. Hosting servers are the physical space of this reality. The files were put there by people, not by Google or YouTube. I know it's an old argument, but certainly still prevalent: Would you sue the manufacturers of inkjet printers because people are counterfeiting currency? It's quite ridiculous what Germany is doing. If you don't like it, block YouTube. See how your citizens react and tell me if it was a good idea.

I don't think we needed Windows 7 to let us know Microsoft was a ripoff. Perhaps that's just me though. I'll take FOSS over Microsoft any day, but I also don't mind getting into the nitty gritty to make my *nix distro the way I want. I'm convinced that people only buy Microsoft products because they are unaware of FOSS. To them, the only other alternative is to buy a Mac (which is a step in the right direction, but imo, Apple reeks of Microsoft cologne these days)

[edit: my apologies for using 'M$'. no hate intended]

I think the Vibram Five Fingers helped the downfall too. I bought a pair of the KSOs and there's been two days I haven't worn them since I got them. People that buy crocs want to have neat shoes that are a little eccentric. They stop being eccentric when everyone has them. Vibrams are now more eccentric than crocs, so the fad is fading. This isn't to say that crocs won't continue to have regular customers though.

IMO, twitter itself is a fad, but only because it's somewhat revolutionary. It's becoming a collectively conscious entity, much like the entire internet. Twitter is around because people want to know what others are thinking as soon as they are thinking it.

Twitter will die when we come up with a more efficient form of telepathy.

I'm kind of against a pharmaceutical regimen for most people. I understand that there are SOME things that people cannot fix themselves, but a lot of the cases, I don't believe drugs are necessary. Let's face it. People take pills because it's easier than eating a healthy diet to make your blood pressure go down.

Depression, in my opinion, is something most people can overcome. Rather than looking within and learning about themselves, most people would rather just pop a feel-good pill every morning.

And the drugs themselves. They're essentially a bunch of random chemicals that big pharma shoves down the throats of test subjects and looks for good things that could happen. I would rather deal with my mild depression than take pills that could make me nauseous, give headaches, make me bleed from strange places or even kill me. Most people don't weigh the costs and benefits of taking prescription drugs... because it's easier.

Based on intuition, I think of the universe as a giant cellular automaton. Each state of the universe is a slice of time, which lasts a Planck length of time. Each slice is static, but the loaf of time-bread is dynamic as a hole. The brain is interesting in that it is capable of storing information from previous slices.

The brain, seeing at 13 fps according to TFA, relies on itself to interpolate the things that happen in between frames as well as combining the separate streams into what you perceive as vision.

I think the most interesting point the article made was that your brain operates a different frequencies. While this is not shocking, it does go to show that we can explain the functionality of our brains as a complicated computer system, and our bodies as a mechanical robot that happens to be squishy.

Now that we view ourselves as machines, perhaps we can apply more engineering practices for bodily upgrades. Anyone else want to be a cyborg as bad as I do?