Depends on how you want to look at it, and who you feel like being cynical against. Easing the job of programmers is a good thing, if they can use 10x more ram and not have to write code to juggle memory as much, they have eliminated a potential source of bugs and a time sink, that is probably hard to maintain as well. Memory is cheap, I got 16GBs for $90 bucks, and though programs are larger, maybe unnecessarily so, nothing comes close to exhausting my memory. It seems like a much better method, than defining some arbitrary limit, stopping all progress, and telling programmers to 'stop being lazy sobs'.

Heard x64 was barely faster than 32-bit, wrote this program to find duplicate files on Windows: http://poshcode.org/3377 - it's at least twice as fast in x64 than 32-bit. Naturally it won't apply to everything, but for certain things x64 is really good.

Directed at you and falcon, these things are complicated, these actions have to be done in private, and are subject to abuse of bad people who get into a position of power. Yes, of course we could do better to weed them out, but there are diminishing returns to everything. And actually I see no problem with using these assholes to destroy our enemies, then turning on them because they are usually not much better. It makes more sense than trying to take all the assholes on at once, and making our plan evident to everyone. That would just not work. And we must do everything we can to make this work, it's easy to speak of it as if it's a game, but if we had lost the planet to the soviet union, that might well have meant eternal darkness for all of the human race forever. While it seems so far removed from our current reality, which is testament to our success I would say, any number of mistakes might have had a cascading effect and caused too many countries to go against us/for them, and so on. It's not easy to put the situation into words, but I feel people think this relatively nice reality we have was inevitable; it was not. That does not excuse gross abuse of our system for people's own ends, but I see that as an inevitable side effect of a situation we did not cause. And your last paragraph is spot on, you get no argument from me.

I know you will probably not give a damn what I think, but I think you see things too black and white. I think the US hates all these SOBs, but we can't be against every single asshole on the planet or we'd have no friends and would definitely lose the fight for the soul of the planet. We have to be 'friends' with some of them, which means, we are friends with them so long as they help us against people we judge to be worse, and that worse could be something the Berkley brigade would call greedy like financial help, but without a strong financial position the US and thus freedom parishes. So we have to make shitty calls all the time, I think (or hope) it's for a ultimately greater good, and one day the world will be democratized and all these stupid fucking dictator will be waiting tables and not bothering anyone (or even better, hung at war tribunals), but who knows. Without omniscience we can only make the best shit call we can out of nothing but shit calls. Just my opinion, take it for what it's worth. Oh btw, we didn't flee Vietnam, not the US anyway, after stabilizing the situation, and setting up South Vietnam to defend itself, the democrats in the US congress (which had a super majority that was too much for even a presidential veto) decided to abruptly cancel funding for South Vietnam, causing their military to collapse against the North's war machine. Now you may consider the democrats to be the US, but I assure you I think quite the opposite.

Defender catches the proof of concept code, but you could drop in your own code, for an unpatched vulnerability, and use the same technique described in the article. My advice is to use x64 IE. FF isn't sandboxed, and chrome isn't 64-bit.

Not a Windows problem, it's a 32-bit problem and the solution is 64-bit, and of the main browsers, IE is easiest to use the x64 version (a checkbox in IE10), with FF being close, slick.

I'll check out that TED talk, thanks. But that's depressing, I've always dreamed of something like Jurassic park (obviously without the stupid non-security... :) )

Assuming you had some great technology that could collect it, is there any possible source of dinosaur DNA that would allow a more or less complete rebuild of a dinosaur (again assuming great futuristic technology that can accomplish this - think nanobots and strong AI)? Or is all dinosaur DNA forever gone? Or is it an undecided question?

Ah, yes that's what I was kind of (clumsily) trying to get at, thanks for the great informative post, that's exactly what I wanted to know and I know that kind of answer does not come easy. :)

Curious question for you physicists or arm-chair physicists, does this have any implications for inflation? I've read here and there that inflation would be problematic if there were large structures in the universe, because nothing would have had time to propagate the distance in the time required to be compatible with inflation, so does this bump up against that limit or break it?

I can't speak for others, but I'm not looking to substitute technology for religion. But would it be such a bad thing, to replace fantasy with reality? Looking at something with a religious mindset does not mean it's not true, that's so patently obvious I can't understand why you even mention it. Many things of ancient religions are made reality today through technology, it reflects nothing on them (from curing diseases, to flying in space) to be subject of past religious fantasies. Actually I would say, religion is mostly just wanting a better way of life but without the person having the ability to fill in the details, where as technology just fills in the details. It just so happens that nanotech + AGI will fill in all there is that is allowable by the laws of physics. What kind of statement is "everything we know about CS suggests it's impossible" as absolutely nothing I know about CS suggests anything of the sort. I guess it's easy to say there is not even a halfway credible theory on how AI works when that has no concrete definition, as it is, Kurzweil's new book 'How to Create a Mind' offers much insight here. Further, well known AI scientist Ben Goertzel has said that we know how to make AI but nobody has focused enough on doing so. (his words, paraphrased.) Yes, but only an idiot would predict "true AI" after all how can anyone ever duplicate the lump of wet mass between your ears on an equivalent computer system. Estimates of brain power put it at about 10-20 petaflops, we just recently passed that point in supercomputers. Stringing together random insults with no data to back them up is not an argument.

Yea, I figure you are just arguing to argue. By that reasoning, I could say a plane is impossible as no living creature can burn energy that fast to reach those speeds. Nanobots don't need to eat metals and rocks for their primary energy source, they can burn Oxygen and Hydrogen in the atmosphere, or many other materials. Atoms don't get placed gingerly next to each other in nanofabrication, they are chemically bonded through mechanosynthesis, and can easily sustain their own gravity. Consider Earth, which is mostly not chemically bonded, especially not chemically bonded diamond (one of the hardest and most rigid compounds), it sustains it's own gravity fine as do larger planets. So no, if you are basing your opinion of it being impossible on these things, I would say you can not. Well logically you can not, not that people are logical most the time.

Pretty much exactly what I think. Director of Engineering is no internship, and while Kurzweil is an accomplished inventor, his inventions don't seem nearly as important as his writings on the singularity. He can only be going to google to "directly engineer" a technological singularity as far as I am concerned.

Jokes going to be on you, and probably the people who thought they were kidding by making this request, if the white house pulls out a real death star made from nanorobotics and AGI they developed in secret. While it can be argued this stuff is far off, it really can't be argued that it's impossible. Short version of nanorobotics is this: You make one nanobot (atomically precise robot the size of a blood cell with manipulator arms for moving atoms), it can then make a second, those two can make four, those four can make eight and so on. Being a million times smaller than human scale machines, they would move a million times faster, so you'd end up with trillions or more in a day, more than enough. Nanobots could make vast structures of atomic precision, controlled by massive amounts of nanocomputer based AI. Building a death star would be as easy as ordering a happy meal. Along with things like eternal life spans (heat death, big crunch, etc. permitting), no diseases, no aging, omnipresent crime prevention, etc. I doubt anyone would actually build a death star if they could, except to say 'gee, look at this cool thing I built' but certainly not impossible.

Who'd a thunk that all the grievance industries are interrelated.