The proposal is that rich people invest in business, creating more new jobs and more value. Poor people spend their money on stuff.

I haven't seen any real support for the notion that investing in businesses based on what rich people think will succeed creates more jobs or a "bigger economic pie" than poor people giving more money to businesses that provide services & goods that the poor actually need.

Obviously, I don't buy it, but that's the supposed reason.

I do carry an extra battery.

That said, you don't know me. And I don't know anyone else who carries an extra battery.

BTW, my phone is a Nexus One. And probably will remain so until it dies (which seems unlikely considering all the abuse it's survived so far) or until Google Glass comes out.

In fact, I see nothing in this whole thread that goes beyond ad hominem. Please provide arguments for or against the one on-topic notion for this story: "Ray Kurzweil predicts the cloud will ... help expand our brain capacity beyond its current limits."

This, to me, is a very sensible, even self-evident, statement. Right now I use Google's cloud of computer mapping services to navigate virtually anywhere I go. I use Google's cloud of search services to find the answer to virtually any question I may have, from the syntax for an API, to repairs for my car, to the lyrics to some song I like. Even in the last few years these capabilities have improved dramatically; I'm sure they will continue to do so.

You may not like the word "cloud", but it accurately describes computing systems with multiple redundant computers accessing multiple copies of information to provide speed and reliability.

Frankly, all the spastic reactions whenever Kurzweil's name is used make you guys look like the unbalanced ones, not him.

(Note that while I'm replying to the grandparent of this conversation, this is directed to the thread as a whole. This one comment is innocuous; the trend here is not.)

Now I don't have to RTFA. IMO that simple statement "this only applies to running untrusted code in a JVM with a SecurityManager" is the most important thing to say about this exploit; sad it wasn't in the summary.

I run my ssh service on port 443 to get through more firewalls. I believe they could check traffic patterns to see that it isn't really https, but I'm not sure they do.

By the time we're doing that, we'll be stimulating memories directly and expanding your imagination with DirectX48 at 120fps, while giving the answer to any question you briefly consider instantly in full multimedia a la Google+Wolfram Alpha+Wikipedia+Mathematica.

And the future *I* want involves my enhanced, uploaded mind occupying a few metric tons of atomically precise computronium distributed across the solar system, with continuous incremental backup a few light years away.

(Of course, from my point of view that computronium is an utterly immersive universe in which I am the dashing hero.)

https://github.com/wurp/Friendly-Backup

It works now, with some bugs. The first targeted usecase is distributed backup.

However, it can store arbitrary read-only content-addressed data as well as signed labels that point point to a particular piece of CBA data to emulate mutable data.

I have a whole slew of plans beyond backup for it, but backup seemed like the thing everyone needs and would most like to have for free on a federated data store.

Hmm, I'm from Arkansas, and I liked it except for about 40% of the people there. And that's pretty much middle of the road for % of local population I find tolerable.

I agree that your bank password should be different from your Amazon password, but please don't list eBay and Amazon as if they are on par with one another regarding password security.

Amazon takes customer trust astoundingly seriously, and has more than a decade of contributions by very bright engineers to protect your password. There are systems, and meta-systems, and corporate policies, and repeated internal emails reiterating the importance of defense social as well as technical attacks.

eBay may be great at keeping your data safe, but I very much doubt they go to the lengths or apply the ingenuity that Amazon does.

Do you want to die today?

You won't tomorrow, either.

Unfortunately common 3 d glasses are circularly polarized not linearly. :-(

Not ridiculous. He was arrested, then spent years in court trying to get the police to do the right thing. What should he have done instead? Stopped when the time he invested became ridiculous? Then they would never change their behavior, and our rights would be even worse off than they are.

Solar energy incident on the earth in a year: (100 watts) * 24 hours * 365 * pi * (6 400 000^2) = 4.05804097 Ã-- 10^23 joules

160 exajoules = 1.6 x 10^20 joules

So we get more than 20,000 as much energy as we currently use in solar. Assuming we could capture it...

The earth doesn't need that energy. The sun puts out enough energy to push 3 * 10^11 kilograms of matter to 99% of the speed of light every year. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2651333&cid=38908157

It seems likely the two competing swarms should be obvious... and assuming a speed of light limit, it seems more of a race to reach the resources than a fight to get there. If my 10kg VNM can get there a year before yours, it will kick the ass of your fleet of 1*10^6kgs of VNM warriors when they get there.

And I think the last two options fall under the "some significant new understanding" clause.

But obviously the earth can support many millions of tons of self reproducing machines (it already supports them).

If an enemy decides to attack me and already controls earth, he could mobilize all that against me. Surely it's worth sending a few pounds, or hundreds of pounds, of my own VNM (Von Neumann Machines) to take trillions of pounds of yummy matter for myself?