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Comment How would you ever turn it off? (Score 3, Insightful) 391

I wish it could be banished (along with the Insert/Delete pair) to a hard-to-fumble-upon switch on the bottom of the keyboard or laptop.

The only thing that will change it make it hard to turn off, so that we'll have users going for months with their caps lock on because they can't find where to switch it back.

Technology

Ray Kurzweil's Slippery Futurism 308

wjousts writes "Well-known futurist Ray Kurzweil has made many predictions about the future in his books The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990), The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) and The Singularity is Near (2005), but how well have his predictions held up now that we live 'in the future'? IEEE Spectrum has a piece questioning the Kurzweil's (self proclaimed) accuracy. Quoting: 'Therein lie the frustrations of Kurzweil's brand of tech punditry. On close examination, his clearest and most successful predictions often lack originality or profundity. And most of his predictions come with so many loopholes that they border on the unfalsifiable. Yet he continues to be taken seriously enough as an oracle of technology to command very impressive speaker fees at pricey conferences, to author best-selling books, and to have cofounded Singularity University, where executives and others are paying quite handsomely to learn how to plan for the not-too-distant day when those disappearing computers will make humans both obsolete and immortal.'"

Comment Why young? (Score 2, Insightful) 614

Why do they have to be young? When I was in middle school, my hero was Einstein.

But, I don't think you're going to find a 20-year-old science hero, like you would a 20-year-old sports hero. To really have a science career, you have to have a PhD, and then some career after that. I think the best you can do is a 30-year-old with promising research, or a 20-year-old whose a promising genius, or made a great invention. Other than that, you're looking for a person who has a PhD + 10 years' work behind them.

Comment Today, the music died. (Score 1) 858

Folks, today is the day that reddit out-interneted slashdot:

I'm focusing on the Atlas 5 because it's the launch vehicle for the X-37, most definitely the most spooky-secret thing the US has (publicly) in the sky. The last time they launched it the world flipped out and lost track of it for a while, but those pesky fuckers at SEESAT-L found it anyway.

Read the rest of the comment for a more detailed analysis.

Slashdot, I am dissapoint :(

Comment Re:This explains the political process (Score 1) 824

I don't necessarily see the cognitive dissonance.

If a store's policy is to give out $50 to every customer, I might say "that's a bad way to run a business." But I'm still going to line up for my $50.

It's not your responsibility to keep the store running. But, as a democracy of, by, and for the people, you do share some of the blame if the country goes down in flames. You share in responsibility for the government in the US. "We the People," you know. That's who's running the place, really.

Comment Not news (Score 1) 330

This was the thesis put forward in Issac Newton: the Last Sorcerer.

The idea we sometimes get of these "first scientists" ushering in an era of rational thinking in an age of superstition is revisionist history. Science and reason as we know it today did not exist back then. If you looked at 'scientific' work of the day, you'll find a lot of odd ideas and theories that would strike us as superstitious or mystical. Isaac Newton was an occultist, and alchemist, and dabbled in all kinds of esoteric things. That he made great contributions to math and physics is more or less a bonus for us. Advancing the human body of knowledge or understanding the world through reason was not his project. He was a mystic and an occultist. Science and progress are modern-day inventions.

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