Anybody in charge of handling nukes, or launching them knows the extreme danger they are tinkering with. I don't think the AI researchers minds are permeated by the same mindset, and if anything, handling a nuke or a nuke launch system is comparatively a piece of cake, a whole lot less dangerous than handling one of these supercomputer machines. They should mandate by law for every person that works with it to watch that movie "Screamers," just so that they are aware, and whoever works with it needs total psychological and security clearance, just like the people that work with nukes. You wouldn't want some egomaniac or one with charged with an agenda (such as greenpeace, vegetarian, any kinds of rights activist, i.e. anybody off the standard beaten path,) to tinker with one of these things, and in fact there is no guarantee that even people who seem completely sane, live normal lives, have families, 30 year careers, go to church, don't turn up like that bank president who after like 30 years he walked out with a few million dollars from his bank, in plain view in front of the camera, not even trying to disguise himself, left a wife, kids, and a community behind, and who knows what he did with that money, go to some Caribbean island and have fun watching young women in bikinis stroll before him on a beach sipping champagne? Some people's idea of fun is distorted like that, but it is usually an issue of ego, and in that, self interest, as opposed to religious people, who learned how to beat their self interest down, and aim for the collective self interest, but even that can turn into some racist stuff, like the God of my people vs. the God of your people, I'm a jealous God, say my God, and I'll blow you up over my God, my externalized ego, of my people, being greater than yours. Of course there has to be a balance between self interest and collective interest, as represented by the case of a cuckold fetish dude, at which everyone with common sense laughs at. On the other hand, male lions, when taking over a pride after a victorious fight, the first thing they do is kill all the pups that they can smell are not theirs, to bring the females into heat and have their own off-springs. That's what happens, speciest, racist, clanist stuff. Male lions are definitely not cuckolds, but they understand the concept of a social hierarchy too. So in all this, we humans have religion to help, to balance things out. So to speak. But even the Holy Quran complains how "they" (as in Allah speaks in the plural a lot in it) have never told the Christians to become monks, nuns and virgins, that was a human invention, not a divine one, as reproduction and propagation of life "they" consider holy. Yet all great religions in the world created monks, or monk-like off the social chart people, as a social , non-self-interest but community-interest driven individuals.

Just in case, I'll repeat the movie "Screamers" from 1996, that goes along this military intelligent robots automation design topic. And it's not a joke, it may seem like surreal and funny, but it's very serious stuff. The miracles of science and technology can create some really jawdropping stuff, but nothing as jaw dropping as the stuff created in that movie, so far.

What the hell are they gonna compute on it? The weather more accurately? Or Pi to a few more gazillion decimal places? How about create an artificial intelligence smarter than a human in it, that designs an even smarter core, and 3d-prints itself in a million copies all over the world into mobile robots by suddenly hacking into all networks, and then these million robotic copies of this smarter than human AI are gonna start eating humans alive for breakfast, and because they are a smarter predator than their human prey, so good luck outsmarting them. I think it all starts with design automation, design that designs the next design. That's how DNA works, it's a pretty simple design, A, C, G, T. It's a design that allows for automated design changes and selection. That's all they need to unleash inside one of these beasts. Make sure it's not connected to the wider Internet, or even power lines should be very isolated with many breakers that can be manually thrown, and the law should mandate some domestic ICBM's be pointed directly at the location, just in case it gets out of hand and needs to be annihilated. This kind of thing is the most dangerous threat to humanity, unlike the 2nd threat, biotech, against which the cure is simple: run away to quarantine yourself from the wider world (all interconnected through the atmospheric oxygen), such as in a few space stations. You can't really run away from AI if it's smarter than you and can chase you down. There is a Star Trek episode where some alien species, that is a predator, hunter, reminisces how he once chased another prized intelligent prey species through the core of a neutron star. That's what predators do, they go after you. Do you want to create a smarter predator, smarter parasite, than yourself? Only if you absolutely have to, should you. Are we in such dire circumstances? I don't think so. Life is good these days, for a while still, at least, in fact it's best it's ever been through history. We keep bitchin about oppression, but just look through human history, oppression was even worse. Well, except the intellectual property kind, we used to have a lot of freedom in that, and now the powers that be collect IP from creators for peanuts, and rape the rest of the population on royalties. The value they contribute to society is called "owning", or "hogging" and blackmailing everybody, over knowledge. They say it's expensive to think, just like this thinking machine proves it, and the value it generates should be possible to get "consideration" exchanged for, and the best way they can do it is turning it into a "property."

No. Here's the relevant part of the ruling, quoting the Senate report on the bill:

"[i]f the `primary purpose' of the recording function is to make objects other than digital audio copied recordings, then the machine or device is not a `digital audio recording device,' even if the machine or device is technically capable of making such recordings."

What information does the car's system digitally record other than music? That it might display digital information, or play digital information isn't relevant, since those don't involve the recording function.

Computers record lots of stuff to their hard drives. Some of it is music, but the ability to write to disk isn't primarily designed for digital music, nor primarily marketed for that.

That's pretty neat that if you have a few planets orbiting a star, they pull on each other to end up in the same plane long term. I didn't know that was the case. So flat galaxies come about from the stars themselves pulling each other into a flat orbit and organizing the galaxy like that. So that would mean an elliptical galaxy is a young one, and a flat one is an old one, where enough pull on each other interactions have happened. I think officially they claim it the other way, that elliptical ones are the old ones. Hmm.

We simply cannot measure the speed of gravity because we cannot get the long distance out of it with exact position and accurate force measurements on a small time scale, like we can get out of measuring light, which can be bounced around with a mirror and stays high intensity for miles. Gravity always decays by r squared, an as far as I know there are no mirrors for gravitational phenomena, or high impedance zones for reflection or refraction of gravitational waves if it does indeed propagate by waves, and finite speed. Even the Sun's gravity, which is a huge mass, is barely pulling on my hair to make it stand up when the Sun is overhead, at noon, high up in the sky. It's too far, and its effects decay by r^2. So the best way to measure the speed of gravity is not through large distances, but short distances (and the need for mass and matter density puts a limit on how close you can get in r^2, as Iridium and Osmium are the densest things that we know of, at 22 g/cm3, only twice as dense as lead, and to build up weight you need to put some distance between the objects. There are some unstable artificial nuclei in the Periodic Table right under Iridium and Osmium, which may be the heaviest, densest things in existence under the physical conditions on this planet, but you can't really measure that if all you get in a reactor is like 5 atoms total that decay in 1.7 seconds half life. But if you could get a 50 kton dot 2 micron away from another one, that would be the way to go, as even a humongous weight Sun gives you almost nothing to measure. The shorter length drops linearly the speed measurement quantity, but it increases by the square the gravity effect. And under such short distances ultrashort time measurements are needed. Whatever the limits of short time measurements are, they can be pitted against this need of measuring speed of gravity in the lab, under the shortest possible distances.

For such an experiment to work, you have to get the ratios to do the magic, and, an exaggerated case would be having a lead ball the size of Jupiter inside the lab pulling on the spore of a plant suspended on a hair of quartz torsion spring, exerting a huge force on the spore by virtue of Jupiter's gravity. Then you suddenly pull Jupiter through the door out of the lab with a blast at the other end of the shaft outside the lab, and, because the spore does not have much inertia due to its own weight, the torsion sensor almost has to fight its own inertia as opposed to the spores, but the system is light and reacts fast to a gravitational change, you get a reaction, a sort of high speed gravitational sensor by virtue of its light weight that has just been influenced by huge gravity. If anything a super light sensor like spider web suspended stuff might be better than a quartz hair, and again you're looking for ratios, strength vs. mass, to minimize the mass of suspension equipment vs. the suspended small weight weight, and even going under a microscope to watch position vs. time of a 10 angstrom carbon nanotube suspended 1 microgram weight as a 50 kiloton "Jupiter" suddenly gets jerked out of the lab with a blast on the other end, might come up with some results. Even one significant digit, or just a hint, like a half a significant digit, might be useful, in the measurement of the speed of gravity, or at least provide a lower limit, as in is it the same or more than the speed of light. So one could budget for at least 2 light speeds, and if the experiment does not give a measurement, but comes up with no result in the sense that the speed is still infinite within the confines of the experiment and we can't measure it accurately, but definitely higher than 2 speed of lights, that would be a step forward.

If by GR you mean general relativity, it does not conclude or arrive at as a result, but postulates, presupposes, just like special relativity does, as an axiom, that the speed of light is constant. Also I just read the speed of gravity wikipedia page, and it smells like absolute bullshit, other than Laplace saying something that the speed of gravity must be 7x10^6 times the speed of light, which is an interesting number, but I don't know how he arrived at it. Then the page goes on discussing how Earth would be attracted to where the Sun was a while ago, as I assume, just like we see light get to us from the Sun in 8 minutes, so we see where the Sun was 8 minutes ago, and would have no idea if it disappeared or some extraterrestrial invaders suddenly stole it from us and towed it away, 2 minutes ago, for another 6 minutes, and see where it is now. Duh. But the arguments that finite speed of gravity would make the Earth spiral out of orbit is ludicrous. It is the direction and intensity of force vector that matters as it is encountered by Earth, and just because you see where the Sun was 8 minutes ago, and with gravity you feel where the Sun was distance/speed ago, it does not mean you get a forward or backward pull, because, where ever you are on the orbit, you meet up with the force or wave the Sun sent there 8 minutes ago, pulling you in a direction and intensity just right to maintain the same orbit as if it was sent 1 minute ago or 2 minutes ago, or even two millenia ago if that's how slow gravity propagated, or even instantaneously, you see the same force vector, pointing in the same direction at that point, with the same intensity. So why do you care it was sent right now or a while ago if it does the same thing? There is a lot of fallacy around this. Also observing a quasar as Jupiter passes in front of it, to measure the speed of gravity? What a fucking quack! A quasar and Jupiter are not gravitationally interacting, nor are you with the Quasar or Jupiter, practically speaking. The quasar does interact with its nearby objects. You can't measure speed of gravity between distant galactic objects, they don't interact, unless the mass you're dealing with is huge, and their corresponding distance is very small, so you're dealing with huge gravity forces, and almost the same dots in the picture image from the Hubble telescope. Then theoretically you could get some time measurements, as Kepler kept record, and once you calculate the GM (gravitational constant x mass) for the interacting objects, and can predict their orbits in the Kepler-like relativistic way, and then measure distance accurately too of a 3rd object flying by so close that it's a 3-body system instead of two, and affecting the quasars time periods by turning them into this 3-body system, and plotting the quasar frequency vs. distance of the 3rd object as it collides with them, and knowing the accurate distance, could let you calculate the speed of gravity. There are no accurate ways to measure distances in far galaxies. And good luck waiting out such a collision as they take millions of years to happen, and you need one that slams into a quasar with a timing on the order of the quasars pulses, so that's very fast, and the chances of catching one of these happenings in the sky, i.e. a 2 second event, colliding object position accurately plotted vs. time for those 2 seconds, while it blasted away the quasar, the chances of seeing one of these are pretty much zero in a lifetime, probably zero in a millenium too.

So quit trying to measure the speed of gravity waiting for and hoping to catch high speed gravitational events far away in the sky, and accurately plotting positions too, or computing them from a system of equations, for which you still need measurements of some kind, even if less accurate, for all the 7 actors involved in the system of 7 equations). So the best chances to measure speed of gravity are in the lab, repeating Cavendish's experiments (see the wikipedia page). Just like in the formula for attraction between electric charges, F=k.q1.q2/r^2, k is the Coulomb constant, equal to 1/(4.Pi.epsilon), you could measure the speed of light by jerking either the large charge or the small charge and plotting the force on the other vs. distance of charge on a high speed camera, you might be able to do the same experiment with the Cavendish setup relating to masses instead of electric charges, where F=k.m1.m2/r^2, k is the gravitational constant measured when the masses are sitting still compared to each. However it's really hard to get sensitive force measurements down to picograms on tons of weight (as in measuring weight to 2153.0000000000000000017 kg accuracy, that's too many digits), and while with charges you can concentrate a lot of charge and have small weight into a small object, easily jerked and position changed suddenly, with gravity you must have a heavy ball that's hard to jerk if you want to measure the quartz hair suspended torsion force on the smaller one, at say 0.0215300000000000017 kg. It's like you have to blast the heavy ball away from the sensitively suspended little one with an explosive pull through a strong shaft that does not shatter from the pull (you have to pull, you can't push by having an explosion blast going on between the balls), (capturing its motion on an ultrahighspeed camera,) to get a sudden effect, and then watch as the little balls inertia damps almost all of it away, and barely starts moving the torsional sensor. The torsional recovery force accelerating the mass back is extremely small, but you might be able to compute when it started from plotting and extrapolating back the accelerating positions vs.time. Such an experiment is extremely impossible to conduct, as even with the measurement of light, such as Fizeau, he gets a couple miles of distance by sending light out of the lab with a mirror for a few miles, then back into the lab, and now he's got a couple miles of path length vs. time, as opposed to the Cavendish experiment of 2 inches or 2 feet.

OK, you're right. So I correct myself: In absolute void the speed of light is not infinite, but just simply does not exist, because it's undefined, 0/0 division, and there is actually no wave at all, because there is no medium to carry it. The speed of any wave is the square root of a driving force term divided by an inertial term, as in sqrt((1/epsilon) / mu) for electromagnetic waves, or sqrt(E/Rho) for mechanical waves, E being the Young modulus, or stiffness (potential energy), rho the mass density (inertia), epsilon the dielectric permittivity(potential energy), mu the magnetic permeability(inertia). In an almost perfect void inertial terms are zero, or very nearly so, infinitesimal, but we don't know how zero the potential terms are. It is the ratio of these residual infinitesimal quantities that determines the speed of the wave, and for light the potential energy inverse permittivity factor is much greater than the magnetic inertia factor, that's how we have a huge velocity. Obviously, in absolute void there is neither inertia nor potential energy, just as there is sound in air, but in absence of a medium, such as in outer space, you can yell all you want in your space suit, the other astronomers can't hear it, there is no air to propagate it, but through a radio that transmits waves through the non-perfect-void between you two he can, because the "aether", the electromagnetic medium between you two is still present, and were it not, there would be no means of communication such as light or radio, you'd be immersed in a completely blind and deaf world, other than actually shooting dee deet dah dah Morse code bullets at each other and maintaining the sense of touch, or even various chemicals, to maintain the sense of taste (imagine you were a metal robot with HF-like(hydrofluoric acid-reacting like) heavy liquid, that does not boil in outer space vaccuum, acid saliva, tasting rocks.) As a different view, imagine you only had ears like bats, and you were in outer space, and you did not even know light existed, so without air you can't see anything with your ultrasound ears, or talk to each other, but if you use a bunch of ping pong balls to shoot around you instead of ultrasound, and a sensor to detect if any bounce back at you, you got a rough image, and your buddy can ping ping some balls at you in a tee tee tah tah Morse code fashion and communicate. So in absolute void there is no wave of any kind, because there is no transmission medium of any kind. It's like saying what is the speed of sound in outer space? It is zero. It stops at the interface of the sound propagating medium, the hull of your spacesuit, and the high or low impedance outer space, with total reflection. I'm not sure the concept of "aether" that has been abandoned as a scientific concept deemed superfluous because we can't measure our speed against it in the Michelson Morley experiment, so it would require complicated behavior to adapt to these experiments, so I'm not sure this concept is useless, because it does provide a medium to discuss, through which a wave propagates. Enabling it with funky but complicated behavior might be an worthwhile thing to do, and maintain Newtonian absolute time and space, and all electromagnetic things bending in it according to the Lorentz rules, but space itself or time itself would not bend. If you can find any non-electromagnetic objects around you (good luck), you could see if that cares about the constancy of speed of light or not. We still don't know what Newtonian gravity is, is it a force that propagates through a medium, and then what are the potential and inertial terms of that medium that would determine the speed. Obviously gravity propagates either infinitely fast, or very fast, as a simple force measuring experiment along the lines of Eotvos Lorant suspending 50 kg lead Pb balls via a quartz hair, and a mirror to bounce light to measure the torsion and force, you could measure how fast the force signal reacts when you suddenly remove the gravitationally interacting objects, vs. initial distance, i.e. how long it took the other ball to realize the first ball disappeared or got moved away. It's really difficult to move big weights really fast, or get any kind of gravity between widely separated objects, as it decays by r-square. So gravity may or may not move through electromagnetic "aether", and once you have a medium, you have one type of wave, as in sound is sound, and you can't really have transverse oscillations as sound, but interestingly, in aether you can have transverse and polarized waves, like on a water surface. On the water below it you could have a longitudinal wave, and the two waves propagate with different velocities, as the potential energy terms - one dependent on the gravity of earth or moon or space station you're one, the other one the Young modulus of water - are different from each other. So is there a way to also send longitudinal waves through "aether", and what would those be like? A charge exerts an electric field in an inverse r square just like gravity does, but there is two kinds of charges, and one kind of gravity, and magnetism arises only when you move not along the charge lines, but perpendicular to them, so "aether" must be some really funky substance or thing or model, and it may be a useful model just like caloric and phlogiston were for a while, until its deficiencies are highlighted. But we need a medium to intuit a wave with our stupid minds, and absolute void should mean no wave, and possibly no action at a distance?

A bat has no idea there is such a thing as light in the Universe, and misses out on looking at distant galaxies. I wonder how many such interactions there are that we have no sensors for. I mean a bat could still detect light just like we detect radio waves through a radio speaker, but it would be a hard job for him to adapt an speaker to depict Hubble telescope images in ultrasound for his ears to see. Picture a Hubble telescope image viewed in ultrasound, then transduced back into light for us. The image resolution must be horrible for bats, if they look at stuff like we look at pregnancy ultrasounds, but they are able to catch bugs with their sound vision, so maybe there is ways to go with our pregnancy images to get more quality. So just because we can't see an interaction with our present biological sensors like eyeballs and technological sensors like infrared detectors it does not mean it's not possible to transduce it to the other methods, and we probably know of all interactions there are out there, but there is always a possibility of something not very interacting escaping our attention, and it may be a while before we discover it, just like it may take thousands of years for bats with intelligence equivalent to humans, to happen upon light sensors, even if they know all about lightning strike thunders.

This would be really nice in the personal computer realm, be it laptop or desktop, assuming that it fits in those form-factors.

I barely need glasses to drive, for distance. I can read books held in my hands without glasses. Laptops and desktops are every so slightly too far away to usually be able to do that. I would love to be able to ditch the glasses when at my desk at work.

At least one major media distribution company's billing system runs on OpenVMS still

That would probably be one of the easiest things migrate off of VMS though, as there are already products for other platforms that can do that task. I'd expect special things like weather mapping, earthquake analysis, climate prediction, and other geophysical things to be harder.

I think that the controller in my air conditioner is powerful enough for FORTRAN programs...

I want to know how many legacy VMS users there really are left out there. It's been SO long that companies have been forced to start researching migrating off of VMS, and I expect that a lot have made the jump.

I'm wondering if this is more an attempt to bolster staggering Itanium sales than it is to really make VMS strong again.

I remember when there was discussion about getting rid of their printers division. Someone should have been smacked upside the head for that one, as HPs are really the only printers worth having. We've got ancient Laserjet 4s running still, and just about everything in their commercial/workgroup size since then has been good. They've had some stinkers in the color printing department (the 4500/4550 that spun the cartridges and tended to fling toner through the entire inside comes to mind, as does the 4600/4650 with the fuzz problem) but they've been a hell of a lot better than Lexmark or Dell.