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Robotics

The Dominant Life Form In the Cosmos Is Probably Superintelligent Robots 391

Posted by Soulskill from the quick-destroy-all-the-remaining-copies-of-Battlebots dept.
Jason Koebler writes: If and when we finally encounter aliens, they probably won't look like little green men, or spiny insectoids. It's likely they won't be biological creatures at all, but rather, advanced robots that outstrip our intelligence in every conceivable way. Susan Schneider, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, joins a handful of astronomers, including Seth Shostak, director of NASA's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, NASA Astrobiologist Paul Davies, and Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick in espousing the view that the dominant intelligence in the cosmos is probably artificial. In her paper "Alien Minds," written for a forthcoming NASA publication, Schneider describes why alien life forms are likely to be synthetic, and how such creatures might think.

Comment Re:the real story (Score 3, Insightful) 230

by Deathlizard (#48596239) Attached to: Forbes Blasts Latests Windows 7 Patch as Malware

the problem that I have with this isn't this particular patch, but the pattern.

Microsoft over the last 6 months have not had a patch cycle that didn't have major widespread issues with a patch that was eventually recalled. The last time they had problems this bad was sometime around 2002-2003, and back then they claimed that they changed their testing criteria to prevent major patch issues from happening, And it worked for a good while. At least I only had to worry about 1-2 bad patches a year at most.

This patch botch, however, takes the cake. There is absolutely no way this patch should have been able to pass a competent Q/A test. Every single windows 7 machine that got this patch through our test systems (which is about 100 PC's spread across multiple vendors and OS images) popped up a "you are a conterfeit victim" message within 24 hours of receiving the patch. There is no way they couldn't have run into this unless they are doing short term checks for patch related issues.

"The Patch Installed without crashing" is Not Good enough Q/A when you are rolling out a patch to millions of potential customers. Someone in MS Q/A Needs to get fired over these issues before it causes more damage (IE: People taking Forbes stupid advice, disabling critical updates and getting infected by some cryptovirus that wipes out all of their company files that could have been prevented by a patch install.)

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