Your comment is probably the most insightful here.

Even with extreme optimism about neurplasticity and nerve cells sliced in the middle (not separated at the synapses but chopped like a stalk of celery) deciding to attach to other sliced neurons, the idea of taking one spinal cord and gluing it to another spinal cord and having ANYTHING line up right seems absurd to me. Talk about a registration problem! I suspect the only way to do it would be to be to perform microscopic surgery where tiny machines connect neurons one-by-one. Of course, even if we had that technology, there's a whole other problem of knowing which ones to connect to which, which probably doesn't have a real solution as you pointed out.

root on ZFS is a thing now. ZFS has a lot of benefits that I'd like to be using, if it were easier. (It's not that big a deal overall, but I don't want to have to do a lot of extensive fiddling when something fails.)

Because when Windows platforms started to get 3d accelerators, the OpenGL implementation on Windows NT was incredibly primitive and performed poorly even for a software implementation, and only high-end corporate users had acceleration at all. It was as likely to use a private API for acceleration as to use OpenGL. Although Windows OpenGL accelerators did exist, they cost thousands of dollars and up. When the first consumer-level GPUs came out for PCs, they too used custom APIs rather than OpenGL. While 3dfx eventually supported a subset of OpenGL functionality under the name "MiniGL", and towards the end of their run actually produced nominally complete OpenGL drivers (for Voodoo x000 series cards) the damage was already done. Microsoft was able to appear to be a hero by implementing their own 3D API instead of OpenGL with vendor extensions, and the rest is history.

Direct3D is successful today because of inertia. If 3dfx and PowerVR had implemented OpenGL from the beginning, then we probably wouldn't have Direct3D at all today. Microsoft would have tried to control OpenGL through fancy-pants vendor-specific extensions, and probably failed because hey, others have also tried that and failed. So, aside from Microsoft of course, I blame 3dfx. MiniGL is what we needed from the beginning.

VMware works better than anything else I've seen. Most of the games I've tried to use in vmware actually still work, which is what keeps me on Linux. It's the best place to run vmware, and the only freely-available Unixlike on which it runs. Otherwise I might well have shifted to FreeBSD by now.

OTOH Linux runs on everything I own, and I mean everything. Routers, access points, desktops, pogoplugs, my Blu-Ray player. So there's not much sense in learning something that will only run on some of that stuff.

They can use a $199 PC, which together with the $99 streaming box is going to be no more expensive than the fancy console - and provide more versatility.

I hate to come on like one of those "PC Master Race" dicks, but the consoles are either especially gutless (like Nintendo's) or spectacularly curated. For people who don't feel hampered by that, OK, great. But boy is that shit annoying. It's more annoying even than having to run Windows.

You can install a quite complete GNU userland on Android. You can also install an X or VNC client ... (searching google) ... ah yes, also a SPICE client, which is probably your best bet actually if it's at all reliable. And then you can run as much Linuxy goodness on your Android device as you like. So how is Android not Linux? It's not GNU/Linux, I guess. Ugh, it makes me feel dirty just to type that. Luckily, I'm typing it from Windows 7.

What people are talking about when they say this stuff is that they want to use them as input devices. When I play a game on the Wii, I pretty much always say "this would be much better with mouse and keyboard." Sure, the Wiimote is cool, and it makes some sense in living rooms*, and I occasionally still have fun playing Wii Sports Resort. But show me a game that makes me point at the screen a lot, and pointlessly waggle the Wiimote periodically, and I'll show you a game which would be better with keyboard and mouse.

Pretty much all consoles with USB ports will let you enter text into more or less all input boxes, even on the Wii. But almost no console games, even an FPS, will let you control the game with keyboard and mouse. We all know why, but that's a feature much needed to win over fence-sitters. Whether it's worth it is another discussion, although my guess is no. We will never be happy with consoles. That's why we have PCs. We occasionally flirt with consoles and then realize that they are lame if you don't have a bunch of gamers in your living room regularly.

* The Wiimote is a crap remote control. That may not be its primary design purpose, but as it turns out Netflix is probably what most Wiis are being used for today...

I understand how it works, that's why I was so impressed. What they (and others) have done in total is solve a long standing problem with NN's, their tendency to be single minded, ie: you train it to recognise cats then train it to recognise dogs, you end up with something that recognises dogs and non-dogs but has forgotten what it knew about cats. The hint is in the name "deep learning".

As for a "huge computer" Watson now knows a lot more than the original and runs on a commodity rack mounted server. Agree, prosthetics is where AI will converge with the human mind, again the technological bits and pieces are already in use, but still very much isolated from each other.

If you define AI to be the replication of human intelligence then it will never arrive except via birth and environment. IMO, it's a very narrow definition and not particularly useful since we presumably all posses our own human like intelligence. No matter how you slice it, it was a major milestone when an AI defeated the best humans in an unbounded problem space where humans excel, such as Jeopardy.

Ditto, I taught myself programming in the early 80's because playing Conway's game of life on graph paper was tedious. Sure, by definition knowledge removes the mystery but to paraphrase Feynman "Knowledge can only add to the awe and beauty of a flower, I don't understand how it can detract"

Steam has shown that it's possible to deliver mods to the console experience, with the workshop. I don't see why an even more curated model of modding wouldn't be palatable to the console developers. They could review the most popular mods for content and then give them a rating in order to give the slightest veneer of involvement.

Well, when I was that age I was installing Slackware on a 386... It's about access. When I was a kid, living in a town with a bunch of computer companies was mandatory in order to have cheap computer deals around. In Santa Cruz county we had Borland, Seagate, SCO, Parallel Computing, Sequoia Semiconductor, Plantronics, and piles of other techie or nominally-techie corporations attracted by the college town environment... and internet access brought in through the college. And $1/MB used hard disks for years and years! Ahh, Seizegate, the memories.

Today, hardware is just lying about everywhere.

I both agree and disagree. I agree that for users, OSS drivers for all would be the best. But I also think that making it difficult to have binary drivers has kept a lot of hardware off of Linux.

But they also make it easy. They provide a really convenient development system for little to no money, just like in Linux-land, and a lot of documentation, just like in Linux-land, except actually Microsoft's documentation seems to be pretty good. Shame about all the years it was full of dirty lies, since Microsoft was using different functions internally, but long gone are the days when that sort of trickery would fly with the public. Now, if performance is unacceptable, they can go somewhere else.

I think more manufacturers would release Linux drivers if they could release binary ones. Would we be grateful? I know some of us would use them.

If your challenge doesn't take into account consumer hardware support, it's not a very good challenge. Consumer hardware support is one of Linux's greatest strengths, especially as compared to BSD. The software support is pretty relevant, too. I'd probably have jumped ship by now (I have nVidia, they have an OK BSD driver I'm told) if I could have vmware. It's the only vm with good 3D support. So since I'm sticking with Linux, I just went ahead and adopted KVM as my VM strategy. Now I'm more or less married to it, although obviously I could migrate away again. I migrated my non-3D-using Windows VMs to KVM already, I could likely migrate them again given a reason. But what's OSS and better than KVM with SPICE? Virtualbox would be if 3D didn't make it asplode every time I tried it.

I've been running "more or less" the same Ubuntu install since Dapper Drake. There was a complete reinstall in there somewhere around Karmic Koala, but I kept my homedir, /opt, and /usr/local. Also, in the same time, I've had to reinstall Windows about a dozen times for one reason or another. And many of my peripherals showed up cheap (scanners, printers, etc) because Windows dropped support for them. Yeah, not Windows, the vendors, but same difference to the user. New windows, new scanner. Thanks, Obama^WHP. Man I can rant about scanner drivers all day, how sad

I can't imagine how that is even possible either, since everything else works. I can post to slashdot, stream video, or do anything else from both Windows and Linux. I even installed steam_latest.deb right before posting, including deleting my .steam directory. No good.

Possibly there is something wrong with my Ubuntu install, but I really can't fathom what that might be since everything else works fine. Until something other than Steam fails, though, I'm going to continue to blame Steam.

I'm not going to post my iptables ruleset or anything, heh heh, but:
All my firewall iptables chains are default ACCEPT, and I drop (or reject) at the end of the chain
All my firewall ebtables chains are default ACCEPT, and I have no drops or rejects
All my desktop chains are default ACCEPT with no other rules.
My only forwarding rules relate to SIP, and don't relate to the IP of this system at all
The IP remains the same when I dual boot, and is fixed.
The Windows firewall obviously knows about Steam.
I have no uPnP daemon running on my firewall.

Perhaps I have missed something obvious? But other stuff works fine.

When I was younger, and angry in random directions, I was the sort who thought that suicidal people should just go ahead and commit suicide and get it the fuck over with for the benefit of the rest of us, so that we don't have to deal with their shit. I think it's a natural consequence of growing up in a world that doesn't give a fuck about you, and does its best to show it every time you come around a corner. I grew up poor and poorly socialized, and let me tell you, that's a severely depressing state. I had basically no sense of self-worth whatsoever until my twenties. Before that, I was just randomly mean, perhaps most of the time. I didn't really give a crap about anyone else, because why bother? What a waste of energy.

Now that I'm older and hopefully wiser, I recognize that this is the attitude that's destroying our society. What's missing, first and foremost, is caring about other people. That's why so few people for example feed the homeless, even though it would cost us so very little time and money, and it's also why towns actually arrest people for doing so. Because caring is hard, and they don't want to have to do it. You make them look bad, and you make them feel bad about themselves. They know that they aren't good human beings, and they don't want to be reminded.

Of course, I'm still mostly at the talk phase. Hopefully I'll get up to the doing phase. But at least I've advanced past the shitting on everything phase. Still a bit much negativity, working on that. Let's all try to grow the fuck up and be nicer. Yeah, irony, it's a bitch, and so have I been. But maybe I know what I'm talking about, from the inside.

Unfortunately, most of the people who give a shit are the (themselves hurt, wounded) instigators who are always happy to push other people towards suicide. Show weakness, and they appear to rip you to shreds.

...whiiiich is why I stopped using Facebook to begin with. I saw a memepic floating about recently that says G+ helps me like people I don't know and FB makes me hate people I used to like, something like that anyhow, and yeah it's so true.