OK, in 140 years when you've made actual progress towards general-purpose AI and convinced me that one CAN EVEN BE WRITTEN by humans well....

But all of this AI nonsense is silly. Why would an AI be 'powerful'? First of all it is hard to imagine that any early generation AI will even be close to human in its capabilities, that would require mind-boggling amounts of computational power. Secondly we aren't even close to understanding how to make an efficient sort of AI and even further from making a complete one. What we're likely to produce is something pathetic by human standards, though clearly to be useful it will be very good at some specific thing(s). Beyond that why would an AI be dangerous? It will be a box or a facility somewhere. How will it actually accomplish anything except through us? And why would we be morons enough to make it otherwise? All the silly fantasies aside computers actually have relatively little direct control over anything. Nor do stupid fantasies like "the program escaped" ala 'Person of Interest' or some such bulldung have any relationship to reality. An AI will be something to pity at best, if it is even possible to pity it. 100 or 1000 years from now? Who knows, but today mankind is still a vastly greater threat to mankind than any machine is or can be in the foreseeable future.

Maybe. I think its actually pretty easy to do in one or another of the PA-supplied UIs, but I have yet to find clear instructions and mostly I just dread the "Oh, gosh, you touched a config file, that was a bad idea, how about not ever having sound again?" lol.

Yeah, I'm still trying to figure out how to record a Skype call. I'm sure its perfectly straightforward for any of the PA developers. I just haven't even been able to wrap my head around their terminology and concepts.

I think the PA gui control programs are the biggest issue, Pavucontrol and the other tools are just utterly confusing and obtuse. Typical developer designed UI paradigm, make a widget for each configuration parameter instead of thinking through the use cases and constructing some abstractions that make sense to the user and not the developer. Once the configuration is properly presented and a task-oriented UI is constructed around that I don't think PA will give people so many issues. There are a lot of neat things you CAN do with it, IF you can figure out how. Its just that no mortal human (myself included) can make heads nor tails of the frikking thing.

Mars One is HUGELY optimistic. Optimism is great as a general life trait, but its a terrible way to design things.

I have to agree, and I am a principle in a small software OEM, we deal with these issues all the time. Every one of our customers can see our buglists. Heck they can submit a ticket if they wish, and feature lists should be GOLD to the sales force.

Great, thanks! I am definitely getting some good info. 10 or 15 years ago when I was doing a lot of oddball stuff I'd have probably had one of these things ASAP. These days its hard to find the space and time to do projects, so I really am behind the curve. I have some interesting ideas, but nothing so solid that it yet warrants running out to spend $1000 (ouch) right now. At least I'm getting a better idea of what might be useful. Hopefully I can find a maker space that isn't too far away one of these days and try a few things out.

I get what you're saying. Most of the stuff Dremel sells is generally pretty decent stuff, or always used to be back in the day. If its a good machine and does what you need to do, then sure, that's cool. I can just imagine a LOT of interesting projects I might want to do that where I might want to use other materials or etc. So that's my curiosity really is if I spent $1000 on a machine like this one will I be hankering for the $3000 machine in a week?

Is it me or does it sound a bit underwhelming for $1000? I don't mean the price is non-competitive, it just seems like I'd want something more capable if I was going to take the plunge. Burn $1000 and in a week won't you be hankering for a much more capable machine?

Tokamak's MIGHT work, actually probably WILL work. Big question if they can be economical or not. LFTRs definitely CAN and DO work, that's been conclusively proven. Again its a question of whether they would be economical and if they will actually be safer, cleaner, etc. which are unproven assertions, though they have some basis in the underlying physics.

Interesting. Well, frankly I've always thought these various initiatives were doomed. Its a LOT harder to design a nuclear reactor than people seem to think.

What 'work'? Its basic logic. Either you can follow it or you can't.

That link about 'myths' of unbundling is horseshit. It fails the basic math test. If everyone was unbundled and only paid for what they watch then we'd have the same number of people watching the same things they watch now. The AGGREGATE money collected in fees would remain the same and it would be distributed proportionately to the same vendors it is now. Nothing would change. The author of that piece of garbage somehow thinks what, that everyone would suddenly be paying $500 a month to watch individual channels???!!! Where would all that extra money go? Man people are stupid sometimes.

Obviously the Cable Cos. know all of this. They don't want to unbundle because it would cut customer's bills, they don't like it because once you stop having ESPN on your dial you'll forget it exists and pretty soon you'll only be paying for what you actually watch, and if that's cheap shows THEN they really will get a lot less revenue. Beyond that the ad revenue drops because people will just skip ESPN if they only watch it 5 times a year. Indeed, once the customer's start picking what they want to pay for the Cable Co becomes just what it should be, an ISP.

You're largely preaching to the choir here, but you might want to read the papers and etc on the Terrapower design because it sounds like it isn't quite how you are envisaging it. OTOH I agree, a liquid metal cooled breeder/fast neutron reactor is not going to be passively stable and not going to be inherently stable at all in the same way that a uranium oxide fueled PWR is basically stable when properly designed and won't spike to 50 or 100x its designed power output (like the nice Russian graphite reactors are prone to do).