Comment Except... (Score 1) 135
Except ccc.de isn't actually blocked. I'm visiting a friend in the UK right now and have no problem reaching ccc.de through PlusNet nor do I have any trouble reaching it through an EE mobile internet connection.
Except ccc.de isn't actually blocked. I'm visiting a friend in the UK right now and have no problem reaching ccc.de through PlusNet nor do I have any trouble reaching it through an EE mobile internet connection.
Do you have some kind of problem with trouble?
If people didn't get into trouble, we wouldn't even be talking about robots, yet. We'd be posting on Slashdot, stuff like "sucks that I didn't find enough berries today, and the area is running out of meaty squirrels, so I'll probably be moving along soon." You think you want to be a factory or farm slave for the rest of your life, but you don't even get to do that, until after you've already figured out that you don't want it.
There is no fundamental difference between creating a strong AI and having a child.
I disagree, though some of it depends on exactly how you create the AI. A child is a machine optimized for serving the "interests" of its genes (half of which it copied from you), and even in the near-future of say "Gattaca" you don't really have much say in how the child works. Even if AIs were grown in a biological analog, the initial inputs would be totally different than anything else in Earth history, much less arbitrary (from our idealist viewpoint) than what goes into making up a person. Even if you set them up to evolve in a biological manner, where the inputs eventually drifted, their "genes" certainly wouldn't be anything like oldschool life genes, much less human. Perhaps you'd get some interesting convergence, but that's not the same thing.
To see the potential of AI, you really need to think like a god, not a biologist. Or possibly somewhere in between the two. Imagine what life on Earth would be like if the creationists were right, and you'll get an analogy of how AIs might end up. (Better yet, think like HPL's elder things, and consider the shoggoth.) Whatever they have in common with previous life would be remarkable exceptions, and most of it would be new and alien-like. I think they're be more alien than "real" (biological) aliens.
Maybe think of AIs as (initially!) part of humanity's extended phenotype, like a spider's web is to a spider, or a dam is to a beaver. Could you convince a spider that a web is like its child, the new spiderdom of the future? I don't think a web that can "do things" would make your argument to the spider any stronger.
I'm not saying you should freak out, but They Will Not Be Humanity.
And most of what I'm saying is from taking a fairly extreme biological view. I wonder if that's kind of outdated, and AIs are going to be even less like life, than predicted in previous decades.
If the roads are very much from safe, why is the UK's road safety record so much better than most other developed countries?
It's over 100% because the %age shown on the site (if you read the FAQ) is %age of domestic demand. If production is >100% it means they are exporting power.
Wiritng cursive has crossed the line for decades (just teach them so they can write legibly, which is still required - but all that cursive shit, no).
However long division and other things such as doing multiplication by hand are important skills that should still be taught: it internalizes the idea that a big difficult calculation can be made easier by turning it into several smaller calculations. It's a bit like learning asm in computer science - you're (probably) never going to use it in the real world but it's important to know in the understanding of how a computer actually works.
If anything I think schools need to be able to get more people to be able to do mental arithmetic and estimation. If you understand these even if you only ever use a calculator it gives you the skills to sanity check the result (how many times have I thought "that's not right" after entering something into a calculator because it disagreed with a mental estimate, then discovered I had miskeyed a number, especially on a touch screen)
France right now, at this very second, is fuelling 98% of their demand with nuclear.
I guess these psycopathic British drivers is why Britain has some of the safest roads in Europe and the world (with around only half the fatalities per million kilometers compared to the US or Canada)
The car industry conspiracy doesn't hold any water - French carmakers are famous for making really good small diesel engines.
I don't think so. The French make awesome small diesel engines, if this disadvantages anyone it will be the French.
In 2014, I have driven more than 45 miles from my origin on exactly two occasions, and one of those was in a rented long wheelbase van.
And how do you achieve this? You need to block land borders, plus control a coast along which piracy is growing. There is no navy big enough to blockade that coast, and putting the army in to block the land exposes them to the disease.
Machines have less problems. I'd like to be a machine. -- Andy Warhol