Well, you can't get worse than me.... finally got around to upgrading the CPU in the ...15 year old box. Doubled its performance! :)

3) Go to the drug store and buy a deck of cards...

Next time you go to fix Grandma's email, bring along a deck of cards and ask her to show you some solitaire games. In fact bring four decks -- some of the old games required more than one.

When faced with a tricky question, one think you have to ask yourself is 'Does this question actually make any sense?' For example you could ask "Can anything get colder than absolute zero?" and the simplistic answer is "no"; but it might be better to say the question itself makes no sense, like asking "What is north of the North Pole"?

I think when we're talking about "superintelligence" it's a linguistic construct that sounds to us like it makes sense, but I don't think we have any precise idea of what we're talking about. What *exactly* do we mean when we say "superintelligent computer" -- if computers today are not already there? After all, they already work on bigger problems than we can. But as Geist notes there are diminishing returns on many problems which are inherently intractable; so there is no physical possibility of "God-like intelligence" as a result of simply making computers merely bigger and faster. In any case it's hard to conjure an existential threat out of computers that can, say, determine that two very large regular expressions match exactly the same input.

Someone who has an IQ of 150 is not 1.5x times as smart as an average person with an IQ of 100. General intelligence doesn't work that way. In fact I think IQ is a pretty unreliable way to rank people by "smartness" when you're well away from the mean -- say over 160 (i.e. four standard deviations) or so. Yes you can rank people in that range by *score*, but that ranking is meaningless. And without a meaningful way to rank two set members by some property, it makes no sense to talk about "increasing" that property.

We can imagine building an AI which is intelligent in the same way people are. Let's say it has an IQ of 100. We fiddle with it and the IQ goes up to 160. That's a clear success, so we fiddle with it some more and the IQ score goes up to 200. That's a more dubious result. Beyond that we make changes, but since we're talking about a machine built to handle questions that are beyond our grasp, we don't know whether we're making actually the machine smarter or just messing it up. This is still true if we leave the changes up to the computer itself.

So the whole issue is just "begging the question"; it's badly framed because we don't know what "God-like" or "super-" intelligence *is*. Here's I think a better framing: will we become dependent upon systems whose complexity has grown to the point where we can neither understand nor control them in any meaningful way? I think this describes the concerns about "superintelligent" computers without recourse to words we don't know the meaning of. And I think it's a real concern. In a sense we've been here before as a species. Empires need information processing to function, so before computers humanity developed bureaucracies, which are a kind of human operated information processing machine. And eventually the administration of a large empire have always lost coherence, leading to the empire falling apart. The only difference is that a complex AI system could continue to run well after human society collapsed.

Thanks. I will give it a try.

Just reimaged 3rd time and 10 is still trying to install. I think if this is true it and Ms is doing forced upgrades after July 24th for those who said no on new images it will be a revolt

Contrariwise show me a form of telecommunication that does *not* involve computers. Even plain old telephone service. Even if you discount the digital switching equipment, the PBXs at business locations are computers.

The overriding principle in any encounter between vehicles should be safety; after that efficiency. A cyclist should make way for a motorist to pass , but *only when doing so poses no hazard*. The biggest hazard presented by operation of any kind of vehicle is unpredictability. For a bike this is swerving in and out of a lane a car presents the greatest danger to himself and others on the road.

The correct, safe, and courteous thing to do is look for the earliest opportunity where it is safe to make enough room for the car to pass, move to the side, then signal the driver it is OK to pass. Note this doesn't mean *instantaneously* moving to the side, which might lead to an equally precipitous move *back* into the lane.

Bikes are just one of the many things you need to deal with in the city, and if the ten or fifteen seconds you're waiting to put the accelerator down is making you late for where you're going then you probably should leave a few minutes earlier, because in city driving if it's not one thing it'll be another. In any case if you look at the video the driver was not being significantly delayed by the cyclist, and even if that is so that is no excuse for driving in an unsafe manner, although in his defense he probably doesn't know how to handle the encounter with the cyclist correctly.

The cyclist of course ought to know how to handle an encounter with a car though, and for that reason it's up to the cyclist to manage an encounter with a car to the greatest degree possible. He should have more experience and a lot more situational awareness. I this case the cyclist's mistake was that he was sorta-kinda to one side in the lane, leaving enough room so the driver thought he was supposed to squeeze past him. The cyclist ought to have clearly claimed the entire lane, acknowledging the presence of the car; that way when he moves to the side it's a clear to the driver it's time to pass.

Because your average user isn't a /. Reader or l33t hax0r... The idea of having settings and data synced across multiple PCs appeals to enough people to warrant it being in the box.

I just did 2 new Windows 8.1 images and ran WIndows update. It keeps forcing 10 shitware on me! I tried creating and cancelling a reservation and it still tries to open WIndows update automatically to install.

No matter what everytime I reboot WIndows update keeps popping up trying to install Windows 10 automatically.

I guess if you imaged a PC before July 24th you were fine. UGH.

They also are just being sat on. Corperations need to have them forcibly taken back as those asshats will never give them up willingly.

I have heard of a monthly "running out of IpV4 addresses" on slashdot since 1998.

And this story has zero meat to it just like the last 690 stories here about it.

How about someone forcing HP to give up their gigantic chunk that they have been camping on unused for 40 years?

Honestly, force internet to be like a utility. dont let them be for profit and force them to spend at last 50% of all profits on infrastructure build out.

These asshole CEO's don't want to do the right thing, then it needs to be done at gunpoint with regulations and laws. Let the SWAT teams raid a CEO office for once instead of a poor persons house.

Carrys on with stable 8.1

Others disagree with your assertion of 10.

It is very beta compared to 8.1