One of their more promising goals is to create a "perfect lens" which would allow an everyday person to view things as small as a virus with the naked eye.

Can someone explain to me how using a lens to see something qualifies as "with the naked eye", exactly?

I thought Slashdot was a nerd hangout...

Geeze....

:)

Why would you assume that Allah would need to or even want revenge for such a thing? Assuming, for the moment, that Allah is actually opposed to gay marriage, and assuming that said deity even actually cared about what it was that we do, what would be the point of an omniscient and omnipotent being giving humans what is supposedly a free will if said deity was going to be petty and actually try to micromanage human behavior via swift vengeance for every infraction?

You were the one who claimed that most would-be pirates were discouraged from doing it prior to the invention of the printing press. Guess what? The high cost of making copies (and the relative lack of literate people to share them with, assuming that the author himself was even literate) discouraged authors from writing things down too.

True.... which is why most creative works that had any chance of distribution were patronized by wealthy people.

Oh, and the library of Alexandria had money to pay its workers to make copies as well, so that's why it worked. Relatively speaking though, such patronized copying facilities were rare enough that they did not practically pose any threat to the initial creator's exclususivity.

Authors really just don't engage in self-censorship as a means of control.

Why not? Publishers do it all the time.... Region control on DVD's and DRM are perfect current examples of self-censorship... although not necessarily placed there by the creator personally, the publisher was still authorized by the creator to make copies of the work, so the creator would certainly be a willing participant to having such restrictions, even if they did not put them there themselves. Of course, the incentive behind publication in such cases has more to do with monetary reward than anything else, and I don't actually advocate such incentives as being worthwhile in the first place.

But outside of that, do you seriously think that all created works are published? Do you think that everyone who makes a creative work even *wants* to always publish it? Costs for creating works that one does not intend to publish is not necessarily high... and may often be something that is just a natural outpouring of that person's creativity, rather than a specific endeavor that is undertaken by the person to specifically create a particular work, so the matter of time investment in creating the work is immaterial. The simple fact that they have created the work at all is sufficient incentive for them to create it. This happens ALL the time... probably millions of times every single day, in fact.

And of course, such self-censorship is extraordinarily effective as a copy-control mechanism, because after all, how anyone copy the work if they don't know it even exists, or if they did, because they just don't have access to it? But the problem with this is that self-censorship does not offer any benefit to society... society cannot be enriched by a creative work that it does not have access to, so copyright gives such a creator the means to control their interests while still publishing (and thereby ideally helping to enrich society through an availability of diverse creative works).

Copyright, from an author's point of view, is a way to recoup their investment.

If that were true, there would be no point to explicitly putting things under something along the lines of a creative commons copyright license where the intent is to give away the work for free. What investment can one possibly recoup with that? Such copyright distribution mechanisms still differ significantly from public domain because they generally still have provisions in place on the purpose or how it is copied, such as allowing free copies for educational use or personal study only, or allowing free copies as long as the existing copyright notice and attributions are kept intact.

Copyright is, and has always been, about control... no more and no less than literally control over the "right to copy". The argument I am suggesting, however, is that allowing the creators to possess such control for a limited time even while they distribute the work is ultimately beneficial, since it gives those creators an incentive to publish (and ideally enrich society in so doing) where they may have otherwise utilized self-censorship as their preferred means of copy control, and society would not have benefited.

Personally, I would drop terms to a year, with numerous opportunities for renewal, but with overall maximum lengths that were still quite short (probably no more than 20 years or so, and less in the case of some types of works, such as computer software

If it were up to me, I would drop the terms of creator-controlled copyright to durations that were largely a function of the style of work itself, since the style of work typically impacts the duration of cultural relevancy for the work in the first place. Paintings and other material works of art would have the longest copyright duration, extending for the life of the creator plus 40 years. If the work was created by a company instead of an individual, then it extends 40 years past the date the creation is first published or publicized as being publicly available to see or obtain. Books would typically have the next-longest copyright duration of 25 years from the date of publication, as long as the book was not of a type where it fairly quickly becomes obsolete (such as a non-fiction, encyclopedic, or reference book where a new edition of the same book is published regularly with newer information within). In the latter case, the duration of the copyright would be the lesser of 25 years or double the length of time that the information is outdated (to a minimum of 5 years). Things like digital photos would have the same copyright duration as a book, 25 years after the date of publication. Movies and music would have a copyright duration of 10 years from publication date, and software would have a copyright duration of 5. If any extensions were to be allowed, I would argue that there should be an exponentially rising fee structure for such extensions so that practical limits are still placed on its duration (any more than about doubling the initial copyright duration should be so expensive as to exceed the annual GDP of a major country and thus be prohibitive), and even then, I would advocate that no more than a single extension could ever be applied to any work. After expiry, I would advocate that the work would fall into a kind-of-controlled public domain, where one is nearly as free to copy the work as if it had been public domain, but with the caveat that all attributions be maintained, and that the original copyright (and duration) be included with the work so that it is clear who originated the work and when, since that may have historical significance, as well as makes it clear that all of the original copyright terms have expired, and the work can be legally copied quite freely, subject to those limitations. Of course, no compensatory claims can be made by the holder of a copyright after their control of copyright has expired.

Hell, some places, like Alexandria during the days of the famous library,...

You are, I assume, aware that the days of the Alexandria library copying all works that entered the city were well over a thousand years before the printing press was even developed, let alone copyright created. Also, creators who did not want their works copied could prevent Alexandria from copying them by simply not going into the city... employing self-censorship as a means of copy control, which has always existed.

Copyright (by which I mean largely the form that it exists today and not as a collusion contract created by publishers) had an intended purpose that was to maximize the enrichment to society that can be obtained by the society having access to diverse kinds of creative works, and offering the creators of those works some means of controlling their works for at least a limited time at least gave many of them an incentive to not resort to self-censorship as their main form of such control.

As a side point on the matter of controlling works for a limited duration, I am compelled to add that I do strongly believe that copyright durations are far too long today, and should be shortened drastically, by no less than a factor of 2, maybe even more, and with very minimal, if any opportunities for extension.

"Troubling"... "not supposed to happen".

I'm not entirely sure if he's trying to deliberately understate it, or if it is just that he may be completely clueless as to what it feels like for the people who are put in that kind of situation.

Copyright is just an extension of the exclusivity that creators had over a work that creators enjoyed in the days before the printing press. Copying was hard enough and error prone that natural checks and balances tended to discourage most (but admittedly not all) from engaging in unauthorized copying. As I said, it didn't stop everyone but it was sufficient. As copying became easier, the only thing that was left was to either shrug and disregard it (in which case many creators would resort to self-censorship as a means of holding onto their exclusivity), or to manufacture a legal structure by which people who disregarded that exclusivity for at least a certain period of time could face punitive action for such behavior. As the law itself becomes increasingly unable to deter people who would violate a copyright, creators are again faced with the same choice of resorting to self-censorship if nothing is done, and reducing the availability of anything that has any hope of becoming a mainstream work to only whatever pop culture demands (oh, and you can bet that it will so laden with DRM and unskippable ads that it will make even what happens today look like a paradise). In the end, it will be a self-serving cycle with no real capacity for diversity or capability to enrich society, the very purpose for which copyright invented in the first place.

... that more men work at Microsoft than women is simply because more men apply to worth there in the first place.

And for any women that might express discomfort with the fact that the workplace is primarily male as a disincentive apply to such a place, I would suggest that is ultimately just a manifestation of their own insecurities (cue the feminists who will call me a misogynist upon reading that)... but my point is that it is *THEY* who are focusing on the gender differences, and not necessarily Microsoft In a work environment that may happen to be dominated by the opposite gender, where one can otherwise perform all of the duties that the job demands with sufficient competency, about the only legitimate reason I can think of that one would have to really experience any discomfort is concerns about sexual harassment. But there are laws that govern that anyways, and a mechanism by which people who engage in such actions can be brought to justice. Some people are sincerely afraid to leave their house alone too... simply because they think they might get mugged. One can either allow fear to paralyze them, or take control of their own life and try and do whatever it is that you want to do. One can't control what other people may or may not do to you, so they really shouldn't worry about that. If one is a woman and finds that you have an aptitude for STEM, then by all means they should enter a field relevant to that, and *NOT* worry about what other people *might* do. Otherwise, they are no different than the agoraphobic who stays indoors because they believe something bad will happen to them if they go out.

You do of course realize that the exact same arguments could be made to apply to things like counterfeiting. Money is, after all, imaginary property in a sense, since it typically has a perceived value associated with it that is not connected with any material value the raw materials the currency is manufactured from may possess.

Autistic people can be extremely literal too.... that doesn't mean that we should necessarily fear what they might do when they follow instructions to the letter. If intelligence in general is not something to be fearful of (and I'm not suggesting that it necessarily isn't), then I cannot see how there remains any compelling reason to be afraid of any intelligence merely because it happens to be artificial. If one is afraid of what a computer that can think might do, why not be equally afraid of what people might do instead? Natural intelligence may be inferior to what artificial intelligence can become, but that hardly means that natural intelligence is particularly impotent. Why be afraid of a machine doing what you suggested above when one is not equally fearful that some person (who by human standards would qualify as a psychotic) might do the same?

I guess my fundamental deal is that I have no faith in our ability to set any goals whatsoever for this thing that won't end up sucking for us.

But you haven't shown how the scenario that is opposite to the one that you claim to have no faith in is genuinely deserving of at least some amount faith (because "having no faith" is generally an admission to actually having some faith in the opposite condition) that it is particularly likely. It's fine if you admit to having irrational reasons for believing what you do.

That's all very well and good, but I wasn't talking about maintained high speeds, I was talking just about the acceleration. I had initial speculated that with that kind of acceleration, there would almost certainly to be some atypical ramifications if you are driving on even slightly non-level roads, and as the above poster remarked, accelerations above 1g can have catastrophic results if even a small bump gets hit, confirming my suspicions Truth be told, it turns out that the claimed acceleration is only slightly over 0.97g, but that is so fricken close enough to a full g of acceleration it that it might as well be such (you probably wouldn't notice the difference without taking instrumental measurements or at least very careful observation), and that's also close enough that I'd have no small concern that similar dangers exist, since to the best of my knowledge, the effects of acceleration are not discontinuous with respect to the acceleration rate.

Why are they manufacturing a car for use by the general public if it is that dangerous on even slightly uneven roads?

And this is more dangerous than human intelligence how? It's not.... The only thing that changes is that instead of a deranged psychopath that lacks a moral center to realize killing other people to get ahead in business (which actually does happen by the way) is bad, you have an intelligent computer that must have similarly not been taught such guidelines of conduct or else deliberately decided to disregard them.

An ai is actually less likely to engage in such behavior than a human because while humans are often irrational a purely logical thinking computer would realize that killing off vast swaths of humanity to somehow further its purpose of making widgets is ultimately counterproductive to the larger goal of having steady revenue stream, since dead people don't buy anything, and even such an ai could never know for certain that any non customer will not eventually become a customer, and to simply kill them off would need Essay deplete resources that are better spent trying to succeed at its goal.

That's gotta have some interesting ramifications when you are driving on a slope, especially if you are accelerating over a small rise in the road.

Human intelligence is encumbered by fallible memory, shaky logic or outright irrationality, and most of all by a lack of focus. Oh, and the need to sleep. All of this adds up to muddy thinking, which makes it difficult for humans to find the optimal route to their goals. A computerized artificial intelligence would likely have none of these disadvantages. It would be, in human terms, a supergenius, or at least a savant. It would win at any game its programmers told it to play, constrained only whatever rules were built into at the design phase. Call me a pessimist, but I think that sooner or later somebody's going to inadvertently tell it to play some game where genocide happens to be the best opening gambit.

I was following right along with you up until your closing sentence. In this case, it's less that you're being pessimistic and more along the lines that you don't clarify how your conclusion is inevitable, or even somehow particularly likely to follow from all of the premises that you described before.