For the moment, I think we can limit ourselves to the number of atoms in the solar system. One rough estimate is that there are 10e29 stars in the universe. If the atoms were divided up approximately evenly between these star's systems, then there'd be 10e82/10e29=10e53. So we have one IPv6 address for each cluster of 10e15 atoms.

Except! I've heard it estimated that about half the matter in the solar system is in the sun, and we don't want to use up the sun to build computers, because we need it to power the computers. So, 10e14 atoms per IPv6 left to work with.

So the question before the audience is:can you build a device that implements an IPv6 stack and a minimal radio transmitter that allows it to communicate with other, similar devices, using only 10e14 atoms? If so, or if it can be done in less, then we may have a problem*. Otherwise, I think we should be fine for now.

(To give you a rough estimate of what you're working with:10e14 atoms of silicon would mass about 46 nanograms.)

Submit your solutions to iwannahelpdestroytheworld@weregonnafreakingcreatethesingularity.com :)

* Although the problem may not be manifest until we convert the *entire* Earth, core and all, into these devices, along with all the other planets, and colonize the Oort cloud, and do the same there. :)

It will also vary depending on the performance of the vehicles immediately ahead of, oncoming-and-passing, or crossing ahead of the street view vehicle. Especially the first: The sensor will be running in the exhaust plumes of the vehicles ahead of the street view car, so the map will be a very non-random sampling.

On the other hand, the partculate and "volatile organic compounds" sensors will produce some very interesting data. The latter is what the federal standards call "unburned hydrocarbons" when emitted from an engine, and the output of modern engines is vanishingly small. But many species of evergreen trees emit them in enormous quantity, as part of their ongoing chemical warfare against insects that eat trees. That's what the blue haze around pine-forested mountains (such as "the Smoky Mountains") is about. You can literally destroy (by extreme and long-term contamination) an automotive conformance test cell (the room where they test the car's emissions), requiring it to be torn out and rebuilt, by placing a Christmas tree in it overnight.

I expect some towns in remote, forested, mountain areas, where people move "for their health" and "for the clean, fresh, air", to get a rude awakening. B-)

But I doubt it will affect the extremely tight standards for automobile engines - except maybe to cause a flap that tightens them further. These days many engines are so clean that running then can IMPROVE the air quality in some places (such as portions of Los Angeles, with topography that created such a thermal inversion that a single settler's campfire could leave the whole valley filled with smoke for a day or more) by inhaling and burning far more hydrocarbon and particulate pollutants than they create.

Ok, so he's the CEO of a big company that makes robots--among many other things. So I really have to wonder if he's actually as clueless as this makes him appear, or if he's cynically trying to convince stupid people that they should by his company's pseudo-friendly robots?

Or is there some third option I'm overlooking?

I mean, he might as well say, "robots must be designed to answer the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything." That's just about as plausible, given the state-of-the-art. (And then he could try to sell us speaking robots that can say "forty-two".) :)

The lack of accidents and crime are more likely related to a general trend in crime going down from before they started turning off the lights. ... Give me at least one full year worth of data so I can compare it to the prior year, and have half of the country keep their lights on so It can be compared to the same time frame as well.

Hear, hear!

There's lots of room for methodology errors. Here's another:

Comparing murder rates between Great Britain and the US is complicated by differences in reporting. The US bumps the murder stat when there is a body and evidence of foul play. G.B. bumps it when they have a conviction.

Do they do that with other crime? If so, stable stats in the absence of street lighting might mean that any rise in crime is compensated for by a fall in identifying, apprehending, and convicting the criminals responsible. (Indeed, turning off the lights might easily result in LOWERED crime statistics at the same time it was causing a drastic increase in actual crime.)

I'm an anesthesiologist. I put people to sleep for cardiac surgery. My hospital does around 400-500 hearts a year... and we don't kill any dogs.

What hospital is that? I'll want to avoid it if I ever need heart surgery.

Seriously: How does your cardiac unit's mortality and morbidity rate stack up against those of hospitals where practice surgery on live animal, models, at least where the surgeon is new to the procedure, is more common?

This was a study of developers. Developers are not exactly typical users. Developers like things like vi and EMACS. And, in fact, developers can already buy keyboards with (for example) caps lock switched with control. (If they care, and are too lazy to remap their own keys.)

Do a broader study of general computer users, and then maybe we'll talk. (No real skin off my nose anyway, since if you design a keyboard layout Idon't like, I'll just remap it to be the way I do like. 'Cause I'm a developer.)

So, it's a GMO, which means the science-deniers on the left will hate it, and it reduces greenhouse gases, so the science-deniers on the right will hate it.

Basically, this is what we need, and it hasn't got a chance of success.

I'm an anesthesiologist. I put people to sleep for cardiac surgery. My hospital does around 400-500 hearts a year... and we don't kill any dogs.

So maybe I'm not up to date, or things are/were different in research hospitals.

My personal info was based on stories told by my mother, in about the '60s, when she was a special duty RN at the University of Michigan hospital, often handling cardiac recovery.

My favorite was the one where the UofMich hospital cafeteria, which had been purely open seating, established separate rooms for the staff to eat after an incident where patients' families overheard, and were traumatized by, a cardiac surgeon's response to a question. Asked how his operations the previous day had gone (referring to his experimental and/or practice surgery on a collie and another dog), he said "The blonde lived but the old bitch died."

The kids and adopted dogs story was from my wife. The surgeon in question was Dr. Albert Starr in (at least) the '60s through '80s. He was at St. Vincent's and also flew, with his team, to operate at a number of other west coast hospitals, university and otherwise.

A possible solution would be better simulations so that a student can learn by doing. I think it is a very different than working on a cadaver or simulated patient using conventional methods.

You obviously aren't familiar with surgical departments or you wouldn't have missed practice surgeries on live animals.

For instance: a typical cardiac surgeon, shortly before EACH operation on a human patient, does a practice operation of the same procedure on a live dog.

One pediatric cardiac surgeon was much beloved by his patents and their families, because (with parental permission) he would let the kid adopt the practice dog, rather than sending it to be destroyed. The kid would wake up from surgery with the new puppy beside him, with the same bandages, etc. (and a day or so farther along in recovery). The dog having been through the same procedure and having helped save the kid's life even before they met made for very strong owner/pet bonds. (There's always a live, healthy, practice dog. If the dog dies (or is severely damaged) the assumption is that the procedure failed. You DON'T do a procedure on a human if it just killed a dog. You analyze, adjust the procedure, and repeat until success.)

Getting skills up does NOT require, or usually involve, a lot of practice on JUST advanced simulations, cadavers or, live patients. The live patients are just the last step, when the skills are already finely honed, and the animal models provide immediate feedback, real situations, and automatically correct modelling of mammalian life processes.

Why don't publishers put the ads in a section of the page that can allow the rest of the page to load and render before the ad loads and renders?

Because you could stop the loading once the content you wanted was rendered, thus skipping the ad.

So the pages are set up so the ad loads and renders first.

But corporations are not people.

See my post, above, pointing out that corporations are groups of people, with all the rights guaranteed to people, who don't lose those rights just because they're acting together for a common purpose.

The legal system DOES, in some situations, treat corporations as pseudo-people. But that's just a convenient way to interact with the corporation's members/stockholders/what-have-you when they're acting together to advance the common purpose that the corporation was chartered to handle.

fuck off you right-wing scum.

In the immortal words of Red Skelton and Mel Blank: "He don't know me very well, do he?"

corporations aren't people.

Au contraire: Though they DO exhibit most of the characteristics of independent lifeforms, corporations are GROUPS of people, working together for a defined purpose. This is true whether they're businesses, schools, labor unions, churches, political parties, special-interest group, or whatever.

I assume we're agreed that people working together as a corporation shouldn't have any extra rights beyond the pooled rights of the individual members. But should these people LOSE any of their rights, just because they're working together?

Should spokesmen for a corporation with ten thousand stockholders, when speaking on issues related to the corporation's purpose, interaction with laws, and its stockholders' interests, have any less access to the ear of a legislator than the ten thousand stockholders themselves? A corporate lobbyist is just a representative of those ten thousand people when they're acting on this particular common interest.

The legal system treats corporations as pseudo-people because it's a convenient way to interact with the people making up the corporation when they're acting as a group.

[Rant deleted.]

Ad homenim. I win. B-)

I wish I could be shocked at this behavior but this is standard operating procedure in America. The government has long been owned by the corporations, stuff like this just removes all doubt.

In the executive branch this has also changed - and not for the better - recently.

One of the biggest political machines in the US is that of Chicago. Chicago is utterly corrupt. But it's also the "City that Works" (according to one of its slogans), because ANYBODY can bribe the relevant officials, for sums that are within reach. The result is not pretty (and never has been). But it is thoroughly entrenched. How it operates is well known throughout the region.

Obama is a typical Chicago machine politician, as are his associates. Those of us familiar with Chicago's politics warned that, should he be elected, the likely result would be the Federal Government's executive branch would be run like Chicago's political machine.

And that's exactly what has happened. The Congress, with its slow turnover, is still largely in the pocket of the same corporate interests as before - but the Executive Branch changes more rapidly and is currently being run on Chicago's political-machine model, top to bottom. (It's usually largely in the hands of organized crime, and has been since the Nixon-Kennedy election - which was substantially a battle between two Mafia "families".)

If you wonder at the odd foreign policies (or lack thereof) of the current regime and their blatant extra-legal use of government agencies to suppress political enemies and promote the interests of arbitrary groups with no obvious ideological connection between them, try thinking of it as a corrupt big-city political machine and see if it makes more sense.

Passing laws which make lobbying a criminal offence would seem to be a good start ...

It would also be unconstitutional.

The Right to Petition IS the right of lobbying, and is constitutionally protected. (That's why anti-lobbying laws keep getting struck down when challenged.)

In the US it's part of the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging ... the right of the people ... to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." You'll also find it in Article 44 of the EU's Charter of Human Rights, Germany's 1949 Fundamental Law, England's Bill of Rights of 1689, Petition of Right of 1628, and Magna Carta (1215).

It's a fundamental part of Western Law: ANYBODY gets to ask their legislature to adjust the law to make it better for them (if they can get the legislators' attention) and not be penalized for doing so.

It's also a REALLY BAD IDEA to try to interfere with this fundamental right (and also with the fundamental right to support the political candidates of one's choice). The big money / big power people can always find ways to influence and finance the politicians of their choice. The only thing such laws do is make it harder on the "big mass of little guys". So they institutionalize elite-class favoritism and corruption, rather than retard it.

If you want to attack corruption the place to do it is the selection of the officials: Elections, and exposure of malfeasance to the electorate.