You'd need to make money to pay for the energy needed to run the replicator and holodeck
Only at first. You then use the replicator to produce the small-scale renewable energy plant needed to power the replicator and holodeck.
Hybrid rocket engines cannot give you the mass fraction to get into orbit.
And why not? I'm not a rocket scientist, but there's nothing in the literature I've read thus far that says hybrids can't be scaled up.
Those lightweight hulls cannot withstand the temperatures associated with re-entry from orbit.
True. But this has always been a puzzle to me. Why is heat shielding less important going up than going down? Why has nobody invented a spacecraft that can aerobrake without turning into a fireball? "Descent" velocity shouldn't be higher than escape velocity, right?
I'd mod you funny.
But taking your post seriously: I don't expect machines to be smarter than us. Or at least all of us. What I fear seeing in the future are a select class, enhanced via cybernetics or genetics (or both), lording it over the rest of the human race. There would be a kind of cybernetic divide, analogous to today's digital divide, between this enhanced "uberclass" and the non-enhanced, technologically disadvantaged underclass. Of course, this is the dystopian scenario. The singularity could, after all, turn out to be a geek utopia.
While I appreciate (the existence of) the service, methinks this is a trademark suit just begging to happen. I mean take a look at their logo [png graphic]. It really looks like an official Google site. In this age of massive information sharing, I have my doubts about patents and copyrights in general.
However with patents, I'd give the trademark owner the benefit of the doubt (you're not necessarily evil if you sue for trademark infringement), unless your trademark happens to be a pure (uncombined) dictionary word (in English or whatever language) or a common or well-etablished proper name (e.g. Smith or Madonna). Thus, I'd throw out any lawsuits involving Apple(tm) or Oracle(tm) but not Facebook(tm), Microsoft(tm), Apple Computers(tm) or Apple Records(tm). Obvious parodies are another matter, so there might be room for site names like Googlevil.
[*] I'm using trademark in the general sense to refer to symbols or names that make up the business identity of a company.
When this thing has been field tested and gone down in price...
I think this is the point of a lot of non-portable high-technology. You manufacture them to gain experience because maybe, just maybe, there'll soon be a market for robot servers. I mean, look at electric cars. There are a lot of companies trying to make one, and yet it's less profitable (if at all) than the standard gas/diesel models.
Japan has a rapidly aging population, so having a significant, if not exactly huge market, for service industry robots is by no means a long shot. Perhaps the future will be one robot to do them all, cut and wash your hair, give you a massage and perhaps, uhm, other things. But who knows, maybe specialist robots will be the rule. One robot to wash you hair, another to cut it, still another to give you a mani/pedicure.
I'm probably not the first to note the similarity of the paper's title to that cliché about rock stars and their groupies. One has to wonder how much the authors were influenced by the Zeitgeist of the sixties, the so-called Flower Power era.
Still it makes for an interesting read that shows how much we already knew about space before Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn finally reached low earth orbit. Maybe a doped astronaut isn't such a bad idea, getting high in the high of space.
Well, compared to a year ago, social networks consume about the same amount of my time, which is none. Actually, I was looking for the following radio buttons:
[ ] I'm antisocial, you insensitive clod
[ ] Does Slashdot count?
There's a confusing reference to "containing malicious executables" in the first sentence of the summary, which appears to be a nearly direct quote of the first few paragraphs of the article itself. However, the emails only contain a "link" to the malware, which, of course, is less exciting news, since that's what some s(p/c)ammers already do. (To be sure, this is corrected in the second sentence which mentions the "messages contain a link" to the file.) This is a two-stage browser-based attack, which uses social engineering via email as its point of entry.
Incidentally, the link to the article is to a site hosted by a anti-virus vendor, rather than an independent security company. So take it all with a grain of salt or puff of powder.
Hey, editor! This is in the wrong section.
Jellyfish, strictly speaking, are software. (Unless you reinforce them with an exoskeleton.)
Our OS who art in CPU, UNIX be thy name. Thy programs run, thy syscalls done, In kernel as it is in user!
