But that we are so far from any kind of AI that worrying about what form it might take is stupid. Yes, there are lots of things that might happen in the far future. Until they are closer, worrying about them is silly. There have been stories from people who are all paranoid about AI and think we need to start making with the rules. No we don't, we are so far away we don't even know how far away we are. We also have no idea what form it'll take. May turn out that self awareness is a uniquely biological trait and we never make computers that are truly strong AI.

Also if you are betting your life (regardless of if this means an actual bet, singular investment of all assets, etc) on something far off, you are a moron. You have no idea when a technology will happen, if it'll even be possible, and if it is if it'll even be marketable. Want a great example? SED, surface-conduction electron-emitter display. Reasonably chance you've never even heard of it. Was a new tech from Canon, basically a flat, large, hig rez take on CRT. Offered extremely high refresh rates (and thus low blur) great contrast ratio, wide viewing angle, etc. Very exciting display technology lots of people looked forward to as an LCD alternative. Wouldn't displace LCD, but would be a better technology for many uses. It was real too, actual working sets were shown at CES in 2006.

What happened? Well as a result of litigation, the financial downturn, and the general market, they decided to pack it in and stop development. They shut down and liquidated that division in 2010, and there's been no further development. So despite it being real and doable, it didn't happen and almost certainly never will happen.

Now compare that to the concept of strong AI, which we have no idea if it even can exist, if it does what form it will take, and if so what technology will be required. Maybe not the best thing to be betting the farm on.

The bigger it is, the wider that is useful. Basically you find that you need a certain amount of vertical real estate to work effectively. So on a small screen like a laptop, a 4:3, or even more square, monitor can be of use. However when you start getting large desktop displays, wide is very nice. Personally I like 16:10 displays for the desktop, in part because I find them aesthetically pleasing (likely because they are near the golden ratio) but also because for the large sizes I like (30" currently) it provides a good amount of vertical real estate, but plenty of horizontal to fill my field of view and allow for multiple things to be displayed at once.

For TV, heck I could go even more than 16:9 if such a thing were standard. I was always partial to 1.85:1 3 perf and 2:1 Superscope for movies myself.

Thank you for that! I haven't laughed like this at an academic paper in, well, a really blooming long time.

And as a bonus, I've given the folks here at the coffee shop something to stare at. :)

Coercion would of course obviate the need for explicit objections. There was no coercion here.

There are of course grey scales of coercion as well. Physical threats would definitely get ruled as rape, but there have been cases where the woman didn't object because she felt like she'd be considered a spoilsport or not cool enough. Those cases have generally not been considered rape by Swedish courts. Unless the law gets changed to include a consent requirement, the courts are quite straight forward on that point; if you feel you are getting raped, you have to tell the person you think is raping you in such a clear way that there is no possibility of misunderstanding.

Sleep is incapacitated and if she had objected upon waking, or failed to wake up (oddly deep sleeper, or more commonly, due to drugs or alcohol), there would have been no question that she had been raped. She did wake up, and by not objecting even when it was clear he wasn't wearing protection, moved that sex into the standard wake-up-sex category which is not generally considered rape under current laws.

And no, they're not my standards, they're Swedish law. Personally I'd prefer a mandatory contract and video taping, just to get everyone to shut the fuck up about the whole debate. It wouldn't cost me anything as I consider thorough negotiation part of any sex I'm willing to engage in, and if someone can't even talk freely and explicitly in detail about exactly what they do and don't want, I sure as fuck am not going to take them to bed.

Again, Sweden does not _have_ a consent requirement. There have been discussions about changing the law to include that, but that is not the law today.

As he did not lie when asked about protection and she did not object it was not rape as Swedish law would currently classify rape.

They were surrendered to CIA agents at the request of the CIA. The CIA prefers to torture their victims outside the US.

And yet, despite being widely regarded as violating multiple laws, somehow nobody was actually convicted of anything. No functionaries, no officials, no politicians. So, yeah, violate the law and send people to get tortured and the newspapers will write a few articles about how bad you are and some will walk past you with a clenched fist in their pocket. Scary. That really wont happen again.

And violating that will get you... a mean article in a newspaper and some angry glares?

Yeah, paid for by the tax payers. Oh, no, we'll have to give tax payer money to someone for violating their rights. We'll get cushy speaking appointments and nice educations for our kids in the US. But oh, no, tax payer money...

Most likely the Swedish security agencies got fed up with getting snickered at and played for total fools. I doubt it had much to do with ethics.

... based on reported public perception. Swedes like to have a very high opinion of their country and government. They get very surprised when confronted with objective measures of education and discover how far they've fallen or discovering they get much better healthcare when on vacation out of the country. Filtering out self-satisfaction bias would be an interesting exercise.

Which means... what? If nobody is even prosecuted when torture protections are violated the law isn't worth the paper it's written on. Unless Thomas Bodström, Göran Persson and the responsible people in the security agencies are actually prosecuted and thrown in jail for what they did to the Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al-Zery it doesn't matter what the law says, because they are above the law. With politicians and security agencies above the law, Sweden cannot be trusted to enforce the laws they claim to have.

Apart from libel or press freedom cases, there is no jury system in Sweden.

Sweden does not have a consent requirement. Rape is defined as either the victim being incapacitated or sexual acts against the explicit objections of the victim. As she woke up, she does not fall under the incapacitated requirement, as she did not clearly object despite him being honest about the lack of protection there was no violation with her objecting. The facts of the case simply will not result in a rape conviction unless significant changes in judicial interpretation is done, and that would, lacking actual changes in law, stretch the interpretative ability of the courts quite a bit.

The STD aspect was the sole reason she felt bad at all, as far as the initial statements took it. And in the light of this case it's quite amusing that the Swedish government is most likely to remove the information requirement on HIV infectees so it will be legal to have sex with someone without first informing them about being HIV positive. When people like SW feel possible HIV exposure is a far worse violation than what a feminist prosecutor for political purposes wants to claim is rape, that's really going to go down well when someone like SW finds out they've been exposed without being told...

However the problem is that it can presumably notify security that you've done that. Given that they'll have full video of it, and know where the unit was, the chances of you getting caught are pretty high.

These aren't the kind of thing that would work well on their own out in the middle of nowhere but on a campus like MS's with human backup I imagine they are pretty effective. Rolling security cameras basically.

"I have a daughter who like science and want's to be a game designer. I see how she has it stacked against her compared to my son."

In what way? If she gets through her education and can demonstrate that she's even remotely competent, she'll get hired simply due to being female. At least a minimum level of gender balance in the work force is a bonus to company social dynamics; too high concentration of either gender and you start getting a culture drift into extremes that enhance the worst aspects of some gendered trait expressions. Keep a certain level of balance and moderation tendencies will keep the culture decent either way. IT has so few women that the imbalance aspect itself can be a good reason to take on female prospective hires if they are at all available and capable of doing the job.

Now of course after the last few years it's become fairly obvious that one will have to do some research and interview probing to avoid hiring somone like Adria Richards, Rose Eveleth, Julie Ann Horvath or Matthew Garrett. The damage they'll cause through toxic interpersonal relationships will outstrip any productivity by massive amounts. Unless you have found an insurance policy that will actually reimburse you for F60.3 damage to your company. But that has nothing to do with gender.

The generic MS drivers know how to see if the drive supports TRIM and send the commands if it does. That's the point of TRIM: It is an ATA standard command, so special software isn't needed.

In fact, in Windows all you use is the generic drivers. I mean you may install drivers for your SATA controller, but not for your drive. My laptop has a Samsung 840 Pro in it, with Samsung's Magician installed. However the drivers in use are disk.sys, partmgr.sys (both Microsoft files) and iastorf.sys (Intel's file). No Samsung provided drivers. Magician can directly send commands to optimize the drive if needed if the OS can't, but the OS sends TRIM commands no problem.

Or perhaps more likely "pro Russian shill" next time, spend a little more time doing research before you put together your bullshit theory. See you seem to have missed one little detail: This came from Russian TV. This isn't something that surfaced in the US, purporting to be originally from Russia, it was on Russian national television.

So, maybe think your bullshit conspiracy through next time,a nd make sure you know the sequence of events.

I hate this attitude that if you don't have the top spot, you are crap. It is so silly the attitude that the US somehow lost something by not having the first spot on the top 500 list.

I mean for one thing, the Chinese computer is more specialized than the big US supercomputers. It gets its performance using Intel Xeon Phi GPGPU type processors. Nothing wrong with hat but they are vector processors hanging off the PCIe bus. They work a lot like graphics cards. There are problems that they are very fast at, linpack (which is what's used to test) being one, but others they are not as fast at. Many of the US supercomputers (like BlueGene/Q) use just standard CPUs, meaning their performance holds steady over more kinds of tasks.

Then there's the fact that while the US might not have the #1 spot they have the #2, 3, 5, 7, 9, and 10 spots. In other words, half of the top 10 computers. That is more impressive than having one really big system. Ya it's nice to have a huge system and some simulations need really big systems to do, but there's something to be said for lots of different research groups having access to high power computers.

Also there's the fact that linkpack isn't necessarily the best benchmark.

I'm happy that the US is looking to invest more in HPC because money spent on research is always well spent in my opinion. However let's stop pretending like it is some major failure that the US doesn't have the #1 computer. Big deal.

I've seen the same kind of thing. I know a lady who's from Serbia. Very smart woman, and she's lived in the US for a couple decades, immigrated and become a citizen. However, when it comes to world news, she believes the Serbian media over all others. It's pretty bad too, it makes Fox News look credible (well almost) with the level of propaganda and shit. However, to her, that's the truth.

It seems a somewhat common thing that whatever you start getting your news from first is what sticks with you as the "true" news if there's disagreement later.

Geeks have real issues with the concepts of knowledge and intent mattering in the law. They think something is either ok, or not ok, and if it is ok it is ok in all situations. Of course that's not how the law work. Intent in particular matters a hell of a lot. Something can be illegal or legal just based off of intent, or can be a different level of crime. Likewise if you know you are helping someone commit a crime, that can get you in trouble whereas doing the same thing unknowingly can be fine.

It is complex, because it varies, there are crimes that don't require intent, or crimes where even doing it unknowingly will get you in trouble, but there are others that are not. It is complex with various shades of gray, which I guess is why geeks can't understand it. Many seem to be very binary thinkers and want absolutes in rules, which the law frequently doesn't have.

I think it's fine to buy them soon after release if you want them and can afford them (remember, to some people $60 for entertainment isn't a huge deal) so long as it has been properly reviewed and your research indicates it is a good game. There are plenty of games that launch strong, just as there are plenty that don't.

But never buy it before you can research if it is good, and if you are likely to enjoy it.