As a very introverted person who almost borders on agoraphobic I found both of the local maker spaces welcoming and comfortable spaces.

I am also a real nerd/geek sloth who gets excited about things most people do not care one bit about and have no clue about.

The very first time I saw a meeting at one of the local maker spaces, it was almost life changing. For the first time in my life I saw 50 people who were actually like me. I didn't know other people like me even existed.

All I can say is: if you think you might have the slightest interest in a maker space or maker community, go check it out, like the article says, I have found them to be the most welcoming and non judgmental community I have ever had the pleasure to be a part of.

So, what is being suggested is that every drone carry with it every person's address that doesn't want a drone above it?

Doesn't that sound a whole lot like a list of addresses the police would love to have? And if you sign up for this list, then somebody who uses a drone for nefarious purposes will respect this address, as opposed to (say) disabling the GPS receiver?

This is a great idea, because we know that you never get unsolicited cell phone calls from Credit Card Services or "Hi, Seniors..."

This is without a doubt the most ridiculous solution to a problem that doesn't exist that I have ever come across.

So, let me state the obvious, just in case someone has missed it: That genie is out of the bottle, and there's no putting her back in.

To say that "artificial neural networks are nothing like what the biological brain does" is no more correct than to say "artificial neural networks are just like the brain."

Machine learning neural networks do the same flavor of thing that a real organic brain does, but at a complexity that is -many- orders of magnitude smaller. They also tend to be directed at a single skill, and don't have to cohabit the network with, well, everything.

They're not the same, but they're not totally different, either. Truth is not well served by hyperbole.

Axis webcams permit loading a single jpeg, using one of several tools, none of which include their super fancy "look at the webcam" web app.

For example, using the *nix command "curl" gives you a jpeg of what's currently being watched, presto, no grief, no complications.

What you -do- with the jpeg is very much up to you.

I run multiple cameras looking out of my residence, and stuff them into motion jpeg files on a terabyte disk. I use a cron file to change files on an hourly basis, and with the number of cameras I have, I have on hand about four weeks of video coverage. I'm using an atom processor, and the whole affair was cheap and very easy to maintain.

The problem isn't simple visits. The problem is twofold: no signs of communication and no signs of substantial change to the surrounding environment. We don't see any Dyson spheres or ringworlds or stellar lifting or any attempts at that all of which would be noticeable. If there are civilizations out there they are ignoring massive amounts of resources. Note also that in the scale of a few billion years travel and colonization isn't that big a deal: galaxies are only around 100,000 light years across so even going at 1% of the speed of light and hopping between stars should lead to galactic colonization within a a few hundred million years at the most.

Possible, but seems unlikely. Every species has that level of hysteria? And what about the species born early enough in the universe's history that they didn't have much reason to worry about the Filter?

While this is really neat, it is yet more of the accumulating evidence that there are no substantial barriers to intelligent life arising or even arising in the early universe. This suggests that something is wiping out civilizations, possibly something the civilizations themselves all do. This problem is known as the Great Filter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter (Strictly speaking the Filter is whatever makes massive, interstellar, civilizations apparently rare, but it looks like most of the Filter really is at or beyond our rough tech level.) The Great Filter could be nuclear war, or epidemics, or biological warfare, or bad nanotech, or possibly something we haven't even thought of that comes completely out of left field. But the evidence for it is growing. This is scary.

That's a question of the level of the burden to establish guilt: the point is that a starting presumption of innocence is a court-specific thing.

The original study can be found at http://agecon.okstate.edu/facu... : Another fun bit in the study:

This appears to follow the general pattern that people will lie to interviewers to seem more smart, educated, or intellectual than they are. They don't mention in the study a correlation between those who said yes to reading a book and then couldn't "remember" it when pressed and those who wanted to ban food containing DNA, but I'd be willing put money on their being a correlation.

A drug test isn't an assumption of guilt in a court of law. The entire guilty until proven innocent is for criminal and civil trials, not for employment. Mandatory drug tests are pragmatically stupid for many reasons in many industries (they are much less likely to catch the hard drugs like cocaine which go out of the system fast than marijuana which lingers, they cost a lot of money), but in the case of Disney where the employees are working on and maintaining rides with many passengers and where people could easily be killed if something goes wrong, drug tests aren't as unreasonable. In general, the real silliness of drug tests is when they are used by things like fast food restaurants or worse when they are used as a condition of welfare (where the evidence is that they cost far far more than they save the state).

Because why just use soil when there's also all that other easily available material also? Note that even if the AI does use soil, using up all the world's soil would still be pretty unpleasant for humans. The central problem is that the AI has no reason to stop at any amount of resources so why not use everything available?

We are actively trying to make fully sentient AI. Moreover, we have good reason to think it can be done: there's an example of a sentient thing already: humans. And the real issue isn't that it wants to kill us, but that it can use the matter we're made up of to do something else with. It doesn't hate you: you just happen to be useful atoms.

The huge (and they _are_ huge) cost of cleanup from places like Hanford has to be understood in the context under which it was created.

The people at Hanford were tasked with creating weapons to kill people, a million at a time. Given that criterion, is it any wonder that they weren't worried about a few salmon, or clean groundwater. They believed at the time that "Nuculer war, toe to toe with the Rooskies" was right around the corner, and they were dealing with the possibility of hundreds of millions of dead. All other reasons just didn't matter.

That turned out not to be the case, but hindsight is always so excellent.

Now, the pendulum has swung so far the other way, we want to clean up Hanford (as an example) well enough that we could build a school on the location. That doesn't seem like a realistic goal. As for a plutonium contaminated waste facility, I should point out that Los Alamos had quite the plutonium problem. They solved it by painting the walls coral - bright bleedin' orange - and then painting over with white paint. The rule was simple - if you see orange, call the safety people. It was (and is) not a perfect solution, but it was (and is) a workable one.

Issues involving free speech and threats to free speech is both a nerd issue and "news that matters." It also is a tech issue because improvements in communication have allowed people to get worked up all over the globe over things that are happening farther away that they wouldn't know about at all otherwise.

It is actually pretty rational to believe in God because, why not?

Which god? What happens if you believe in the wrong one and the real god ends up super pissed off? For all you know, the god you believe in might be an ex of the real god.

You might very well be worse off than if you had believed in no god.

Pascals Wager has been a discredited reason for believing in a god for a long time now.