Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Robot factories of the future? (Score 2) 688

I remember a story I read long ago in which the poor HAD to live in mansions, drive expensive cars all day, play golf constantly, eat expensive food and generally run around all day wearing out the production of vast robot factories. They would return home at the end of the day exhausted from their "work." The rich lived in modest homes and had plenty of time for themselves. Are we headed there?

Comment Just being himself (Score 1) 574

Unmotivated intelligence is just clever programming. Nature did not create intelligence; she created what I call "Mentis," which is a combination of a complex motivation array and the tool "intelligence" which creates the behavior-space to satisfy the motivation array. Some people think that "intelligent" machines will somehow spontaineously develop a motivation array as in Asimov's robot stories (which I read in youth and never felt were right). Nobody is studying motivation programming, not realizing it is something different from the tool it uses.

Comment Metrosexuals (Score 0) 454

Metrosexual types will be happy to hop down to the corner and jump into a "pod" rented by the hour to go get their nails done, but the feeling of power and freedom that comes from driving is not going to go away. Note we are not flying to work as futurists of the past predicted. They seldom take into account practical problems or human psychology, instead replacing both with youthful enthusiasm.

Comment Macroparasitic behavior (Score 1) 554

Here it comes, the good sounding arguments for absorbing an asset of the mass of people. The macro-parasite identifies, targets, and absorbs any asset of the mass and does it with increasing efficiency due to technology. Interest rates on savings are essentially zero, transferring well over 400 billion dollars from the mass to banks since 2008 (Stockman, The Great Deformation, pg.583) because that part of the macro-parasite is "too big to fail." Now the government part of the macro-parasite is set to absorb the asset of more money in the pockets of the mass from declining energy costs by increasing taxes. How about the government handling it's costs more effectively instead? How about cutting spending instead of going on a spending binge? No, that unexpected decrease in fuel costs to the mass (gasoline and home heating oil) has got the macro-parasite drooling like a starving dog before a steak, and that increased tax money will go into general revenues and ultimately be used to increase the reelection prospects of politicians by bribing electorates with their own money. How about letting the people have a win for a change?

Comment The pilots and engineers are immoral (Score 1) 594

The pilots and engineers are immoral. To aid and abet a program that must inevitably lead to prominent people getting blown up on the way to space after paying 250,000 dollars for the privilege is just plain lacking in a moral concern for other's lives. They are willing to spend other people's lives to indulge their personal interests in engineering and space. And people will get blown up because nothing is 100% safe in this world, especially spaceflight. Wasn't there just a spectacular Antares launch vehicle failure? We know these things are inevitable. Space shuttles have exploded. Branson is planning multiple flights per DAY. Look for a future headline screaming: "Branson spaceflight disaster kills Stephen Hawking, Katy Perry, Tom Hanks, Ashton Kutcher, and Leonardo DiCaprio. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie next."

Comment Re: Perceive the obvious (Score 1) 399

Who are the mysterious "they" who discouraged women? You disrespect women when you refuse to acknowledge that they are responsible with men for any culture they create and live in. When enough Saudi women want to drive, they will. The first woman to get a bachelor's degree in the U. S. did so in the 1860s. Madam Curie won a Nobel prize in physics in the 1920s. You argue that women should be given. I say create aggressively and take it, just like men. Stop whining about not being allowed and non-existent glass ceilings.

Comment Re:I disagree. (Score 3, Informative) 145

I work in the USPS as an Electronics Technician (with an engineering degree) and I'd like to point out that our OCR system is accurate, fast, and robust. Our read rate is up to 98-99% and most of our human REC centers (humans read the addresses the OCR system cannot and send the result back to the machine in real time) are now shut down. Our scanners read and our image computers interpret typed and handwritten addresses, bar codes, id tags, and indicia at up to 30,000 letters per hour per machine. And they do it while having dust and glue and ink accumulating on the quartz windows of the cameras. They do this in an electrically noisy environment and with continuous heavy vibration. Yes, they run "unsupervised" and they have replaced hundreds of thousands of USPS employees. Any problem with CV at a higher level is a back end theory and programming problem and that will just take time and effort.

Comment Perceive the obvious (Score 1) 399

I sympathize with those infected by gynocentric, gender-levelling political correctness, but the proof is obvious. Men invented business, industry, science, technology, government. Steve Jobs and the Woz of Apple, Bill Gates and Ballmer of Microsoft, Hewlett and Packard, Thomas Edison, Ford, Dell, Zukerberg of Facebook, Jeff Bezos of Amazon,even Thomas Savery who invented and patented the steam engine that fuelled the industrial revolution - the list is unending. Men invented and developed every aspect of the internet. These are men that pushed the exploration of the world and each and every subject that has advanced mankind since the beginning. Where were the women, the "founding mothers" of the United States, or ANY state? Where are their political philosophies, their physical inventions that significantly altered and advanced mankind? And please don't say they weren't "allowed" to achieve and invent. Women are half the population of the world and always have been. You cannot keep half the world from doing that which is natural for them to do, yet, women have not been aggressively creative anywhere near the level of men. You believe what you believe (if you are an American) because the 19th amendment to the Constitution of the United States created a political equality that has forced over time a phony physical, social, and economic equality that requires us to lie about the real differences between men and women. That is nice. If the world were 100% safe and there was no need to advance every aspect of life creatively I would embrace the lie. But, there is still, and always will be, a need to perceive and deal with the brutal realities of life if we wish to survive and prosper into the future. And that means we must perceive and deal with the real differences between men and women, not hide from them.

Slashdot Top Deals

An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you really care to know.

Working...