I never said it wasn't open source. My comment was about whether or not it's "locked to a single platform". I assert that without a herculean porting effort, it effectively is.

C'mon. Bridging API frameworks is where "it's at" today.

I'll believe it when I see it. I guess getting it to run under WINE might be doable, but then again that was equally doable (at least in principle) when the source was closed.

I'm not sure how sound that logic is. You might as well say that cars can't be any faster than their creators.

My computer is already smarter than me in certain ways; for example it can calculate a square root much faster than I can, it can beat me at chess, and it can translate English into Arabic better than I can. Of course we no longer think of those things as necessarily indicating intelligence, but that merely indicates that we did not in the past have a clear definition of what constitutes 'intelligence', and that we probably still don't. Meanwhile, every year our game of "No True Scotsman" whittles away our definition of "true intelligence" a bit more, until one day there's nothing left.

While your prediction is entirely valid, I'd like to point out that it won't be the robots causing the civil unrest, but rather society's (hopefully temporary) failure to adapt to a new economic model where workers are no longer required for most tasks.

Having menial labor done "for free" is actually a huge advantage for humanity -- the challenge will be coming up with a legal framework so that the fruits of all that free labor get distributed widely, and not just to the few people who own the robot workforce.

Well, you can't say you weren't warned; there have been about a zillion articles along the lines of "everybody better learn how to multithread, because we've hit the wall on single-core performance and the only way to make use of extra transistors now is to add more cores".

They also are just being sat on. Corperations need to have them forcibly taken back as those asshats will never give them up willingly.

I have heard of a monthly "running out of IpV4 addresses" on slashdot since 1998.

And this story has zero meat to it just like the last 690 stories here about it.

How about someone forcing HP to give up their gigantic chunk that they have been camping on unused for 40 years?

Honestly, force internet to be like a utility. dont let them be for profit and force them to spend at last 50% of all profits on infrastructure build out.

These asshole CEO's don't want to do the right thing, then it needs to be done at gunpoint with regulations and laws. Let the SWAT teams raid a CEO office for once instead of a poor persons house.

Indeed, Titan the easiest large world to explore by drone, so long as they tolerate the cryogenic conditions. A highly efficient version could potentially fly continuously just on RTG power (there have been proposals along these lines), although anything adapted to deal with the added weight / inefficiency of hardware to carefully land, collect samples, carry them, etc would probably have to use flight batteries.

While I agree with parts of your argument, land lines are expensive more because they have millions of miles of physical wires to maintain. Cell towers do not have this burden.

Also, Cell phone service for any smart phone is MUCH more expensive than landlines now if you are single. It's sort of like "$100 for 4" or "$100 for 1".

That said, I use smartjack (flawlessly) over my internet. $19 a year. It's mainly a backup to find my cell phone and for extremely long gaming calls (can't get one player to use skype). I think the network effect for land lines is collapsing.
Pretty soon it will be smarter to have a "land line" format phone that actually connects to a local cell tower (no lines to maintain, install, etc.).

But it occurs to me that as long as they have DSL cable service, the lines will be there anyway. So maybe the network effect won't be lost. not sure. I haven't been a landline customer for 3 years.

The surface pro and Surface pro 2 BOTH have had non stop issues with wireless drivers for two reasons.

1 - microsoft chose the shittiest wireless chipset made on the planet, the Marvell Avastar 88W8797 Wireless
2 - The drivers were written by drunken morons.

you can easily bork the wireless that require you to delete the device, uninstall the drivers, reboot, re detect and then reinstall the drivers. I was hoping that microsoft had fixed this with windows 10, but nope. it's the exact same crap windows 8 driver that somehow self corrupts it's self on boot up.

It doesn't help that Marvell as a company makes only steaming piles of dog shit. All of their chipsets are complete garbage and any maker that uses them are ran by morons.

Only creationists cling to that definition. Evolution killed it dead.
The problem is that change occurs gradually. The common ancestors of you and a cat could certainly interbreed. And so could their offspring, for a long while, until at first you had individuals that were different enough that they couldn't, although most could, and then twogroups that were incompatible, although both could interbreed with a third one, and eventually, all individuals that could interbreed had died off. But what's the exact point where there were two species?

To get the pre-evolution "interbreed" criterion to work, you have to define a proto-species. One individual that is who everyone else is measured against. Otherwise, you wlll run into the problem where your Nth cousin on one side can breed with individuals that you cannot. Where does the line go then?
But by defining a proto-species, you also end up with individuals and groups that will belong to multiple species, because they're midway between the two.

Look at lions and tigers. One variety of tiger can interbreed with lions and create viable offspring, while others cannot. Yet the different types of tigers can interbreed. So our division into species for lions and tigers is not based on breeding.

Your biological parents certainly could breed - there's sad evidence for that. So could their parents. And so on, back through time, back to the common ancestor of you and a chimp. It's a gradual change. Making pigeonholes you can place each individual in is pretty much impossible unless you're prepared to say that your parents were a different species.

We are not good at thinking gradually, alas. We want to classify and group things, to make things simpler. But it's as futile as trying to define where one cloud ends and another one begins. It will always be arbitrary, and subject to change over time.

But the question is how do you define it?

"Species" is a construct to make it easier for us. We like to classify things. We probably have a brain that favors classifying things. We certainly have brains that favor "us" versus "them". But there really is no such thing as "species" - it's just a convenient lie.

The old rule, "can breed with and produce viable offspring" does not work - evolution killed it. Species that cannot interbreed have a common ancestor, That logically kills that definition (and most others, like your attempt to define humans using human as part of the definition - a classic begging the question).

All living things on earth are related. There are no precise boundaries between "species". Our parents differs slightly from us, and our grandparents even more We may classify our great-N-grandparent or Nth cousin a different species, but we have no rules for saying that our great-N-grandparent was a different species while our great-N-1-grandparent wasn't.

There is currently no objective rule that can say whether someone is or was human or not. Any such rule will either include what we consider other species or exclude some who we consider people. And most certainly, it won't stand the test of time, as we evolve into something we of today surely would call a different species.

I think we need to move beyond our propensity for pigeon-holing, and accept a gradient way of thinking, without boundaries, but degrees of similarity.
I'm very similar to my father, but less so to my ancestor 10,000 years ago, and very dissimilar to my ancestor a million years ago. There's no point in saying who was "human" - it was mostly a gradual change, with a little bit of hybridization throw in at times. I can't point to one of my ancestors and declare that he wasn't human, but his son was. But I can say how much they differed from me. That's useful. Making rules we cannot logically defend isn't.

Also, Fukushima is only rendering about 500sq miles uninhabitable for (currently optimistically estimated) 25 years while Chernobyl is about 900sq miles for over 25 years so far. It won't return to average radiation levels for over 20,000 years. You can live there now... if you don't want to have children and accept a higher risk of cancer. About 600 elderly live there now. The animals in the area have mutations, stillbirths, etc. But, those that survive handle the radiation better as time goes on and thrive from the lack of human predation and habitat destruction.

The Chernobyl radiation area 's sort of butterfly shaped tho and due to wind pattern there is a second 'wing' / exclusion area which is also uninhabitable of similar size- so about 1800sq miles total.

http://www.subbrit.org.uk/rsg/...

http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

China, and the chinese, have a massive superiority complex laid over a very deep inferiority complex stemming from the 1800s all the way to the 1940s.

Until that gets resolved, they are more dangerous than average. They have a chip on their shoulder and have something to "prove" combined with a sense of manifest destiny.

Their military spending is much less BUT their labor costs are much less so their spending is much higher than it looks like given the raw numbers. Effectively its 3 to 4 times as large.

Hopefully they transition to a truly confident nation and resolve their issues. Then there is still "average" danger. Any group of people can go apeshit on other groups of people when they think they are more powerful. It's happened over and over.