Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Go for it (Score 1) 92

I come down on the side of Tsiolkovsky: âoeEarth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.â

A baby in a cradle is the wrong analogy -- a better analogy is an internal organ inside a body. Yes, you can (with advanced technology and at great expense) remove the internal organ from the body and keep it alive externally for some time, but it's going to be unpleasant for everyone involved, and sooner or later the disembodied organ will wither and die, unless it is returned to the environment it was specifically evolved to live within.

Comment Re:Say hello to Wirth's law (Score 1) 79

OTOH the nice thing about software is that it's easy to update, so anyone is free to replace their slow/inefficient software with a faster/efficient version as soon as they obtain it, at which point their fast hardware should run the efficient software very quickly. Nothing (except possibly bad management decisions?) is preventing anyone from creating efficient software, either.

Comment Re:If all of AI went away today (Score 1) 149

The concept of artificial intelligence (AI) has been part of human culture for thousands of years, appearing in ancient myths and legends.

Perhaps it was referring to golems? That idea dates back to 400-500 BC, although really they behave more like traditional computer programs than anything we'd currently consider intelligent.

Comment Re:Yo Dawg (Score 3, Insightful) 9

I don't need an AI to write my code, since I can write code myself. That said, it could be nice to have an AI inspect my code and point out anything it suspects might be a bug... there are already lots of static analysis tools that do this sort of thing and they are great, but I think AI might be able to find different classes of bug that are beyond the capabilities of static analysis.

Going a bit further, what would be even more useful is an AI that can run my program and exercise its GUI (or fuzz its inputs) and monitor the resulting behavior the way a human would, to look for faults during execution. Human-driven SQA is always a lot of tedious work, and a production bottleneck.

Comment There are cheaper ways to generate heat (Score 3, Informative) 50

In a fission nuclear plant, nuclear fuel is used to generate heat to boil water to run a steam turbine.

That's all well and good, but there's no reason the heat has to come from nuclear fission; any similarly reliable heat-source would do just as well. Perhaps there are cheaper and safer ways to obtain the required heat? You can do a whole lot of drilling with $80,000,000,000 dollars, especially since without any radioactive material to worry about, you don't have to spend all that money on security, failsafe backup systems, and long-term waste disposal anymore.

Slashdot Top Deals

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. - Edmund Burke

Working...