Hey, at least Louis Savain stopped pimping his ridiculous ideas about parallel computing on Slashdot. Now he's just spamming us with his ideas on free energy and, presumably, perpetual motion machines. The rebelscience blog he maintains (and spams links to incessantly) is amusing, but so far the only value I can disceern is its entertainment value.

When people start questioning fundamental principles of physics such as inertia, you should start asking critical questions.

Now, if he had started down the path of promoting supercapacitors as a superior alternative to LiIon/LiPo batteries, he might have seemed more credible (and wouldn't have been modded Offtopic). Not that I think supercaps are going to develop the capacities and power densities of lithium cells, but at least they represent a useful and interesting technology.

I know there are plenty of sites that claim that NiMH doesn't have a memory effect, but some manufacturers apparently claim otherwise in their data sheets. I found this discussion initiated by a man who was testing some Sanyo NiMH batteries; the Sanyo data sheet definitely did claim they had a memory effect, and his tests confirmed this. The effect is small but apparently measurable, and apparently also easy to undo with a normal discharge cycle.

"Druggie" is not a word, so I am not certain how you are correcting its spelling.

Well, several dictionaries do not agree with you.

Here is the entry from dictionary.com -- note that according to the Random House entry, "druggy" is an acceptable alternate spelling, contrary to the GP. The Merriam-Webster entry also indicates "druggy" as a variant spelling.

Here is the entry from the Oxford English Dictionary, widely considered to be authoritative on all dialects of the English language.

So, the GP may have been wrong for taking you (or whoever) to task for the "druggy" spelling, but you are most certainly wrong that it is not a word. Next time, do a little research. A slang term that has entered common use is still a word, regardless of its origins.

Also, the GP was very much right for calling out the hate speech for what it was.

Thank you and the rest of your generation for your contribution to the epidemic.

Only the people who were actually infected contributed to the epidemic, so blaming the GP and his entire generation is a bit of an overstatement. Besides, he's talking about the 1970s; we now know that the virus may have originated as early as the late 19th century, or the early 20th century. The promiscuity of the 1970s was what it was, and certainly did contribute to the spread of many infectious agents, but recall that the main explosion of unprotected sex happened in the heterosexual population due to the introduction of birth control pills. Male-to-female transmission rates of HIV are pretty low, and female-to-female rates are even lower. That leaves the male-to-male group, which wouldn't be affected so much by the advent of the birth control pill...

I will also note that it wasn't until the 1980s that gay activists were seriously promoting safer sex practices such as ubiquitous condom use, something that was actively resisted by many in the gay community at first. (Some of that was fighting the "condoms are only for preventing pregnancy" myth, I would imagine, while others groused about the lack of freedom and spontaneity, etc. I met a few in the latter category, some of whom were convinced the whole thing was a conspiracy to eradicate gay identity.)

RPN, optional on an HP calculator?

Heresy, I say!

(Actually, I think one of the HP calcs I used to own had an infix mode that you could switch to... which I never used.)

Do bit-torrents have legitimate purposes? Sure. Can they be accomplished by another protocol? As long as you aren't downloading 20g/day of stolen movies/music.

It seems that you're claiming that the only reason to use BitTorrent instead of some other (presumably less bandwidth-intensive) protocol is for illicit activities -- your example given is stolen music and movies. This, despite leading in with the reasonable-sounding declaration that there are legitimate uses for torrents.

Personally, I would hate to have to rely on FTP or HTTP to download a Linux DVD ISO, or the latest patch for World of Warcraft (yes, WoW patches are distributed via BitTorrent). In most cases, I could get what I wanted via FTP or HTTP, but I can't tell you how many times I had downloads > 75% complete which choked for some strange reason and would not resume, forcing me to start over from scratch. BitTorrent has proven frequently faster and almost always more reliable.

In the case of Blizzard, I think they do offer patches for direct download, but that method seems kind of frowned upon... and you don't get to download that way until after the patch becomes mandatory IIRC.

Thinking of some of the NIN albums I (legally) downloaded, I know Trent made a few things available via BitTorrent -- mostly longer works, like the lossless or 96k/24bit high-res versions of albums. Again, I don't have a problem downloading a smattering of MP3 files the more conventional way, but if I want the lossless version of an album, I'm going to torrent that. And you know what? After the torrent is done, I'm going to leave the BitTorrent client running for a couple days so others can benefit from my seed, which moves traffic away from Trent's servers and helps distribute the load across the network.

It doesn't say that. In fact, the teacher's guide says this in the answer section:

Caitlin is not a songlifter because personal use is permitted when music fans buy their music. Caitlin can copy her music onto her hard drive and her MP3 player. Caitlin can even burn a CD with her own special mix of music she has purchased.

This is related to the item from the activity guide:

Caitlin wants to listen to music as much as possible. She copies all the music she buys online onto blank CDs so she can listen to her music when her friends come over to play. And she transfers the music she buys on CD onto her MP3 player so she can listen when driving in the car with her family.

This is followed by a multiple choice checklist with possible answers. I suspect the summary was written with the assumption that the "correct" answer is the one most likely to inflame Slashdot passions.

In short, this is (as another commenter pointed out elsewhere) likely FUD. I re-read TFA multiple times and couldn't figure out where the author of the summary got that bit from, and then dug down into the PDFs on the Music Rules site. Turns out I couldn't find anything resembling the claim made in the summary because it wasn't there to be found.

While just about all the claims made by David Renzer et. al. are pure bunk, I took special notice of the claims pertaining to iTunes and its ability to stream internet radio.

iTunes merely provides a way to index and "tune in" internet radio stations, but is not the originator of the content -- the internet radio station provides the content. Apple isn't even the "broadcaster" of the content, in the sense that once iTunes connects to the station's URL and gets a stream, the network traffic is going from the internet radio station to the listener; Apple's servers don't come into play, except perhaps as an indexing service. (One of the comments in TFA had a similar point, but the author made the mistake of calling Apple the broadcaster.)

You don't even need to use Apple's official list of indexed internet radio stations. Instead, you can simply enter a URL directly into iTunes.

The point I'm making is this: Doesn't the internet radio station already pay a performance royalty? According to this article, that's supposedly the case -- and additionally, there's also a publishing royalty that is paid for internet radio. That's inherently unfair, since traditional radio stations only pay the publishing royalty and not the performance royalty.

Seems as though Renzer and his pals want to double dip and demand performance royalties from Apple for streaming internet radio when they already obtain performance royalties from the actual radio stations themselves.

Bacteria and fungus abundantly live on/in organisms with no free water. Such as cheese and bread. They may release water from the organic compounds in which they live, but that is really not the same as needing water. Although you could certainly argue that without the other beings that produced the bread or cheese they wouldn't exist. Which may or may not be valid.

These bacteria and fungi have cells which contain water. The cell structure wouldn't exist without it. That water has to come from somewhere, whether it's by absorption from the environment or by chemical breakdown of food... or gifted in part by an ancestor via mitosis.

I think you are underestimating the amount of water present in a typical loaf of bread, or for that matter, in a typical cheese. (Hard cheeses might have little water in them, but there are certainly different types of cheese.) The fungi and bacteria are also free to fix moisture from the atmosphere, even if none can be obtained from the food on which they live.

If the cells contain water, then water is a necessity for life, because the chemical reactions within the cell require it. I think you're playing a little fast and loose with your definitions and your reasoning here. Or maybe you're engaging in semantic games. Either way, what you're doing isn't science.

So, I stand on the water is not a necessary requirement for life. [...] I'm not a biologist, just casual reader of such topics.

So you have an opinion that you hold dearly in the face of evidence to the contrary, but you admit that you have no actual scientific credentials in this field, and that you're basically a dilletante?

But let me go on...

When I said alcohol, I was including the entire classification of alcohols, not simply your sterilizing ethanol.

Actually, all alcohols are toxic to cellular life -- some are simply more toxic than others. Ethanol can be tolerated by humans because we have enzymes that can metabolize it relatively quickly, but humans can and have died from ethanol poisoning. Obviously, single-celled organisms don't have the body mass of a large animal to render the absorbed alcohol dilute and spread damage around.

If you want to understand why alcohol makes a crappy solvent for life as we know it (and that includes all cellular life on this planet), you need to understand the biochemistry. I found a couple decent resources here and here which explain this in enough detail to get you started.

As for your rogues gallery of bacteria, I would point out that in no case have you provided the name of a single organism that can survive without water. (No, even Deinococcus peraridilitoris requires some water. Desert sand may be pretty darned dry, but moisture does collect at night, and during the cold season. A bacterium, or even a colony of bacteria, doesn't need much.) That they are extremophiles only proves that life can invade just about any niche, but these examples do nothing to blow away any of the basic requirements.

There's another organism I've read about and seen microphotos of in a NOVA science program -- sorry, don't have a specific scientific name handy, but it lives in small pockets inside rocks that are extracted from miles-deep bore holes. You can find a good jumping-off point here These bacteria live off the chemical energy derived from slowly dissolving the minerals of the rock around them, and they divide very slowly -- on the order of once every 100 years, perhaps longer. Even here, all of the basic given requirements (yes, even water) hold true and are met.

anyone remember back when a movie could be 2 or 3 hours long and didn't require explosions every few seconds to keep an audience interested

In actuality, movies have been gradually increasing in average length since the inception of the motion picture industry. The earliest films were really short -- The Great Train Robbery, released in 1903, was 12 minutes long. In this decade, 90 minutes is considered a bit on the short side, and anything under 90 minutes (many animated films fall into this category) is "really friggin' short, suitable for children and anyone else with a short attention span."

I had at least one film history site blocked at work, but I found a couple other pages that have interesting stats. This page shows the trend line for film length -- the graph is given in meters of film, which correlates linearly with run time (duration). This page gives a bar graph of run time broken down by decade, although this WikiAnswers article does critique the methodology used by the author of that study (e.g., the choice of the top 50 rated films in those decades, which may skew results).

Precious few movies approached the 3-hour mark "back in the day" -- I think Gandhi, released in 1984, is the only one I can remember seeing as a child, and it was a rare experience for me in that it was the first time I remember going to a movie that had an intermission. A more recent example would be Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of Hamlet.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, people tend to remember the past selectively, and usually with rose-tinted glasses.

It's true that your typical summer blockbuster relies more heavily on shock value and SFX/VFX to keep the audience's attention, but I would argue that the vast majority of dramas that we see today easily exceed 2 hours yet don't rely on explosions and other VFX to carry the audience; just off the top of my head, I can think of We Own the Night and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

So... I see hope for the future, not despair. :-)

but they're also going to get used the idea of screwing players over without any real negative feedback?

This, I fear, is going to bite Sony in the ass in the long-term, but they are going to flirt with this model anyway because it frankly goes with the kind of corporate culture they've developed. It's a bit like having the much-storied "arrogance" of Apple, without as much good taste or sense. (Not trying to start a flame war, considering how much Apple hardware I own, but the perception is out there, and not entirely unjustified.) The control freaks in Sony like the idea of being able to make unilateral changes to their products without getting beaten up by whiners, and as long as revenues don't take a hit, they're likely to win the day. That entire model is predicated upon gamers either (a) not noticing, or (b) not caring that the game is being nerfed or otherwise mangled in an undesirable way. As soon as Sony crosses some threshold where someone in the gaming community notices and gets vocal about it, social network effects take hold and even people not directly affected by the changes will complain or quit playing.

If an established company keeps starting MMOs that are designed like this, the MMOs will start to appear to be nothing more than get-rich-quick schemes. But since these lite MMOs are mainly designed to tweak the reward circuits of the brains of the players, there will always be a small core of players who will play such games; these are the same kinds of people who'd play slot machines in Vegas. So this is a lot like gambling, without the requirement that sometimes the house has to pay out. The money is real, but the rewards are virtual. Calling these MMOs "games" is a bit like calling a roulette wheel or a slot machine a game -- you might call it that, but it surely has no real skill involved.

Until we begin to explore something like wetware, our AIs are going to be dead from the get -go, just symbol manipulating machines.

Now you're just handwaving to try and justify your apparently irrational belief that there's something magic about emotions, that they exist somehow outside of the very flesh that embodies them.

Incidentally, we have something "like" wetware (whatever that term is supposed to mean when you use it, as I suspect my definition is not the same as yours). We call them neural networks. We have computers that perform neural simulations that even model the metabolic activities in cells, although I believe that level of modeling is probably unnecessary to get useful results.

And we have not one barking clue how pleasure and pain work or could be translated to a synthetic intelligence.

Actually, we have a pretty good notion of how pleasure and pain work in the human body and brain, and we're getting a better picture all the time. I tire of this "know-nothing" crap that gets bandied about in AI discussions.

The neurophysiology of pain is a topic of great research, since it has great practical benefits. To say we have no clue how pain works is ludicrous.

Ah, yes, the old philosopher's rant against symbolic manipulation. I'm sure you're a fan of Searle, too.

It's worth noting that most proponents of symbol manipulation for strong AI have now moved on to hybrid approaches -- even Marvin Minsky has acknowledged the value of neural networks in the toolbox, despite having singlehandedly destroyed all progress in neural network research for about a decade with his Perceptrons paper.

You talk about being able to disassemble the thought process of an AI based upon symbol manipulation. You suggest that, if we were able to step through every one of millions (or billions) of program states and choices, nothing would surprise us.

I would suggest that you're right, but you should look at other hypothetical or not-so-hypothetical complex systems. I would argue that if you could trace out every neural firing in a human brain, map the activation sequences, what sensory stimuli activated what neurons and what conclusions were formed in that brain, nothing would surprise you there either. Again, you're dealing with millions (billions? trillions?) of states, and some pretty unsophisticated building blocks (relatively speaking) with poor computational abilities. But if the previous hypothetical situation is, by your own thought experiment, not strictly intractable, then this problem isn't intractable either.

Emotions aren't magic. They are bound up in neural firing patterns, neurotransmitters, and the meta-mechanisms built on top of those base building blocks -- there are structures and patterns of neurons in various brain regions, each region specializing in a different type of activity. At the end of the day, when you stop hiding behind philosophical weasel words, you're left with one choice: either the human brain is all that there is to human intelligence, and the brain is a complex but ultimately understandable computational device, or there's something magic that we can neither see nor hear nor touch but which somehow pilots the brain and the body and gives us our "free will." I'd rather be honest and accept a deterministic (albeit complex) human brain being the sole descriptor of human intelligence than try to invent some mysical entity that makes us somehow special and saves the notion of free will.

My own conjecture is that emotional states can be simulated by a state machine, based on the notion that what humans experience as emotions are states described by neurophysiology of the brain and its neurochemical interaction with the body. Since the brain can't be completely divorced from the body, we may have to treat the entire thing as a system -- hormones produced in the body clearly affect cognition and emotions. That said, anywhere I said "brain" above, feel free to substitute "brain-body system."

Your analogy fails because a (general purpose) computer has never traditionally been defined by the peripherals that are attached to it. However, purpose-built devices like e-book readers, digital cameras, calculators, and music players are defined by the primary interface they present to the user.

Could you call a calculator a computer? Sure -- and many of them today are as programmable as a general purpose computer of a decade ago. That doesn't change the fact that the typical calculator has a form factor that suggests "calculator" to those that see it, and has its affordances laid out in a pattern that facilitates the easy manipulation of arithmetic expressions.

The same argument could be made for digital cameras, cell phones, your iPod or Zune or Zen or whatever, and so on. Each of those devices has a form that suggests its function (to a greater or lesser degree, highly dependent on the skill of the engineers). Of course there are convergence devices which, with rare exception, are never as good as a well-engineered single-purpose device.

So when the GP talks about how this device is not really an e-book reader, he's right. It has too many other convergence features to be credible as an e-book reader, while at the same time lacking the one feature most e-book readers have that makes them worthwhile -- the e-ink display. Indeed, the Skype feature precludes the use of e-ink! The list of features is ambitious; the last time I saw a convergence device with that much ambition behind it, it was one of Sony's Magic Cap devices. (If I were to compare Magic Cap to a modern device, I'd say the closest equivalent would be a smart phone, which itself is a category that seems to successfully merge the features of a PDA and traditional cellphone.)

Yeah, the price is "right" for a lot of folks, so many will buy this. Whether it will satisfy those who need a reliable e-book reader that can hold a charge for more than a day -- hell, for more than a few hours -- is another question. I would argue that the typical use case for an e-book reader will not be satisfied by this device.

Regardless... my laptop can display e-books, but I wouldn't call it an e-book reader. Reading e-books is just one thing I can do with it -- my laptop is a general-purpose computer. And this device from Asus is a multifunction device that has one innovation (two portrait screens hinged together) and a bunch of extra things tacked on; it can display e-books, but it's certainly not engineered to do so optimally. So what do you do when the technology platform is sub-par? Throw in a bunch of other crap to try and sell the device. It might be marketed as an e-book reader, but I'm with the GP -- it just doesn't meet my criteria.

According to TFA, they are also talking about including a webcam in the device and including Skype so it can make video calls. While color e-ink might be feasible, the refresh rate isn't going to be sufficiently high enough for video playback or conferencing needs.