If we can get AI good enough to provide a good listener the end-result will be the same.

And that's way easier than creating one which can actually have a conversation since it just have to shut up and listen.

So you see, we are screwed already!

Don't like African Americans? I'll load up the "Negro avoider" app on my computer. And never have my commute disrupted again by the sight of people I don't like.

          I think that falls into "stupidity is its own reward" category.

        Brett

Haha no kidding. I had an instructor once that taught the A+ certification class as well as bunch of other computer classes, but when I asked a question about Big Endian vs Little Endian in regards to one of the test questions on significant bits, he had no idea what I was talking about and had never even heard of Endian-ness. It was at that point I discounted just about every authoritative thing he tried to say in class.

I live in Russia now and I lived in the USSR for long enough of my childhood to remember how things were. I hope this satisfies your curiosity. I know that the idea of building anything resembling Marx's communism died with Lenin and Trotsky but that was not the point of my post. I was commenting on the silliness of the 'good' sharing and 'bad, commercial' sharing. You know from my experience workers in the USSR free from commercial exploitation did not go on to create a variety of amazing things, most just took the situation as a chance to seat around idly most of the work day. Anything consumer, more complicated than a loaf of bread was sold broken right at the store, was not uncommon at all to come to the store and find every TV set in stock to be non-functional, then buy it anyways and then spend weeks or months procuring electronic components to fix it yourself. Sound a lot like Free Software, doesn't it? IMHO Free Software has run out of steam, beyond several high profile projects (that land actual paying jobs or fame) Free Software just does not provide enough motivation for people both to do interesting tasks (If I am good at something that is interesting to me, I'd rather do it at a place that pays me money for it) and for mundane tasks (who wants to do testing and good support with actual ETAs for free?).

But... everyone knows the internet is a series of tubes and therefore neither wire nor radio.

The french version of scrabble has a value of 10 for the W and Y letters, because they are in very few words. If only I was allowed tu use english words....

(And german words. The german language is full of letters never found in any other language).

> It's just generated from sonar data instead of an artists interpretation.

I'm guessing an artist was involved.

Why is there no noise? How would the software know what parts should be yellow, and what parts should be black?

I guess it's too much to ask of a mainstream magazine to just give us the image, without tweaking it by hand to make it all purty.

I was already assuming a 25% duty cycle (flashing aka moving the laser). I don't think you can trim it more than that without increasing the power required to make it noticeable to the naked eye. But we're still talking about a faint flashing in the sky... Not anything that demands attention.. just something subtly noticeable.

The 100mW figure was based on the brightness of the moon in the daytime sky. Surely not bright, but at least visible. Maybe 10x more would be better for people to stop and notice it...

But 1kw lasers are considered pretty high power, so we're still off by a factor of 100 or 1,000...

I dunno... Just for indonesia...