Well the sad part is that 1) is true. Average layperson has no business discussing anything at all .2) and 3) naturally flow out of it.

Holy shit some morons modded this cretin informative... FYI to completely wipe out NYC AND suburbs you only need half a dozen of sub 300kt devices airbursted at right altitude.

I suggest for all ignoramuses to go read http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/2005/11/00_starr_effects-of-300-kiloton-detonation.htm

250 MT warheads? What delusional fool. Every major city one each is targeted with dozens warheads plus all the military installtion, power generation facilites and such. Not everthing will be in fireball - true , some country quacks like OP will still be alive for a bit -that is until the radioactive fallout covers all of their land and their only options would be to sit in shelter and slowly die.

I am pretty sure someone will survive though.

Same exact thing could be said about US. just US organized crime is much more refined as they had time to cultivate from robber barons to CEOs. Russia "ruling elite" had to grind they teeth in mob wars just recently -in 1990s

Your AC , but just in case - older you are , less probability your children are "without damage". Considering for it to be apparent it has to be some serious damage, most of it usually not so noticeable , but its a fact that babies from 30+ old mother are less healthy than those of 20+ and older it goes worse it becomes

Yes it is. Machine is "motivated" as it follow linear execution plan for boot up. That its motivation. You could make a machine which would boot up slower or faster depending on temperature outside or whatever other "motivation" you assign to it . Motivation is easy. Picking the right motivation is harder (ever thought why one of the most important feedback mechanisms is pain?)

Because 50% of their energy is Hydro and 11% is nuclear. France is actually most impressive country - with 77% nuclear they have the cleanest energy . The dumbfucks and coal/oil shills responsible for derailing nuclear power should be hanged by the balls in the pipes of coal power plants. Coal power plants are number #1 source of air pollution and leading cause of deaths caused by it .It also throws as much radioactive ash straight in the air as all nuclear power plants combined (who at the very least store they waster underground and at best can reprocess it for even more clean power)

I dont honestly care all that much about download size. good service should provide at least 5 Mb/s(this is what I get from torrents) and at that speed I just leave computer running overnight and when I am at work and when I am back it is there. I only bought games for cd keys -never used the media, I prefer torrents

I actually still have that DVD drive which last time I used for windows reinstall but from now on I am going to use flash drives for that. I will not need that bulky useless piece of hardware

Copyright is the barrier which prevents free market create efficent and convenient distribution systems for content. I mean how ridiculous is that torrents are much more convenient than any legal channel? -they provide better speeds and better quality products.

For example I bought Witcher enchanced edition on D2d. Not only it took 2 days to download 10 GB (most of which was non english resources ,useless to me) , I also got restricted content ( e.g. without sex scenes and with no blood). Then I went to mininova and downloaded 3gb version which had everything enabled and no restrictions and I got it at 650 kb/sec (while d2d was 150 kb/sec).

I generally "buy" stuff to reward developers or artists, I dont actually get stuff from legal channels because it is pain in the ass.

But VSync is. RTFA - performance drop in 3d mode is HUUUUGE (3-4 times less than non vsynced non 3d). First thing they will have to do is fix triple buffering so vsync does not affect framerate that much. Although I am not holding my breath for that.

I have 280 GTX on 3.15 C2D and I cant run TF2 at proper framerates (it dips to 20-30 fps) -its a known source engine bug , from the days of HL2 release, it is STILL not fixed. And this is Valve, apparently the only developer out there still committed to PC platform as main target, everyone else just does ports from consoles, of incredibly bad quality (cough, GTA4, cough)

Eh, I don't know if I agree with that. Do you believe that there would be no market for a natural language query search engine? I believe there would be a tremendous market for that. How about a hands free GPS you could speak to (even in a very limited way)? I think there's a large market for that too.

Well I am quite content with google. I already use "natural query language" pretty much when doing searches. It is not quite exactly grammatically correct , but neither is my English :)

I don't know if human level intelligence is necessary to have a natural language search engine, for example. But even if getting to natural language is a ways off, and it involves high level AI functioning - Kurzweil was still far off on most of his predictions, and things seem to generally lag behind his timeline, already.

I do agree that Kurzweil is off the mark in many areas which involves the degree of technology adoption by mass market and general population. But I dont think that is very important. Advances is what is important - microelectronics , brain modeling , autonomous software, MRI scanning . And we moving quite well - modeling mouse brain should not be too far off. Military robotics is on the rise, CPUs move in direction of being massively parallel .

I think it is quite possible we could have self driving car very soon, - if there was general desire to implement the technology and upgrade infrastructure for it, but population is dumb and averse to change, so that might not happen at all (e.g. till we have general AI ,at which point that will be irrelevant)

Many predictions were centered around a growing ability on the part of AI to understand, process, and interpret the meaning of speech. We're still not there - not imminently close to a solution either.

  That is because the market does not not need speech recognition THAT much just yet. On the other hand we advanced leaps and bounds in image recognition - because market wants it (especially military ) . Understanding human language in all its entirety means an AI equivalent of a human, and that task is far away- (2030 according to Kurzweil). We did advance a lot though in text interpretations (search engines do that quite well)

But that's not so much voice recognition, as natural language parsing, and that's a whole different situation

its not language parsing , its UI problem. Whether game engine allows you specify such complex requests or not . How advanced command queuing ,templating and units AI is, not how you give the command. -clicking factory group 5 and selecting "anti-air+patrol" template would still be faster with mouse and keyboard (as well as creating the group and template first place).

People confuse language parsing problem and actual request executions. Parsing is useless if you cant figure out how to execute it .

You want to have the maximum number of Americans working and increase economic activity ? Lower the minimum wage. Level the playing field between legal and illegal labour.

So you saying that all it is there to blame is illegal labour? Even though it is only about 10 mill -and they do make more than minimum wage already! ( no americans will do hard work for $10/h -that is why illegals take that work, not because they work under min wage)

Not all games benefit of course, but RTS would for sure and so should shooters - In multiplayer better teams have coordinated on voice channels for a decade already, no reason why you shouldn't be able to give AI voice commands in single-player too.

-Because its useless. I formerly played lots of mmorpg and currently play multiplayer FPS/RTS mostly. - In all those games the speed to interact with computer are way beyond what any voicecom could handle. in Rts it sometimes downright crazy of how many actions per second you have to do in a heated fight- even voice communication with your teammates kept to absolute minimum ,because you just can't spare any cycles.

- "Unit 1 move to point B" . vs 300 clicks per minute. Voice com PwnT!

You gotta give MS props- they know how to bury concurrence!