This is a really interesting concept. Not only from the demanding perspective (eg earthquake, blizzard) but think of the planning possibilities.

If you add some metadata about the input (eg. a snow blocked road would be a requirement for clearance, and a snow plough would be a method of clearing) and a higher level system could start to organise resources accordingly, with or without human intervention.

Of course, a "humanitarian crisis" would have human involvement anyway, but think about traffic for example. Cars could send their current speed and location to a network that redistributed traffic in peak hour. This is more than just traffic avoidance, it's highway load balancing...

There are doubtless many more opportunities!

that's easy, every perv is in New York!

(just kidding ;)

I don't mean old as in "last week", this came up months ago, if not even pre 2009!

Not with cell phones, but some study was claiming to predict human location based on a study of your previous location, to a high degree of accuracy.

Now if I could just find the original link... I'm sure it was on slashdot...

Maybe you should pay some attention ;) The current generation of SSDs are all supporting some type of trimming.

I would expect the first generation of any technology to have issues. Don't write them off just because the first round was sub-optimal!

true, I shouldn't have written it like that.

Nor did we last time. Nobody understands the list it seems :) But your point was "people won't find out", not they "won't understand".

"...But about half of the sites on the list are not related to child porn and include a slew of online poker sites, YouTube links, regular gay and straight porn sites, Wikipedia entries, euthanasia sites, websites of fringe religions such as satanic sites, fetish sites, Christian sites, the website of a tour operator and even a Queensland dentist..."
(Sydney Morning Herald)

You'd just have to wait for the govt to let the list slip to the public, as they have done in the past.

From New Scientist:

... I'll remember that next time I squat a mosquito!

Hey, I live in Australia and therefore I resemble that remark...

Engage the Ion Thrusters, No. 1.

You make an interesting point, if not necessarily for sexbots...

Think of the Star Trek movie First Contact where Data gets feeling on his arm from the Borg - image what a difference this could make to a robot?!

Imagine not only touch sensitive fingers, but the ability to detect wind, or feel past objects such as trees or guage the movement of a crowd. For a robot that's pretty cool.

This has big implications for the robot industry. They shouldn't look like us, but they should be as functionally similar to us as possible (or better).

yes of course, and I think you meant "aren't"? A lack of ethics approval is different to a specific ethics committee disapproval (which appears what they got, for valid reasons).

wait, which one is the car?

*sigh* I'm not suggesting that MMR vaccine causes autism. This is my last post, if you guys don't get it then too bad.

I am saying "anything at all" because originally there was a comment

This comment in itself is wrong. Let's disengage the issue and analyse it. Paraphrasing:

"There is more anecdotal evidence to prove x doesn't cause y, so wouldn't that push the debate into being over, if anecdotal evidence is the measuring bar?"

Answer: No.

Reason: let there be a theory that f(x) = f(y) for all values of x. You could try and prove it by substituting numbers for x. You could show that thousands of values of x are consistent with your theory. This does not prove it.

You could find one value for which the theory does not hold. This does disprove it.

I am not saying that therefore the MMR - autism link is proven.

I am not saying that any child with autism who's had an MMR vaccine proves the link.

My original mistake was to use a personal anecdote in my post. I thought people might find it interesting. I'll take care not do to that in the future.

Goodbye.

Negatory ghost rider. Statistics mean nothing to the individual, only to large groups. According to statistics, both my kids should have had Down Syndrome (from the scans) but neither of them have. That doesn't disprove the measurement theories for early detection of Down Syndrome, just that in my case we had 2 exceptions.

If he wants to ignore the vaccine, and go with the consequences, then that's up to him, so long as he accepts the consequences whatever they may be (including death).

And you're telling me this because...?

Let me say it slowly: I. Agree. With. You.

I'm not drawing any links between MMR and Autism. I was just talking about proofs in and of themselves, nothing to do with MMR / autism.

If that's what you want to think, but that's going a bit far.