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Comment Obligatory religious joke (Score 3, Funny) 52

by davidwr (#66218898) Attached to: Scientists Made a Cell From Scratch For First Time

After discovering how to clone humans, two scientists challenged God:

"We don't need you anymore," they said. "We can make life by ourselves now."

"Okay," God replied, "let's have a man-making contest."

"All right," said the scientists. "We'll do it like you did in the beginning." Then they reached down to grab a handful of dirt to begin to form a man.

Then they heard God's voice from heaven: "Hold it - get your own dirt!"

--
Credit: Not sure who created this joke, but I 8th-commandmented it from here.

Comment Re:Yes. This is how you keep housing costs down (Score 1) 122

by davidwr (#66218834) Attached to: New Florida Law Bans Local Net-Zero Emissions Policies

he only thing that can make it less carbon intensive is using low carbon power to generate the electricity.

1) Use solar, hydro, wave-power, etc. so there is no or very little incremental carbon cost
2) Offset the amortized carbon-cost of setting up the green-power-plant and any small incremental carbon cost by planting forests or buying carbon offsets.

There you go, net zero.

Submission + - Max Planck Slapped With Paper Retractions by Suspected Rogue Algorithm (science.org) 1

Submitted by He Who Has No Name
He Who Has No Name writes: Being a titan in the history of physics, the 1918 Nobel Laureate in Physics, having the smallest rational physical measurement (the Planck Length) named after you, and being deceased for 79 years is all apparently still not enough to prevent your work from being threshed and hit with retractions by an algorithm. Science.org has a succinct article that explains it:

"In early May, Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec (UQ) at Montreal, was browsing Retraction Watch, a website that catalogs fraud, data manipulation, and other scientific sins. He noticed a link that read, “Retractions by Nobel Prize winners.” Were there really Nobel laureates whose papers had been withdrawn from the scientific literature?
After clicking, Gingras froze. “That’s impossible,” he recalls thinking. The fourth name on the list, with two retracted papers, was Max Planck—a legendary pioneer of quantum mechanics and the 1918 Nobel laureate in physics. Gingras had never heard a whiff of scandal about Planck, who was almost as widely revered for his character as his physics. In 1933, for example, he bravely confronted Adolf Hitler over Nazi Germany’s discriminatory laws against Jews."

The Springer Nature, the current-day owner of the journal Naturwissenschaften in which the papers were published 86 years ago, appears to have set an algorithm loose on their library, hunting for plagiarism and other reasons to retract papers... and failed to tell it to leave historic cornerstone works and authors alone.

"The retraction of the second Planck paper, published in 1940, left Gingras and Khelfaoui even more baffled. It also cited copyright violation—yet the piece had never appeared elsewhere. Then Khelfaoui noticed something that added to suspicions that an algorithm was at work. [...] In November 1940, philosopher Aloys Müller criticized Planck’s views in a Naturwissenschaften piece titled “Naturwissenschaft und reale Außenwelt” (“Natural Science and the Real External World”). A month later, Planck responded in print—and used the exact same title. This, Gingras and Khelfaoui suspect, caused Springer Nature’s copyright bot to retract the paper as plagiarism decades later, even though the contents of the two essays differ markedly."

However, apparently feeling like they had to retract the paper was not enough to fully dissuade Springer Nature from still selling it, in its retracted form:

"Gingras was especially incensed that Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95."

Comment Re: UK - where you get lesser sentence raping a ch (Score 1) 72

Are you talking about the average child-molestation-sentence compared to the average sentence for testing fraud of this scale, or are you cherry-picking cases?

Also, context mayters: If you are looking at the average child molestation care, is the average case one where a 20 year old is busted with a 15 year old girlfriend (where you could make a case for 35 months being a reasonable average sentence) or is the average more like a 50 year old serial rapist who molested dozens of people 12 or younger (where 350 months may be considered too lenient)?

Comment Re: Memory prices (Score 2) 26

What would really make them worth something is an easy upgrade path to an operating system that was still getting security updates.

Google, Apple, and the major phone vendors could score big PR points be extending security updates to 10 years on products introduced since 2016. In the long run PR points can translate into customer loyalty which can translate into "Step 4: PROFIIT!" in a non-sarcastic way.

Comment How to turn off an non-moving AI (Score 1) 1

by davidwr (#66197918) Attached to: Humanity isn't ready for the coming intelligence explosion

1) assume the AI may or may not be lying, so ignore anything it says
2) remove or block connections to the outside world
3) remove electrical power

Really, only #3 is needed but #2 may be faster than removing batteries. #1 is only there as a reminder, in case what the AI is trying to stall you achieving #2 or #3.

Now, if your evil AI is moving around like a robot or drone, or replicating itself like a virus, then you have more work to do.

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