valentinej

valentinej

  • Commented on Life With and Without Animated Ducks: The Future Is Gender Distributed
    Since it seemed like a bunch of people were confused by garbage disposals, I thought I'd give explaining them a go. The garbage disposal is meant to make cleaning the sink easier after rinsing dishes or cooking. It's not (usually)...
  • Commented on Tanenbaum's Law v. the Fermi Paradox
    "I think the motivation I outlined - resurrecting the dead - is definitely the most plausible simply because I, and probably millions of others would do it if possible, as soon as possible." How, may I ask, will running simulations...
  • Commented on Tanenbaum's Law v. the Fermi Paradox
    Estimates for human brain processing capacity vary from around 1 to 1000 petaflops. Those estimates are rather... speculative, to say the least. With 1011 neurons and 1014 synapses, each neuron being somewhat akin to a small DSP in its own...
  • Commented on Tanenbaum's Law v. the Fermi Paradox
    Of course, one might also argue that our computer systems are also on the order of trillions of times less powerful/efficient than the human brain, which we already have several good examples of. By that standard, a factor of merely...
  • Commented on Tanenbaum's Law v. the Fermi Paradox
    It seems to me that you might be able to generate interest in a conversation with a 20 year cycle time, but not if the cycle is 200 years. You're assuming that we're dealing with modern humans, where 20 years...
  • Commented on Tanenbaum's Law v. the Fermi Paradox
    Actually, going with data compression as an angle, if we assume that both slow bulk data and fast expensive data is available... What is the economic value of getting old, rich data you already know about? To give a simple...
  • Commented on Tanenbaum's Law v. the Fermi Paradox
    The actual form of the data redundancy / error correction is somewhat interesting here. Both methods of communication suffer from tremendous latency, of a sort that we don't generally deal with today. With your typical communications medium now, you use...
  • Commented on I may be being unduly optimistic ...
    Ok, so basically this is what happens, I think: Old datasets encrypted with existing public key cryptosystems become decryptable. Any data you let out in that mode is retroactively at risk. Symmetric key data is fine. There's some churn as...
  • Commented on Artificial Stupids
    Strongly disagree. You're still imagining a beefed up expert program instead of a self-guided organism faced with the intractable difficulty to interact with a world. Reactivating a 5 year old copy would simply give you an entity busy with...
  • Commented on Artificial Stupids
    Not necesarily. It all depends on the energy and capital (equipment cost) requirements of running an AI mind. For instance, if your energy bill for running 100 AI minds is higher than the wages and associated costs of an...
  • Commented on Artificial Stupids
    Charlie, While I think you're clearly right to criticize the SF idea of an Asimov style robot (a sentient, servile and happy slave), I don't really see how this translates into sentient AI in general. An AI construct that is...
  • Commented on "Why are your houses so heavy?"
    Given that the city's policy of upgrading city streets with safer and more visible bicycle lanes was described by an import from Texas at my office as "The Mayor's war on car drivers" and as grounds for him to be...
  • Commented on "Why are your houses so heavy?"
    And that the commonest contributing factor (after driver negligence) was a lack of safe crossings and sidewalks? The trend here in Seattle (reportedly driven by federal highway regulations) is to simply remove crosswalks if too many auto drivers run over...
  • Commented on Looking under the street lamp again
    ... the English Channel, the Straits of Gibraltar, and the Bering Straits -- the latter would be potentially a huge railfreight route I was under the impression that ocean shipping was generally much cheaper than rail. Given this, and the...
  • Commented on Looking under the street lamp again
    It is plausible. It is not an SF meme. Our historical experience does not indicate any technological limits. Quite the reverse. Every time someone suggests that we have reached the end of some science or technology, we get an...
  • Commented on Looking under the street lamp again
    I would be quite disappointed if I thought that our space colony technology in that future was uprated O'Neill's. Surely your own disappointment is no barrier to this being a plausible scenario? It's good to keep in mind that...
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