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Comment Re:me dumb (Score 4, Interesting) 157

The quarterback and receiver are together when the play begins. As the play develops they remain entangled, even over an increasing distance, up until the moment the ball is caught. Some quarterbacks are better at entanglement than others. As for wormholes, fans manifest their existence every time they shout their disapproval at the officials -- as if they were standing next to them.

Comment Re:Of course AI will try to kill us all (Score 1) 197

I anticipate a populist backlash like what we are seeing now with regards to Genetically Modified Organisms. As portrayed in the film "A.I." Didn't Frank Herbert predict the hatred of computers in his novel "Dune?"

My view is that as long as people can control their robots the way they can a pet dog they will like their mechanical friends, but give the A.I. too much "I" and that affection will flip to distrust and outright hate. The kind we see every day between (insert group here) and (insert group here). The more an A.I. presents as human the more hatred it will trigger. I give you Hello Kitty as one example.

Back in the 80's Japanese photocopy manufacturers added recorded warning messages. Chrysler did the same for some of its cars (New Yorker?). "Please remove the original." "You are low on gas." People hated those nagging reminders. Cute ring tones work much better.

Submission Planes Without Pilots

HughPickens.com writes: John Markoff writes in the NYT that in the aftermath of the co-pilot crashing a Germanwings plane into a mountain, aviation experts are beginning to wonder if human pilots are really necessary aboard commercial planes. Advances in sensor technology, computing and artificial intelligence are making human pilots less necessary than ever in the cockpit and government agencies are already experimenting with replacing the co-pilot, perhaps even both pilots on cargo planes, with robots or remote operators. What the Germanwings crash “has done has elevated the question of should there or not be ways to externally control commercial aircraft,” says Mary Cummings. NASA is exploring a related possibility: moving the co-pilot out of the cockpit on commercial flights, and instead using a single remote operator to serve as co-pilot for multiple aircraft. In this scenario, a ground controller might operate as a dispatcher managing a dozen or more flights simultaneously. It would be possible for the ground controller to “beam” into individual planes when needed and to land a plane remotely in the event that the pilot became incapacitated — or worse. “Could we have a single-pilot aircraft with the ability to remotely control the aircraft from the ground that is safer than today’s systems?" asks Cummings. "The answer is yes.”

Automating that job may save money. But will passengers ever set foot on plane piloted by robots, or humans thousands of miles from the cockpit? In written testimony submitted to the Senate last month, the Air Line Pilots Association warned, “It is vitally important that the pressure to capitalize on the technology not lead to an incomplete safety analysis of the aircraft and operations.” The association defended the unique skills of a human pilot: “A pilot on board an aircraft can see, feel, smell or hear many indications of an impending problem (PDF) and begin to formulate a course of action before even sophisticated sensors and indicators provide positive indications of trouble.” Not all of the scientists and engineers believe that increasingly sophisticated planes will always be safer planes. "Technology can have costs of its own,” says Amy Pritchett. “If you put more technology in the cockpit, you have more technology that can fail.”

Submission Google Rolls Out VP9 Encoding for YouTube->

An anonymous reader writes: The YouTube engineering blog announced that they've begun encoding videos with Google's open VP9 codec. Their goal is to use the efficiency of VP9 to bring better quality video to people in low-bandwidth areas, and to spur uptake of 4K video in more developed areas. "[I]f your Internet connection used to only play up to 480p without buffering on YouTube, it can now play silky smooth 720p with VP9."
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Submission Microbe tornadoes create 'living crystals'->

sciencehabit writes: Scientists have discovered the first "living crystal" formed by a microbe—the speedy Thiovulum majus, one of the fastest swimming species of bacteria known. These bacteria live in the muddy bottoms of salt marshes and produce energy by oxidizing sulfide. Researchers discovered that when the bacteria hit the edge of a container, they move along its surface and eventually aggregate into ordered, 2D formations. The microbes generate a tornadolike flow with their spinning flagella, which pull nearby bacteria toward them, causing them to arrange in crystalline clump. Whereas most crystals are inert structures, these crystals rearrange and rotate over time (video), thanks to the forces each bacterium exerts on its neighbors
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The program isn't debugged until the last user is dead.