The Top 5 Technology Panics of 2009 146
destinyland writes "An A.I. researcher lists the Top 5 Technology Panics of 2009 — along with the corresponding reality. There's exploding iPods, the uproar over 'bombing' the moon, and even a flesh-eating robot. But in each case, he supplies some much-needed perspective. 'These incidents are incredibly rare ... the rocket stage weighs around two tons, while the Moon weighs in at a 73,477,000,000,000,000,000 tons... and desecration of the dead is against the laws of war — and plant matter is a much better fuel source anyway.'"
Large Haldron Collider (Score:2, Interesting)
Black Holes Won't Destroy the Earth [livescience.com]
"Probabaly."
Re:Large Haldron Collider (Score:5, Funny)
There's an RSS feed [hasthelhcd...eearth.com] use can use to keep tabs on wether or not the LHC has destroyed the earth. Very useful site.
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I'll just wait for the story about the blackhole sucking up the Earth to show up here. Ok, it'll take a while, but we'll be on the even horizon of it for an awful long time. Oh ya, time dilation. We wouldn't know if it had already started. :)
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Don't worry, you will be sure to get multiple stories about it here.
It will be just like you didn't know what you didn't know what you missed.
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Re:Large Haldron Collider (Score:5, Interesting)
Check the page source for that site [hasthelhcd...eearth.com]. It is quite interesting.
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Wrong box, kitty.
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Watch the live webcam [cyriak.co.uk].
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Well, no LHC black hole will destroy the earth, but you never know when a stray will come floating by our way.
A.I. researcher (Score:3, Insightful)
Thomas McCabe is a mathematics student at Yale University and a research associate at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
Not sure that's the mainstream definition of "A.I. researcher", but more relevantly, I can think of another technology panic that seems to keep recurring that the Singularity Institute might have something to do with.
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in fairness, he is pretty optimistic for a guy whose name sounds like macabre [reference.com]...
I wish that robot WAS flesh-eating. (Score:3, Funny)
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They are still human!
If they weren't then we wouldn't give a shit about following Geneva conventions.
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Logically speaking you are correct.
Humans, however, are hardly rational beings. If they were, however, the point would be moot as dead bodies on the battle-field would not exist in the first place.
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Mod Parent Down... oops, it's the story! (Score:2, Insightful)
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Better than before the end of the year. Remember the scramble during the tsunami of 2004? Many of the year end "top" stories had to be re-written.
How is the LHC not on here? (Score:5, Interesting)
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more than a few kids decided not to do their homework
Hardly surprising, given it's a newer excuse than "dog ate it". Maybe someone will believe they were actually afraid and cut them a break for going out and getting drunk instead of doing their work...
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Re:How is the LHC not on here? (Score:4, Informative)
The mathematics is largely redundant is answering the question of whether the LHC will destroy the earth. Particle collisions that are exactly the same (as well as some that are more powerful) as the ones in the LHC have been occurring in the earth's atmosphere ever since it first formed. If the earth has had several billion years to be eaten by blackholes or stranglets produced by one of these interactions, and still hasn't, then it's pretty safe to assume that those interactions simply don't produce those byproducts.
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Re:How is the LHC not on here? (Score:5, Funny)
"My homework is in my bag, but the act of observing it may destroy it" would be much more worthy of being let off.
Conficker April 1st (Score:5, Insightful)
How about the incredibly overrated Conficker [certifiedbug.com] / Kido [kaspersky.com] / Downadup [microsoft.com] worm that was going to cause the end of the Internet on April 1st 2009? Big media blew it out of proportion considering Microsoft had patched the flaw and all major AV vendors had protected against it months before April 1st. The only people really affected by it were the patch-avoiders.
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Death-by-IPv4 (Score:5, Insightful)
Flesh-eating Robots Will Devour Us All (Score:2)
Human bodies are bette
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OTOH, each eaten human can potentially decrase the usage of IPv4
capcha: brutally
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OTOH, each eaten human can potentially decrase the usage of IPv4
OTOH, they can still vote (thank goodness).
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Re:Flesh-eating Robots Will Devour Us All (Score:4, Insightful)
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Except the robots designed to eat human flesh will be there only to eat the humans. And there will be plenty of human flesh to fuel their eating frenzy.
What kind of a war are you running where your robots scare the shit out of the bushes, not the enemy soldiers?
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A lot of the recent conflicts seem to have taken place in desert regions, which don't have a lot of foliage. If we were currently fighting in Vietnam, your comment would make a lot of sense, but with Iraq and even worse, Afghanistan, it doesn't. There isn't a lot growing in those places.
And remember, it takes a lot less energy to digest meat and get energy from it, than to eat plants and digest them. That's why cows have 4 stomach chambers and rabbits have to eat their own shit, and predators like cats h
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Yes, killer robots will eat us. And I posted that specifically so that you would panic. Thanks for playing.
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Human bodies are better fuel, because it has more energy available per bite. That's why top predators eat meat, though it costs so much energy to get. That mere assertion is no defense.
That is bullshit.
First of all, calories in meat mainly com from fat, no fat means only a very few calories. Low fat meat has roughly half the calories more fatty meat has.
Even with fat taken into account (e.g. a fatty T-Bone steak, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meat [wikipedia.org] NOTE THIS ARE CALIRIES) meat has roughly 15% of the calo
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meat has roughly 15% of the calories e.g. potatoes have
Hmmm. Looking at those figures, I would suggest that it's the tedious kilocalories = Calories issue [google.com.au] raising its ugly head again.
Eg. other tables of meat kilocalories [weightloss...rces.co.uk] suggest it's on par with your potatoes.
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Red herring. Potatoes are not a food that most herbivores can eat; they're roots. Most herbivores, like cows, eat only plants growing above ground: leaves, grass, etc. Only a few animals, like wild pigs and moles, eat tubers naturally.
More importantly, tubers like potatoes are very hard to digest by most animals, including humans. That's why humans invented "cooking", to make the starchy tuber turn into something more easily digested and absorbed. Some believe this was an important part of human evolut
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Tree wood has about 2300 (kilo)calories per pound, while human meat has somewhere from 800-2000 (kilo)calories per pound. But bones have even more calories than wood. And I don't think the flesh-eating robots we've seen can eat wood (or bone), but rather leaves. Which have about 100 (kilo)calories per pound [about.com]. Meat is a better fuel.
Bullshit, I couldn't find the calories for.
Potatoes have some of the highest calories of any staple plant, which is why Europe went through a population explosion after bringing th
You forgot.. (Score:1)
When a hard drive died on one of the servers at my startup... According to management that was definitely the biggest of 2009.
Ignores a lot more panics (Score:5, Insightful)
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I wouldn't say that it did "nothing". It caused a lot of pain for IT folks trying to clean that shit out of their networks, that's for sure. On the other hand, it was not as dramatically serious as the media would have you believe (but then the media always blows things out of proportion - that's their job apparently).
Killer electronics is nothing new (Score:4, Insightful)
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0th (Score:2)
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Oh, you mean the great panic at One Infinite Loop?
Flesh Eating Robots - FAIL (Score:1)
It "weighs" two tons? (Score:1)
Submitter gets an 'F' for failing to understand basic physics.
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How ironic. You too fail to understand basic physics, because you don't seem to know that tons is not a unit of weight (neither does the editor/submitter).
And an 'F' for the parent. (Score:2)
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Gravity is just a theory.
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In normal English we say something "weighs" two tons, rather than "masses" two tons.
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Mod parent up, he's the only one who gets it. If a thing weighs two tons on earth, its mass is two tons whether it's on earth, on the moon, or in microgravity.
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Depends on what kind of tons, doesn't it? After all, in English measurements, a "pound" is a unit of weight (not mass), and a "ton" is defined as exactly 2000 pounds. But then there's also the "metric ton" (or "tonne"), which of course is derived from the kilogram, and is a unit of mass.
Why Not LHC? (Score:5, Funny)
LHC isn't on the list for the simple reason that there was nothing to panic about.
In 2009.
Wait..What!? (Score:2)
First I was like.."Wow"...then I was "Oh Shit"...Then I was all "Phew"
THEN I was like.."Wow"...then I was "Oh Shit"...Then I was all "Phew"
THEN I was like.."Wow"...then I was "Oh Shit"...Then I was all "Phew"
THEN I was like.."Wow"...then I was "Oh Shit"...Then I was all "Phew"
THEN I was like.."Wow"...then I was "Oh Shit"...Then I was all "Phew"
Dude, what a rollercoaster!
Sad comparison (Score:2, Insightful)
00,000,012,162,748,511,374.98 (US Debt) ** Only 6 more decimal places to go! **
I think it's sad that when I look at numbers referring to things like moon weight or number of stars in the galaxy that the first thing that comes to my mind is my countries national debt in relation to those numbers. http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/ -> $12,162,748,511,374.98 as of January 4th, 2010.
laws of war? (Score:3, Interesting)
The torturing of war prisoners of war in Iraq and the interviews with the involved army personal clearly showed that the US military have no clue about "laws of war". Several convicted US soldiers admitted frankly they never had heard about the convention of Geneva.
angel'o'sphere
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well, "the internet" is slightly less portable than a cell phone. maybe if you took apart the tubes and put them in the back of a truck, but even then it's still harder to fit in your pocket than a cell phone.
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well, "the internet" is slightly less portable than a cell phone.
"The Internet" is just a giant network, so qualifying or quantifying its "portability" is pretty meaningless. The Internet is already everywhere that the network reaches, and so does not need to travel from place to place. However, if we define the "portability" of something as the "ability of a person to use the thing regardless of physical location", then the portability of the Internet is entirely dependent on the portability of the computer and the ubiquity of Internet access points (likely wireless)
3G coverage not available everywhere (Score:2)
one might argue that the Internet is exactly as portable as a cell phone.
There's a map for that, unless of course you're happy with dial-up speeds for a broadband price.
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What about connection via satellite?
Existing satellite Internet offerings are for stationary connections, not mobile connections. And even at home, they don't work with hill or trees to your north (in au/nz/za) or south (in the rest of the developed world).
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The panic is that kids think that pictures given privately to their friends are going to be kept that way... nope. One wrong friend who publishes it and there's no end to it.
Look what happened to Vanessa Hudgens. She was a Disney star with a song out and part of the High School Musical cast. A picture she knew was being taken gets out, and suddenly it's a career-ended.
Re:The entire Internet is a panic then? (Score:4, Interesting)
The panic is that kids think that pictures given privately to their friends are going to be kept that way... nope. One wrong friend who publishes it and there's no end to it.
This is semi-off-topic, but what you said here reminds me of something that happened on a web forum I used to moderate on. We had a private section for the staff to have discussions in. Once in a while a user would get into it with another user and because of the formation of various cliques sometimes that'd rock the boat for several members of the staff in the private forum. One staff member in particular was a little too abrasive when describing the offending users that weren't in his group of friends. I tried to warn him that he should be careful about what he says. Just because it's 'private' doesn't mean that somebody watching couldn't do a copy/paste. He replied with "I shouldn't have to censor what I say, blah blah blah!" A month or so later he did manage to use the right series of words aimed at the right person at the right time for another member of the staff to see it, get pissed, and send an e-mail to the person he bad-mouthed to see what was being said behind his back. He, of course, shot into orbit. The funny thing is, if he had done this in public view, it probably would have been a short lived series of fireworks. But because he did this in a private forum, this guy got so angry he created a bunch of threads talking about how shitty the site is, then he told his story to people in another forum and for several days they'd come in and start trouble. The staff member in question never did admit to me that I was right.
Anyway, so what does that have to do with the topic at hand? You are absolutely right about the concern of the 'one wrong friend'. I'd be extra concerned when talking about teenagers and their ever-changing groups of friends and enemies. In general there's a lesson to be learned about being careful what you say when it can be copied verbatim for the rest of time. It's kinda sad, though, that the 'sexting' stories about consequences are getting more attention than the stories about people saying the wrong thing on Facebook and getting fired.
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Hehe. No.
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Pfft. Old news. That's why *I* only buy cell phones with the words DON'T PANIC written in large friendly letters on their covers.
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You cannot weigh the moon, this is nonsense.
BS. Sure you can weigh the moon. We can calculate it's weight very well by multiplying it's mass by g (F=M*a). Even so, in my country a tonne is exactly 1000kg. So even when the guy is referring to "weight" he really means mass.
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In the US and most the rest of the world, it is too. But the article wrote ton which is short for a "short ton" which refers to a short imperial ton.
The differences is that a tonne is a "metric ton" equal to 1000 kg or 2204 lbs, an "Imperial ton" (also known as a long ton) is 2240 lbs, or about 1016 kg, and a ton, known also as a short ton, is 2000 lbs or roughly 907 kg.
It gets a little more confusing when they use the word tonne in combination with energy
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Uhh, you can do it really easy: http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/ast99/ast99487.htm
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Re:Weight... (Score:4, Informative)
No. The correct nomenclature is 7.3477x10^19. And we certainly know it to 5 significant figures, which is all original value in TFA states.
Brett
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It is pretty easy to weigh the Moon. Put it on the surface of a known mass(*) and measure the gravitational force between the two masses. The force is called "weight".
(*) You can also put a known mass on the surface of the Moon. Makes no difference for the measurement.
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If you want to calculate the mass from the measurement, then yes. If you just want to know the weight, then no.
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heh usefulness?
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Cleans up the battlefield... Makes biofuel... Possibilities are endless...
Slashdot does all of that?
Re:Sexting (Score:4, Interesting)
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Laws were meant to keep people from harming one another. "sexting" harms no one.
That assumes that the sender and receiver are playing by the same rules - and the communication is genuinely private.
Not being intercepted and exploited by others.
You have a problem is one of the parties a minor and the other an adult. You have a problem if the text or images are being shared or broadcast without consent.
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This makes no sense. Are you going to make it a crime for teenagers to shower naked because someone could, conceivably, secretly videotape them while doing so?
Even disregarding the utter stupidity of this line of reasoning, how on Earth would it keep someone from being exploited and harmed to make them a CRIMINAL?
For the record, BTW, whether I think "sexting" is acceptable doesn't depend on the relative ages of the participants, either. People are either old enough to do it or not; if they are old enough to
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The communications themselves are not necessarily harmful if performed by consenting parties on both sides. The interception and exploitation of that communication is harmful.
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your premise that "'sexting' harms no one" is false.
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29546030/ [msn.com]
"...sent nude pictures of herself to a boyfriend. When they broke up, he sent them to other high school girls. The girls were harassing her, calling her a slut and a whore. She was miserable and depressed, afraid even to go to school."
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there would be things like counseling to commit a crime, the crime of forwarding the images to others.
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I think you're being incredibly short-sighted. Did you forget about the intense amounts of peer pressure that can be placed on a teenager? People can be convinced to do things well outside of their normal purview, simply by convincing them that it is the only way to be socially accepted. Teenagers have been shown to have very limited reasoning skills and not to be able to see all of the possible consequences of their actions.
While I do believe that in most cases, sexting is probably a victimless crime, ther
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Well, their conscience and the fear of reprisal and punishment.
Re:No one has Global Warming on here either... (Score:5, Interesting)
I kind of got the impression that "global warming" is political speak dressed up as green speak for "our economony is now almost entirely service based, the bottom has fallen out of the unsustainable credit market, what can we in the west sell to the emerging economic giants now that they have all the large industry... how about green technology?".
Maybe I'm being overly cynical, but then back in the 80's I was saying that "nuclear is bad" was political speak dressed up as green speak for "big oil is good and cheap and currently abundant" and, in hindsight, if we'd built a ton of nuclear reactors back then the world would potentially be in a much better state today (no impending fuel crisis, potentially no big war in the middle east, no extra couple of decades of pumping pollutants directly into the skies, further development of nuclear technology allowing costs to decrease and making it more viable for emerging industrial countries, etc).