Advocates of the concept called singularity envision a future in which humans and technology fully converge, but a keynote speaker at the World Future Society conference voiced skepticism about the idea, citing the complexities of the human mind.
Proponents of singularity claim that in 20 years, nanotechnology implanted in people will repair wounds and advanced robots will assist with daily tasks. The concept ultimately calls for people to transcend the limits of biology by using technology to develop into something more advanced and intelligent than human genetics allows.
Wendell Wallach, a scholar at Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, supports technology but labels himself a “friendly skeptic” on this marriage of people and machines.
While he is “excited by where the science will take us,” Wallach, who spoke Thursday at the World Future Society in Boston, is a “skeptic because we don’t know enough about humans to pull it off.”
Wallach’s critique of singularity focused on areas including understanding the intricacies of the mind, the complexities of developing robots with morals and the question of who is responsible when a robot’s morals prove problematic.
The singularity movement holds that the evolution of the computer will lead to further development of the human mind, since that is also a computer.
Wallach countered that the brain is engaged in massive parallel thinking and that researchers do not fully grasp how this part of the body operates. He compared this ability to a computer, in which “one bit is out of place and Windows locks up,” he said.
He also said that computers face barriers in dealing with vision, language and locomotion.
“We don’t know which of these challenges we’ll master in 20 years. Some will be ceilings,” he said.
But what if it’s all an illusion, a sort of cosmic frill, or a side effect of something else going on at deeper levels of reality?
So says Erik Verlinde, 48, a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, whose contention that gravity is indeed an illusion has caused a continuing ruckus among physicists, or at least among those who profess to understand it. Reversing the logic of 300 years of science, he argued in a recent paper, titled “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” that gravity is a consequence of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases.
“For me gravity doesn’t exist,” said Dr. Verlinde, who was recently in the United States to explain himself. Not that he can’t fall down, but Dr. Verlinde is among a number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms.
Nvidia’s acquisition of Ageia in 2008 was a strategic move to boost the marketability of its GPU offerings. With the discontinuation of the dedicated PhyX boards, the acceleration moved to the GeForce GPU as a differentiation factor that set it apart from AMD’s ATI cards.
If a PhysX game detected the presence of an Nvidia GPU, it would move the hardware physics to the video card. Without an Nvidia board, the physics would hit the CPU, which in all cases is slower than what a GPU can do.
It’s expected that Nvidia would like to do everything it can to distance itself from the CPU and the GPUs of its competitors, but closer looks at the PhysX software implementation have shown that there could be some shadiness going on.
An excellent investigation by David Kanter at Real World Technologies found that Nvidia’s PhysX software implementation for use by CPUs still uses x87 code, which has been deprecated by Intel in 2005 and now has been fully replaced by SSE. Intel supported SSE since 2000, and AMD implemented it in 2003.
The x87 code is slow, ugly, and remains supported on today’s modern CPU solely for legacy reasons. In short, there is no technical reason for Nvidia to continue running PhysX on CPUs using such terrible software when moving to SSE would speed things considerably – unless that would make the GeForce GPGPU look less mighty compared to the CPU.
A few days after announcing that Windows XP SP2 would no longer be supported, Microsoft on Monday announced the availability of a beta version of its Service Pack 1 update to Windows 7.
Intended for business computing professionals, the single update package simultaneously addresses Windows Server 2008 R2, which uses the same core code base as Windows 7. Microsoft made the announcement on the first day of its Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Washington D.C.
Microsoft had discussed the coming service pack back in March at the company’s Desktop Virtualization Hour event, but no release date was divulged at that time. Then just last month at Tech Ed 2010 Bob Muglia, Microsoft’s president of Server and Tools Division, announced that the public beta of the service pack would appear in July, without getting more specific.
According to Microsoft’s TechNet site targeting IT professionals, “This early release of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Beta is not available for home users. The SP1 Beta does not provide new end-user features, and installation is not supported by Microsoft.” In fact, as has mostly been the case with recent Windows service packs, this first Windows 7 update is made up of previous fixes already delivered through Windows Update.
CDBurnerXP is a free application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the feature to burn and create ISOs, as well as a multilanguage interface. Everyone, even companies, can use it for free. It does not include adware or similar malicious components.
Key Features
- burn all kinds of discs
- audio-CDs with or without gaps between tracks
- burn and create ISO files
- data verification after burning process
- create bootable discs
- multi-language interface
- bin/nrg → ISO converter, simple cover printing and much more!
- Operating Systems: Windows 2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista
CDBurnerXP Pro 4.3.5.2256 Changelist
+ Disc spanning: Data compilations can now be spead on multiple discs
+ New option “-changefiledates” for the command line version
! Fixed: Incorrect error “There is not enough free space on the disc.” when burning audio discs
! Fixed: Audio pause length is twice as long as intended
! Fixed: Burn speed is disregarded when burning audio discs
! Fixed some progress bars not being displayed in the task bar (Win7)
! Adjusted incorrect “File” count in command line version
! Fixed: Command line -folder[\X]:\A -folder[\X]:\B does not work
! Fixed: Incorrect log message when extracting CD image to file
Full List of Features, Compatible Drives List, Full Changelist
Download CDBurnerXP Pro 4.3.5.2256
Ensure you are private, secure, and anonymous online!
- Secure your web session, data, online shopping, and personal information online with HTTPS encryption.
- Protect yourself from identity theft online.
- Hide your IP address for your privacy online.
- Access all content privately without censorship; bypass firewalls.
- Protect yourself from snoopers at Wi-Fi hotspots, hotels, airports, corporate offices.
- Works on wireless and wired connections alike.
- Works on the PC and the MAC, including new operating systems (Windows 7 and Snow Leopard).
Hotspot Shield protects your entire web surfing session; securing your connection at both your home Internet network & Public Internet networks (both wired and wireless). Hotspot Shield protects your identity by ensuring that all web transactions (shopping, filling out forms, downloads) are secured through HTTPS. Hotspot Shield also makes you private online making your identity invisible to third party websites and ISP’s. Unless you choose to sign into a certain site, you will be anonymous for your entire web session with Hotspot Shield. We love the web because of the freedom that it creates to explore, organize, and communicate. Hotspot Shield enables access to all information online, providing freedom to access all web content freely and securely. Secure your entire web session and ensure your privacy online; your passwords, credit card numbers, and all of your data is secured with Hotspot Shield. Standard antivirus software protects your computer, but not your web activities.
Experts warn that free Internet connections could lead to identity theft, “Early Show” Consumer Correspondent Susan Koeppen points out.
She notes that nine million people fall victim to identity theft every year. And now, with thousands of wifi hot spots across the country, thieves are finding a new and easy way to steal your information.
Everywhere you look — there’s wifi. But web surfers beware: Hackers are out there and trying to use wifi to rob you blind.
Tim Pierson, an ethical hacker, told CBS News, “Information you’d send to and from your bank, information coming off of your credit card — any of those types of information you’d rather people not have, goes over wifi.”
Security experts estimate hackers can easily take in $1,000 worth of data from just one hacked computer.
Pierson explained, “I can basically do anything you would do on your computer and the best part about it, from the perspective of the hacker is, you’re never going to know I’ve done it.”
Pierson is a consultant who points out security flaws.
“The Early Show” asked Pierson and a fellow ethical hacker — whose name was given only as Dino — to show how easy it is to follow someone’s every move online, using just a laptop and some hacking software.
In a New York coffee shop, Koeppen started a Google search on wifi. She didn’t tell the hackers what she was looking up.
The hacker knew instantly that she searched for her name in the search engine.
Koeppen said all that hackers need to do is set up their own bogus wifi access point, such as one called “free public wifi.” Then they just have to wait for unsuspecting computer users to log in.
But the big story this week in Nature is that we might have been wrong all along in estimating something very basic about the humble proton: its size. A team from the Paul-Scherrer Institute in Switzerland that’s been tackling this for a decade says its arduous measurements of the proton show it is 4 percent smaller than the previous best estimate. For something as simple as the size of a proton, one of the basic measurements upon with the standard model of particle physics is built, 4 percent is a vast expanse that could shake up quantum electrodynamics if it’s true.
If the [standard model] turns out to be wrong, “it would be quite revolutionary. It would mean that we know a lot less than we thought we knew,” said physicist Peter J. Mohr of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md., who was not involved in the research. “If it is a fundamental problem, we don’t know what the consequences are yet” [Los Angeles Times].
Simply, the long-standing value used for a proton’s radius is 0.8768 femtometers, (a femtometer equals one quadrillionth of a meter). But the study team found it to be 0.84184 femtometers.
In a twist of fate that copyright owners are sure to snicker at, The Pirate Bay apparently has been hacked and the info bandits have made off with user information.
According to Brian Krebs, up until December an Internet security reporter with The Washington Post, an Argentinian hacker called Ch Russo penetrated The Pirate Bay, one of the world’s leading BitTorrent search engines, and snatched “user names, e-mail and Internet addresses of more than 4 million of the site’s users.”
Reporting on his blog, Krebsonsecurity.com, Krebs said that to prove the validity of his claims, Russo sent Krebs’ own username and password for The Pirate Bay. Krebs confirmed that the information was accurate.
Russo acknowledged that he and an associate who helped get into The Pirate Bay considered selling the data to the big music labels or Hollywood studios, but instead went public about the site’s vulnerabilities.
“We wanted to tell people that their information may not be so well-protected,” Russo said.
Russo said he accessed The Pirate Bay’s user database by exploiting some of the site’s vulnerabilities to SQL injections.