In brief

Something I had long given up hoping for: the first signs of a healthily competitive online music business.

Good to see Franks already working hard on his legacy: How Tommy Franks won the Iraq war

Swarm crime could be the killer app to drive a more even distribution of technology.

US army continues attempts to seduce geekish doves.

[/misc] posted at 11:35 #

Simulations

The title: “The Simulation Argument: Why the Probability that You Are Living in a Matrix is Quite High” is strange as the first paragraph directly contradicts it: “The Matrix got many otherwise not-so-philosophical minds ruminating on the nature of reality. But the scenario depicted in the movie is ridiculous: human brains being kept in tanks by intelligent machines just to produce power.”

Nevertheless, this is interesting stuff.

Now we get to the core of the simulation argument. This does not purport to demonstrate that you are in a simulation. Instead, it shows that we should accept as true at least one of the following three propositions:

(1) The chances that a species at our current level of development can avoid going extinct before becoming technologically mature is negligibly small

(2) Almost no technologically mature civilisations are interested in running computer simulations of minds like ours

(3) You are almost certainly in a simulation.

These arguments assume finite computational power. If you also consider the possibility of infinite computational power and infinite storage (a real stretch, I know) then simulations could be recursive. The probability of being in a simulation becomes even higher and our ‘God’ is also probably in a simulation.

Via Slashdot

[/society] posted at 11:34 #

Palm WiFi

Palm look like they have a clue:

The Tungsten C is Palm’s first handheld with Wi-Fi built in.

Then show that they don’t:

The Tungsten W is a combination phone, organizer and e-mail device and shares a similar design with the Tungsten C. Instead of a Wi-Fi radio chip built in, though, it has a GSM/GPRS (Global System for Mobile Communications/General Packet Radio Service) chip so it can access cellular networks.

Instead of?

[/technology] posted at 11:31 #