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POPSFree software to use after Windows reinstallation One day all software will be free, is the message at the top of the page, and the Author created the page/site after reinstalling windows clean, and outfitting the system with free and open source software. He goes through his installation step by step, and there are user comments under his post, with feedback and other freeware suggestions by users.
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POPSA Game worthwhile playing ! As a serious gamer I am certainly going to devote some time to this one. The idea is brilliant. Collaborative computing may bring breakthroughs that are decades away otherwise. If you pop this at least give the game a try :-)
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POPSArtificial brain predicts death-row executions Since the direct approach had failed, the researchers turned to an artificial neural network (ANN) - an intelligent computer system, modelled after the human brain - that is able to deduce how various factors within a jumble of data relate to each other. The system can then take what it has learned and make predictions about a new set of data.To find out which factors might be linked to executions, the researchers first "trained" their ANN by entering the profiles of 1000 death row inmates between 1973 and 2000. Half of this sample of prisoners had been executed and the other half had survived. Each profile contained 18 factors, including the inmate's sex, age, race, marital status, educational level and information on their capital offences.
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POPSClipcasts & The Shape of the Net to Come It's amazing how the press out there, and most of the public, seems to have missed the big picture of what's going on here. They think this is about social networking and internet advertising. They are dead wrong. We're all involved in a much bigger game now, and the pieces are the very building blocks of society's future. I've clipped a few of the puzzle pieces together to make my point: 1. Cold War: Open v. Closed software ...leads to... 2. Show down between Cloud computing vs. PC software ...meanwhile... 3. Microsoft (PC OS) muscles in on Facebook (Internet Platform for Web Apps.) ...and on the other side... 4. Google (the world's leading search engine) muscles in on Firefox (the world's leading alternative web browser.) ...and then... 5.) Clipmarks, total wild card, leapfrogs over facebook into decentralized internet platforms with Clipcasts! Something VERY VERY BIG is afoot!
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POPSThe Terrifying Future of Computing Q&A: Author Nicholas Carr -- Carr: The scariest thing about Stanley Kubrick's vision wasn't that computers started to act like people but that people had started to act like computers. We're beginning to process information as if we're nodes; it's all about the speed of locating and reading data. We're transferring our intelligence into the machine, and the machine is transferring its way of thinking into us.
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POPSWorms Do Calculus To Find Meals In their paper, the researchers documented how two related, closely located chemosensory neurons, acting in tandem, regulate behavior. The left neuron controls an on switch, while the opposing right one an off switch. These sister neurons are situated much like the two nostrils or two eyes of mammals. Together these neurons are known as ASE for antagonistic sensory cues.
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POPSARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION? we need not assume that the thesis of substrate-independence is necessarily true (either analytically or metaphysically) – just that, in fact, a computer running a suitable program would be conscious
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POPSone step closer to building artificial human brain Markram believes that with the state of technology today, it is possible to build an entire rat's neocortex, which is the next phase of the Blue Brain project, due to begin next year. From there, it's cats, then monkeys and finally, a human brain. Markram is banking on Moore's law holding steady, as a computer with the power of the human brain, using today's technology, would take up several football pitches and run up an electricity bill of $3bn a year. But by the time Markram gets around to mimicking a full human brain, computing will have moved on.
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POPSThe power and the glory The market for energy is huge. At present, the world’s population consumes about 15 terawatts of power. (A terawatt is 1,000 gigawatts, and a gigawatt is the capacity of the largest sort of coal-fired power station.) That translates into a business worth $6 trillion a year—about a tenth of the world’s economic output—according to John Doerr, a venture capitalist who is heavily involved in the industry. And by 2050, power consumption is likely to have risen to 30 terawatts.
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POPS Robots and Humans: Intel say equal by 2050
Robots: From the Factory Floor to Your Kitchen - Robots today are primarily used in the factory environment, designed to perform a single task repeatedly and bolted down. To make robotics personal, robots need to move and manipulate objects in cluttered and dynamic human environments, according to Rattner. They need to be cognizant of their surroundings by sensing and recognizing movement in a dynamic physical world, and learn to adapt to new scenarios. Rattner demonstrated two working personal robot prototypes developed at Intel’s research labs. One of the demonstrations showed electric field pre-touch that has been built into a robot hand. The technique is a novel sensing modality used by fish but not humans, so they can “feel” objects before they even touch them. The other demonstration was a complete autonomous mobile manipulation robot that can recognize faces and interpret and execute commands as generic as “please clean this mess” using state-of-the-art motion planning, manipula
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POPSThey say they want a revolution Increasing computing power 10,000 times — to speeds in the hundreds of petaflops — would allow modellers to study simulations at the kilometre scale, enabling better predictions on the activity of hurricanes and, eventually, the local deep convection that transfers much energy into the upper atmosphere (see 'A real solution?'). This research could then be fed into operational models.