Liberty is an inherently offensive lifestyle. Living in a free society guarantees that each one of us will see our most cherished principles and beliefs questioned and in some cases mocked. That psychic discomfort is the price we pay for basic civic peace. It's worth it. It's a pragmatic principle. Defend everyone else's rights, because if you don't there is no one to defend yours. -- MaxedOutMama

I don't just want gun rights... I want individual liberty, a culture of self-reliance....I want the whole bloody thing. -- Kim du Toit

The most glaring example of the cognitive dissonance on the left is the concept that human beings are inherently good, yet at the same time cannot be trusted with any kind of weapon, unless the magic fairy dust of government authority gets sprinkled upon them.-- Moshe Ben-David

The cult of the left believes that it is engaged in a great apocalyptic battle with corporations and industrialists for the ownership of the unthinking masses. Its acolytes see themselves as the individuals who have been "liberated" to think for themselves. They make choices. You however are just a member of the unthinking masses. You are not really a person, but only respond to the agendas of your corporate overlords. If you eat too much, it's because corporations make you eat. If you kill, it's because corporations encourage you to buy guns. You are not an individual. You are a social problem. -- Sultan Knish

All politics in this country now is just dress rehearsal for civil war. -- Billy Beck

Wednesday, December 01, 2010

"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."

That's from the Orange Catholic Bible from Frank Herbert's classic 1965 SciFi novel Dune. (Which reminds me - it's time to read it again.)

Back in 2008 I reported on the successful creation of the fourth fundamental electronic component.  To complement the inductor, resistor and capacitor, researchers at Hewlett-Packard had finally created the Memristor. The characteristic of the memristor is that its resistance changes based on the direction current flows through it.  In one direction the resistance goes up, in the other direction, down.  But the key characteristic is that after the current flow stops, the resistance of the device stops changing and remains fixed.  It is, in effect, a non-volatile memory device.

At the time the story was that several neuroscience and engineering labs were looking at the memristor as the key component for systems that emulate neural networks.

And they still are. Now the research is being funded by DARPA. If you're at all interested in artificial intelligence, it's a fascinating article.

And the Singularity grows nearer.

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