Facebook hat seinen Nutzern verboten, das Wort Lamebook zu verwenden.

I remember hearing a story back in high school about politics in the 19th century and how it played a part in the U.S. use, or disuse, of the metric system. In the 1960's public schools actually taught history. Anyway, it seems the French Revolution was the initial driving force for legitimizing the metric system. At that time the French Revolution was reviled by the rest of western governments for its horror and excesses. It really was the first successful communist revolution. As a strong protest against anything to do with the revolution and its tenets, American government officials vowed never to legitimize anything spawned from it. Now 200 years later here we are.

A tremendous sinkhole caused by the heavy rains of Tropical Storm Agatha in Guatemala City was estimated to be 30 meters wide and over 60 meters deep. As the sinkhole formed, it swallowed a clothing factory about three miles from the site of a similar sinkhole three years earlier. The clothing factory had closed only an hour before it plunged into the Earth. (REUTERS/Casa Presidencial) #

Bild 33 ist einfach nur gerecht.

Hospital Corpsman Shannon Crowley, 22, US Marine with the FET (Female Engagement Team) 1st Battalion 8th Marines, Regimental Combat team II takes a nap before being sent out on a mission to Kunjak on November 12, 2010 in Musa Qala, Afghanistan. (Paula Bronstein/Getty Images) #

Tactical Nav incorporates a compass, camera and a gridded map reference system to accurately pinpoint specific locations down to a few feet and relay that information to other users linked in.

2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal

By Lev Grossman Thursday, Feb. 10, 2011

On Feb. 15, 1965, a diffident but self-possessed high school student named Raymond Kurzweil appeared as a guest on a game show called I've Got a Secret. He was introduced by the host, Steve Allen, then he played a short musical composition on a piano. The idea was that Kurzweil was hiding an unusual fact and the panelists — they included a comedian and a former Miss America — had to guess what it was.

On the show (see the clip on YouTube), the beauty queen did a good job of grilling Kurzweil, but the comedian got the win: the music was composed by a computer. Kurzweil got $200.

Kurzweil then demonstrated the computer, which he built himself — a desk-size affair with loudly clacking relays, hooked up to a typewriter. The panelists were pretty blasé about it; they were more impressed by Kurzweil's age than by anything he'd actually done. They were ready to move on to Mrs. Chester Loney of Rough and Ready, Calif., whose secret was that she'd been President Lyndon Johnson's first-grade teacher.

But Kurzweil would spend much of the rest of his career working out what his demonstration meant. Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only. It's an act of self-expression; you're not supposed to be able to do it if you don't have a self. To see creativity, the exclusive domain of humans, usurped by a computer built by a 17-year-old is to watch a line blur that cannot be unblurred, the line between organic intelligence and artificial intelligence.

That was Kurzweil's real secret, and back in 1965 nobody guessed it. Maybe not even him, not yet. But now, 46 years later, Kurzweil believes that we're approaching a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more intelligent than humans. When that happens, humanity — our bodies, our minds, our civilization — will be completely and irreversibly transformed. He believes that this moment is not only inevitable but imminent. According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it is about 35 years away.

Computers are getting faster. Everybody knows that. Also, computers are getting faster faster — that is, the rate at which they're getting faster is increasing.

True? True.

So if computers are getting so much faster, so incredibly fast, there might conceivably come a moment when they are capable of something comparable to human intelligence. Artificial intelligence. All that horsepower could be put in the service of emulating whatever it is our brains are doing when they create consciousness — not just doing arithmetic very quickly or composing piano music but also driving cars, writing books, making ethical decisions, appreciating fancy paintings, making witty observations at cocktail parties.

If you can swallow that idea, and Kurzweil and a lot of other very smart people can, then all bets are off. From that point on, there's no reason to think computers would stop getting more powerful. They would keep on developing until they were far more intelligent than we are. Their rate of development would also continue to increase, because they would take over their own development from their slower-thinking human creators. Imagine a computer scientist that was itself a super-intelligent computer. It would work incredibly quickly. It could draw on huge amounts of data effortlessly. It wouldn't even take breaks to play Farmville.

Probably. It's impossible to predict the behavior of these smarter-than-human intelligences with which (with whom?) we might one day share the planet, because if you could, you'd be as smart as they would be. But there are a lot of theories about it. Maybe we'll merge with them to become super-intelligent cyborgs, using computers to extend our intellectual abilities the same way that cars and planes extend our physical abilities. Maybe the artificial intelligences will help us treat the effects of old age and prolong our life spans indefinitely. Maybe we'll scan our consciousnesses into computers and live inside them as software, forever, virtually. Maybe the computers will turn on humanity and annihilate us. The one thing all these theories have in common is the transformation of our species into something that is no longer recognizable as such to humanity circa 2011. This transformation has a name: the Singularity.

[...]

Continued at: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,...48138-1,00.html

Federal Ballisticlean

Brand new three box lot (150rnds total) of Federal Ballisticlean 9mm CQT (Close Quarters Training). This is the stuff Airline Pilots use. So lethal that Law Enforcement is not permitted to use it (see sticker on outer case). This stuff does not wound--it cores! Call it the ultimate "Roto-Rooter Round". The jacketed bullet is made of zinc wire that begins to unwind upon impact. Two inches in, the outer wires break off and create their own wound channels. The core then begins to open and continues another 4 to 5" creating a tennis-ball size cavity. (try it on wet phonebooks and see for yourself!) Will ship anywhere in U.S.

wow, ist die Insel klein

GEIL! Will haben! WILL HABEN!!!

- http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13...l#ixzz1HLKo7IsN

MFG
ironduke57