Posts Tagged ‘internet’

Daily Mail: destroying human intellect since 1896

Tuesday, April 19th, 2011

According to research by comScore the MailOnline, the online home of British tabloid paper the Daily Mail, has overtaken the Huffington Post to be the second largest online newspaper site behind the NY Times:

Associated’s MailOnline has overtaken the Huffington Post to become the world’s second largest ‘newspaper’ site, as defined by ComScore.

According to the global market researcher, MailOnline achieved a 27% rise in unique visitors between February and last month, to 39,635,000, while a 20% lift at the Huffington Post took it to 38,429,000.

This is, of course, very bad news for humanity. The Daily Mail, you see, is a vile, depraved rag that pollutes the human mind with homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, xenophobic lies, distortions, manipulations, and falsehoods.

In short, the Daily Mail is destroying the intellect of its readers. It replaces fact with fear-mongering hyperbole, pollutes debate with blatant lies and straw-man arguments, manages to raise hypocrisy to new unimaginable heights, and generally serves to make the world a worse place.

Featured all to regularly on the Tabloid Watch blog, the Daily Mail has actively contributed to the continued dumbing-down of the masses and serves to instil cancer-causing fear and cancer-curing hope in everything from alcohol to yoghurt.

The fact that this horrendous platform of misinformation and brain-destroying hypocrisy is now the second most-read online news source, should serve as a stark reminder that the human race is doomed.

Continued survival of the human species depends on an informed population making the best possible decisions. The Daily Mail, as an active counterforce against facts and reason, is making people more stupid and thus helps reduce the changes of continued human prosperity.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Lose | No Comments »

The Internet: resembling the human brain

Wednesday, August 11th, 2010

nerve cellsApparently the human brain has a structure very similar to that of the Internet: “a vastly interconnected network”.

If the brain has a hierarchical structure like a large company, as neurology has long held, the “to” and “from” diagram would show straight lines from independent regions up towards a central processing unit: the company’s boss.

But instead, the researchers saw loops between differing regions, feeding back to and directly linking regions that were not known to communicate with one another. This is a better fit with the model of vast networks such as the internet.
Source: BBC News

The BBC News article goes in to the specifics of what this means for our understanding of the human brain, but I’d like to flip the perspective around: what does it mean for the potential of the Internet?

If the Internet is similar to a human brain, does that mean that – in due time – it may start doing similar things? Such as, you know, think?

Tags: , ,
Posted in Win | No Comments »

High Speed Broadband: a legal right

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

The Internet of ThingsThe Fins get it. They somehow, consciously or subconsciously, realise that the rise of a networked machine intelligence is the key to humanity’s lasting legacy.

It is because of this awareness, of course, that Finland has now made broadband internet access a legal right for all their citizens.

The widespread applause this decision has been heralded with is a good indication that other nations are inclined to follow Finland’s luminous example. Soon all developed countries will have broadband internet access available to all.

This also means that the  ubiquity of the internet will be accelerated. The ‘internet of things‘ will be hastened, and as a result a machine intelligence is more likely to rise soon.

Humanity, knowingly or otherwise, is enabling its own AI apocalypse.

Tags: ,
Posted in Win | No Comments »

Supercomputers: relics of the mainframe age

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Computer chipThe biannual supercomputer Top 500 list has been published once again, listing the 500 most powerful supercomputers currently in existence. You can see the list on the BBC website in a nice infographic and sort it by various metrics: speed, manufacturer, OS, and country.

The accompanying BBC news article puts this list in proper perspective. Many of the world’s most powerful computer systems aren’t made public, so will be absent from this list. Additionally, supercomputers may become an obsolete technology – networked computing seems to hold the keys to the future.

Distributed computing applications such as Seti@Home and Folding@Home have already demonstrated that by combining the processing power of many standard desktop PCs you can do things way beyond the reach of current supercomputers for a fraction of the cost.

On top of that a distributed network of connected computers more closely resembles the way the human brain and nervous system work: independent computer nodes [neurons] communicating through a vast interlinked network [synapses].

The potential of networked computing is growing exponentially. Ever more devices are being connected to the Internet, adding their processing power to the total. Supercomputers, for all their awesomeness, are relics of a bygone era – the mainframe age. The network is the supercomputer of the Internet age.

Tags: , ,
Posted in Win | No Comments »

The Semantic Web: making machines understand

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

The semantic web is the holy grail of internet technologies – a way of tagging up information so that machines, such as search engines, can understand the context and meaning of that information.

Search engines in their current form are pretty stupid machines. Sure, it seems like they’re incredibly sophisticated and smart, but at their basic level all they’re really doing is matching keywords to content. Search engines don’t understand, for lack of a better word, what they’re showing you.

The semantic web is the next step in the evolution of the internet that will allow search engines to understand the information they are indexing, whether it’s simple stuff like addresses and dates, or complex material such as human relationships and humour. I think there’s a good chance the first functional AIs will be derived from internet search engines.

The video below explains why the semantic web is so important to the future of the internet.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Win | No Comments »