A) Please get into the habit of using metric.
[energy provided by sun to earth] 1KW per sqr Meter on the earth [surface]
Now that's a nice coincidence! (Speaking about the metric system...)
FWIW, 1l water = 10cmx10cmx10 cm = 1kg (or 1mx1mx1m water = 1 ton) is not a coincidence.
Neither is 1 W = 1 kg * m / sÂ
The conventional wisdom is to spend your way out of a recession and clean up the mess later rather than trying to pay your way out of debt with money you don't really have.
That worked really well. Until 2000. And again, until 2009. And it will work really well again, until year (2017?)
I'm from Europe, but aren't you paying for receiving Dish?
From my standpoint: Either pay or ads, but never both.
The pay-TV in Europe is ad-free (well, at least during the show), pay-TV companies are treating their customers like dirt. Free-TV is rich, has many consumers, but is continuously degrading in quality (both the kind of content, and amount of ads) since 15 years.
As soon as something becomes routinely doable by a computer, it is no longer considered a sign of intelligence; it's a mere mechanical activity.
Correct. I have observed this thought in myself. I also wondered whether I deceive myself. But this is something else than AI: AI aspires to create "intelligent" machines, which can:
learn, understand, and reason.
Without having been programmed specifically. To follow a certain programmed algorithm, which is simply processed and executed, doesn't count as AI for me. That is then indeed purely mechanical. Input -> specific, given process -> Output.
What we see is that we can program ever more jobs as such a mechanical algorithm, through advances in hardware and software as you describe. Our toolbox increases, gets more powerful, therefore we can build more powerful, more useful machines. We can take a data source like the ID3 tags of songs played in Amarok, and compare that with those from other users, and find matches and differences, and based on that make proposals. 20 years ago, we'd have said that needs a true music lover or an inspired music shop owner, but now we can program it with our bigger toolbox. We can even generalize it to arbitrary data sources (RDF, OWL). Nevertheless, it's still a mechanical process that a human has analyzed, abstracted, broken down, and expressed as mechanical steps using the toolbox. It's the human who thought it out, and the computer just follows a given work pattern.
This is very useful and on a very high level, but it's per se not KI for me, because the computer has neither learned nor understood nor reasoned. Throw corn in from the top, run through mill, get flour out at the bottom. "Routinely" and "mechanical" are the key words in your comment. Sorting letters into a file folder cabinet is a routine that requires no intelligence, even if a human executes it. Inventing sorting was intelligent. But it only needs to be done once. That's what computers are good for, IMHO: Routine. We are striving to let them do ever more, higher-level routine jobs.
The disks are getting full; purge a file today.
