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Yep! That's the one! Thanks! 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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So I won't know whether my girlfriend broke up because of me or if if because she was hacked. Great.
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Uncle Ray (tm) is a strange creature: every time I think he's insane, he comes up with something I've been thinking about, too, at which point I realize that either he's not insane at all, or that I'm completely nuts. Recently, I've been leaning toward the latter...
...but in any event, this is something I've been thinking about as well, vis-à-vis Sutton's Zeroth Law of Population Growth: "As the population of the world increases, the sum of its IQ remains a constant."
Have you noticed how stupid young people are these days? They have in front of them a computer with a search engine on it, not to mention Wikipedia, and they have instant access to the sum total of human knowledge -- and they know absolutely nothing. Why? I finally realized that the one implies the other: if they need to know a thing for some reason, they can grab the information off the internet, use it once and forget it. When we were kids, we had to go to the library to get the information, and then, quite possibly, the book we needed would be out, so we had to wait around, or try to get it somewhere else... actually make an effort. And when we got the book, the information we wanted would be bracketed by other information which (the book having no search function) we were also obliged to read: the information, in other words, was in context and made sense - and thus we remembered it. But search-engine-supplied information, and Wikipedia-supplied information, is utterly a-priori: it's almost as though it were designed to be a single-serving piece of data which can be deleted and forgotten about after use.
I think, though, that the human race is currently in an interstitial phase of development: we have access to all information, all the time, but it's still externalized to a great extent, in that we have to use a device to look it up. Eventually, though, Uncle Ray will be proven right, and we will be wet-wired into all of it, and it will appear to us as an extension of our own thoughts (my own impression of it is that it would be something like the mini-thinker that a character in Greg Bear's "Moving Mars" has implanted in her head to help with physics problems: she leans against a wall and finds herself thinking about lines of force and so forth).
So, in that scenario, what does "intelligence" mean? Clearly, intelligence will no longer be indicated by the breadth of a person's knowledge: after all, Wikipedia knows a lot, but it's not intelligent. One definition of intelligence is that it has less to do with what you know and more to do with how you use it. For example, knowing two things, can you extrapolate a third? Can you then extrapolate a fourth based on those three? You'd be amazed how many people can't. Can you know when your extrapolation starts to veer into fantasy?
I also think that a new manifestation of intelligence will emerge: if you have access to the sum total of human knowledge, all the time, your main problem will be to organize it so that it's useful: to prioritize and categorize and search it, otherwise even the simplest searches will either take you years or will have you spouting nonsense. If the relevance of one item of knowledge to another (in a human brain) can be indicated by the number of neuronal connections between the cells remembering them, and the distance of those connections (and I think it probably can: the human brain learns by growing new connections to link data) then our task will either be to impose that structure personally upon the data to which we're now connected, or, preferably, to take a gestalt view of the way anyone out there already connects any two items, and to replicate that structure in the internet so that the whole thing works like the connections in the brain.
Without something like that in place, I can only assume that everyone connected to such a system will instantly go insane...
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I will make a prediction - that will not happen. Certainly won't happen by 2030.
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I've been at my new job for a month now. I'm working through a recruiter for the first 3 months.
The recruiter's accounting department just accidentally CC'd me on an invoice to the company's accounting department here with a copy of their invoice.
Now that I know how much the company is REALLY paying... I can't wait to negotiate when I go full time.
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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Well, you should CC to us(CPian) too. It might help for future
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Might not be an accident.
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Do not forget that if the recruiter company is paying the employee tax and benefits the amount will be much hire. When a company I worked for would bid a project they would bid you at three times your hourly amount to cover everything.
Mongo: Mongo only pawn... in game of life.
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The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde
Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
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“We imported them from a supplier in the UK as we couldn’t find anyone locally." Nooo.  The only, and properly local, delicacy I've ever tried is fried flying ants, and they were sort of good, slightly nutty, if any real taste at all.
No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly. - Oscar Wilde
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You cannot (legally) smoke or drink alcohol on California Beaches (apart from Paradise Cove) though that doesn't always stop people. Oddly, you can do either on Florida beaches. Not sure of other places. The Kommunist State of Kalifornia has some really draconian, leftist-inspired and completely dumb laws.
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Karel Čapek wrote: You cannot (legally) smoke or drink alcohol on California Beaches
Yes, and it's wonderful.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Of course, you can walk off the beach, perhaps to the car park, smoke a few and chug some beer before returning to your chair. 
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I remember when they passed the public smoking laws in California. It was so nice to not have to deal with smoke hardly at all anymore. I say to those laws.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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Me too!
(As someone who is actually allergic to tobacco smoke!)
"Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed."
- G.K. Chesterton
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Matt T Heffron wrote: (As someone who is actually allergic to tobacco smoke!)
Since it causes cancer and other health issues, one could say that everyone is "allergic" to the smoke. 
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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RyanDev wrote: Since it causes cancer and other health issues,
Rather certain that for the average person spending the day on a beach in California is going to have a greater negative potential impact on their health than anything besides fantasy land stories associated with second hand smoke on those same beaches.
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RyanDev wrote: You think it's a fantasy that second-hand smoke causes cancer
What part of the beach and spending the day on it did you not understand in that post and which I specifically pointed out?
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You made it clear that you believe second hand smoke in a beach setting will do nothing. Don't expect me to participate in your delusions.
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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RyanDev wrote: You made it clear that you believe second hand smoke in a beach setting will do nothing
And you made it clear that you have no understanding of all associated risks at a beach nor the relative nature of each.
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jschell wrote: that you have no understanding of all associated risks at a beach
Sharks. Meteors hitting the earth. Fat guys with no shirt on. Sure, I understand all the risks. What else is there?
There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
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RyanDev wrote: What else is there?
Skin cancer. Rip tides. And others.
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