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Category: internet – Page 242

The rumors were true. Microsoft has announced an Xbox variant with no optical disc drive called the Xbox One S All-Digital Edition. It looks the same as any other Xbox One S with the important distinction that there’s no drive slot on the front. Microsoft will push game downloads, and it’s including a few of them free with the console. That might nudge some people to drop $250 on the device when it launches in a few weeks, but the pricing still seems too high.

Without the optical drive, Microsoft’s new game console won’t be able to play your existing game discs or Blu-ray movies. However, any digital Xbox content you own will be available on the All-Digital Edition. This seems mainly like a play to attract new gamers who don’t have a giant library of now-useless discs. It also ties neatly into the recently unveiled Game Pass subscription and xCloud game streaming tech.

The All-Digital Edition console comes with free downloads of Sea of Thieves, Forza Horizon 3, and Minecraft. Microsoft also stresses that all your games, saves, and backups are available in the cloud. You’ll just need a speedy internet connection to access them on short notice. You can at least pre-load new games on the All-Digital Edition to start playing them as soon as they’re live. That might be even faster than popping in a disc that requires installation and patching on launch day.

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EU researchers have developed a graphene-enabled detector for terahertz light that is faster and more sensitive than existing room-temperature technologies. This can lead to a fully digital low-cost terahertz camera system. This could be as cheap as the camera inside the smartphone, since such a detector has proven to have a very low power consumption and is fully compatible with CMOS technology.

Detecting terahertz (THz) light is extremely useful for two main reasons. Firstly, THz technology is becoming a key element in applications regarding security (such as airport scanners), wireless data communication, and quality control, to mention just a few. However, current THz detectors have shown strong limitations in terms of simultaneously meeting the requirements for sensitivity, speed, spectral range, being able to operate at room temperature.

Secondly, it is a very safe type of radiation due to its low-energy photons, with more than a hundred times less energy than that of photons in the visible light range.

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A team of University of Otago/Dodd-Walls Centre scientists have created a novel device that could enable the next generation of faster, more energy efficient internet. Their breakthrough results have been published in the world’s premiere scientific journal Nature this morning.

The internet is one of the single biggest consumers of power in the world. With data capacity expected to double every year and the used to encode and process data reaching its limits, there is huge pressure to find new solutions to increase the speed and capacity of the internet.

Principal Investigator Dr. Harald Schwefel and Dr. Madhuri Kumari’s research has found an answer. They have created a device called a microresonator made out of a tiny disc of crystal. The device transforms a single colour of into a rainbow of 160 different frequencies – each beam totally in sync with each other and perfectly stable. One such device could replace hundreds of power-consuming lasers currently used to encode and send data around the world.

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The goal of a worldwide “quantum internet” could be one step closer thanks to new experiments by researchers in Japan and Canada who have made the first ever quantum repeaters that work using an all-photonic protocol. The scheme importantly allows for the time-reversed adaptive Bell measurement, which is a key component for all-photonic quantum repeaters. It is based on optical devices alone and does not require any quantum memories or quantum error correction.

The Internet as we know it was not designed to be secure, and hacking, break-ins and espionage are unfortunately par for the course today. A quantum internet would be much more secure – as well as being much faster – since it exploits key features of quantum physics such as quantum entanglement.

Entanglement and quantum memories.

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David Chalmers is University Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University. He is best known for his work on consciousness, including his formulation of the “hard problem” of consciousness; Daniel C. Dennett is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of a dozen books, including Consciousness Explained, and, most recently, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds; John Brockman, moderator, is a cultural impresario whose career has encompassed the avant-garde art world, science, books, software, and the Internet. He is the author of By The Late John Brockman and The Third Culture; editor of the Edge Annual Question book series, and Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI.

[ED. NOTE: On Saturday, March 9th, more than 1200 people jammed into Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, for a conversation between two of our greatest philosophers, David Chalmers and Daniel C. Dennett: “Is Superintelligence Impossible?” the next event in Edge’s ongoing “Possible Minds Project.” Watch the video, listen to the EdgeCast, read the transcript. Thanks to physicist, artist, author, and Edgie Janna Levin, Director of Sciences at Pioneer Works, who presented the event with the support of Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative. —JB]

Somebody said that the philosopher is the one who says, “We know it’s possible in practice, we’re trying to figure out if it’s possible in principle.” Unfortunately, philosophers sometimes spend too much time worrying about logical possibilities that are importantly negligible in every other regard. So, let me go on the record as saying, yes, I think that conscious AI is possible because, after all, what are we? We’re conscious. We’re robots made of robots made of robots. We’re actual. In principle, you could make us out of other materials. Some of your best friends in the future could be robots. Possible in principle, absolutely no secret ingredients, but we’re not going to see it. We’re not going to see it for various reasons. One is, if you want a conscious agent, we’ve got plenty of them around and they’re quite wonderful, whereas the ones that we would make would be not so wonderful. —Daniel C. Dennett

One of our questions here is, is superintelligence possible or impossible? I’m on the side of possible. I like the possible, which is one reason I like John’s theme, “Possible Minds.” That’s a wonderful theme for thinking about intelligence, both natural and artificial, and consciousness, both natural and artificial. … The space of possible minds is absolutely vast—all the minds there ever have been, will be, or could be. Starting with the actual minds, I guess there have been a hundred billion or so humans with minds of their own. Some pretty amazing minds have been in there. Confucius, Isaac Newton, Jane Austen, Pablo Picasso, Martin Luther King, on it goes. But still, those hundred billion minds put together are just the tiniest corner of this space of possible minds. —David Chalmers

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A team has proposed using nanobots to create the ‘internet of thoughts’, where instant knowledge could be downloaded just by thinking it.

An international team of scientists led by members of UC Berkeley and the US Institute for Molecular Manufacturing predicts that exponential progress in nanotechnology, nanomedicine, artificial intelligence (AI) and computation will lead this century to the development of a human ‘brain-cloud interface’ (B-CI).

Writing in Frontiers in Neuroscience, the team said that a B-CI would connect neurons and synapses in the brain to vast cloud computing networks in real time.

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Scientists say our brains will connect to computers within decades to form an ‘internet of thoughts’ that will provide instant access to information…

Forward-leaning scientists and researchers say advancements in society’s computers and biotechnology will go straight to our heads — literally.

In a new paper published in the Frontiers in Neuroscience, researchers embarked on an international collaboration that predicts groundbreaking developments in the world of ‘Human Brain/Cloud Interface’s’ within the next few decades.

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