Slashdot Mirror

NoWhere Man writes "Raging Bull has an article which states that Intel is having to shrink its die size earlier than expected to keep up with AMD's Athlon. "Intel couldn't afford to wait on developing a mainstream desktop Willamette chip," McComas said. "They've returned to the old tried-and-true Pentium III core as a quick fix." The new Pentium III speed grade will be among the first to use Intel's new 0.13-micron wafer processing with copper interconnect. At the same time, Intel is said to be readying a 200-MHz frontside bus to support the faster Pentium III."

NoWhere Man writes "Raging Bull has an article which states that Intel is having to shrink its die size earlier than expected to keep up with AMD's Athlon. "Intel couldn't afford to wait on developing a mainstream desktop Willamette chip," McComas said. "They've returned to the old tried-and-true Pentium III core as a quick fix." The new Pentium III speed grade will be among the first to use Intel's new 0.13-micron wafer processing with copper interconnect. At the same time, Intel is said to be readying a 200-MHz frontside bus to support the faster Pentium III."

Stefan MacGeek writes: "Nvidia, the manufacturer for 3D graphics chips has closed an OEM deal with Apple. Future Macs will use Nvidia graphics chips. Nvidia has recently presented the GeForce 2 MX, their first chip suitable for use in Macs. It is not yet known if Nvidia will take over as Apple's main supplier of graphics chips from ATI. Source: The German computer news site Heise " Here's a link to the story itself, und wenn Sie Deutsch nicht können, continue your scavenger hunt at Babelfish. This sounds great for Macs and their users. One thing to keep in mind though: the article cautions that it's unclear whether nVidia chips will be installed as full-fledged video cards, or integrated as in previous Macintosh models. [Updated 8 July 3:00GMT by timothy] An alert Bethor points to this MacCentral story in which Nvidia denies the whole thing, claiming that such news is at least months in the future.

Cannonball writes: "An article posted by Alta Vista Tech announces the sale of Bungie to Microsoft for an undisclosed sum. Halo will become an X-Box title." There's been rumors about this for the last few days, but here's the confirmation. Bungie makes such fine titles as the Myth series - which I really enjoyed.

Unhappy Windows User asks: "An article on AltaVista states that Microsoft will "fight to the death anything that threatens its intellectual property". The article states that, by keeping APIs closed, Microsoft has an advantage over other software vendors such as Corel. But how exactly would disclosing the source code be a threat to IP? After all, it's still protected by copyright, isn't it? Not publishing the source code simply gives Microsoft a chance to leverage their monopoly on the market. What's to stop companies distributing software with source code whilst maintaining the copyright to it? This would only allow other companies to write software that integrates with it, and the security-conscious would be able to check the code for bugs and potential security flaws. After all, when I buy a car, I cannot make an identical copy and sell it, as the design is protected by copyright. But I am entitled to look inside, and fix it if something's wrong. " Interesting thought. Would the revealing of source code damage IP rights simply because it is in the open for all to see? Your ideas still remain your ideas and your implementation of said ideas are still yours as well, right?

MicAttAck writes: "This Heise-Article (in German: use your Fish in the ear) reports: Scientists of the University of Essen have developed a method to arrange gold-55-nano-clusters. These gold-clusters (so called quantum-points) are the building blocks for nano-transistors. Because of the special properties of these clusters, they can actually hold an electron (normally gold leads electric current very well). They release the electron when they are "sucked out" by electric voltage. The gold-clusters are coated with a special plastic to insulate them and to achieve a structured arrangement. The two chemists Monika Baeumle and Norbert Beyer who developed this got an award yesterday (2000-05-18) for their achievement. "

LindaAthena writes "Thus were the words from a French report on a meeting of the G8 nations and 150 representatives of companies from the communications and information technology sectors. A summit on cyber crime was held in Paris with the U.S. pushing for total police power to bypass due process and other countries' laws to catch cyber-criminals (as defined, of course, by the U.S.). Note that public images of nudity in France are rated "G" while U.S. protected "racial hatred speech" is a crime there. The article from Le Monde can be found in the original French or viewed in Babelfish. " A number of people have submitted this recently from the recent G8 meeting. The U.S. apparently pushed very hard for major cyberpolicing actions, while France was one of the few nations in the group that adopted a more intelligent long-term view.

Remember the plan, in the U.S. and Canada, to tax DAT and send the profits to the music labels? Bubblehead writes "GEMA successfully sued HP over the fact that music CDs can be copied with CD-Rs. Now HP has to pay DM17 (US$8) for each CD burner sold since February 1998. So far I only found a German article on this (AP). You can translate with Babelfish. I think this is going too far - it's like adding a surcharge to a camera, because you might take a photo of an expensive painting."

Members of the band Metallica have agreed, through their publicist, to answer questions from Slashdot readers about their recent legal actions against Napster and Napster users. They did a live chat interview Tuesday on the subject with a crowd rounded up by artistdirect.com and Yahoo!. Now it's our turn, so let's give them a fine, thorough, Slashdot-style grilling. (more)

Notes before you post:

1) Due to an anticipated high volume of questions, please confine yourself to one question per post, and keep it short! As usual, we'll allow 24 hours for posting and moderation, then select 10 - 15 of the highest-moderated questions and send them to our interview guest(s) by e-mail. Answers will be posted as soon as we get them back, hopefully within the next week.

2) Please read some of what other people have had to say before posting; Richard Stallman made some comments about Napster and Metallica in his interview here earlier this week. Bruce Perens has written an interesting piece on Napster and Free Software which we also suggest reading, along with Jon Katz's most recent editorial about this brou-ha-ha. We also suggest a fast look at this story (and the comments attached to it), and possibly a quick perusal of other material on the subject previously published here and elsewhere.

3. Credit where credit is due: Emmett Plant set this up. It wasn't easy. Please thank him profusely. He deserves it.

It's been a busy week for Napster and Gnutella... mbell sent us an MSNBC story on Gnutella which gets a lot of stuff right, but spends more time proclaiming that it's all about kiddie porn to really give the point fair time. the geek noted a wired bit about a San Diego ISP banning Napster from their clients: this is because it's a "Server", not because it's controversial software tho, but it's at least nice to know your ISP is watching what you do. The thing that bothers me most is that accounts were threatened even tho they weren't exceeding bandwidth quotas. Seems harsh. And finally NeoMage pointed out that the once amazing (face it, Kill 'm All and Master of Puppets are amazing albums) Metallica has become the first 'big name' band to sue Napster for copyright violations against the artists' music.

Professor Pollack put a lot of time and thought into answering your questions, and it shows. What follows is a "deeper than we expected" series of comments about Artificial Intelligence and intellectual property distribution from one of the acknowledged leaders in both fields. How do you justify your expectations? (Score:5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward For the past 40 years, AI has just been 10 years or so away.

It's still just 10 years or so away.

It's not getting any closer.

How do you justify any degree of optimism about the future of AI at this point? What makes now fundamentally different from anytime in the past 40 years?

It is funny, this is the same question I asked Marvin Minsky, the father of AI, at ALife 5 in Japan. He attacked every modern approach, including neural nets, fuzzy logic, evolutionary algorithms, and so on for over an hour, suggesting that his student's (Winston's) thesis should have been the paradigm of the field! I asked, "If AI sucks so much, why are you still in the field after 40 years?"

Hypocrite! Here I am, still in the field after 20 years! As soon as I've convinced myself one approach to AI is too slow, I find another, leaving quietly without attacking the friends I've made. AI is a big wide open field with a lot of smart people trying different things. (Savage attacks by insiders exiting are the worst thing in science, such as Bar Hillel's attack on Machine Translation in the 60's. Forty Years later, MT is "cool" again, in this month's issue of Wired.)

So I can say that, from my perspective as having worked on many different approaches to AI, writing problem space search algorithms for solving puzzles will not result in a general problem solver. Automating predicate logic won't make a computer equivalent to a philosopher. A computer can't do natural language any better than Eliza, without an internal need to communicate to survive and a large blessing of custom hardware. Neural nets are great function approximators with good mathematical results on limited kinds of learning, but we can't set 12 weights to get what we want, let alone 10 billion weights. And even though simple nonlinear systems give off chaos and fractals, Kolmogorov's law tells us simple systems are still simple. Evolution is one path to complexity, but most genetic algorithms simply search a finite search space and optimize a fixed goal.

So I'm locally pessimistic but globally optimistic! Who said AI is 10 years away? It's here now, in limited forms, yielding a lot of economic value, as your mouse clickstream is datamined so the ads which pop up are for things you might actually buy. But the SF ideal of a humanoid robot like Commander Data is centuries away.

I hold the view that any system which responds to its environment in a conditional way based on some internal state, even a thermostat, has a bit of intelligence. Immune systems, ecologies, and economies design things and solve problems. Every computer program you write has a bit of intelligence captured in it. The problem is, real AI of the sort you are alluding to is an organization which might be realizable as a 10 billion line program or a 10 billion weight dynamical neural system, and no human software engineering team can write autonomous code which is more than 10-100 million lines. Even Windows is just DOS with wallpaper, and big applications always require a human in the loop, selecting subprograms from menus or command lines.

Since 1994, we've been working on how to automatically evolve physical symbol systems which would have 10 billion unique moving parts, what we call "Biologically Complex" systems. When I say "We," it is because everything I do is in collaboration with my Ph.D students! A 10 Billion Line program is an absurd goal obviously, but it drives our research to focus in on the process of growth itself, rather than on what shortcuts we can accomplish by hand. We look at co-evolution, which involves machine learners training each other, and on questions of what kinds of substrates for computing could provide a universe of functionality while being constrained in a way which reduces the size or dimensionality of the search space. This constraint is called inductive bias. We seek minimal inductive bias systems, in which the human hints, or "gradient engineering" tricks are fully explicit. (Sevan Ficici, Richard Watson) We still work on neural nets and fractals as a substrate, and have made some progress in understanding how they work (Ofer Melnik, Simon Levy).

It's been more than five years, and while we are not even at the million line mark yet, I am still optimistic and haven't given up on co-evolution to move to a new field. I think that my lab has made progress in understanding why Hillis's sorting networks and Tesauro's Backgammon player were such breakthroughs and where they were limited. (Hugue Juille, Alan Blair). I think we have begun to understand the nature of mediocrity as an attractor in educational systems and how to change the utility functions to avoid collusion, and apply this to human learning (Elizabeth Sklar). We have become more applied, bring co-evolution to the Internet and to robotics, replicating and extending the beautiful results of Karl Sims from 1994 (Pablo Funes, Greg Hornby, Hod Lipson). All the work is available to study at the laboratory's Web site.

AI and ethics. (Score:5, Interesting) by kwsNI What do you say to the people that feel it is unethical to try to create "intelligence"?

I take this as a shorter version of the longer religious question the editor thankfully didn't select. I've talked to myrabbi, perhaps one of the great theologians around today. Even though I am an atheist, he thinks I am on a spiritual quest to understand [God as] the principles of the universe which allow self-organization of life as a chemical process far from equilibrium which dissipates energy and creates structure that exploits emergent properties of physics. Can a spiritual quest be unethical? I suggest that people with this question read Three Scientists and Their God, by Robert Wright, or watch the Morris documentary "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control".

A second ethical question, besides usurping God's rights, is how can you take funding from national and military agencies like NSF, Darpa and ONR? For the past 50 years at least, they have been the seed capital for the science behind most of the technological progress I know about. With the venture capital economy, that curiosity-based seed function may be privatized, if some of the big VC funds dedicate 10% for long range science, and the ethical question of whether you are doing something for public good or private gain begins to dominate over the religious and military questions. That is the same question many scientists and Linux hackers ask themselves daily: Can I do good and make money without a conflict of interest?

Turing award. (Score:5, Funny) by V. Do we win something if we can fool him into answering a computer-generated question? ;)

It has always been the case that limiting the range of dialog leads to more successful masquerading. In our CEL online educational game, for example, the only interactions between players are the actual plays, which enables artificial agents to be accepted as game partners.

BTW, the Turing Award is an annual lifetime achievement award in computer science, which has gone to people like John Backus for his eloquent apology for Fortran when he should have given us APL and LISP. The Turing Test is the name given to Alan Turing's proposal for testing for successful AI. Given that we don't deny airplanes fly, I think if AI ever flies, we won't question it. So I propose using the Louis Armstrong Test, his answer to the question "What is jazz?"

How should an amateur get started working on AI? (Score:5,Interesting) by Henry House It seems to me that a significant problem holding back the development of AI is that few non-professionals grok AI well enough to offer any contribution to the AI and open-source communities. What do you suggest that I, as a person interested in both AI and open source, do about this? What are the professionals in the AI field doing about this?

Reading is fundamental.

Frankenstein (Score:5, Interesting) by Borealis For a long time there has been a fear of a Frankenstein being incarnated with AI. Movies like The Matrix and the recent essay by Bill Joy both express worries that AI (in the form of self replicating robots with some AI agenda) can possibly overcome us if we are not careful. Personally I have always considered the idea rather outlandish, but I'm wondering what an actual expert thinks about the idea.

Do you believe that there is any foundation for worry? If so, what areas should we concentrate on to be sure to avoid any problems? If not, what are the limiting factors that prevent an "evil" AI?

AI doesn't kill People. AI might make guns smart enough to sense the weight or handsize of the user, preventing children from killing each other. Everything ever invented is capable of good or evil. Evil arises most often when masses of humans are denied fundamental rights. The Evil Rate and Unemployment Rate are closely linked.

I read Bill Joy's article in Wired last month. And I loved the Unabomber's excerpt because it is based on some of the best Philip Dick paranoid Science Fiction, like: Vulcan's Hammer, We Can Build You, and the Simulacrum. There is a lot of SF on the Golem question and one of my favorites is Marge Piercy's He, She, and It , which proposes a moratorium on AI inside humanoid robots. You can have smart software on the Web, and human looking idiobots, but you can't put real AI inside human looking robots, or you have to pay the price.

My lab is indeed working on self-replicating robotics and were worried for a split second about getting the fetal brain tissue reaction when our paper comes out shortly. We can now envision the "third bootstrap", after precision manufacturing and computation, where machines make the machines which make themselves, just as machine tools are used to make more machine tools, and computers compile their own programs. But the replication loop is quite a sophisticated automatic manufacturing process, which requires a large industrial infrastructure, and a lot of liability insurance. So far, no VC's, Saudi Princes, or government agencies have offered the necessary $500M first round of financing for fullyautomateddesign.com.

It would be wrong of me to say leave my frankenbots alone, and go after frankenfoods and frankenano. I think Joe Weizenbaum's book should be required reading, because every few years somebody else comes up with the idea of inserting computers inside animal bodies, so that the first act of any war will be to exterminate all nonhuman life forms. But I do think we have to worry more about large scale industrial and agricultural processes which are allowed to externalize their by-products affecting the environment, than we need worry about robotic ice-9. We will die quicker from e-mail spam caused by viral marketing customer acquisition schemes or from global warming and ozone depletion triggering major climactic change, red tide or another pollutant taking out fish from the food chain, or even from people throwing away old EGA screens and 386 motherboards in landfills, poisoning the aquifers. I promise that for every robot we build, there will be another robot to recycle it when its job is complete.

Anyhow, IMO Joy's angst must reflect the Sun setting on any instruction set architecture besides x86, but that's a different discussion. Talk to me about the ethics, when your very own open source movement leads to the inevitability of an Intel instruction set monopoly by providing a useful alternative to Microsoft :)

Questions based on your academic path (Score:5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward The way to the field of AI isn't always extremely clear. What type of background do they expect? Is it mostly a researching position or is it treated like a normal job with normal goals? Are there any classes or subjects or schools you recommend to make it into the AI field? Also, how exactly did you get into the field? How did AI intrigue you into what you do now, despite all the controversy to create an intelligence that could possibly be considered a "god" compared to the human existence? Very interesting to say the least, and something I'm interested in.

There is no AI business field to speak of which is differentiated from the general software business. Most companies which were "AI companies" in an earlier generation of university spin-offs for Lisp Machines, and Expert Systems Shells, failed miserably. Venture Capitalists won't fall into the same sinkhole twice. There are industrial process control companies which use refined bits of AI, e.g. in visual inspection of manufacturing processes, and Neural Network companies, like HNC, who have changed business plans and are now "pattern-recognition e-commerce security." companies. The Speech recognition industry has condensed into one company. Web- based AI means search engines and Language Engines. Ask Jeeves and Google and Direct Hit and many others may use bits of AI and adaptive technologies in their system.

Jobs in AI are just like software jobs everywhere: chain you to a workstation and make you work out boring details in exchange for salary and very little equity. But find a great graduate program in computer science, and you will likely find fun and exciting work for no salary and no equity! And you have to be great at both real and discrete mathematics as well as a natural born programming genius.

As for me, I started programming computers in APL as a freshman in college, and because it was such a high level language and I didn't sleep much, I wrote an awful lot of code in a few years. I was naturally drawn to building heuristic puzzle solvers, game players, and logical theorem provers. Before I met my wife, friends thought I was in love with computers. After working at IBM, I went to graduate school in Urbana and worked with David Waltz on LISP hacking, natural language processing, and reinvented neural networks, which were censored from the AI curriculum of the early 80's. I came to the limit of what could be done with neural networks for intelligence by 1988, and at Ohio State University, started looking at fractals and chaos as a source for generativity. Unfortunately, interesting behavior requires lots of levels and lots of parameters, which is why we started looking at evolution for selecting and adjusting lots of parameters, a focus since I've been at Brandeis.

While there is a lot of detailed work and dead ends, the search for mechanical intelligence is one of the great unsolved problems, which is in some way deeply equivalent to questions on the origin of life, human language, morphogenesis, child development, and human cultural and economic change. John Casti's book is a great place to start reading about these big problems.

Human brain - AI connection - is there? (Score:5, Interesting) Do you think that a greater understanding of the human brain and how intelligence has emerged in us is crucial to the creation of AI, or do you think that the two are unconnected? Will a greater understanding of memory and thought aid in development, or will AI be different enough so that such knowledge isn't required?

Also, what do you think about the potential of the models used today to attempt to achieve a working AI? Do you think that the models themselves (e.g. the neural net model) are correct and have the potential to produce an AI given enough power and configuration, or do you think that our current models are just a stepping stone along the way to a better model which is required for success?

Obviously there are clear medicinal benefits to brain research. And the study of any real biological system leads to interesting metaphors which can be the basis for a novel computational model. But I think it is unlikely that research into the biology of the brain is crucial to understanding cognition or replicating intelligence. It's like studying the width of wires in integrated circuits of a computer. Even if you get the whole wiring diagram for a computer, it still tells you little about the programs running on it. I think understanding the brain is a problem which is underestimated. I heard 25,000 scientists attend the annual Neurosciences meeting, three times the largest ever interested in AI. It could be called the Mandelsciences meeting, and different labs compete to describe what they find in those little windows on the Mandelbrot set! But I have a lot of friends who are neuroscientists, and I can be just as facetious about linguistics.

Seriously, I believe we have to understand and replicate the processes which lead to the development of the brain and its behavior, not replicate the mammalian brain itself.

The second part of your question "how intelligence has emerged in us" can be interpreted as a more interesting direction. Here, there is a lot of opportunity to relate human intelligence as animal intelligence plus a little more. The fields of evolutionary epistemology, adaptive behavior, and computational neuroethology are quite interesting. It is a great question to understand cognition as it appears in other animals, insects, worms, and even bacterial colonies. The basic principles of multicellular cooperation are more important than the millions of specific adaptations of the human brain.

As for models question, it is sort of like asking whether a chair is built out of metal, wood, plastic, rubber, or cardboard. It doesn't matter, as long as it are strong enough. The organization of molecules has to provide a surface and a normal force at the right height for sitting. As for the organization of 10 billion things which might make an AI? Doesn't matter if it is c, java, lisp, neurons, or tightly coupled markovian 2nd order polynomial fuzzy sets. Will it stand, or collapse under its own weight?

most likely path? (Score:5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward Dr Jordan:

Do you think that AI is more likely to arise as the result of explicit efforts to create an intelligent system by programmers, or by evolution of artificial life entities? Or on the third hand, do you think efforts like Cog (training the machine like a child, with a long, human aided learning process) will be the first to create a thinking machine?

We are taking the second path, seeking the principles for self-organization so we can harness them to create and invent forms of organization.. There is a 4th path you don't mention, which is the terminator/Truenames hypothesis, that AI will simply arise among the powerful router machines of the internet. How would we recognize coherent behavior arising in telecom infrastructure if it didn't wake up talking English? I think a SETI for coherent intentional behavior emerging out of the infrastructure would be a fun project to do for the people worrying about risks to the information infrastructure.

Software Market & Open Source (Score:5, Insightful) by Breace In your 'hyperbook' about your idea of a software market I noticed that you say that Open Source evangelists should support your movement because it will be (quote) A way for your next team to be rewarded for their creative work if it turns into Sendmail, Apache, or Linux.

I assume (from reading other parts) that you are talking about a monetary reward. My question is (and this is not meant as a flame by any means), do you really think that that's what the Open Source community is after, after all? Do you think that people like Torvalds or RMS are unhappy for not being rewarded enough?

If the OS community doesn't care about monetary rewards, is there an other benefit in having your proposed Software Market?

According to economic theory, utility is what motivates you to make decisions in your own self interest. Simple games, like the prisoner's dilemma, rationalize utility with numeric values to illustrate the concept, but it isn't money at all. If someone behaves in an unpredictable way, we must have our definition of their utility wrong.

There are plenty of motivations for writing open source code, including the challenge and the feeling of altruism, both of which have utility. A lot of people may write open source for credit in the community, which also has utility. If RMS was a radical advocate of anonymity who wrote the GPL so you couldn't put your name on the source code because it promoted the glorification of the individual, participating might provide less utility.

Why not Write a Screensaver? (Score:5, Interesting) by peteshaw First of all, it is indeed an honor to pester a big name scientist with my puny little questions! Hopefully I will not arouse angst with the simplicity of my perceptions. Aha! I toss my Wheaties on Mount Olympus and hope to see golden flakes drift down from the sky!

I have always thought that distributed computing naturally lends itself to large scale AI problems, specifically your Neural Networks and Dynamical Systems work. I am thinking specifically of the SETI@home project, and the distributed.net projects. Have you thought about, or to your knowledge has anyone thought about harnessing the power of collective geekdom for sort of a brute force approach to neural networks. I don't know how NN normally work, but it seems that you could write a very small, lightweight client, and embed it into a screen saver a'la SETI@home. This SS would really be really a simple client 'node'. You could then add some cute graphics like a picture of a human brain and some brightly colored synapses or what have you.

Once the /.ers got their hands on such a geek toy I have no doubt you'd have the equivalent of several hundred thousand hours or more of free computer time, and who knows, maybe we could all make a brain together! I would love to think of my computer as a small cog in some vast neural network, or at least I would until Arnold Schwarzenegger got sent back in time to kill my mom. Whaddayathink, Jordan? Is this a good idea, or am I an idiot?

No, its very imaginative. You could be one of my AI grad students. But rather than focusing on neural networks, which, because of matrix multiplication, do not distribute well, people are looking at such systems for evolutionary computation. You can evolve individuals on networked workstations and collect them, or evolve populations which interact occasionally and pass dna around. Look at Tom Ray's Net Tierra project to see how it is going. My colleague Hod Lipson is developing a screensaver for our evolutionary robotics project, but release 1 will be Windows rather than Linux compatible (./sorry)

Actually, one of my early business plans for the Internet, circa the first working java browsers, was to show naughty pictures while harvesting cycles from your computer and reselling them to people needing computer time. All was needed was an assembly language interpreter in java and some interfacing. The problem is that most computationally intense problems people want to solve have large data flow requirements which conflict with the download of the naughty pictures! When I recently tried to corner the market in pig latin domain names for my new "incubator", panies.com panies.com, I didn't secure putation.com because it sounded bad. One week later I realized it was a pretty good name for a distributed computation service, but somebody else had grabbed the URL!

However, there is a critical piece missing from all these visions. intelligence is a property of an organization of computation, it is not computation itself. The problem of robotics is not the limited power of microcomputers, since we could drive any robot from a supercomputer if we knew what to write! We can get infinite cycles already, but nobody can write a coherent program bigger than 10M lines. We have figure out to use cycles towards discovery of a process of self-organization, rather than on a known software organization itself.

AI Metrics (Score:5, Interesting) by john_many_jars I have read several coffee table science books on the subject and often find myself asking for a way to measure AI. As has been noted, AI is always elusive and is just around the corner. My question is how do you gauge how far AI has come and what is AI?

For instance, what's the difference between your TRON demonstration and a highly advanced system of solving a (very specific) non-linear differential equation to find relative and (hopefully absolute) extrema in the wildly complicated space of TRON strategies? Or, is that the definition of intelligence?

This is a very hard question which I won't be able to joke my way out of. I think that system performance in specific domains can be measured, like a rating system for a game likeTRON. I think we might be able to get a measure of the generative capacity of a system in all possible environments, by capturing strings of symbols representing different actions, and looking at the grammar of behavior. In general, however, observers have an effect on their observations of computational capacity. I usually think of intelligence as a measurement, not the thing being measured, sort of like the difference between temperature and heat, or weight and mass. It could be a measurement of operational knowledge (programmed, not static in a database), or of efficient use of knowledge resources. This measurement is applied to an organization. So committees of very smart people can operate idiotically, and groups of dumb insects can be very intelligent.

My current best working definition is that intelligence is the ratio of the amount of problem-solving accomplished to the number of cycles wasted. When I say we need 10B lines of code, it is not to say that raw program size is a measure of intelligence, but to express the idea that inside that code are enough different heuristics and gizmos to solve lots of problems effectively.

And what about Freedom? (Score:5, Insightful) by Hobbex Mr. Pollack,

I read your article about "information property" and was surprised to find you dealt with the matter completely from the point of view of advancing the market. Their are those of us who would argue that the wellbeing of the market is, at most, a second order concern, and that the important issues that Information age gives rise regarding the perceived ownership of information are really about Freedom and integrity.

These issues range from the simple desire to have the right to do whatever one wants with data that one has access to, to the simple futility and danger of trying to limit to paying individuals something that by nature, mathematics, and now technology is Free. They concern the fact that our machines are now so integral in our lives that they have become a part of our identity, with our computers as the extension of ourselves into "cyberspace", and that any proposal which aims to keep the total right to control over everything in the computer away from the user is thus an invasion into our integrity, personality, and freedom.

Do you consider the economics of the market to be a greater concern than individual freedom?

This is a beautiful question, thank you. My book is exactly about freedom and rights: The freedom to sell a copy of a book you are done reading. The freedom to share in the rewards when something you design or write is in demand by millions of people. The right to own what you buy.

I see an inexorable movement towards dispossessionism, both coming from the "right," with UCITA, secured digital rights, anti-crypto-tampering in the DMCA, and ASP subscription models, and coming from the "left", with ideas that we should give our writing up into free collectivist projects.

The Internet is the beginning of Goldstein's "celestial jukebox," the encyclopedia of everything anyone has ever written, every episode of every TV show, and every song by every band. It sounds wonderful until you realize that you will have to pay per view! Bill Gates now has the money to deploy satellites which will force you to rent his word processor for $1/hour, the same rate for renting a movie. The laws on theft of satellite programs, unfortunately, as legal doctrine goes, considers decoding satellite broadcasts as theft of cable services, rather than as protected first amendment rights to receive radio broadcasts. Once secure distribution of programs on a rental basis is established, all content publishing will move inexorably into that mode to maximize profits. No more books, no more records. No more ownership. Dispossession.

The Free software movement, League for Programming Freedom, Open Source Software, on the other hand, talk idealistic young individuals out of their writing. "Contribute it towards a greater good." Be rewarded by occasional e-mails of thanks from your peers. The Free Music movement, or "let's RIP our CD's and trade MP3s through Napster" isn't as politically as economically motivated, but is also making musicians contribute their work for the greater good, at least of dormitories! Dispossession.

Fascism and Communism, while they have philosophical appeal for their mimetic simplicity, have proven themselves consistently the enemies of freedom, enterprise and creativity. Ordinary people are "dispossessed" of their property, which ends up, not surprisingly, in the pockets of the promoters of the simple philosophy.

My purpose in writing License to Bill is to begin a discussion not only on a societal remedy to the microsoft problem, but to secure, as a human right, the right to own information properties I buy, rather than just being able to rent them. I especially want the right to own and sell copies of my own creations, and to own a library of other's creations, reasonably priced based on supply and demand, without fear that a change in technology will render my investments worthless..

A market is just a mechanism which humanity uses to allocate resources fairly. It is neither good nor evil.

To which I would add... (Score:5, Interesting) by joss I also read your IP proposal, and agree with the points mentioned above.

However, I also have a problem with your proposal from an economic perspective:

Property laws developed as a mechanism for optimal utilization of scarce resources. The laws and ethics for standard property make little sense when the cost of replication is $0. The market is the best mechanism for distributing scarce resources, so you propose we make all IP resources scarce so that IP behaves like other commodities and all the laws of the market apply.

We are rapidly entering a world where most wealth is held as a form of IP. Free replication of IP increases the net wealth of the planet. If everybody on earth had access to all the IP on earth, then everybody would be far richer - it's not a zero sum game. Of course, we're several decades at least from this being a viable option since we've reached a local minima. (Need equivalent to starship replicators first - nanotech...)

Artificially pretending that IP is a scarce resource will keep the lawyers, accountants, politicians in work, and will also allow some money to flow back to the creatives, but at the cost of impoverishing humanity.

I could actually see your proposal being adopted, and I can see how it will maintain capitalism as the dominant model, but I also believe that it is the most damaging economic suggestion in human history

Could you tell me why I'm wrong.

Wow! "I also believe that it is the most damaging economic suggestion in human history" Surely this is a wonderful compliment.

The history and future of money is very interesting, and one you can read about in various books, including one byMilton Friedman, and one from the Cato Institute. I think today's software houses who force upgrades on their customers are like the wildcat banks of the nineteenth century, printing up banknotes, and then declaring bankruptcy, vanishing with the deposits and setting up shop in another town.

Before money, there was simply trade in raw and polished goods. Then there was weighing and coinage. Lots of people thought coins were the real value and heartily resisted paper money. The gold and silver standards gave way, and eventually the idea that there was gold for every dollar bill was revealed as a hoax, and now "money" is simply a record in your bank's computer that there is a certain amount you are entitled to withdraw based on the amounts other banks have deposited for you. The only essential different between a rich and poor person is what the bank computers and the registrar of deeds say it is, backed by military force. And the money supply and international exchanges now somehow represents our national wealth with respect to other nations, and other nation's confidence that our banking system isn't duplicating dollars. Instead of objects of trade, money is information about potential trade.

While you might not like the idea that money is abstract and in limited supply, and you have more or less than you want, it is the soft underbelly of "Starship Economics" that Gene Roddenberry died before coming up with the backstory for how to have a non-mediocre society with unlimited replication for all.

I once invented a transporter machine for paper using public key crypto and fax technology. It would hold the source paper in a metal box, verify the copy was printed, and then destroy the original and legitimize the copy. With this system, you could fax a dollar bill to a friend! Now: is a dollar bill is just the likeness of a dollar bill on a crinkly piece of thermal paper, or the actual piece of green stuff? If Paypal can figure out how you can beam money from your palmpilot to mine, but a bug lets you keep a copy of the money, I bet their valuation would go way down.

I am simply saying that permanent use and resale licenses to changeable information (software, art, literature, music, movies) which can be traded securely, without loss or duplication, in a public market, is a form of currency.

Unlimited replication of currency just doesn't work, any more than two copies of William Shatner.

I stake the middle ground. Both the "right" copyright publishers who make currency loss through expiring keys and forced upgrades, and the "left" copyright violators who duplicate currency, will be welcome at my table when they see the light.

----------

Thanks for your interesting questions. My comments do not reflect the official position of my employer Brandeis University, the sponsors of my laboratory's research, or the companies i am involved with, Abuzz, Xilicon, or Thinmail.

Humbly yours,
Jordan Pollack
Bigname@scientist.com
P.S. you too can be a scientist thanks to mail.com:)

Professor Pollack put a lot of time and thought into answering your questions, and it shows. What follows is a "deeper than we expected" series of comments about Artificial Intelligence and intellectual property distribution from one of the acknowledged leaders in both fields. How do you justify your expectations? (Score:5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward For the past 40 years, AI has just been 10 years or so away.

It's still just 10 years or so away.

It's not getting any closer.

How do you justify any degree of optimism about the future of AI at this point? What makes now fundamentally different from anytime in the past 40 years?

It is funny, this is the same question I asked Marvin Minsky, the father of AI, at ALife 5 in Japan. He attacked every modern approach, including neural nets, fuzzy logic, evolutionary algorithms, and so on for over an hour, suggesting that his student's (Winston's) thesis should have been the paradigm of the field! I asked, "If AI sucks so much, why are you still in the field after 40 years?"

Hypocrite! Here I am, still in the field after 20 years! As soon as I've convinced myself one approach to AI is too slow, I find another, leaving quietly without attacking the friends I've made. AI is a big wide open field with a lot of smart people trying different things. (Savage attacks by insiders exiting are the worst thing in science, such as Bar Hillel's attack on Machine Translation in the 60's. Forty Years later, MT is "cool" again, in this month's issue of Wired.)

So I can say that, from my perspective as having worked on many different approaches to AI, writing problem space search algorithms for solving puzzles will not result in a general problem solver. Automating predicate logic won't make a computer equivalent to a philosopher. A computer can't do natural language any better than Eliza, without an internal need to communicate to survive and a large blessing of custom hardware. Neural nets are great function approximators with good mathematical results on limited kinds of learning, but we can't set 12 weights to get what we want, let alone 10 billion weights. And even though simple nonlinear systems give off chaos and fractals, Kolmogorov's law tells us simple systems are still simple. Evolution is one path to complexity, but most genetic algorithms simply search a finite search space and optimize a fixed goal.

So I'm locally pessimistic but globally optimistic! Who said AI is 10 years away? It's here now, in limited forms, yielding a lot of economic value, as your mouse clickstream is datamined so the ads which pop up are for things you might actually buy. But the SF ideal of a humanoid robot like Commander Data is centuries away.

I hold the view that any system which responds to its environment in a conditional way based on some internal state, even a thermostat, has a bit of intelligence. Immune systems, ecologies, and economies design things and solve problems. Every computer program you write has a bit of intelligence captured in it. The problem is, real AI of the sort you are alluding to is an organization which might be realizable as a 10 billion line program or a 10 billion weight dynamical neural system, and no human software engineering team can write autonomous code which is more than 10-100 million lines. Even Windows is just DOS with wallpaper, and big applications always require a human in the loop, selecting subprograms from menus or command lines.

Since 1994, we've been working on how to automatically evolve physical symbol systems which would have 10 billion unique moving parts, what we call "Biologically Complex" systems. When I say "We," it is because everything I do is in collaboration with my Ph.D students! A 10 Billion Line program is an absurd goal obviously, but it drives our research to focus in on the process of growth itself, rather than on what shortcuts we can accomplish by hand. We look at co-evolution, which involves machine learners training each other, and on questions of what kinds of substrates for computing could provide a universe of functionality while being constrained in a way which reduces the size or dimensionality of the search space. This constraint is called inductive bias. We seek minimal inductive bias systems, in which the human hints, or "gradient engineering" tricks are fully explicit. (Sevan Ficici, Richard Watson) We still work on neural nets and fractals as a substrate, and have made some progress in understanding how they work (Ofer Melnik, Simon Levy).

It's been more than five years, and while we are not even at the million line mark yet, I am still optimistic and haven't given up on co-evolution to move to a new field. I think that my lab has made progress in understanding why Hillis's sorting networks and Tesauro's Backgammon player were such breakthroughs and where they were limited. (Hugue Juille, Alan Blair). I think we have begun to understand the nature of mediocrity as an attractor in educational systems and how to change the utility functions to avoid collusion, and apply this to human learning (Elizabeth Sklar). We have become more applied, bring co-evolution to the Internet and to robotics, replicating and extending the beautiful results of Karl Sims from 1994 (Pablo Funes, Greg Hornby, Hod Lipson). All the work is available to study at the laboratory's Web site.

AI and ethics. (Score:5, Interesting) by kwsNI What do you say to the people that feel it is unethical to try to create "intelligence"?

I take this as a shorter version of the longer religious question the editor thankfully didn't select. I've talked to myrabbi, perhaps one of the great theologians around today. Even though I am an atheist, he thinks I am on a spiritual quest to understand [God as] the principles of the universe which allow self-organization of life as a chemical process far from equilibrium which dissipates energy and creates structure that exploits emergent properties of physics. Can a spiritual quest be unethical? I suggest that people with this question read Three Scientists and Their God, by Robert Wright, or watch the Morris documentary "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control".

A second ethical question, besides usurping God's rights, is how can you take funding from national and military agencies like NSF, Darpa and ONR? For the past 50 years at least, they have been the seed capital for the science behind most of the technological progress I know about. With the venture capital economy, that curiosity-based seed function may be privatized, if some of the big VC funds dedicate 10% for long range science, and the ethical question of whether you are doing something for public good or private gain begins to dominate over the religious and military questions. That is the same question many scientists and Linux hackers ask themselves daily: Can I do good and make money without a conflict of interest?

Turing award. (Score:5, Funny) by V. Do we win something if we can fool him into answering a computer-generated question? ;)

It has always been the case that limiting the range of dialog leads to more successful masquerading. In our CEL online educational game, for example, the only interactions between players are the actual plays, which enables artificial agents to be accepted as game partners.

BTW, the Turing Award is an annual lifetime achievement award in computer science, which has gone to people like John Backus for his eloquent apology for Fortran when he should have given us APL and LISP. The Turing Test is the name given to Alan Turing's proposal for testing for successful AI. Given that we don't deny airplanes fly, I think if AI ever flies, we won't question it. So I propose using the Louis Armstrong Test, his answer to the question "What is jazz?"

How should an amateur get started working on AI? (Score:5,Interesting) by Henry House It seems to me that a significant problem holding back the development of AI is that few non-professionals grok AI well enough to offer any contribution to the AI and open-source communities. What do you suggest that I, as a person interested in both AI and open source, do about this? What are the professionals in the AI field doing about this?

Reading is fundamental.

Frankenstein (Score:5, Interesting) by Borealis For a long time there has been a fear of a Frankenstein being incarnated with AI. Movies like The Matrix and the recent essay by Bill Joy both express worries that AI (in the form of self replicating robots with some AI agenda) can possibly overcome us if we are not careful. Personally I have always considered the idea rather outlandish, but I'm wondering what an actual expert thinks about the idea.

Do you believe that there is any foundation for worry? If so, what areas should we concentrate on to be sure to avoid any problems? If not, what are the limiting factors that prevent an "evil" AI?

AI doesn't kill People. AI might make guns smart enough to sense the weight or handsize of the user, preventing children from killing each other. Everything ever invented is capable of good or evil. Evil arises most often when masses of humans are denied fundamental rights. The Evil Rate and Unemployment Rate are closely linked.

I read Bill Joy's article in Wired last month. And I loved the Unabomber's excerpt because it is based on some of the best Philip Dick paranoid Science Fiction, like: Vulcan's Hammer, We Can Build You, and the Simulacrum. There is a lot of SF on the Golem question and one of my favorites is Marge Piercy's He, She, and It , which proposes a moratorium on AI inside humanoid robots. You can have smart software on the Web, and human looking idiobots, but you can't put real AI inside human looking robots, or you have to pay the price.

My lab is indeed working on self-replicating robotics and were worried for a split second about getting the fetal brain tissue reaction when our paper comes out shortly. We can now envision the "third bootstrap", after precision manufacturing and computation, where machines make the machines which make themselves, just as machine tools are used to make more machine tools, and computers compile their own programs. But the replication loop is quite a sophisticated automatic manufacturing process, which requires a large industrial infrastructure, and a lot of liability insurance. So far, no VC's, Saudi Princes, or government agencies have offered the necessary $500M first round of financing for fullyautomateddesign.com.

It would be wrong of me to say leave my frankenbots alone, and go after frankenfoods and frankenano. I think Joe Weizenbaum's book should be required reading, because every few years somebody else comes up with the idea of inserting computers inside animal bodies, so that the first act of any war will be to exterminate all nonhuman life forms. But I do think we have to worry more about large scale industrial and agricultural processes which are allowed to externalize their by-products affecting the environment, than we need worry about robotic ice-9. We will die quicker from e-mail spam caused by viral marketing customer acquisition schemes or from global warming and ozone depletion triggering major climactic change, red tide or another pollutant taking out fish from the food chain, or even from people throwing away old EGA screens and 386 motherboards in landfills, poisoning the aquifers. I promise that for every robot we build, there will be another robot to recycle it when its job is complete.

Anyhow, IMO Joy's angst must reflect the Sun setting on any instruction set architecture besides x86, but that's a different discussion. Talk to me about the ethics, when your very own open source movement leads to the inevitability of an Intel instruction set monopoly by providing a useful alternative to Microsoft :)

Questions based on your academic path (Score:5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward The way to the field of AI isn't always extremely clear. What type of background do they expect? Is it mostly a researching position or is it treated like a normal job with normal goals? Are there any classes or subjects or schools you recommend to make it into the AI field? Also, how exactly did you get into the field? How did AI intrigue you into what you do now, despite all the controversy to create an intelligence that could possibly be considered a "god" compared to the human existence? Very interesting to say the least, and something I'm interested in.

There is no AI business field to speak of which is differentiated from the general software business. Most companies which were "AI companies" in an earlier generation of university spin-offs for Lisp Machines, and Expert Systems Shells, failed miserably. Venture Capitalists won't fall into the same sinkhole twice. There are industrial process control companies which use refined bits of AI, e.g. in visual inspection of manufacturing processes, and Neural Network companies, like HNC, who have changed business plans and are now "pattern-recognition e-commerce security." companies. The Speech recognition industry has condensed into one company. Web- based AI means search engines and Language Engines. Ask Jeeves and Google and Direct Hit and many others may use bits of AI and adaptive technologies in their system.

Jobs in AI are just like software jobs everywhere: chain you to a workstation and make you work out boring details in exchange for salary and very little equity. But find a great graduate program in computer science, and you will likely find fun and exciting work for no salary and no equity! And you have to be great at both real and discrete mathematics as well as a natural born programming genius.

As for me, I started programming computers in APL as a freshman in college, and because it was such a high level language and I didn't sleep much, I wrote an awful lot of code in a few years. I was naturally drawn to building heuristic puzzle solvers, game players, and logical theorem provers. Before I met my wife, friends thought I was in love with computers. After working at IBM, I went to graduate school in Urbana and worked with David Waltz on LISP hacking, natural language processing, and reinvented neural networks, which were censored from the AI curriculum of the early 80's. I came to the limit of what could be done with neural networks for intelligence by 1988, and at Ohio State University, started looking at fractals and chaos as a source for generativity. Unfortunately, interesting behavior requires lots of levels and lots of parameters, which is why we started looking at evolution for selecting and adjusting lots of parameters, a focus since I've been at Brandeis.

While there is a lot of detailed work and dead ends, the search for mechanical intelligence is one of the great unsolved problems, which is in some way deeply equivalent to questions on the origin of life, human language, morphogenesis, child development, and human cultural and economic change. John Casti's book is a great place to start reading about these big problems.

Human brain - AI connection - is there? (Score:5, Interesting) Do you think that a greater understanding of the human brain and how intelligence has emerged in us is crucial to the creation of AI, or do you think that the two are unconnected? Will a greater understanding of memory and thought aid in development, or will AI be different enough so that such knowledge isn't required?

Also, what do you think about the potential of the models used today to attempt to achieve a working AI? Do you think that the models themselves (e.g. the neural net model) are correct and have the potential to produce an AI given enough power and configuration, or do you think that our current models are just a stepping stone along the way to a better model which is required for success?

Obviously there are clear medicinal benefits to brain research. And the study of any real biological system leads to interesting metaphors which can be the basis for a novel computational model. But I think it is unlikely that research into the biology of the brain is crucial to understanding cognition or replicating intelligence. It's like studying the width of wires in integrated circuits of a computer. Even if you get the whole wiring diagram for a computer, it still tells you little about the programs running on it. I think understanding the brain is a problem which is underestimated. I heard 25,000 scientists attend the annual Neurosciences meeting, three times the largest ever interested in AI. It could be called the Mandelsciences meeting, and different labs compete to describe what they find in those little windows on the Mandelbrot set! But I have a lot of friends who are neuroscientists, and I can be just as facetious about linguistics.

Seriously, I believe we have to understand and replicate the processes which lead to the development of the brain and its behavior, not replicate the mammalian brain itself.

The second part of your question "how intelligence has emerged in us" can be interpreted as a more interesting direction. Here, there is a lot of opportunity to relate human intelligence as animal intelligence plus a little more. The fields of evolutionary epistemology, adaptive behavior, and computational neuroethology are quite interesting. It is a great question to understand cognition as it appears in other animals, insects, worms, and even bacterial colonies. The basic principles of multicellular cooperation are more important than the millions of specific adaptations of the human brain.

As for models question, it is sort of like asking whether a chair is built out of metal, wood, plastic, rubber, or cardboard. It doesn't matter, as long as it are strong enough. The organization of molecules has to provide a surface and a normal force at the right height for sitting. As for the organization of 10 billion things which might make an AI? Doesn't matter if it is c, java, lisp, neurons, or tightly coupled markovian 2nd order polynomial fuzzy sets. Will it stand, or collapse under its own weight?

most likely path? (Score:5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward Dr Jordan:

Do you think that AI is more likely to arise as the result of explicit efforts to create an intelligent system by programmers, or by evolution of artificial life entities? Or on the third hand, do you think efforts like Cog (training the machine like a child, with a long, human aided learning process) will be the first to create a thinking machine?

We are taking the second path, seeking the principles for self-organization so we can harness them to create and invent forms of organization.. There is a 4th path you don't mention, which is the terminator/Truenames hypothesis, that AI will simply arise among the powerful router machines of the internet. How would we recognize coherent behavior arising in telecom infrastructure if it didn't wake up talking English? I think a SETI for coherent intentional behavior emerging out of the infrastructure would be a fun project to do for the people worrying about risks to the information infrastructure.

Software Market & Open Source (Score:5, Insightful) by Breace In your 'hyperbook' about your idea of a software market I noticed that you say that Open Source evangelists should support your movement because it will be (quote) A way for your next team to be rewarded for their creative work if it turns into Sendmail, Apache, or Linux.

I assume (from reading other parts) that you are talking about a monetary reward. My question is (and this is not meant as a flame by any means), do you really think that that's what the Open Source community is after, after all? Do you think that people like Torvalds or RMS are unhappy for not being rewarded enough?

If the OS community doesn't care about monetary rewards, is there an other benefit in having your proposed Software Market?

According to economic theory, utility is what motivates you to make decisions in your own self interest. Simple games, like the prisoner's dilemma, rationalize utility with numeric values to illustrate the concept, but it isn't money at all. If someone behaves in an unpredictable way, we must have our definition of their utility wrong.

There are plenty of motivations for writing open source code, including the challenge and the feeling of altruism, both of which have utility. A lot of people may write open source for credit in the community, which also has utility. If RMS was a radical advocate of anonymity who wrote the GPL so you couldn't put your name on the source code because it promoted the glorification of the individual, participating might provide less utility.

Why not Write a Screensaver? (Score:5, Interesting) by peteshaw First of all, it is indeed an honor to pester a big name scientist with my puny little questions! Hopefully I will not arouse angst with the simplicity of my perceptions. Aha! I toss my Wheaties on Mount Olympus and hope to see golden flakes drift down from the sky!

I have always thought that distributed computing naturally lends itself to large scale AI problems, specifically your Neural Networks and Dynamical Systems work. I am thinking specifically of the SETI@home project, and the distributed.net projects. Have you thought about, or to your knowledge has anyone thought about harnessing the power of collective geekdom for sort of a brute force approach to neural networks. I don't know how NN normally work, but it seems that you could write a very small, lightweight client, and embed it into a screen saver a'la SETI@home. This SS would really be really a simple client 'node'. You could then add some cute graphics like a picture of a human brain and some brightly colored synapses or what have you.

Once the /.ers got their hands on such a geek toy I have no doubt you'd have the equivalent of several hundred thousand hours or more of free computer time, and who knows, maybe we could all make a brain together! I would love to think of my computer as a small cog in some vast neural network, or at least I would until Arnold Schwarzenegger got sent back in time to kill my mom. Whaddayathink, Jordan? Is this a good idea, or am I an idiot?

No, its very imaginative. You could be one of my AI grad students. But rather than focusing on neural networks, which, because of matrix multiplication, do not distribute well, people are looking at such systems for evolutionary computation. You can evolve individuals on networked workstations and collect them, or evolve populations which interact occasionally and pass dna around. Look at Tom Ray's Net Tierra project to see how it is going. My colleague Hod Lipson is developing a screensaver for our evolutionary robotics project, but release 1 will be Windows rather than Linux compatible (./sorry)

Actually, one of my early business plans for the Internet, circa the first working java browsers, was to show naughty pictures while harvesting cycles from your computer and reselling them to people needing computer time. All was needed was an assembly language interpreter in java and some interfacing. The problem is that most computationally intense problems people want to solve have large data flow requirements which conflict with the download of the naughty pictures! When I recently tried to corner the market in pig latin domain names for my new "incubator", panies.com panies.com, I didn't secure putation.com because it sounded bad. One week later I realized it was a pretty good name for a distributed computation service, but somebody else had grabbed the URL!

However, there is a critical piece missing from all these visions. intelligence is a property of an organization of computation, it is not computation itself. The problem of robotics is not the limited power of microcomputers, since we could drive any robot from a supercomputer if we knew what to write! We can get infinite cycles already, but nobody can write a coherent program bigger than 10M lines. We have figure out to use cycles towards discovery of a process of self-organization, rather than on a known software organization itself.

AI Metrics (Score:5, Interesting) by john_many_jars I have read several coffee table science books on the subject and often find myself asking for a way to measure AI. As has been noted, AI is always elusive and is just around the corner. My question is how do you gauge how far AI has come and what is AI?

For instance, what's the difference between your TRON demonstration and a highly advanced system of solving a (very specific) non-linear differential equation to find relative and (hopefully absolute) extrema in the wildly complicated space of TRON strategies? Or, is that the definition of intelligence?

This is a very hard question which I won't be able to joke my way out of. I think that system performance in specific domains can be measured, like a rating system for a game likeTRON. I think we might be able to get a measure of the generative capacity of a system in all possible environments, by capturing strings of symbols representing different actions, and looking at the grammar of behavior. In general, however, observers have an effect on their observations of computational capacity. I usually think of intelligence as a measurement, not the thing being measured, sort of like the difference between temperature and heat, or weight and mass. It could be a measurement of operational knowledge (programmed, not static in a database), or of efficient use of knowledge resources. This measurement is applied to an organization. So committees of very smart people can operate idiotically, and groups of dumb insects can be very intelligent.

My current best working definition is that intelligence is the ratio of the amount of problem-solving accomplished to the number of cycles wasted. When I say we need 10B lines of code, it is not to say that raw program size is a measure of intelligence, but to express the idea that inside that code are enough different heuristics and gizmos to solve lots of problems effectively.

And what about Freedom? (Score:5, Insightful) by Hobbex Mr. Pollack,

I read your article about "information property" and was surprised to find you dealt with the matter completely from the point of view of advancing the market. Their are those of us who would argue that the wellbeing of the market is, at most, a second order concern, and that the important issues that Information age gives rise regarding the perceived ownership of information are really about Freedom and integrity.

These issues range from the simple desire to have the right to do whatever one wants with data that one has access to, to the simple futility and danger of trying to limit to paying individuals something that by nature, mathematics, and now technology is Free. They concern the fact that our machines are now so integral in our lives that they have become a part of our identity, with our computers as the extension of ourselves into "cyberspace", and that any proposal which aims to keep the total right to control over everything in the computer away from the user is thus an invasion into our integrity, personality, and freedom.

Do you consider the economics of the market to be a greater concern than individual freedom?

This is a beautiful question, thank you. My book is exactly about freedom and rights: The freedom to sell a copy of a book you are done reading. The freedom to share in the rewards when something you design or write is in demand by millions of people. The right to own what you buy.

I see an inexorable movement towards dispossessionism, both coming from the "right," with UCITA, secured digital rights, anti-crypto-tampering in the DMCA, and ASP subscription models, and coming from the "left", with ideas that we should give our writing up into free collectivist projects.

The Internet is the beginning of Goldstein's "celestial jukebox," the encyclopedia of everything anyone has ever written, every episode of every TV show, and every song by every band. It sounds wonderful until you realize that you will have to pay per view! Bill Gates now has the money to deploy satellites which will force you to rent his word processor for $1/hour, the same rate for renting a movie. The laws on theft of satellite programs, unfortunately, as legal doctrine goes, considers decoding satellite broadcasts as theft of cable services, rather than as protected first amendment rights to receive radio broadcasts. Once secure distribution of programs on a rental basis is established, all content publishing will move inexorably into that mode to maximize profits. No more books, no more records. No more ownership. Dispossession.

The Free software movement, League for Programming Freedom, Open Source Software, on the other hand, talk idealistic young individuals out of their writing. "Contribute it towards a greater good." Be rewarded by occasional e-mails of thanks from your peers. The Free Music movement, or "let's RIP our CD's and trade MP3s through Napster" isn't as politically as economically motivated, but is also making musicians contribute their work for the greater good, at least of dormitories! Dispossession.

Fascism and Communism, while they have philosophical appeal for their mimetic simplicity, have proven themselves consistently the enemies of freedom, enterprise and creativity. Ordinary people are "dispossessed" of their property, which ends up, not surprisingly, in the pockets of the promoters of the simple philosophy.

My purpose in writing License to Bill is to begin a discussion not only on a societal remedy to the microsoft problem, but to secure, as a human right, the right to own information properties I buy, rather than just being able to rent them. I especially want the right to own and sell copies of my own creations, and to own a library of other's creations, reasonably priced based on supply and demand, without fear that a change in technology will render my investments worthless..

A market is just a mechanism which humanity uses to allocate resources fairly. It is neither good nor evil.

To which I would add... (Score:5, Interesting) by joss I also read your IP proposal, and agree with the points mentioned above.

However, I also have a problem with your proposal from an economic perspective:

Property laws developed as a mechanism for optimal utilization of scarce resources. The laws and ethics for standard property make little sense when the cost of replication is $0. The market is the best mechanism for distributing scarce resources, so you propose we make all IP resources scarce so that IP behaves like other commodities and all the laws of the market apply.

We are rapidly entering a world where most wealth is held as a form of IP. Free replication of IP increases the net wealth of the planet. If everybody on earth had access to all the IP on earth, then everybody would be far richer - it's not a zero sum game. Of course, we're several decades at least from this being a viable option since we've reached a local minima. (Need equivalent to starship replicators first - nanotech...)

Artificially pretending that IP is a scarce resource will keep the lawyers, accountants, politicians in work, and will also allow some money to flow back to the creatives, but at the cost of impoverishing humanity.

I could actually see your proposal being adopted, and I can see how it will maintain capitalism as the dominant model, but I also believe that it is the most damaging economic suggestion in human history

Could you tell me why I'm wrong.

Wow! "I also believe that it is the most damaging economic suggestion in human history" Surely this is a wonderful compliment.

The history and future of money is very interesting, and one you can read about in various books, including one byMilton Friedman, and one from the Cato Institute. I think today's software houses who force upgrades on their customers are like the wildcat banks of the nineteenth century, printing up banknotes, and then declaring bankruptcy, vanishing with the deposits and setting up shop in another town.

Before money, there was simply trade in raw and polished goods. Then there was weighing and coinage. Lots of people thought coins were the real value and heartily resisted paper money. The gold and silver standards gave way, and eventually the idea that there was gold for every dollar bill was revealed as a hoax, and now "money" is simply a record in your bank's computer that there is a certain amount you are entitled to withdraw based on the amounts other banks have deposited for you. The only essential different between a rich and poor person is what the bank computers and the registrar of deeds say it is, backed by military force. And the money supply and international exchanges now somehow represents our national wealth with respect to other nations, and other nation's confidence that our banking system isn't duplicating dollars. Instead of objects of trade, money is information about potential trade.

While you might not like the idea that money is abstract and in limited supply, and you have more or less than you want, it is the soft underbelly of "Starship Economics" that Gene Roddenberry died before coming up with the backstory for how to have a non-mediocre society with unlimited replication for all.

I once invented a transporter machine for paper using public key crypto and fax technology. It would hold the source paper in a metal box, verify the copy was printed, and then destroy the original and legitimize the copy. With this system, you could fax a dollar bill to a friend! Now: is a dollar bill is just the likeness of a dollar bill on a crinkly piece of thermal paper, or the actual piece of green stuff? If Paypal can figure out how you can beam money from your palmpilot to mine, but a bug lets you keep a copy of the money, I bet their valuation would go way down.

I am simply saying that permanent use and resale licenses to changeable information (software, art, literature, music, movies) which can be traded securely, without loss or duplication, in a public market, is a form of currency.

Unlimited replication of currency just doesn't work, any more than two copies of William Shatner.

I stake the middle ground. Both the "right" copyright publishers who make currency loss through expiring keys and forced upgrades, and the "left" copyright violators who duplicate currency, will be welcome at my table when they see the light.

----------

Thanks for your interesting questions. My comments do not reflect the official position of my employer Brandeis University, the sponsors of my laboratory's research, or the companies i am involved with, Abuzz, Xilicon, or Thinmail.

Humbly yours,
Jordan Pollack
Bigname@scientist.com
P.S. you too can be a scientist thanks to mail.com:)

leine writes, "The statement written by a part of the German government to use Open Source Software (see this article) has been withdrawn from the public. The German magazine c't cites in an article the spokesman of the German ministry of the interior, that the paper has been withdrawn on an order from the ministry. (The article is in German, babelfish is your friend.) "

Phredd was among the first to write with this news: "A copy of MS Windows 2001 beta has been leaked out to the Net. I wonder if it will have fixed any of the 65,000 documented bugs. No one is installing Win2k so I guess the MS marketing machine is trying to get rev 2 out the door ... New and Improved! Only 32k bugs! Geesh ..." Here's the story on 2001-pre, codenamed Whistler.

Now, if the MPAA and the DMCA can exert enough pressure to get Napster pulled from thousands of sites, and if U.S. copyright law is enough of a spur to arrest teenagers in Norway, what will be the fate of ftp sites which (knowingly or unknowingly) host this one?

The german technical magazine C'T recently visited Transmeta's office in Santa Clara. Transmeta's roster is impressive, including not only Linus but also Robert Collins and Christian Ludloff both well known for their work on finding undocumented instructions and registers. Transmeta's LongRun technology (reducing CPU power by varying frequency and voltage) only works with APM, and without it the TM5400's net consumption is 5W at 43 degres Celsius and 600Mhz. At 700Mhz the TM5400's performance is slightly under that of a 500Mhz PIII. The TM5400 will be the first processor to use IBM's new CMOS8S copper process. In the interview David Ditzel denies having used Elbrus technology in Crusoe. For non german speakers, there's always Babelfish.

Blocking software can work on any category of material. Here in the States we try to block sex. But in Germany, they're going to use censorware to go after MP3s. Its "Rights Protection System" is rumored to already be in testing - and the rights that get protected are those of Mariah Carey and her label, needless to say, not yours or mine. What does this mean for our German readers, and others? More thoughts below...

If you only read one link, read Fitug's fact sheet (in English). It summarizes the situation pretty well. See Declan McCullagh's Politech for some more links.

Basically, the German recording industry is selling the idea that they should have carte blanche to block any incoming packets they see fit, at the router. As Lawrence Lessig and others have warned, the large ISPs are the weak link, subject to easy regulation. And as Fitug's paper says, only the large service providers need be forced to use this system: small providers get their feeds from the large ones, auto-censored for their pleasure.

Think for a moment about how this system will work in practice. Pirate websites, by definition, operate under the radar: they are hard to find. They are often up only briefly, or require a password to access. They aren't linked to search engines. Sharing copyrighted material is illegal is every major Western country, so these sites aren't going to list themselves on Yahoo.

But it's already been shown that censorware can't even block what's on Yahoo. That's not an exaggeration. I work with the Censorware Project, and we did a report on Bess in 1999. The software didn't just fail to block a lot of hardcore sex. It failed to block hardcoresex.com - and hundreds of other porn sites listed on Yahoo.

This new "Rights Protection System" is going to use the same technologies as existing censorware and have about the same results:

"Im Prinzip funktioniert das 'Right Protection System' also ähnlich wie das Programm Cyberpatrol..."

"So in principle, the 'Rights Protection System' will work like the program Cyber Patrol..."

Someone has to maintain this "Rights Protection System," just like someone has to maintain Cyber Patrol. What chance does it have to find even a fraction of the napster servers, hotline servers, IRC channels, and, yes, even websites where pirate MP3s are being traded?

And when a pirate site is found, the rock'n'roll will be blocked the same way existing censorware blocks sex or drugs. Let's say a directory full of copyrighted MP3s is at

http://BigUniversity.edu/users/joepirate/secret/

The RPS staffers have no way of knowing whether "joepirate" is going to have friends who share MP3s, is going to change user IDs, or is going to put his songs into some other directory. The block will be made not on the /secret/ directory. If the university is lucky, there will be a block on the /users/ directory.

But since the "filtering" takes place at the router, it is much more likely that the entire webserver will be blocked. Big University probably won't be getting many exchange students from Germany next year.

And on what basis is the country going to ask its service providers to put this extra software on their routers? According to a spokesperson for the German branch of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI):

"The packet forwarding process in the router is not a passive forwarding of the incoming signals. The packet is processed and manipulated by the router before it is transmitted onwards. So the [service providers] that purchase and install these routers have a heavy participatory role in the operation of the Internet."

In other words, since the hardware is already routing ("manipulating") packets from one network to another, it's really no different to add a blacklist that forbids certain URLs or IP numbers.

The executives speaking in favor of this proposal make it sound like it's going to benefit the little musician, the one struggling to make it. The IFPI points out magnanimously that it invests some of its profits in unknown artists (duh):

"Jede dritte Mark, die mit den Hits der Megastars erwirtschaftet wird, fließt heute in die Förderung junger Künstler."

"Today, every third Mark made by the megastars' hits goes toward the promotion of young artists."

Isn't that nice. But what about the "young artists" who haven't been signed with a label yet?

If I'm trying to make a name for myself by giving away my own music, and the RPS staffers spot a directory full of my MP3s, are they really going to compare each of my files' titles against their libraries? Are they going to listen to each MP3 they find? More likely, they will assume that files named "my_heart_will_go_on.mp3" and "song-001.mp3" are songs copyrighted by someone else, and not my own original work.

Simple solution: block my whole directory. Or my whole server. If there's a little collateral damage - well, less competition for their own artists.

And they won't bother to tell me about it, of course; so my music is now blocked from eighty million potential listeners - customers - and I will never know.

This doesn't help "young artists" - unless you think enslaving them to the existing labels is helping them. The IFPI chooses to ignore that giving away MP3s can help a struggling artist, not hurt.

Meanwhile, executives for the German Authors' Rights Society (GEMA) redefine arrogance. My German is rusty and Babelfish is almost no help, so bear with me. First, they count their money:

"Erfolgreiche Jahresbilanz. Zunächst aber habe ich die Ehre, Ihnen den Geschäftsbericht 1998 vorzulegen. Er dokumentiert mit seinem Gesamtertrag von DM 1,465 Mrd. und einer Verteilsumme von DM 1,263 Mrd. die wirtschaftliche Ertragskraft unserer musikalischen Verwertungsgesellschaft..."

"Successful Annual Balance. But first I have the honor to submit the business report for 1998. It documents total proceeds of 1.465 billion Marks and a distribution total of 1.263 billion Marks for our commercial music corporation..."

(Incidentally, Babelfish translates "unserer musikalischen Verwertungsgesellschaft" as "our musical exploitation corporation" - which may be accurate but probably isn't what was intended.)

Then, two sentences later:

"...auch die den kreativen Schöpfer bedrohenden Kräfte, die sich hinter Schlagworten wie 'arbeitsplatzschaffende Kommunikationsgesellschaft' oder 'Digitalisierung der Welt' verstecken, nicht aus den Augen verloren werden dürfen. Hier drohen uns - allerdings zu bewältigende - Gefahren. Und in der Tat, sie werden auch nicht eine Sekunde aus den Augen verloren, diese Gefahren. So wird denn die GEMA nicht müde, die globalisierungssüchtigen Verfechter absoluter Kommunikationsfreiheit und damit Verächter von Kultur und geistigem Eigentum immer wieder in die Schranken zu verweisen."

"...and we should not lose track of those powers who threaten creative people*, who hide themselves behind slogans like 'job-creating communications company' or 'digitalization of the world.' We are threatened by these dangers - which nevertheless can be overcome. Indeed, these dangers will not for one second be lost from our eyes. GEMA will never, ever tire of putting these globalization-addicted advocates of absolute freedom of communication - the depisers of culture and intellectual property - in their place."

Boy. How serious are these guys?

But of course they're serious. After all, negative billions are at stake.

Finally, consider what will happen once the German music industry, or any other, manages to install content-based blocking at the routers of the entire country.

Pirated music isn't the only illegal content in Germany. And once the software's in place, no politician will be able to resist adding one more type of content to block.

What will be the next category they enable on their nationwide blacklist? You might think sex. I'm betting it's Holocaust-denial. The denial of the Holocaust is something I've been working against for eight years (wearing one of my other "activist hats"). And for eight years I've been repeating that the most effective way to repudiate this dishonest political ideology is to expose it to the light of day.

Let people read the junk. And let them read refutations of the junk. That's the best way for people to recognize that deniers are liars: give them access to what everyone says, and let them make up their own minds.

But the German government disagrees. Unfortunately, they don't realize that the best way to convince a confused citizen that Holocaust-deniers are saying something valuable is to have the government ban it. "After all," goes the logic, "they wouldn't ban it if it weren't dangerous - and what could be more dangerous than the truth?"

Then, finally, after they make free-speech martyrs out of neo-Nazis, will come the effort to block sexual content. All of these blocking efforts - music, Holocaust-denial, sex - will work approximately as well as censorware has worked anywhere else. And will do approximately as much collateral damage.

This approach to censoring an entire country - block content at the incoming routers - has not yet been tried on a large scale in any Western country. Many Asian countries (notably excepting Japan) and most if not all fundamentalist Islam countries have adopted nationwide blocking. We'll see if this is the first step toward bringing the technology to the West.

If anyone has information about who will be creating and maintaining the blacklists used by the "Rights Protection System," please post a comment here or email me.

Killjoy_b writes, "Dune fans never had it so good. First Frank Herbert's son's new Dune: House Atreides book came out in February and now there is a new Dune miniseries in the making. You can check out the pics at this Science Fiction Film Site. The page itself is German. Enjoy. " You know where the fish is.Tim sent this additional page of info. In English.

drxenon writes, "In this story on AltaVista Live, the real truth about those hand injuries is made known. Nintendo is offering up to $80 million (US) worth of gloves for buyers of the "Mario Party" Nintendo64 game. Over 90 complaints have been filed concerning blisters, cuts, and other hand injuries!" The article gives info on how to get *your* gloves. If you're a Nintendo user, go for it!

drxenon writes, "In this story on AltaVista Live, the real truth about those hand injuries is made known. Nintendo is offering up to $80 million (US) worth of gloves for buyers of the "Mario Party" Nintendo64 game. Over 90 complaints have been filed concerning blisters, cuts, and other hand injuries!" The article gives info on how to get *your* gloves. If you're a Nintendo user, go for it!

Anonymous Coward writes, "Well, not exactly a bunker: '[T]he eighth floor of a nondescript downtown building a few blocks from the White House,' which now contains about $9 million of computer equipment that has no real use so far as Y2K goes. Since Y2K was not the meltdown that was anticipated, read about their quandary in this Associated Press article."

When the command center was announced last August, as explained in this Reuters article, the government's idea was that post-Y2K, the center would serve to coordinate "future cooperation between key infrastructure industries and the federal government to protect communication networks."

The government certainly has a vested interest in keeping communication networks functional; the question is, how vested? Especially with the recent talk of ever greater (and more explicit) governmental oversight of Internet traffic and activities, I'm not sure I want any more observation posts than already exist.

On the other hand, it seems likely that government involvement in Cyberspace will increase dramatically, and soon. Is there some way that this command post could play a vaguely positive role in that involvement? Or does it smack of a open door to ever-more-pervasive observation and tracking of personal behavior?

Get Behind the Mule writes: "The senate of the German city-state of Hamburg, which has a population of about 1.7 million, has announced that all of its citizens will receive free Internet access, an e-mail address ("first.last@hamburg.de") and a WWW home page. Citizens will pay no direct provider costs, only telephone costs. The services are expected to be available as of the middle of this year. Those of you who don't sprechen das Deutsch will have to try your luck with Babelfish."

Anonymous Coward writes "According to the Associated Press and Altavista News, iCraveTV agreed yesterday not to rebroadcast American TV programming. See the full story here. Of particular interest is that 'The plaintiffs -- including Disney, MGM, Paramount and ABC, CBS and Fox -- accused iCraveTV of copyright infringement, trademark infringement and unfair competition.'"

askwar writes "Heise reports in this article that Be Inc. is to debut their BeIA dubbed operating system for Internet Appliances today at the DEMO 2000 in California. According to Heise, BeIA will support Real's G2 and Macromedia's Flash. Another nice thing is the file system of BeIA, which will be database like, and allows the users to create their own file types with special attributes. This, and the ability to search for specifically search for these attributes, the system will be suited very well for technical/scientifical applications, says Heise. The article on Heise is in German, so you either have to learn it :-], or go to the Babelfish. "

Stephan Ullmann writes "Another nice story on the Heise Newsticker: According to this study (in German) from the Swiss WWW-Performance Index, WWW sites using MS IIS have on average twice as much downtime as sites with Apache. To obtain these values they were monitoring 100 big Swiss Internet sites every five minutes for a period of more than three months. They logged the downtime and the latency of the machines. Furthermore, they mentioned that there are a number of sites with IIS that are rebooted every day at the same time ;-) On average in all categories the servers had a weekly downtime of 99 minutes." Better check out Babelfish if you don't sprechen Sie Deutsch.

PCB writes "I found the following on www.heise.de: BMG-Entertainment started selling audio-CDs using the Cactus Data Shield, a copy-protection system developed by Midbar and Sonopress which makes it impossible to grab the music from the CD and to listen to it using "an old CD-Player" or a CD-ROM-drive. It is used on the albums "Razorblade Romance" by Him and "My Private War" by Philip Boa & The Voodoo Club. What's worse: the copy-protection is not even mentioned on the outside of the CD-case, and as these CDs are not really RedBook-compliant, they actually don't contain CD Digital Audio. " You'll need use the Fish of Many Languages to translate into your appropriate native tongue.

groov3 writes " A French-language Slashdot-style weblog called pssst received this afternoon a cease and desist letter from lawyers representing Yahoo! They asked them to remove a parody site called Yahoo! Québec (site in French). Problem is: they're not the authors. It seems Yahoo!'s lawyers cannot properly read HTML or URLs. Another amusing case of legal cluelessness. A local online tech news site called Multimédium has more details (in French again)." a limp Babelfish translation of the Multimédium story seems to imply that Yahoo!'s big problem with the parody is the use of the "Yahoo!" trademark and logo itself, changed only by the addition of the word "Quebec." Any French-speaking Slashdot readers care to help us English monolinguists out on this one?Click below for more explanation:

Morph3us writes "Here's some more info on the cease and desist letter from Yahoo! inc. to the French-language weblog pssst! Actually, what Yahoo! INC. doesn't like in this parody is the fact that it is using the actual logo of Yahoo!, with the single addition of the word "Québec" in a very similar font. Also, the search engine used in the parody was searching in a porn site database. Both of these facts could lure visitors into thinking that Yahoo! inc. was associated with the site and was offering a porn site search engine. Pssst doesn't have any power on the site Yahoo! Quebec and even on the link to it in Pssst, because it was posted by an anonymous contributor (although I guess they could delete it from the database). This contributor is also the author of the site and of the first message posted on Slashdot about this story. The author of the site sent me an e-mail today mentionning he had changed the search engine to seek in the Vatican's web site ("from one extreme to the other" as he told me!). He also plans to modify the logo to Youhou! instead of Yahoo! But there's no intention of removing the site at the moment. "

tjansen writes "The German Site Heise reports in this article that Windows 2000 may be banned in Germany. The reason is the included deframentation software Diskeeper that is written by the Scientology-owned company Executive Software. Many state agencies and companies have policies that they are not allowed to use services from a company that is related to Scientology. " A good number of you will probably need to use The Babelfish.Update: 12/03 11:28 by H :Check out the English translation.

x00 writes "The BBC News site is currently reporting that Altavista is going to float and that it could be worth 5 Billion Dollars. It also states that it could possibly merge with Lycos. "

A reader writes "The brand new and yet unreleased STOA report (European Union Technical Committee) recommends an inquiry of the possible roles of the NSA ^[?] and the FBI ^[?] in the creation of Pentium III serial number. Possible consequences could be an European Union ^[?] -wide embargo against Pentium III-powered equipment. Read the scoop here. The article is in German, use our beloved BabelFish. " Just a note: this potential embargo not in place - it's just a possibility. But given recent Echelon fears, this is interesting news.

One of the many ACs wrote in with the news that the German government is donating 250,000 marks (that's about 82,500, or $132,000) to the GNU Privacy Guard project. The article is in German, but the ever reliable Babelfish comes to the rescue.

Scipius writes "German tech-mag c't reports that Transmeta's new processor will likely be released on the 19th of January 2000. It also reveals the apparent code name: Crusoe." The article's in German, of course. But we'll take a juicy Transmeta rumor - and that's all this is - in any language. Babelfish time!

ost writes "There was a recent article in an Austrian newsapaper saying that Wallace and Gromit Creator, Nick Park, signed a deal for four movies with Steven Spielberg's Company DreamWorks. But the main thing i want to point out is that if Wallace and Gromit are to go to Hollywood, that poor penguin that was the villian in "The Wrong Trousers" has to be re-sozialized!" The article is in German - head over to the Tower of babel fish to get the skinny. I do enjoy Spielberg equaling Play mountain in the Fish - makes the translation all worth it!

GeHa & others called our attention to the new AltaVista main page that went live late Saturday night (EDT). Apparently the formal kickoff for the redesign is scheduled for Monday and will include a live Lauryn Hill Webcast. I wonder what entertainer Google would choose to help publicize a major site change. Any ideas? UPDATE by RM Sunday morning: the new page is aparently on again, off again until the formal Monday launch. IMO it's not as useful as the old one even though AV is making much noise about it.

CNet has a good status update on censorware, chock-full of facts and links. So-called "filtering" products are quietly inching toward a nationwide mandate in schools and libraries that take federal funds. It also turns out they are supported by the Catholic Church.

First Person writes "Following on the heels of the Apple 'Lethal Weapon G4' ads, the French military may prevent Apple'sAirPort wireless system from being sold in France. According to this article, the 2.4-GHz frequency is reserved for the army. Equipment broadcasting at that frequency may therefore damage or be damaged by military hardware. As wireless systems start to proliferate, these conflicts should become increasingly common." (The article's in French; perhaps utilize the Babelfish thing, eh?)

Renaud writes "The French Ministry of Economy and Finances today announced it would launch an investigation on Microsoft's alleged "dominant position abuse". Another article talks about the forced bundling of Windows 98 with new PCs. Interestingly enough, a Microsoft France spokesman is quoted as saying : "If someone doesn't want to use Windows 98, he can bring his computer back to his reseller, who will fill a coupon and refund him"." Yes, it's true; the article are in French - so head over to The Fish and try to make heads or tails of the translation.

An Anonymous Coward writes "Apparently, the recent claim for the trademark "Linux" in Germany will be "properly" handed. According to this article (in German), Linus Torvalds holds the rights for Linux in Germany and the EU for quite some time. The German Linux user group LIVE has already unchained their lawyers to take care of the recent attempt to register Linux as trademark again. " Try Babelfishing the article.

Andreas Spengler writes "Apparently a german lawfirm has filed a claim with the german patent office for the trademark Linux in Germany. It's still unknown what their goal is. " The article is in German, as one would expect. Babelfish the article.

Alex T-B writes "A 17-year old Swede has been sued by the IFPI for having links to MP3s from his homepage. The tracks weren't actually located on his system. How does this bode for future suing practices - can anybody get sued for just linking to stuff someone somewhere considers to be 'bad'? Der Artikel ist auf Deutsch - use babelfish. " MP3s or not, lawsuits over links scare me.

A number of people have written in with the news that Cryptonym has found an apparent backdoor for the NSA (called NSAKEY) in all current versions of Windows. However, you can open this backdoor yourself and install your own strong cryto module in place of the built-in one. More details are also online, but to be quite frank, we aren't quite sure on this one-so, if you're more qualified comment, please do so below.Update: 09/03 11:19 by H :Thanks to Jens Hillman for more information from the German Chaos Computer Club. Der Webpage ist auf Deutsch-Babelfish it.

We have been subjected to endless debates over whether children need protection from Internet porn and violence. But isn't there at least as much positive as negative material on the World Wide Web? I decided to find out by using opposing pairs of good and evil keywords in a series of AltaVista searches. The results were somewhat surprising. To begin with, the keyword good brought up a total of 18,803,720 results, while evil netted a mere 1,185,680. In other words, good appears to be more than 10 times as popular as evil online!

More evidence of Internet goodness:

Life got 23,765,261 results;
Death got only 5,973,580.

Love got 14,985,600 results;
Lust got only 889,330.

God got 5,596,690 results;
Satan only got 164,850;
Devil only got 635,160.

Marriage got 3,626,700 results;
Divorce only got 649,930.

Heaven got 977,930 results;
Hell only got 707,410.

Joy got 1,137,460 results;
Sorrow only got 190,740.

Linux got 3,461,380 results;
Unix got 1,948,040 results;
Windows NT only got 1,208,125.

Intelligence got 1,888,970 results;
Stupidity only got 77,430.

Apparently those misguided souls who condemn the World Wide Web as some sort of hellhole (3965 results) need to think again. The word Education was mentioned on 34,470,924 Web pages, while a search for Ignorance only came up with 141,530. And, despite endless yammer about kids getting hold of bomb-building instructions online, cruising the World Wide Web is statistically more likely to make them fat than to teach them how to blow up buildings; the word cooking netted 2,167,210 Web pages, the word Bomb only got 622,050, and the phrase homemade bombs only brought up 662.

Religious believers should take heart from the fact that Salvation drew 280,700 AltaVista responses, while Damnation only came up with 8141. Christians, instead of condemning the Internet as immoral, might want to change their tune and start boasting about their online dominance - the word Christian drew 6,715,031 results, as opposed to 93,240 for Jew, 322,740 for Muslim, 279,990 for Buddhist, and 236,420 for Hindu, while the word Atheist only came up with 78,870 pages.

What does all of this mean? I have no idea. This small (but rigorously unscientific) study, like the psychic hotlines advertised heavily on late-night cable TV, is meant to be used for entertainment purposes only. Please feel free to add to it (or subtract from it) and draw your own conclusions, which I'm sure will be far more insightful than any I could possibly come up with on my own.

Bartmoss writes "According to the german computer magazine C'T, 3Com will release two updates to the PalmOS and, as 3Com-president Alan Kessler told The Business Journal, a "Palm Organizer with a color display." The article is in German; learn German or use Babelfish. "

Dan Kegel writes "PC Welt reports the Justice Committee of Austria's Parliament has decided to ban spam. Commercial e-mail in Austria must go only to people who have opted in. Violations are to be punished with a large fine. The new law presumably still needs to be approved by the full house. Seen in the German Linux site LinuxTicker.com. " Der Webpage ist auf Deutsch. Use Babelfish. I suspect the only way we'll kill spam is if we start charging a penny per email or something, but thats a bummer of a solution. I'd settle for simply requiring unsolicited emails to say in the subject that they were spam.

SuSE has formed SuSE Labs, an effort to contribute to free software projects. The press release (which can be mangled by Babelfish for all you non-German speakers) mentions projects like XFree86, KDE, and ISDN4Linux which SuSE has already worked on, and says that they will be working on them in the future, as well as other projects like ALSA. This seems pretty cool - I know Jaroslav (the ALSA guy) was hired by SuSE awhile ago.

An anonymous reader wrote in to say "There is a story about 1 Gigabyte RAM-Modules from Samsung. Samsung finished development, shipping is due. They are going to use a 0.13-micron process. The article is in German, use Babelfish. "

kris writes "German c't magazine has a story about SUSE (english site: suse.com) reporting a larger turnover that RedHat (26.6 Mio. DM == 15 Mio US$ vs. RedHat with 11 Mio. US$). Suse also reported earnings, while RedHat reported a loss of $130,000 during the same time." kris has translated the article below if you want. Else use babelfish. Here is a rough translation of the article:

Suse: We are the largest.

As a reaction to the IPO of RedHat, which requires the company to disclose its earnings, german Linux distributor Suse has disclosed their own numbers. While RedHat reported a turnover of $11M between March 1998 and February 1999, Suse reported a turnover of almost $15M (Deutschmark 26.6 M) between 01-Apr-1998 and 31-Mar-1999. Like RedHat, most of this is due to their distribution sales (Deutschmark 17.4M). Unlike RedHat, who lost $130.000 during this time, Suse was able to report earnings of an undisclosed amount during this time.

Both companies employ approx. 130 people each at the time and are growing rapidly: In 1Q1999 Suse reported a turnover of Deutschmark 9.5M, an increase of 230% compared to the year before. Since the funding of SUSE Inc. in the USA, german Distributor Suse is focusing more and more on the international market. CEO Roland Dyroff reported a larger than proportional growth of the US daugther. He did not want to answer direct questions about an IPO, though. "

KeefR writes "According to ct (a german computer magazin), BellSouth is going to provide internet access in Atlanta based on a Passive Optic Network (PON) with a speed of 100 Mbit/s and more. The Network is based on ATM and you get a Fast-Ethernet Port (using some kind of hardware). It's limited to 400 users in the first phase. The first users'll get a 100Mbit/s internet connection, 120 digital and 70 analog video channels and 31 digital audio channels. The cost is about 60 US-$. The article is in german, translation at babelfish "

An anonymous reader wrote in to send us an article from Deja News discussing the fact that German Usenet Admins have declared AOL Rogue, and are discussing banning the ISP to cut down trolls and spam. The RFD ist auf Deutsch, so you might wanna hit up Babelfish for your usual amusingly broken translation.

An anonymous reader sent us this page (its in german! Use babelfish) which says that EGCS has been accepted as the official compiler of the GNU Project by RMS. I've seen a lot of confirmation of this, but nothing official on the GNU website. Anyway, I'm glad to see it. EGCS is a great compiler- it'll be even cooler once its simply GCC! Update: 04/21 01:26 by J : The GNU website has been updated. The EGCS steering committee has been renamed, and is now officially in charge of GCC.

GeeWiz writes "According to the German Heise Newsticker, the c't editors got hold of information that confirms that Microsoft has assigned 37 developers with the task of porting Office to Linux. " Try using Babelfish to translate the article to english if your Deutsch ist nicht so gut.