Slashdot Mirror

The last Slashback of July brings you updates on the open-source Blender and Diebold's approach to voting security, and a skeptical look at the design origins of the Dragon V CPU, John Poindexter's very own future, and more. Read on for the details.

A cleaner UI would be nice in the next round. Qbertino writes "Blender 2.28 - the first major release after it was GPLd after a $100,000 community source-code buyout in October last year -- is finished. It's now got a wide variety of added features such as Audio Sequencing (as mentioned earlier) and a complete redo of the built-in Python engine for your 3D scripting convenience and import/export empowerment. It runs on Linux, FreeBSD, Irix, Solaris and that other OS :-). See the full changelog here and get the new version binaries here. Cheers to the Blender folks and: Happy Blending!"

Just close the curtain on your way out, citizen. utunga writes "After recent claims that their voting systems were grossly insecure, Diebold has issued a rebuttal which has in turn been panned. One question this raises : Do programmers now have worry that their comments ... such as - 'Reimplemented MMIO functions, as MS is too effing lazy to provide them under CE. Most of this is cribbed from the Wine Project.' - might wind up in the media (or worse, in court) as evidence for one side or the other ?"

Correspondence school? chipace writes "The newly released Dragon-V CPU could have deeper roots in Austin, Texas than in China. The Alchemy Au1500 (AMD) displayed at Comdex 2002 has a lot in common with the new CultureCom Dragon-V cpu (or is it the other way around?). Both have identical MIPS32 cores (16k instruction + 16k data caches), Ethernet MACs, USB 1.1, PCI 2.2, SDRAM controller ... same power consumption. I'm not saying they are pin-compatible... just that this is by no means an original chip (seeing as the Au1500 has been available for over a year). Is the Dragon-V a ground-up development that CultureCom is describing, or is this just another case of a Chinese company doing reverse engineering?"

They can swim out and try, though. Complete Bastard writes "The Australian is reporting today that Aussie corporate Linux users, including AusRegistry, which runs Australia's domain name registry, are also starting to say no to SCO's licensing scheme. After reading the recent /. roundup of corporate ire, it would seem the business world is starting to truly make it's opinions known in this issue..."

The wisdom of the free market. skwang writes "Do you think John Poindexter should keep his job? The head of Pentagon's department responsible for Terrorism Information Awareness (formerly Total Information Awareness) and most recently known for his Policy Analysis Market, which would allow investors to buy future's contracts in middle east events such as the overthrow of King Adbullah of Jordan, has himself a futures contract on Tradesports, as reported by CNN.

Investors can now buy futures contracts to speculate on whether or not Poindexter will keep his job after August 31st. Since Poindexter's contracts are new, they do not represent an accurate indicator of his job security."

Could be too late: Eponymous Coward writes "CNN writes "Retired Adm. John Poindexter, who created a firestorm this week with his plan to create a futures market that would capitalize on predicting terror attacks, will resign in coming weeks from his post at the Pentagon, a senior defense official said Thursday. The official said the research that Poindexter and his Total Information Awareness program (TIA) were conducting had become just too 'unorthodox'." Ya think?"

No good deed goes unpunished. Anonymous Coward writes "In regards to the June 25th Article 'WiFi Exposes Sensitive Student Data': The School district has decided to boot all volunteers, the story is here..."

Seems like a harsh way to treat long-time volunteers with expensive skills.

An anonymous reader writes "DARPA's OASIS program consists of more than 20 research projects in intrusion-tolerant systems. The basic idea is to concede that systems will be penetrated by malware and hackers, but to keep operating anyway. Other projects take a wide variety of technical approaches to providing intrusion tolerance. MIT's Automatic Trust Management uses models of trust to choose from a variety of ways to achieve system goals; Duke/MCNC's SITAR (Scalable Intrusion Tolerant Architecture) adapts tricks from fault-tolerant systems and distributes decision-making; BBN-Illinois-Maryland-Boeing's ITUA employs unpredictable adaptation. Shutting down the military while waging war is not an option, but the idea of continuing to operating critical defense systems even after known penetration by hostile hackers or damaging worms will take some getting used to."

Gregus writes "The Village Voice delves into the DARPA's latest plan to track people and vehicle movement in cities, ostensibly for urban warfare, though this would be really handy watching 'suspicious' people in any city. "The goal, according to a recent Pentagon presentation to defense contractors, is to 'track everything that moves.' " The actual DARPA RFP and briefings. I just feel more safe all the time."

t0rnt0pieces writes "DARPA is developing an urban surveillance system that would use computers and thousands of cameras to track, record and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a city. Officials claim that the project is designed to help the U.S. military protect troops and fight in cities overseas, but police, scientists and privacy experts say the technology could easily be adapted to spy on Americans. Combined with other technologies, such as software that scans databases of everyday transactions and personal records worldwide, the government would have a reasonably good idea of where everyone is most of the time. Read the news story and the contracting document."

t0rnt0pieces writes "DARPA is developing an urban surveillance system that would use computers and thousands of cameras to track, record and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a city. Officials claim that the project is designed to help the U.S. military protect troops and fight in cities overseas, but police, scientists and privacy experts say the technology could easily be adapted to spy on Americans. Combined with other technologies, such as software that scans databases of everyday transactions and personal records worldwide, the government would have a reasonably good idea of where everyone is most of the time. Read the news story and the contracting document."

while(true) writes "As reported previously here on Slashdot, hypersonic jets from NASA has recently been in the news. Now DARPA is showing interest in the military applications and is to host a conference on hypersonic unmanned bombers. These bombers could be based in the US and yet strike from space at any place in the world within 2 hours. BBC has a report about these air/spacecraft that could be operational by 2025."

Factomatic writes "Kent Salas has unveiled his latest creation, the Pyramac G4 pyramid, which took six months to design and build. Salas says the toughest part was figuring out how to get all of those rectangular parts to fit into a pyramid, but he finally managed to cram in the motherboard from a 466 MHz Graphite Power Mac he bought on eBay for $600, a $400 1.4 GHz overclocked G4 upgrade card, 768 MB RAM, a 100 GB hard drive, an ATI 8500 video card and a CD-RW/DVD optical drive. You may remember Salas as the creator of the BlueIce modified Power Mac G4 tower with a front-mounted 5-inch LCD screen (also here). Wired News has an article and eight images of the Pyramac mod, but Salas has included the full set of 51 images on the building page of Pyramac site. I'm sure it won't be long before pyramid PCs show up at mini-itx.com... add a Webcam to the top and John Poindexter's vision of Total Information Awareness can be a reality in your home or office!"

Hans Reiser leads a successful Free Software project that has attracted plenty of attention, many users, and even that Holy Grail of so many who have started their own Free or Open Source projects: Big-time funding from DARPA, SuSE, and others. How did he do it? What's his advice for other project leaders? Ask him! And ask him any other question you have in mind. Please stick to one question per post, and avoid questions that can be answered with a few minutes' worth of research. We'll publish Mr. Reiser's answers as soon as he gets them back to us.

PizzaFace writes "Congress was concerned that the Pentagon's 'Total Information Awareness' program would invade citizens' privacy, so it gave the program the red light until the Pentagon addressed Congress's privacy concerns. DARPA, the Pentagon technology agency that brought us the Internet in more innocent times, showed its Total Marketing Awareness by renaming the TIA program, 'Terrorism Information Awareness.' The gist of its report seems to be that data may be collected from everyone, but it will only be used against evildoers. You can read DARPA's report and a background story from the Washington Post."

oni writes "Here's a story on wired about a Pentagon project called LifeLog. It seeks to record every bit of information that can be had, index it by name, or SSN, or even location, and make the database searchable. Furthermore, '[LifeLog adds] physical information (like how we feel) and media data (like what we read) to this transactional data.'" If you think you can build such a system, apply for a grant. There's also a current AP story about Total Information Awareness.

clonebarkins writes "Federal Computer Week has an article on a DARPA-funded study of privacy-related concerns related to TIA. "We envision software that will mask the identity of any individual whose pattern of activities triggers the suspicion of investigators," says the program manager of the Information and Intelligence Exploitation Division. Yeah, sure--that'll happen about as soon as Ashcroft converts to Islam."

clonebarkins writes "Federal Computer Week has an article on a DARPA-funded study of privacy-related concerns related to TIA. "We envision software that will mask the identity of any individual whose pattern of activities triggers the suspicion of investigators," says the program manager of the Information and Intelligence Exploitation Division. Yeah, sure--that'll happen about as soon as Ashcroft converts to Islam."

An Anonymous Reader writes "DARPA has released the details of a 'Grand Challenge,' with a $1 million prize. The challenge is to build an autonomous vehicle which can 'navigate on its own over a 250-mile desert course in less than 10 hours.' from L.A. to Vegas, 'without external communication or human control.' The contest is to be conducted in March 2004, and is open to all comers. Can we get at least one entry to represent slashdot?" We've mentioned this contest a few times before: any intended entrants out there want to disclose your secret plans?

An Anonymous Reader writes "DARPA has released the details of a 'Grand Challenge,' with a $1 million prize. The challenge is to build an autonomous vehicle which can 'navigate on its own over a 250-mile desert course in less than 10 hours.' from L.A. to Vegas, 'without external communication or human control.' The contest is to be conducted in March 2004, and is open to all comers. Can we get at least one entry to represent slashdot?" We've mentioned this contest a few times before: any intended entrants out there want to disclose your secret plans?

A reader writes:"After a SF Weekly column on DARPA's TIA, attention has turned to the Poindexter Family house. Using legal/public means groups are finding and publishing Alan's phone numbers, address, etc."Those with access to DMV and criminal records databases, credit card records, telephone bills, tax records, birth and death and marriage records, medical records, and similar personally identifiable databases could combine their information publicly to assist in the demonstration." Some seem to trust in TIA's benevolence, but I believe otherwise. Perhaps it is already too late? At least I can rest assured HumanID isn't operational. Yet. "

A reader writes:"After a SF Weekly column on DARPA's TIA, attention has turned to the Poindexter Family house. Using legal/public means groups are finding and publishing Alan's phone numbers, address, etc."Those with access to DMV and criminal records databases, credit card records, telephone bills, tax records, birth and death and marriage records, medical records, and similar personally identifiable databases could combine their information publicly to assist in the demonstration." Some seem to trust in TIA's benevolence, but I believe otherwise. Perhaps it is already too late? At least I can rest assured HumanID isn't operational. Yet. "

Slashback with more on GNU Radio; BeUnited's ongoing bid for Gobe Productive's source code; AOL, IM and the USPTO; the consequences one observer faced for watching spammer Alan Ralsky and more. Read on for the details.

Don't Post While Sleepy: Hi, Chrisd here apologizing about that false post on Sony/Nintendo Playstation Trademark Settlement. Oops. Doh. No excuse. Mea Culpa. I'll be more careful next time.

Is "Rubber stamping everything" a patentable business practice? Brian Dear writes "With all the news these days about the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issuing a patent to AOL/ICQ/Mirabilis for Instant Messaging, I thought the Slashdot community would be interested in reading about TERM-talk on PLATO, which was announced on the PLATO network on this day in 1973. Here is the URL with a screen shot of the actual announcement."

Turing, Marconi and Rosen: pick any two. squiggleslash writes "Salon is running an informative and sympathetic story about GNU radio. The article discusses how the project could end up pre-empting the Hollywood producers and other content cartel's attempts to destroy modifiable consumer hardware by creating a blatently legitimate space where programmable hardware is a requirement, as well as opening up radio to groups outside of the current cabals. Good stuff."

We've mentioned quite a bit about GNU Radio before (see also Eric Blossom's interview questions and answers; this article delves into the fight that the GNU Radio folks are gearing up for over broadcast flags.

Suiteness and light. To follow up on our mention of the effort to buy from Gobe (and release as Free software) the sourcecode of Gobe Productive, Simon Gauvin of beunited.org writes "beunited.org has been pledged over $10,000.00 by the public and corporate community for the release of Gobe Productive for BeOS. Linux users have also pledged, and we encourage more members of the Linux community to participate for the release of the Linux version. Call all your friends and send them over to beunited.org to help raise awareness!"

Here's the relevant discussion thread if you'd like to learn more about this effort; I wish the site had a bar chart of some sort showing how much money was currently raised, and an obvious PayPal link or similar. Note that for now, beunited's first goal is to open the source for the BeOS version of Productive.

Ralsky, Ralsky, Ralsky ... IsoRashi writes "Over at the Register they have this short article about a guy who took some photos of spammer Alan Ralsky's home. After taking the photographs, the man was chased by someone in a black jaguar and he began receiving threatening phone calls the next day. Here is a direct link to the site the photographer set up."

Read your TOS carefully before you start downloading ... Sergeant Beavis writes "Nate Carlson was kind enough to create a HOWTO for connecting your Linux box to Sprint's Vision network via a Sanyo SCP-4900 phone. However Sanyo's store shows the cable to be out of stock. Now comes FutureDial to the rescue with both the USB cable and SnapDialer software for connecting to the Vision network with Windows instead of Linux. Oh, the cable only cost $19.99 at your local Radio Shack. Enjoy!"

And let this be a lesson (of sorts) to you! gh0ul writes "Looks like Uzi Nissan (for those of you who don't recall owns nissan.com) has lost his fight with Nissan Motors to keep his nissan.com (last name by birthright/company) domain. The site now reads "In compliance with a ruling issued by the United States District Court in Los Angeles on November 14, 2002, in the lawsuit of Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. v. Nissan Computer Corporation, this web site has been converted to non-commercial use." Are we ever going to have any protection against these kind of things?"

The Eye was never there. You never saw it. It was not creepy. Finally, Rob writes "The creepy all-seeing eye logo from John Poindexter and the Total Information Awareness project is suddenly missing from the TIA web site. Old site ; Current site Perhaps TIA is seeking suggestions for a new logo?"

mesozoic writes "Wired is running a story about hackers publishing John Poindexter's personal information (like satellite photos of his home) to protest the proposed Total Information Awareness system. This is just too funny, and it may even raise a few more eyebrows among the national media."

pberry writes "The EFF Action Center has two new alerts (1, 2) on stopping "Total Information Awareness." TIA is a collection of DARPA-funded initiatives that are very scary. The project is headed by Admiral John Poindexter and has no implementation guidelines thus far. In other words, it is misguided to say that these tools will be used in any particular way, but it is clear that if they do what they say they will, America could be a very scary place to live."

pberry writes "The EFF Action Center has two new alerts (1, 2) on stopping "Total Information Awareness." TIA is a collection of DARPA-funded initiatives that are very scary. The project is headed by Admiral John Poindexter and has no implementation guidelines thus far. In other words, it is misguided to say that these tools will be used in any particular way, but it is clear that if they do what they say they will, America could be a very scary place to live."

NASAKnight writes "Remember the slashdot story a while back about the DARPA Autonomous Robot Race? Well, they were supposed to post initial rules and information in September, but they were late. They just came out today, so take a look."

Slashback with more on Salon's struggle to balance ads and subscriptions, online retailers versus online bargain hunters, the not-at-all-secret government proposal to obtain "Total Information Awareness" (including information about you), and more.

Circumventing the upsell, but not all of it. Responding to the recent post about cable service a la carte, alta writes "I got a response from Jane Black (who wrote the original article) and she said slashdot jumped the gun. You can not pick and choose which channel you want. You can just choose to get basic limited and premium without getting the 2 steps in between. Here's the actual piece of law:

"Buy-through of other tiers prohibited - A cable operator may not require the subscription to any tier other than the basic service tier required by paragraph (7) as a condition of access to video programming offered on a per channel or per program basis. A cable operator may not discriminate between subscribers to the basic service tier and other subscribers with regard to the rates charged for video programming offered on a per channel or per program basis.

Read it all here. Here's what Jane said:

'But please make sure you understand the rule (Slashdot's headline was misleading indeed.) You can't just choose which channels you want. The new rule says that you can get basic (the network and cspan etc) plus HBO/Starz/Showtime *without* having to buy the standard package as well. If you want AMC, Lifetime, whatever, you still need to buy the whole package. Make sense?'

If you still need it, you can find more about the law here. Just type 543 in the "Section" field. The citation is: Section 623(b)(8) of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended. Found at volume 47 of the US Code Section 543(b)(8)"

The Salon dilemma. A Slashdot post last week reported that Salon was in serious financial trouble, and had dropped its premium section and instituted giant ads. Salon has now moved to over-the-counter trading. "While we valued the prestige of a NASDAQ listing, this move to the OTC market should not affect our core business," says Salon's president and CEO in the story. Update: 11/26 00:42 GMT by J : One correction: Salon has not dropped its premium section.

Dole, or Hormel? MacAndrew writes "As briefly discussed in slashdot a few weeks ago, Senator-elect Elizabeth Dole has been sued by a constituent who received eight unsolicited emails from her. He claims $100 damages including "emotional distress for having received spam from someone who should know better." Salon has now published an article focusing on the critical political versus commercial speech aspect of the case. Courts have recognized political speech as the innermost circle of free speech protection, and groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation believe spam laws that interfere with it may be not just unwise but unconstitutional."

Surely, someone's wallet will end up fat. In reaction to the recent story about provisions of the DMCA being used to prevent the posting of post-Thanksgiving sales prices from large retailers, Brian McWilliams writes "I finished up my story about FatWallet after you posted that link on Slashdot. Might help explain some stuff."

Well, we thought this here panopticon would be a nice idea ... McLuhanesque writes "DARPA has posted the architecture for their Total Information Awareness Systems , the uber-database that purports to suck in every scrap of electronic information about everyone, mix in some Human ID at a Distance technology, among other stuff, and profile ... well, just about everyone. More of their proposed fun and games are listed here." And Declan McCullagh writes: "Just posted the transcript of the Pentagon news briefing (worth a read) on Politech. Note this is on the TIA program, not 'eDNA.'

$10,000 is nothing to sneeze at. The idea of buying code into the world of Free software (aka code Ransom, as mentioned on Slashdot a few days ago) is drawing interest. waxed writes "FreePepper is an effort to collect enough money to purchase the source code for the multiplatform text editor Pepper from its author, Maarten Hekkelman, who has ceased development of it and re-release it under a BSD-style license. Donations may be made via PayPal or cheque."

Slashback with more on Salon's struggle to balance ads and subscriptions, online retailers versus online bargain hunters, the not-at-all-secret government proposal to obtain "Total Information Awareness" (including information about you), and more.

Circumventing the upsell, but not all of it. Responding to the recent post about cable service a la carte, alta writes "I got a response from Jane Black (who wrote the original article) and she said slashdot jumped the gun. You can not pick and choose which channel you want. You can just choose to get basic limited and premium without getting the 2 steps in between. Here's the actual piece of law:

"Buy-through of other tiers prohibited - A cable operator may not require the subscription to any tier other than the basic service tier required by paragraph (7) as a condition of access to video programming offered on a per channel or per program basis. A cable operator may not discriminate between subscribers to the basic service tier and other subscribers with regard to the rates charged for video programming offered on a per channel or per program basis.

Read it all here. Here's what Jane said:

'But please make sure you understand the rule (Slashdot's headline was misleading indeed.) You can't just choose which channels you want. The new rule says that you can get basic (the network and cspan etc) plus HBO/Starz/Showtime *without* having to buy the standard package as well. If you want AMC, Lifetime, whatever, you still need to buy the whole package. Make sense?'

If you still need it, you can find more about the law here. Just type 543 in the "Section" field. The citation is: Section 623(b)(8) of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended. Found at volume 47 of the US Code Section 543(b)(8)"

The Salon dilemma. A Slashdot post last week reported that Salon was in serious financial trouble, and had dropped its premium section and instituted giant ads. Salon has now moved to over-the-counter trading. "While we valued the prestige of a NASDAQ listing, this move to the OTC market should not affect our core business," says Salon's president and CEO in the story. Update: 11/26 00:42 GMT by J : One correction: Salon has not dropped its premium section.

Dole, or Hormel? MacAndrew writes "As briefly discussed in slashdot a few weeks ago, Senator-elect Elizabeth Dole has been sued by a constituent who received eight unsolicited emails from her. He claims $100 damages including "emotional distress for having received spam from someone who should know better." Salon has now published an article focusing on the critical political versus commercial speech aspect of the case. Courts have recognized political speech as the innermost circle of free speech protection, and groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation believe spam laws that interfere with it may be not just unwise but unconstitutional."

Surely, someone's wallet will end up fat. In reaction to the recent story about provisions of the DMCA being used to prevent the posting of post-Thanksgiving sales prices from large retailers, Brian McWilliams writes "I finished up my story about FatWallet after you posted that link on Slashdot. Might help explain some stuff."

Well, we thought this here panopticon would be a nice idea ... McLuhanesque writes "DARPA has posted the architecture for their Total Information Awareness Systems , the uber-database that purports to suck in every scrap of electronic information about everyone, mix in some Human ID at a Distance technology, among other stuff, and profile ... well, just about everyone. More of their proposed fun and games are listed here." And Declan McCullagh writes: "Just posted the transcript of the Pentagon news briefing (worth a read) on Politech. Note this is on the TIA program, not 'eDNA.'

$10,000 is nothing to sneeze at. The idea of buying code into the world of Free software (aka code Ransom, as mentioned on Slashdot a few days ago) is drawing interest. waxed writes "FreePepper is an effort to collect enough money to purchase the source code for the multiplatform text editor Pepper from its author, Maarten Hekkelman, who has ceased development of it and re-release it under a BSD-style license. Donations may be made via PayPal or cheque."

Slashback with more on Salon's struggle to balance ads and subscriptions, online retailers versus online bargain hunters, the not-at-all-secret government proposal to obtain "Total Information Awareness" (including information about you), and more.

Circumventing the upsell, but not all of it. Responding to the recent post about cable service a la carte, alta writes "I got a response from Jane Black (who wrote the original article) and she said slashdot jumped the gun. You can not pick and choose which channel you want. You can just choose to get basic limited and premium without getting the 2 steps in between. Here's the actual piece of law:

"Buy-through of other tiers prohibited - A cable operator may not require the subscription to any tier other than the basic service tier required by paragraph (7) as a condition of access to video programming offered on a per channel or per program basis. A cable operator may not discriminate between subscribers to the basic service tier and other subscribers with regard to the rates charged for video programming offered on a per channel or per program basis.

Read it all here. Here's what Jane said:

'But please make sure you understand the rule (Slashdot's headline was misleading indeed.) You can't just choose which channels you want. The new rule says that you can get basic (the network and cspan etc) plus HBO/Starz/Showtime *without* having to buy the standard package as well. If you want AMC, Lifetime, whatever, you still need to buy the whole package. Make sense?'

If you still need it, you can find more about the law here. Just type 543 in the "Section" field. The citation is: Section 623(b)(8) of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended. Found at volume 47 of the US Code Section 543(b)(8)"

The Salon dilemma. A Slashdot post last week reported that Salon was in serious financial trouble, and had dropped its premium section and instituted giant ads. Salon has now moved to over-the-counter trading. "While we valued the prestige of a NASDAQ listing, this move to the OTC market should not affect our core business," says Salon's president and CEO in the story. Update: 11/26 00:42 GMT by J : One correction: Salon has not dropped its premium section.

Dole, or Hormel? MacAndrew writes "As briefly discussed in slashdot a few weeks ago, Senator-elect Elizabeth Dole has been sued by a constituent who received eight unsolicited emails from her. He claims $100 damages including "emotional distress for having received spam from someone who should know better." Salon has now published an article focusing on the critical political versus commercial speech aspect of the case. Courts have recognized political speech as the innermost circle of free speech protection, and groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation believe spam laws that interfere with it may be not just unwise but unconstitutional."

Surely, someone's wallet will end up fat. In reaction to the recent story about provisions of the DMCA being used to prevent the posting of post-Thanksgiving sales prices from large retailers, Brian McWilliams writes "I finished up my story about FatWallet after you posted that link on Slashdot. Might help explain some stuff."

Well, we thought this here panopticon would be a nice idea ... McLuhanesque writes "DARPA has posted the architecture for their Total Information Awareness Systems , the uber-database that purports to suck in every scrap of electronic information about everyone, mix in some Human ID at a Distance technology, among other stuff, and profile ... well, just about everyone. More of their proposed fun and games are listed here." And Declan McCullagh writes: "Just posted the transcript of the Pentagon news briefing (worth a read) on Politech. Note this is on the TIA program, not 'eDNA.'

$10,000 is nothing to sneeze at. The idea of buying code into the world of Free software (aka code Ransom, as mentioned on Slashdot a few days ago) is drawing interest. waxed writes "FreePepper is an effort to collect enough money to purchase the source code for the multiplatform text editor Pepper from its author, Maarten Hekkelman, who has ceased development of it and re-release it under a BSD-style license. Donations may be made via PayPal or cheque."

Slashback with more on Salon's struggle to balance ads and subscriptions, online retailers versus online bargain hunters, the not-at-all-secret government proposal to obtain "Total Information Awareness" (including information about you), and more.

Circumventing the upsell, but not all of it. Responding to the recent post about cable service a la carte, alta writes "I got a response from Jane Black (who wrote the original article) and she said slashdot jumped the gun. You can not pick and choose which channel you want. You can just choose to get basic limited and premium without getting the 2 steps in between. Here's the actual piece of law:

"Buy-through of other tiers prohibited - A cable operator may not require the subscription to any tier other than the basic service tier required by paragraph (7) as a condition of access to video programming offered on a per channel or per program basis. A cable operator may not discriminate between subscribers to the basic service tier and other subscribers with regard to the rates charged for video programming offered on a per channel or per program basis.

Read it all here. Here's what Jane said:

'But please make sure you understand the rule (Slashdot's headline was misleading indeed.) You can't just choose which channels you want. The new rule says that you can get basic (the network and cspan etc) plus HBO/Starz/Showtime *without* having to buy the standard package as well. If you want AMC, Lifetime, whatever, you still need to buy the whole package. Make sense?'

If you still need it, you can find more about the law here. Just type 543 in the "Section" field. The citation is: Section 623(b)(8) of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended. Found at volume 47 of the US Code Section 543(b)(8)"

The Salon dilemma. A Slashdot post last week reported that Salon was in serious financial trouble, and had dropped its premium section and instituted giant ads. Salon has now moved to over-the-counter trading. "While we valued the prestige of a NASDAQ listing, this move to the OTC market should not affect our core business," says Salon's president and CEO in the story. Update: 11/26 00:42 GMT by J : One correction: Salon has not dropped its premium section.

Dole, or Hormel? MacAndrew writes "As briefly discussed in slashdot a few weeks ago, Senator-elect Elizabeth Dole has been sued by a constituent who received eight unsolicited emails from her. He claims $100 damages including "emotional distress for having received spam from someone who should know better." Salon has now published an article focusing on the critical political versus commercial speech aspect of the case. Courts have recognized political speech as the innermost circle of free speech protection, and groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation believe spam laws that interfere with it may be not just unwise but unconstitutional."

Surely, someone's wallet will end up fat. In reaction to the recent story about provisions of the DMCA being used to prevent the posting of post-Thanksgiving sales prices from large retailers, Brian McWilliams writes "I finished up my story about FatWallet after you posted that link on Slashdot. Might help explain some stuff."

Well, we thought this here panopticon would be a nice idea ... McLuhanesque writes "DARPA has posted the architecture for their Total Information Awareness Systems , the uber-database that purports to suck in every scrap of electronic information about everyone, mix in some Human ID at a Distance technology, among other stuff, and profile ... well, just about everyone. More of their proposed fun and games are listed here." And Declan McCullagh writes: "Just posted the transcript of the Pentagon news briefing (worth a read) on Politech. Note this is on the TIA program, not 'eDNA.'

$10,000 is nothing to sneeze at. The idea of buying code into the world of Free software (aka code Ransom, as mentioned on Slashdot a few days ago) is drawing interest. waxed writes "FreePepper is an effort to collect enough money to purchase the source code for the multiplatform text editor Pepper from its author, Maarten Hekkelman, who has ceased development of it and re-release it under a BSD-style license. Donations may be made via PayPal or cheque."

celady writes: "From KurzweilAI.net, apparently DARPA, the main research and development center for the department of defense, is going to fund an all-terrain robot race . The robots will race from Los Angeles to Las Vegas completely without human intervention. This could prove useful in the battlefield someday. DARPA really has some interesting projects going on. This one is BORING compared to the Vortex Combustor and the Chip-Size Atomic Clock. Watch the DARPA site for updates."

celady writes: "From KurzweilAI.net, apparently DARPA, the main research and development center for the department of defense, is going to fund an all-terrain robot race . The robots will race from Los Angeles to Las Vegas completely without human intervention. This could prove useful in the battlefield someday. DARPA really has some interesting projects going on. This one is BORING compared to the Vortex Combustor and the Chip-Size Atomic Clock. Watch the DARPA site for updates."

celady writes: "From KurzweilAI.net, apparently DARPA, the main research and development center for the department of defense, is going to fund an all-terrain robot race . The robots will race from Los Angeles to Las Vegas completely without human intervention. This could prove useful in the battlefield someday. DARPA really has some interesting projects going on. This one is BORING compared to the Vortex Combustor and the Chip-Size Atomic Clock. Watch the DARPA site for updates."

opencity writes "CNN (and AP) reports on the 'Spy Fly' project. "Biologists and technologists at the University of California, Berkeley have spent the past four years developing a tiny robot, called the Micromechanical Flying Insect, that they say will one day fly like a fly." Good technical stuff on the Cal Berkeley page. The Pentagon likes the idea for spying and battlefield deployment but their page has no info about weaponization or command / communication technologies."

silance writes "Take a look at this project from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)! This time the boys are trying to hammer out a portable, two-way, real-time, multi-lingual audible speech translator proposed to be run on everything from PDA's to wearable military hardware to workstations (to replace their PRE-EXISTING ONE-WAY real-time hand-held audible translators, of course!). The site contains descriptions of technical approaches, a technical milestones timeline, and a nifty Power Point presentation for the executive-types ;) They should give William Shatner a beta model out of pure respect... Here's a link to Google's cached HTML version of the Power Point presentation just in case. (P.S. - get a load of that logo at the bottom of the page!)"

silance writes "Take a look at this project from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)! This time the boys are trying to hammer out a portable, two-way, real-time, multi-lingual audible speech translator proposed to be run on everything from PDA's to wearable military hardware to workstations (to replace their PRE-EXISTING ONE-WAY real-time hand-held audible translators, of course!). The site contains descriptions of technical approaches, a technical milestones timeline, and a nifty Power Point presentation for the executive-types ;) They should give William Shatner a beta model out of pure respect... Here's a link to Google's cached HTML version of the Power Point presentation just in case. (P.S. - get a load of that logo at the bottom of the page!)"

silance writes "Take a look at this project from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)! This time the boys are trying to hammer out a portable, two-way, real-time, multi-lingual audible speech translator proposed to be run on everything from PDA's to wearable military hardware to workstations (to replace their PRE-EXISTING ONE-WAY real-time hand-held audible translators, of course!). The site contains descriptions of technical approaches, a technical milestones timeline, and a nifty Power Point presentation for the executive-types ;) They should give William Shatner a beta model out of pure respect... Here's a link to Google's cached HTML version of the Power Point presentation just in case. (P.S. - get a load of that logo at the bottom of the page!)"

silance writes "Take a look at this project from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)! This time the boys are trying to hammer out a portable, two-way, real-time, multi-lingual audible speech translator proposed to be run on everything from PDA's to wearable military hardware to workstations (to replace their PRE-EXISTING ONE-WAY real-time hand-held audible translators, of course!). The site contains descriptions of technical approaches, a technical milestones timeline, and a nifty Power Point presentation for the executive-types ;) They should give William Shatner a beta model out of pure respect... Here's a link to Google's cached HTML version of the Power Point presentation just in case. (P.S. - get a load of that logo at the bottom of the page!)"

silance writes "Take a look at this project from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)! This time the boys are trying to hammer out a portable, two-way, real-time, multi-lingual audible speech translator proposed to be run on everything from PDA's to wearable military hardware to workstations (to replace their PRE-EXISTING ONE-WAY real-time hand-held audible translators, of course!). The site contains descriptions of technical approaches, a technical milestones timeline, and a nifty Power Point presentation for the executive-types ;) They should give William Shatner a beta model out of pure respect... Here's a link to Google's cached HTML version of the Power Point presentation just in case. (P.S. - get a load of that logo at the bottom of the page!)"

An Anonymous Coward writes: "The Sacramento Bee is running this story about the first powered device to achieve "hypersonic" speeds in the Earth's atmosphere. In a series of DARPA-sponsored tests, at Arnold Air Force Base in Tennessee, a scramjet engine, encased in a titanium projectile, was fired from a 130-foot cannon, at an initial velocity of Mach 7.1. The scramjet's engines then ignited, and the object moved another 260 feet, in just 30 milliseconds, before it came to rest in a series of steel plates designed to halt the flight. Peak acceleration: about 10,000 G's. Elapsed time, including cigarettes & pillowtalk: less than a second. PS: According to this nifty page at NASA, Mach 7.1 is about 5406 MPH, whereas 260 ft, per 0.03 seconds, is about 5909 MPH."

naoursla writes: "Remember the DARPA research solicitation for proposals on Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation? Here is a group that is making progress on it. Right now they have a pair of legs powered by a chain saw engine. Science News has an article about the researchers this week." And cmholm writes: "Fleshing out this earlier Slashdot story on wearable translators for the military is an article from AFCEA's June Signal magazine. Using a ViA II PC wearable running ViA's Language Translator software, the system can translate between spoken English and Korean, Thai, Chinese, Arabic, Albanian, Spanish, and other major European languages." So between the two, you can either talk to the aliens, or throw them out the airlock.

naoursla writes: "Remember the DARPA research solicitation for proposals on Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation? Here is a group that is making progress on it. Right now they have a pair of legs powered by a chain saw engine. Science News has an article about the researchers this week." And cmholm writes: "Fleshing out this earlier Slashdot story on wearable translators for the military is an article from AFCEA's June Signal magazine. Using a ViA II PC wearable running ViA's Language Translator software, the system can translate between spoken English and Korean, Thai, Chinese, Arabic, Albanian, Spanish, and other major European languages." So between the two, you can either talk to the aliens, or throw them out the airlock.

Mike Wilson writes: "New Scientist has an article about a 'dim-witted' robot which may survive in circumstances where smarter devices would fail." Hope you're not paranoid about a 50cm metal scorpion sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. I know I'm not, those are good folks with good intentions and robot slaves.

taatacgactc writes: "DARPA (DoD) is now supporting the development of a SPICE equivalent for biological circuits (aka BioSPICE). Best of all, it's to be "open source". Given the hyperexponential improvement in biological technology and the bioengineering efforts getting off the ground, fun stuff should be happening. Of course, there is the "dark side"." More information here. The submitter may be overstating the bit about "open source": the proposal says "All software developed as a part of the program will be open, in the sense that program performers and other DARPA authorized users will have the right to view, use, modify, and distribute code within the program authorized community. All derived works including revision, enhancement, modification, translation, abridgement and expansion of code will also remain open in this sense. ... The DARPA Director reserves the right to approve and exercise licensing arrangements depending on the context and the relevance to national security."

taatacgactc writes: "DARPA (DoD) is now supporting the development of a SPICE equivalent for biological circuits (aka BioSPICE). Best of all, it's to be "open source". Given the hyperexponential improvement in biological technology and the bioengineering efforts getting off the ground, fun stuff should be happening. Of course, there is the "dark side"." More information here. The submitter may be overstating the bit about "open source": the proposal says "All software developed as a part of the program will be open, in the sense that program performers and other DARPA authorized users will have the right to view, use, modify, and distribute code within the program authorized community. All derived works including revision, enhancement, modification, translation, abridgement and expansion of code will also remain open in this sense. ... The DARPA Director reserves the right to approve and exercise licensing arrangements depending on the context and the relevance to national security."

divert writes "Just got an email on the SEC-PROG mailing list that DARPA is looking to fund security research for open source operating systems." Maybe someone should just tell them about OpenBSD, save some time and money.

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.

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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:)

xlogan writes, "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is soliciting innovative research proposals on Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation (EHPA). The agency has put their proposal online. " The sheer number of mundane tasks I could accomplish with an exoskeleton is amazing. Why, I could rearrange furniture in the blink of an eye, all while defending the Earth from Evil! And with my super-enhanced vision and hearing, I might finally be allowed to join The Justice League of America ^[?] .

xlogan writes, "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is soliciting innovative research proposals on Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation (EHPA). The agency has put their proposal online. " The sheer number of mundane tasks I could accomplish with an exoskeleton is amazing. Why, I could rearrange furniture in the blink of an eye, all while defending the Earth from Evil! And with my super-enhanced vision and hearing, I might finally be allowed to join The Justice League of America ^[?] .