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Here's my website. I invite anybody to look at the source code, and compare it against your run-of-the-mill WordPress website.

It doesn't do comments on blog posts, it does not have an interface to post new blog entries, it does not keep track of which articles have been viewed. You might as well generate your pages from templates and serve them statically, 0 lines of python needed on the webserver.

Here's my website. I invite anybody to look at the source code, and compare it against your run-of-the-mill WordPress website.

Here are the 249 lines of Python code that I use to render it. In addition to the source code, there are x6 template files (each less than 1KB large), and x1 CSS file (less than 2KB).

What the parent post says, rings true to me.

No need for Django, no need for frameworks, no need for deployment systems beyond DropBox.

"The long term savings in terms of enabling staff to go in and edit stuff live has saved a fortune." -- This especially rings true to me.

"I tried Django and the sheer volume of stuff I needed to do to get the same functionality up was huge and then the staff couldn't edit it because for all that's claimed for Django, there's a big model you have to get in you head before you can start meddling with it, and that means web professionals who cost a lot of money." -- And this too. (And I'm a professional Django developer, by day.)

I heard recently that there are people working on an "Indie Web" concept; I'm all in favor.

Here's my website. I invite anybody to look at the source code, and compare it against your run-of-the-mill WordPress website.

Here are the 249 lines of Python code that I use to render it. In addition to the source code, there are x6 template files (each less than 1KB large), and x1 CSS file (less than 2KB).

What the parent post says, rings true to me.

No need for Django, no need for frameworks, no need for deployment systems beyond DropBox.

"The long term savings in terms of enabling staff to go in and edit stuff live has saved a fortune." -- This especially rings true to me.

"I tried Django and the sheer volume of stuff I needed to do to get the same functionality up was huge and then the staff couldn't edit it because for all that's claimed for Django, there's a big model you have to get in you head before you can start meddling with it, and that means web professionals who cost a lot of money." -- And this too. (And I'm a professional Django developer, by day.)

I heard recently that there are people working on an "Indie Web" concept; I'm all in favor.

There are four Gods that I can recognize, while maintaining purely naturalistic commitments:

• Reality, (or "The Universe") -- Carl Sagan's aforementioned "God."
• Beingness -- admittedly, "weak beer..."
• "The End-Point of all Reasoning" -- Teilhard's "Omega Point," if you think there is such a thing,
• "The Highest Possible Ideal Imaginable"

(Not necessarily that these are things that naturalists must label "God," but that these are things that naturalists could label "God.")

The Noosphere (the world of reflection, consideration, feeling, thought, consciousness, etc., etc.,.) has clearly arisen. It exists in a world of reasoning, thinking, seeing, hearing, feeling, etc.,.

It is not at all clear to me that more complex beings would somehow discard emotion, motivation, and so on. If anything, I would think that they would have more complex experiences of reasoning, and accompanying deeper emotions. That is, I don't think that more complex beings would simply be (I'll call them) "aggressive cybernetic plants." I don't think that the end-point of life is really just more sophisticated murder-and-reproduce machines. (And I think if we did see something like that, our human nature, which lives substantially in the Noosphere, would require that we expunge the beast, destroy it, resist it, etc., etc.,. -- How many movies have just this theme?)

We will judge alien species and/or our own creations with our hearts, which seem to have emerged with the Noosphere, though I don't rule out the possibility that dogs and cats experience "heart" as we do, as well.

If cats and dogs experience "heart," and if to some degree even smaller / less brain animals experience "heart," then it is possible that "heart" is a fundamental reality of the Universe, and we have a sound bridge of identification between Heart & Reality. That is, the "Reality" and "Beingness" Gods are then not very far off from the "Ultimate Ideal" or "Eventual Reality" Gods.

What I mean to say is, to the extend that anything is experienced, by naturalistic commitments, this experience arises completely and thoroughly out of the Universe. So then feelings of complex thought, emotion, commitments, imaginings, faith, and so on-- all these things that make up "heart," are part of the Universe.

My own personal, perfectly naturalistic faith, a faith that is becoming understanding and knowledge to me, is that this is the case.

I think that this is a stronger statement than Carl Sagan ever made: Carl Sagan looks at the Universe and experiences wonder. Reveling in Wonder is one thing, then you choose what to do on your own afterward, basically disconnected from that experience. What I'm saying is that I think that the Universe may be fundamentally religiously oriented towards the development of the Heart and Virtues. This is because the Noosphere actually is Universe (or "Universe-stuff",) rather than disconnected from it. "Who's to say what has heart?", is a legitimate question. But I don't think that we can doubt that we have heart, and I think most of us (perhaps all of us) are operating with distinct respect for heart, whatever we understand it to be.

There are four Gods that I can recognize, while maintaining purely naturalistic commitments:

• Reality, (or "The Universe") -- Carl Sagan's aforementioned "God."
• Beingness -- admittedly, "weak beer..."
• "The End-Point of all Reasoning" -- Teilhard's "Omega Point," if you think there is such a thing,
• "The Highest Possible Ideal Imaginable"

(Not necessarily that these are things that naturalists must label "God," but that these are things that naturalists could label "God.")

The Noosphere (the world of reflection, consideration, feeling, thought, consciousness, etc., etc.,.) has clearly arisen. It exists in a world of reasoning, thinking, seeing, hearing, feeling, etc.,.

It is not at all clear to me that more complex beings would somehow discard emotion, motivation, and so on. If anything, I would think that they would have more complex experiences of reasoning, and accompanying deeper emotions. That is, I don't think that more complex beings would simply be (I'll call them) "aggressive cybernetic plants." I don't think that the end-point of life is really just more sophisticated murder-and-reproduce machines. (And I think if we did see something like that, our human nature, which lives substantially in the Noosphere, would require that we expunge the beast, destroy it, resist it, etc., etc.,. -- How many movies have just this theme?)

We will judge alien species and/or our own creations with our hearts, which seem to have emerged with the Noosphere, though I don't rule out the possibility that dogs and cats experience "heart" as we do, as well.

If cats and dogs experience "heart," and if to some degree even smaller / less brain animals experience "heart," then it is possible that "heart" is a fundamental reality of the Universe, and we have a sound bridge of identification between Heart & Reality. That is, the "Reality" and "Beingness" Gods are then not very far off from the "Ultimate Ideal" or "Eventual Reality" Gods.

What I mean to say is, to the extend that anything is experienced, by naturalistic commitments, this experience arises completely and thoroughly out of the Universe. So then feelings of complex thought, emotion, commitments, imaginings, faith, and so on-- all these things that make up "heart," are part of the Universe.

My own personal, perfectly naturalistic faith, a faith that is becoming understanding and knowledge to me, is that this is the case.

I think that this is a stronger statement than Carl Sagan ever made: Carl Sagan looks at the Universe and experiences wonder. Reveling in Wonder is one thing, then you choose what to do on your own afterward, basically disconnected from that experience. What I'm saying is that I think that the Universe may be fundamentally religiously oriented towards the development of the Heart and Virtues. This is because the Noosphere actually is Universe (or "Universe-stuff",) rather than disconnected from it. "Who's to say what has heart?", is a legitimate question. But I don't think that we can doubt that we have heart, and I think most of us (perhaps all of us) are operating with distinct respect for heart, whatever we understand it to be.

Here here.

Playing video games, while holding a tiny baby in the lap -- same here.

She first started playing Starcraft when she was 4, I am proud to say, and yet she was playing Wind Waker before that.

Amber & I both remember with great fondness when we first found her, running around in Wind Waker, fully competent, attacking goblins with a sword. Just the day before, she was bonking into walls. 24 hours later, she's running around gleefully, cheering, hacking up monsters. We are so proud!

Presently, she's six, and we're playing Okami tag-team. Soon, she will be 7, which means Shichi-go-san... We take our video games and literature very seriously. :D

Well, first, I got called to work as a programmer, after 3 years of dot-com slumber crash. That made an enormous difference in my life. They already knew that I could code because they were sifting through my online questions and scripts and programs and so on. And they already knew that I was deeply committed to the Open Source ethic. They also knew that I was available. It was all out there. So they called me up and I was a software developer again.

But more importantly, I regularly get to meet very interesting people in my field of "work," (the things I deeply care about, and work on, for the public, but don't get paid for,) because they know who I am, what I work on and think about, and so on.

While I have been in plenty of "online fist-fights" and have said plenty of embarrassing things, it just doesn't seem to have mattered much.

If you look at this from an economic perspective: "You know what you're getting." Whereas if someone comes to me plain slate, I have to wonder, "What's this person's history? Why are they hiding?"

Religion has been misunderstood by both scientists and religious alike.

It's question is not "How does the world work?", but "What opens the heart?"

Albert Einstein wrote, "How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it."

See also: Spiritual Atheism, Evolutionary Spirituality, and maybe Happy Feet as well.

Your first paragraph's argument I find interesting.

I disagree that violence is the only result when you fervently believe in something: Many times, children are the result (parents believing in one another's love,) sacrifice can be a result (the followers of Ghandi,) some times a company or a new product are a result (belief that the company can make it,) or the discovery of a new country ("there's something over there.")

You are concerned that evangelizing science, thoughtful skepticism, appreciation for the Universe, the common humanity of all people, and the Enlightenment will lead to violence, but that indoctrinating religious people's children will not. I remain unconvinced.

As for a baseline literacy and knowledge; I'm not so sure that it really works. Perhaps we're stealing away the minds of some fundamentalist Christians children, and perhaps it's the school system that does it, but I remain unconvinced. I think that, when children picked up science in schools, it's because their parents were open to it already, and encouraging their children: "Study this. Learn what we have not." And how did that happen? I think that people looked around, at the scientific discoveries, and talked with scientists they knew, or read a book, or read an argument in a newspaper, and talked about it with people, and made up their own mind. I don't think it was the school. I think the school battle is near irrelevant, really. You can teach kids things, but if their parents oppose it, especially in an organized way, I'm not convinced you get traction; I think you just annoy people.

As for just the concept of schooling, as necessary to teach the basics and so on; This is the most radical thing you'll hear me say here (and feel free to dismiss it,) but I don't believe in it at all. I say that because I visited a Sudbury school, after reading an article on Boing Boing that Cory Doctorow wrote. I interviewed several of the kids there, and checked out what they were reading, and what they were doing. I was impressed: Kids actually do teach themselves how to read, and more than that, I was impressed with how articulate, thoughtful, confident, good natured, responsible, and adult they were. They were still kids, and they weren't geniuses, but there was an unmistakable clarity, thoughtfulness, and deliberateness there, and it was there with all of them (teenagers mostly) that I talked with. If you bring an argument to them, and say, "What do you think about this?" ...they'll give you a thoughtful reply, from many angles.

What I'm saying is: I'm not convinced that "schooling" is one tenth as necessary as our society believes that it is. Yes, many of these kids (I don't know the figures)

I've put my money where my mouth is, incidentally; I've enrolled my almost-6-years-old daughter in the school, and I'm, personally, very impressed.

I doubt I've convinced you of anything particular, but, please carry this with you, and if you ever get a chance, perhaps look into this a little.

You can complain a lot and get very minor changes.

But you aren't going to change the structure of the system.

Everyone wants to raise their kids in radically different ways.

My daughter thrives at ClearWater. What's the chance of making my local public school work like that? Basically, 0.

• Possibility to a certain degree of working at home through the use of TV-telephones, telefaxes, etc. (forecast: 1998)
• Acquisition of observation data from unmanned probes around Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and outside the solar system. (1999)
• Development of optical communication technology that can realize substantial savings in the use of copper. (1999)
• Possibility of external fertilization or artificial womb. (2001)
• Widespread use of heart transplant from human being by resolving problems such as transplant immunity, rejection and donor. (2001)
• Practical use of rapid-transit railway using iron rail and iron wheel, which can run at 300 km/h. (2006)
• Development of artificial ear. (2007)

• Possibility to a certain degree of working at home through the use of TV-telephones, telefaxes, etc. (forecast: 1998)
• Acquisition of observation data from unmanned probes around Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and outside the solar system. (1999)
• Development of optical communication technology that can realize substantial savings in the use of copper. (1999)
• Possibility of external fertilization or artificial womb. (2001)
• Widespread use of heart transplant from human being by resolving problems such as transplant immunity, rejection and donor. (2001)
• Practical use of rapid-transit railway using iron rail and iron wheel, which can run at 300 km/h. (2006)
• Development of artificial ear. (2007)

• Possibility to a certain degree of working at home through the use of TV-telephones, telefaxes, etc. (forecast: 1998)
• Acquisition of observation data from unmanned probes around Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and outside the solar system. (1999)
• Development of optical communication technology that can realize substantial savings in the use of copper. (1999)
• Possibility of external fertilization or artificial womb. (2001)
• Widespread use of heart transplant from human being by resolving problems such as transplant immunity, rejection and donor. (2001)
• Practical use of rapid-transit railway using iron rail and iron wheel, which can run at 300 km/h. (2006)
• Development of artificial ear. (2007)

"I believe '2' is a good number. '4' will be an interesting number for the high-end. Will we see eight cores in the client in the next two years? If someone chooses to do that, engineering-wise that is possible. But I doubt this is something the market needs."

I very strongly suspect that he's talking about 8-cores in the next two years.

Most app dev's don't know how to use 2 cores efficiently at the moment, much less 8. And for the next two years, app dev's probably don't know what to do with 8.

And look! Behold! Their 8-core plans are for post-2008!

Folks, this is nonsense. Intel has said, over and over and over again, that we're going to x100's of cores by 2015.

And they have very clear ideas for specific applications: Real-time super-resolution for cameras. Speech and Voice recognition. Recognizing who's sitting in front of the camera, quickly. Virtualization. All kinds of stuff.

There's no end to the amount of useful processing that can occur.

"I believe '2' is a good number. '4' will be an interesting number for the high-end. Will we see eight cores in the client in the next two years? If someone chooses to do that, engineering-wise that is possible. But I doubt this is something the market needs."

I very strongly suspect that he's talking about 8-cores in the next two years.

Most app dev's don't know how to use 2 cores efficiently at the moment, much less 8. And for the next two years, app dev's probably don't know what to do with 8.

And look! Behold! Their 8-core plans are for post-2008!

Folks, this is nonsense. Intel has said, over and over and over again, that we're going to x100's of cores by 2015.

And they have very clear ideas for specific applications: Real-time super-resolution for cameras. Speech and Voice recognition. Recognizing who's sitting in front of the camera, quickly. Virtualization. All kinds of stuff.

There's no end to the amount of useful processing that can occur.

"I believe '2' is a good number. '4' will be an interesting number for the high-end. Will we see eight cores in the client in the next two years? If someone chooses to do that, engineering-wise that is possible. But I doubt this is something the market needs."

I very strongly suspect that he's talking about 8-cores in the next two years.

Most app dev's don't know how to use 2 cores efficiently at the moment, much less 8. And for the next two years, app dev's probably don't know what to do with 8.

And look! Behold! Their 8-core plans are for post-2008!

Folks, this is nonsense. Intel has said, over and over and over again, that we're going to x100's of cores by 2015.

And they have very clear ideas for specific applications: Real-time super-resolution for cameras. Speech and Voice recognition. Recognizing who's sitting in front of the camera, quickly. Virtualization. All kinds of stuff.

There's no end to the amount of useful processing that can occur.

Her favorite configuration is Protoss (her) & Protoss (me) vs. Zerg (computer.)

I wrote about how she used to play the Terrans on my blog a while back.

If I'm lost in online stuff, I hear: "C'mon daddy, it's time to play StarCraft."

Eventually, you'll get full 3D textured models out of your pen "scanner."

Intel said they were going to be releasing x100-core processors by 2015.

Just watch the Intel 2005 Keynote speech, (video) hear about x100 cores and x100 GBits/sec chip-chip data transfer.

It's not like this is a big secret or anything.

• Possibility to a certain degree of working at home through the use of TV-telephones, telefaxes, etc. (forecast: 1998)
• Acquisition of observation data from unmanned probes around Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and outside the solar system. (1999)
• Development of optical communication technology that can realize substantial savings in the use of copper. (1999)
• Possibility of external fertilization or artificial womb. (2001)
• Widespread use of heart transplant from human being by resolving problems such as transplant immunity, rejection and donor. (2001)
• Practical use of rapid-transit railway using iron rail and iron wheel, which can run at 300 km/h. (2006)
• Development of artificial ear. (2007)

• Possibility to a certain degree of working at home through the use of TV-telephones, telefaxes, etc. (forecast: 1998)
• Acquisition of observation data from unmanned probes around Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and outside the solar system. (1999)
• Development of optical communication technology that can realize substantial savings in the use of copper. (1999)
• Possibility of external fertilization or artificial womb. (2001)
• Widespread use of heart transplant from human being by resolving problems such as transplant immunity, rejection and donor. (2001)
• Practical use of rapid-transit railway using iron rail and iron wheel, which can run at 300 km/h. (2006)
• Development of artificial ear. (2007)

You would not need just the images, but also very accurate positioning data on where the photos were taken.

Quite right!

In theory, perhaps you could extrapolate the positioning information by looking at static objects in the frame, shadows, etc., but I don't think that's anywhere near practical.

No; It actually exists, now. It's not just a theory. I have a video on my hard drive here, demonstrating it ("kitchen.mp4.avi",) but I can't find it online. No matter; do a google search on "real-time camera tracking in unknown scenes" (which is the title I see when I start up the video,

It's just as you say-- those little points are called "landmarks," and it uses them to track by.

However if you had a cellphone with augmented GPS (WAAS or something like it) that had submeter accuracy or better, and you were taking pictures of a large object, and maybe included a compass chip or something like it to give you an azimuth reading, then I think you could do what you're talking about. At the very least you'd be able to easily construct a photographic panorama / flyaround (a la Quicktime VR). The work necessary to produce a 3-D model might be, as a physicist I knew used to say, "really nontrivial." At least working just from the images and telemetry data without any other subjective stuff (like selecting out the areas by hand as those 2-d photogrammetry systems have you doing, it seems).

A blue bird in industry has told me that in the next 3-5 years, cell phones will have not only GPS, but $3 accelerometers capable of sub-meter resolution sustained for 1 hour without update. (Important for underground locations.)

The work to produce 3-D models may be non-trivial, but: Did you follow the links I gave you? It's all been done- and this isn't recent: This is a few years back.

Here's a very simple example, here's a more complicated one, and here's yet another, this time dated 2000. Be sure to check out the generated 3D models.

So the techniques are out there, and they're in practice, and many people are starting to wake up that these are useful things to do. There's a lot of money to be made here. So, this is why I don't think it'll be long before this is integrated into cameras.

We have 2D camera phone scanners. Why not 3-D? Some even do OCR.

But in general I think that's a very cool idea. It would be neat to see digital camera manufacturers start to embed GPS chips into cameras; at the very least it would be cool to open something in iPhoto and see a minimap of exactly where you took the photo. I know that there are some vacation photos of mine that I wish I knew exactly where I'd been standing when I took it, and there's no easy way to figure out now. It's not like the chips to do that would be bulky anymore, now that they've been miniaturized for cellphones. In fact I think I remember a fairly old Kodak DSLR (one of their really serious ones that were built on Nikon F1 frames) that had a serial port and might have been able to connect to a GPS, for that purpose. I think it's a feature that's ready for prime time.

The cell phones have cameras, and many phones already have GPS. It won't be long before they all do..!

3-D photography does not require multiple lenses, if you can move the camera, and if the target is relatively stationary.

So for example, if you were photographing a mountain scene, you can just wave your camera around. If you had 25 different shots, it's like having 25 different eyes to position and construct an image from.

And the resulting calculated image can have a much greater resolution than the camera itself.

So, you can end up with a 3D high-resolution textured model, simply from one camera input. Like, say, your cell phone.

Now, granted, that's a lot of processing for a camera to perform... ...which is why wireless is so interesting. If you can send the pictures to google, and get google to work out the calculations, and send you the result, ...

Look up Photogrammetry.

My understanding is that the brain doesn't die after 100 years, like the body does.

If the body didn't strangle the brain to death, the brain could probably go on living for a lot longer.

I've read an estimate of 150 years somewhere, but I'm not sure what the real length is.

If we can develop Brain in a Jar technology, we may be able to circumvent the body entirely. It seems entirely feasible, to me.

The strategy is to work on freeways first: 2010-2020. Freeways are much more controlled than cities. Cities, much harder, will come later. 2020-2030. A city should be a humming hive of sensors and intelligences, by that point. (links)

So, according to the article, we will see this commercially around 2008-2010.

Justin Rattner tells us that in 2015, we should expect to see real-time super-resolution from cell cameras. That is, the ability to pick up several frames, and figure out more about the image, in real time, just based on the offsetting from holding a camera with a minute unconscious shake. (The problem is parallelizable, and 2015's x10-x100 core systems should take care of it.)

We already have the software to construct models & textures, after some rendering, from video footage.

If we could do real-time super-resolution in 2015, then it makes sense to me that, with some processing time, cell phone cameras in 2015 will render 3D-model textures and models. If the 4G network is around by then, (and it should be,) we could very well see instead that the data is sent to more powerful processing arrays elsewhere, (ie, on your home computers, or on Google's computers) and rendered into models in real-time. 4G is around 20Mb, perhaps 3G at 3Mb is enough to transmit low-grade video capture in real-time; Enough to make our 3D models in real time as well.

Presently, the OCR cameras require some rendering time. That requirement will clearly be gone by 2015; The cameras will automatically OCR text that is identified on-screen. (Perhaps the alarm will be a constant chirping buzz, whenever you use it?)

As a side note: Perhaps Google maps of the future will learn about what street names go to what streets, simply by recognizing and reading the sign posts.

What do you want to bet Google's going to get video footage of every city, and crank it into full-on 3D models? You better believe it. I'm betting on 2015, tops. (Who knows; I wouldn't be shocked if they weren't cranking on their Seattle footage now.)

We should also expect, I think, that the public will assemble it's own models from public footage. Volunteers will capture footage with their cell phones (or, if they are showing off, sophisticated digital video recordsers,) and feed it to a public free culture grid, which will churn out 3D models and textures for distribution and retrieval.

Is there a flaw in my reasoning? Are these outlandish thoughts for 2015? No! You can't have your Flying Car! Down boy! Retrain your imagination! Yes, people have predicted the future before; read about NISTEP's 1970's predictions for 1990-2000.

So, according to the article, we will see this commercially around 2008-2010.

Justin Rattner tells us that in 2015, we should expect to see real-time super-resolution from cell cameras. That is, the ability to pick up several frames, and figure out more about the image, in real time, just based on the offsetting from holding a camera with a minute unconscious shake. (The problem is parallelizable, and 2015's x10-x100 core systems should take care of it.)

We already have the software to construct models & textures, after some rendering, from video footage.

If we could do real-time super-resolution in 2015, then it makes sense to me that, with some processing time, cell phone cameras in 2015 will render 3D-model textures and models. If the 4G network is around by then, (and it should be,) we could very well see instead that the data is sent to more powerful processing arrays elsewhere, (ie, on your home computers, or on Google's computers) and rendered into models in real-time. 4G is around 20Mb, perhaps 3G at 3Mb is enough to transmit low-grade video capture in real-time; Enough to make our 3D models in real time as well.

Presently, the OCR cameras require some rendering time. That requirement will clearly be gone by 2015; The cameras will automatically OCR text that is identified on-screen. (Perhaps the alarm will be a constant chirping buzz, whenever you use it?)

As a side note: Perhaps Google maps of the future will learn about what street names go to what streets, simply by recognizing and reading the sign posts.

What do you want to bet Google's going to get video footage of every city, and crank it into full-on 3D models? You better believe it. I'm betting on 2015, tops. (Who knows; I wouldn't be shocked if they weren't cranking on their Seattle footage now.)

We should also expect, I think, that the public will assemble it's own models from public footage. Volunteers will capture footage with their cell phones (or, if they are showing off, sophisticated digital video recordsers,) and feed it to a public free culture grid, which will churn out 3D models and textures for distribution and retrieval.

Is there a flaw in my reasoning? Are these outlandish thoughts for 2015? No! You can't have your Flying Car! Down boy! Retrain your imagination! Yes, people have predicted the future before; read about NISTEP's 1970's predictions for 1990-2000.

So, according to the article, we will see this commercially around 2008-2010.

Justin Rattner tells us that in 2015, we should expect to see real-time super-resolution from cell cameras. That is, the ability to pick up several frames, and figure out more about the image, in real time, just based on the offsetting from holding a camera with a minute unconscious shake. (The problem is parallelizable, and 2015's x10-x100 core systems should take care of it.)

We already have the software to construct models & textures, after some rendering, from video footage.

If we could do real-time super-resolution in 2015, then it makes sense to me that, with some processing time, cell phone cameras in 2015 will render 3D-model textures and models. If the 4G network is around by then, (and it should be,) we could very well see instead that the data is sent to more powerful processing arrays elsewhere, (ie, on your home computers, or on Google's computers) and rendered into models in real-time. 4G is around 20Mb, perhaps 3G at 3Mb is enough to transmit low-grade video capture in real-time; Enough to make our 3D models in real time as well.

Presently, the OCR cameras require some rendering time. That requirement will clearly be gone by 2015; The cameras will automatically OCR text that is identified on-screen. (Perhaps the alarm will be a constant chirping buzz, whenever you use it?)

As a side note: Perhaps Google maps of the future will learn about what street names go to what streets, simply by recognizing and reading the sign posts.

What do you want to bet Google's going to get video footage of every city, and crank it into full-on 3D models? You better believe it. I'm betting on 2015, tops. (Who knows; I wouldn't be shocked if they weren't cranking on their Seattle footage now.)

We should also expect, I think, that the public will assemble it's own models from public footage. Volunteers will capture footage with their cell phones (or, if they are showing off, sophisticated digital video recordsers,) and feed it to a public free culture grid, which will churn out 3D models and textures for distribution and retrieval.

Is there a flaw in my reasoning? Are these outlandish thoughts for 2015? No! You can't have your Flying Car! Down boy! Retrain your imagination! Yes, people have predicted the future before; read about NISTEP's 1970's predictions for 1990-2000.

So, according to the article, we will see this commercially around 2008-2010.

Justin Rattner tells us that in 2015, we should expect to see real-time super-resolution from cell cameras. That is, the ability to pick up several frames, and figure out more about the image, in real time, just based on the offsetting from holding a camera with a minute unconscious shake. (The problem is parallelizable, and 2015's x10-x100 core systems should take care of it.)

We already have the software to construct models & textures, after some rendering, from video footage.

If we could do real-time super-resolution in 2015, then it makes sense to me that, with some processing time, cell phone cameras in 2015 will render 3D-model textures and models. If the 4G network is around by then, (and it should be,) we could very well see instead that the data is sent to more powerful processing arrays elsewhere, (ie, on your home computers, or on Google's computers) and rendered into models in real-time. 4G is around 20Mb, perhaps 3G at 3Mb is enough to transmit low-grade video capture in real-time; Enough to make our 3D models in real time as well.

Presently, the OCR cameras require some rendering time. That requirement will clearly be gone by 2015; The cameras will automatically OCR text that is identified on-screen. (Perhaps the alarm will be a constant chirping buzz, whenever you use it?)

As a side note: Perhaps Google maps of the future will learn about what street names go to what streets, simply by recognizing and reading the sign posts.

What do you want to bet Google's going to get video footage of every city, and crank it into full-on 3D models? You better believe it. I'm betting on 2015, tops. (Who knows; I wouldn't be shocked if they weren't cranking on their Seattle footage now.)

We should also expect, I think, that the public will assemble it's own models from public footage. Volunteers will capture footage with their cell phones (or, if they are showing off, sophisticated digital video recordsers,) and feed it to a public free culture grid, which will churn out 3D models and textures for distribution and retrieval.

Is there a flaw in my reasoning? Are these outlandish thoughts for 2015? No! You can't have your Flying Car! Down boy! Retrain your imagination! Yes, people have predicted the future before; read about NISTEP's 1970's predictions for 1990-2000.

It says "All it does is connect the Web server to your Python code with as little fuss as possible. It doesn't make decisions about what other tools to use, ..."

And then in the very next paragraph, it says: "Instead of relying on Apache or another Web server, CherryPy runs its own small Python-based Web server."

No, no, no!

I love CherryPy as a way of routing requests to Python objects and functions. Rock on!

But look, I'm running like 20 wiki and 5 custom web apps and a few WordPress installations on my server.

And they are all plugged into Apache.

So, actually, in fact, CherryPy has now made some decisions about what tools I'm supposed to use.

Sure, I can forward requests from Apache to the CherryPy server, but that is yet another hassle, it is yet another thing to support and maintain and think about.

I wish instead that the CherryPy dev's had made it so there were multiple adapters to the CherryPy system.

All that said:

CherryPy is my favorite system for doing web apps in Python. I've used it, I've loved it, it's great. It does make programming WebApps "fun," which is perverse. So, it's succeeded.

But I strongly dislike how I have to do this funny Apache business to get it to run on port 80, or I have to give people weird 8080 addresses, like you saw in the article.

Another thing I dislike, is that it's kind of tricky to get it to do XML-RPC, in my experience. (Then again, that was 3 months ago. Perhaps things have changed now.)

(I just use AutoXmlRpcServer or AutoXmlRpcCgi for when it's XML-RPC alone, without a web side along with it.)

But again: CherryPy is my favorite, when there is no XML-RPC aspect, and when I don't mind the weird config stuff I have to do to get it to cooperate with Apache.

It says "All it does is connect the Web server to your Python code with as little fuss as possible. It doesn't make decisions about what other tools to use, ..."

And then in the very next paragraph, it says: "Instead of relying on Apache or another Web server, CherryPy runs its own small Python-based Web server."

No, no, no!

I love CherryPy as a way of routing requests to Python objects and functions. Rock on!

But look, I'm running like 20 wiki and 5 custom web apps and a few WordPress installations on my server.

And they are all plugged into Apache.

So, actually, in fact, CherryPy has now made some decisions about what tools I'm supposed to use.

Sure, I can forward requests from Apache to the CherryPy server, but that is yet another hassle, it is yet another thing to support and maintain and think about.

I wish instead that the CherryPy dev's had made it so there were multiple adapters to the CherryPy system.

All that said:

CherryPy is my favorite system for doing web apps in Python. I've used it, I've loved it, it's great. It does make programming WebApps "fun," which is perverse. So, it's succeeded.

But I strongly dislike how I have to do this funny Apache business to get it to run on port 80, or I have to give people weird 8080 addresses, like you saw in the article.

Another thing I dislike, is that it's kind of tricky to get it to do XML-RPC, in my experience. (Then again, that was 3 months ago. Perhaps things have changed now.)

(I just use AutoXmlRpcServer or AutoXmlRpcCgi for when it's XML-RPC alone, without a web side along with it.)

But again: CherryPy is my favorite, when there is no XML-RPC aspect, and when I don't mind the weird config stuff I have to do to get it to cooperate with Apache.

People are now working on making and visiting complete worlds, not just sequels.

I believe it's similar to how our songs are getting longer and longer, too- it's not unusual to hear a song that goes on for 20 minutes, now. In fact, we just call it a "mix," and it's a big long stream of music, with a little of this, a little of that, mixed in for funn.

People feel attached to these worlds, and they wonder about these characters. They don't want to be hit with a brand new world everyday. Rather, they like a particular world, and they want to see it carried out further.

Also, they want it on multiple senses. They want to read it in book format, they want to play it as a video game, as a role playing game, they want to see it as a movie, they want to keep up with it as a TV show. All these things that people want to do.

People want to know the side stories, feel out the nooks and crannies of the complexities.

This is Slashdot, so I should mention that there are implications for Free Software game developers: network your worlds. Make a Tetris game that celebrates a theme from a constructed world that some tabletop gamers articulated in detail. Fetch fanfic authors to create stories based in this world. Get an existing RPG engine, and see if you can make a short game out of one of those authors' stories. See if an illustrator won't do an illustration of a major scene. We can have whole worlds, not just isolated projects.

...to imagine a world of 2050.

It's not easy.

However, I have some puzzle pieces.

One of the characters is raised by the N'th generation upgrade of his parent's pokemon data. They started on the Gameboy, transfered them to the N64, then the GameCube games, and then with Revolution, to the Nintendo servers, where the pokemon AI were continually upgraded until such an age where people purchased back the hosting of their pokemon, who were, at that point, highly intelligent creatures.

There is a religious group called "The Explainers," which is basically the organized scientific perspective of today, combined with a story describing the recognized myth of Prometheus, the Enlightenment, and a metaphysics of progress. They formed out the realization on behalf of scientists and the non-religious public, that they need to actively combat a growing religious throwback conservatism, that is aggressively using virtual reality technologies to keep our minds in the middle ages and the BCs.

But really, it's just incredibly difficult to write a story like this. The changes that we'll likely see in the next 20 years are, frankly, shocking. We will see sophisticated AIs, significantly easier programming, the merging of the online and offline worlds, people being turned into robots in the workplace, robots being able to do most every physical labor. No telling when we'll get the Augmented Reality vision displays: 10 years? 20 years? Probably not much longer than that, given that we already have displays based on projecting laser light directly into the eye.

And then there's the mass public organizing going on online, and all these changes in how we think about and organize information...

Really, it's very hard to just project 20 years into the future, let alone 50.

...to imagine a world of 2050.

It's not easy.

However, I have some puzzle pieces.

One of the characters is raised by the N'th generation upgrade of his parent's pokemon data. They started on the Gameboy, transfered them to the N64, then the GameCube games, and then with Revolution, to the Nintendo servers, where the pokemon AI were continually upgraded until such an age where people purchased back the hosting of their pokemon, who were, at that point, highly intelligent creatures.

There is a religious group called "The Explainers," which is basically the organized scientific perspective of today, combined with a story describing the recognized myth of Prometheus, the Enlightenment, and a metaphysics of progress. They formed out the realization on behalf of scientists and the non-religious public, that they need to actively combat a growing religious throwback conservatism, that is aggressively using virtual reality technologies to keep our minds in the middle ages and the BCs.

But really, it's just incredibly difficult to write a story like this. The changes that we'll likely see in the next 20 years are, frankly, shocking. We will see sophisticated AIs, significantly easier programming, the merging of the online and offline worlds, people being turned into robots in the workplace, robots being able to do most every physical labor. No telling when we'll get the Augmented Reality vision displays: 10 years? 20 years? Probably not much longer than that, given that we already have displays based on projecting laser light directly into the eye.

And then there's the mass public organizing going on online, and all these changes in how we think about and organize information...

Really, it's very hard to just project 20 years into the future, let alone 50.

...to imagine a world of 2050.

It's not easy.

However, I have some puzzle pieces.

One of the characters is raised by the N'th generation upgrade of his parent's pokemon data. They started on the Gameboy, transfered them to the N64, then the GameCube games, and then with Revolution, to the Nintendo servers, where the pokemon AI were continually upgraded until such an age where people purchased back the hosting of their pokemon, who were, at that point, highly intelligent creatures.

There is a religious group called "The Explainers," which is basically the organized scientific perspective of today, combined with a story describing the recognized myth of Prometheus, the Enlightenment, and a metaphysics of progress. They formed out the realization on behalf of scientists and the non-religious public, that they need to actively combat a growing religious throwback conservatism, that is aggressively using virtual reality technologies to keep our minds in the middle ages and the BCs.

But really, it's just incredibly difficult to write a story like this. The changes that we'll likely see in the next 20 years are, frankly, shocking. We will see sophisticated AIs, significantly easier programming, the merging of the online and offline worlds, people being turned into robots in the workplace, robots being able to do most every physical labor. No telling when we'll get the Augmented Reality vision displays: 10 years? 20 years? Probably not much longer than that, given that we already have displays based on projecting laser light directly into the eye.

And then there's the mass public organizing going on online, and all these changes in how we think about and organize information...

Really, it's very hard to just project 20 years into the future, let alone 50.

• voice interaction
• visual interaction (face recognition, identifying shape, video analysis)
• 3D graphics
• machine learning

• voice interaction
• visual interaction (face recognition, identifying shape, video analysis)
• 3D graphics
• machine learning

• voice interaction
• visual interaction (face recognition, identifying shape, video analysis)
• 3D graphics
• machine learning

If you take this argument further, you get something that looks a little like this. You're going to have to scroll down a ways to part 2: Hive Mind Independence, which takes place somewhere between 2013-2023 by the scenario timeline.

The basic idea is this: What if the smart mobs take over? Not just software, but everything?

We see these open developments happening first in software, then elsewhere.

First Open Source software, then Open Source encyclopedia, then Open Source manufacturing, etc., etc.,. It does not seem unreasonable to me to believe that more and more work will develop on top of the network of relationships and trusts that arise from open development.

You might be interested in something I'm working on.

I want it to be easy to use bookmarks in speech, not just keep them in a file.

You can see this in wiki- in wiki, if you use a [[special link syntax,]] it'll automatically link the text.

I want that for everything.

If I'm writing in Slashdot, I shouldn't have to write out less-than a href=quote (lookup-and-paste-URL-here) greater-than blah blah less-than /a greater-than, to tell you about "blah blah." I'd much rather just type [[blah blah,]] and have slashdot look up my link from my namespace.

Just like in wiki. But it should be possible from any text medium, and it should be able to link to anything with a URL.

Check out our project if you're interested. We've got a timeline on the scale of a year right now, we've written a bunch of software. We've just formalized our Store spec (so that Firefox and other tools can communicate with a names store in a standard way,) and are in process of formalizing our query spec, so that our name servers all talk the same language. We're about to embark on our Firefox plugin, so you can just name a page as you see it. We have a del.icio.us script as well, that can autogenerate namespace descriptions from del.icio.us XML.

If you create diagrams and explanations, tablets make a huge difference.

When we solve the problem of incorporating images online, and when we have cheap tablets, you're going to see Wikipedia (and the rest of the web) light up with diagrammed explanations of things.

Visual Language is going to be big and near-ubiquitous. It'll be a lot easier to learn about stuff.

But, the pressure will be on you to make visual explanations. People will have much higher visual literacy. The knowledge in "Understanding Comics" will be near-ubiquitous- common sense. Text-only will be fogey-style.

So, after a while, the pressure will be on to use a Tablet, or whatever the future equivalent is. Perhaps you'll just write with a stylus on a table, and the camera next to you infer where you're drawing, and use a laser to print it down for you, or something. Who knows.

If you create diagrams and explanations, tablets make a huge difference.

When we solve the problem of incorporating images online, and when we have cheap tablets, you're going to see Wikipedia (and the rest of the web) light up with diagrammed explanations of things.

Visual Language is going to be big and near-ubiquitous. It'll be a lot easier to learn about stuff.

But, the pressure will be on you to make visual explanations. People will have much higher visual literacy. The knowledge in "Understanding Comics" will be near-ubiquitous- common sense. Text-only will be fogey-style.

So, after a while, the pressure will be on to use a Tablet, or whatever the future equivalent is. Perhaps you'll just write with a stylus on a table, and the camera next to you infer where you're drawing, and use a laser to print it down for you, or something. Who knows.

If you create diagrams and explanations, tablets make a huge difference.

When we solve the problem of incorporating images online, and when we have cheap tablets, you're going to see Wikipedia (and the rest of the web) light up with diagrammed explanations of things.

Visual Language is going to be big and near-ubiquitous. It'll be a lot easier to learn about stuff.

But, the pressure will be on you to make visual explanations. People will have much higher visual literacy. The knowledge in "Understanding Comics" will be near-ubiquitous- common sense. Text-only will be fogey-style.

So, after a while, the pressure will be on to use a Tablet, or whatever the future equivalent is. Perhaps you'll just write with a stylus on a table, and the camera next to you infer where you're drawing, and use a laser to print it down for you, or something. Who knows.

When you open up the SVG door, you don't just make space for "pretty pictures." You ALSO get,...

• Visual Programming Languages - because they're so easy to make, once it's easy to move shapes around on the screen and aggregate diagrams.
• non-boxy user-interface - look at the UI all around you- it's characterized almost exclusively by boxes. Many problems are best described by hooking pieces together, spatially. But our UI is all set up for entering or selecting text into boxes.
• Graphs, graphs, graphs - as in circles connected by lines. Collaborative organization of ideas on a spatial surface.

As SVG comes on line, at both the web-browser level and the desktop-programming level, and as people become proficient in these things, we'll make a major step forward in user interface.

Working with graphs will change the way we think. Our tools have, so far, afforded creating hierarchical structures. That is, it's far easier to express hierarchy with text editors, than it is to express network. Hierarchy is fine, but it's only part of the picture. The other part is more-biological looking network organizations. As the tools come online to create biological organizations (as we see appearing in message-oriented programming models, component based developments,) we'll think about programming (and perhaps our world) in very different ways.

To make this a little clearer: If you look in magazine articles where they're discussing programming architecture and software layout, you're going to see lots of 2D diagrams with lots of pieces plugging into other pieces in a graphical layout- sort of like a circuit board. This is different than the way we have traditionally programmed, which is more like a tree shape. Even within object oriented programming, because our interface still affords tree layouts. Where we have explored beyond tree layouts, (complex networks of design patterns,) we have struggled with the user interface, and people have stretched out to make better representations that capture graph-like programs: Think of your clumbsy UML editors, and things like that- really trying to hack a solution between more-or-less linear code expressions, and the 2D graphs that we're thinking in.

When SVG is well understood, documented, with tools at desktop and web levels, we should start to see native 2D programming languages, that don't feel like either toy languages, or cheap hacks riding on top of other programming languages.

I've written more about this at Futures:SvgRevolution.

Not bummed out yet? Massive parallelism works well for people doing scientific computing, but for the average joe, it's useless. ...rarely do I have two time-critical things to worry about at the same time.

In the 2005 Intel keynote speech, distributed computation expert Justin Rattner noted that "without language support, this isn't going to work."

Pretty much all apps can make use of parallel execution. If you have to interpret a big chunk of data, you can usually break it into segments, and process them in parallel, and then perform a fuse step at the end. Dividing into 2 isn't so exciting, dividing into 4 is pretty amazing.

Right now, few programs make use of parallel execution. This is why you have to run a bunch of programs at once to see basically anything. Threading and multiple processes is a nice way to take advantage of wait time, but that's different than parsing a big XML file in parallel.

Also, you're thinking about current use of computers. In the relatively near future, you're going to have CPU's cranking pretty much all the time. You're going to have face recognition running on your computers, you're cameras are going to be building 3D reconstructions of everything they see before them, yadda yadda yadda. In the nearer term, search and indexing loads are probably going to go up. There are going to be more things like the google desktop search bar that want to run and calculate all the time. We are rearchitecting our computers to support this sort of thing.

Not bummed out yet? Massive parallelism works well for people doing scientific computing, but for the average joe, it's useless. ...rarely do I have two time-critical things to worry about at the same time.

In the 2005 Intel keynote speech, distributed computation expert Justin Rattner noted that "without language support, this isn't going to work."

Pretty much all apps can make use of parallel execution. If you have to interpret a big chunk of data, you can usually break it into segments, and process them in parallel, and then perform a fuse step at the end. Dividing into 2 isn't so exciting, dividing into 4 is pretty amazing.

Right now, few programs make use of parallel execution. This is why you have to run a bunch of programs at once to see basically anything. Threading and multiple processes is a nice way to take advantage of wait time, but that's different than parsing a big XML file in parallel.

Also, you're thinking about current use of computers. In the relatively near future, you're going to have CPU's cranking pretty much all the time. You're going to have face recognition running on your computers, you're cameras are going to be building 3D reconstructions of everything they see before them, yadda yadda yadda. In the nearer term, search and indexing loads are probably going to go up. There are going to be more things like the google desktop search bar that want to run and calculate all the time. We are rearchitecting our computers to support this sort of thing.

Ha!

I'm going to have to take you out back and talk with you about this elsewhere.

Your problem with it seems to be how you feel about who you are, not what you know about it.

No, I'm sorry, but you've mischaracterized this one. You're talking to the real deal right now.

I'm fully aware of the "Poor religious boy Wakka who can't defy the sacred teachings" story, but I assure you, that ain't it.

You're going to have to make a real argument, pick a number, and get in line.

Your challenge: The explanatory gap between the Zombie world and the world where people have experiences.

The next number's 437, but don't worry, I mow through these people so fast, you'll be up in no time. {;)}=

(Wait till I put the awareness wiki back online, we can do this one again over there.)

You may all be interested in the TaoRiver Futures wiki.

There's also another one developing, the WikiCities Futures wiki.

The idea is that by combining our understandings from our respective fields, we can attempt to better understand the possibilities open to us, and the timing and dependencies behind them.

Many other related wiki are listed on the Futures wiki WikiNode.

You may all be interested in the TaoRiver Futures wiki.

There's also another one developing, the WikiCities Futures wiki.

The idea is that by combining our understandings from our respective fields, we can attempt to better understand the possibilities open to us, and the timing and dependencies behind them.

Many other related wiki are listed on the Futures wiki WikiNode.

I'm not sure whose side of the coin you're arguing.

I am arguing with you, so we are on the opposite sides of coin. :)

I'd say that the prerendered quality is advancing faster than the videogame quality.

This is simply not true, and my examples from 1984-1989-1995-2001 demonstrate it. Prerendered CGI is improving very fast, but real-time PC graphics are improving even faster.

There is no point in doing raytracing if you can avoid it. But in filmmaking the cost of renderfarms is never the limiting factor, so these people are not very motivated in cutting corners. On the PC the situation is different, that's why nVidia and ATi are forced to constantly invent new ways to do the same thing faster.

Check out this and this. The gap is already very small and it's getting smaller ridiculously fast. Some things are still missing, first of all, realistic lighting and shadowing and realistic pixel shaders, but these technologies are only 1-year old on the PC, so give them some time (i.e. 2-3 years) to fully shine.

If you know the facts, there can be no doubt about it - real-time graphics will soon catch up with rendered CGI.