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Here is a link to another Lucy robot.
Could be interesting....

Since nobody who seems to have actually read any computer science papers has posted, here are two that immediately come to my mind.

Vannevar Bush. As We May Think. Atlantic Monthly, July, 1945.

This paper put forth the very first ideas about how people can mechanically search for information. While we don't have desks with levers on them, we do have Google. :)

Tim Berners Lee. Information Management: A Proposal. 1989.

This paper is where Tim Berners Lee proposes what we now know as the world wide web. It's an interesting read if you'd like to see what the original intent of the web was so that you can compare it to what we have today.

A place to look for good old computer science papers is in older issues of Communications of the ACM. There are lots of articles in plain English that you may find of interest. If you are a university student, your school may have a subscription to the ACM Digital Library. If they do, you can read all the issues back to 1958.

Also, you can find a lot of interesting CS publications at Citeseer. They have a page with the top 200 most accessed papers of all times. When I skimmed through it, I saw quite a few titles that may be of interest.

I'd boast of our "less likely being a random occurence", like this

Loose the tin foil hat people. There are people out there who really do want to spy on you but you will never know who they are becasue you have blinded yourself with your on agenda and politics.

No, OS/2 up to version 2.0 was jointly developed by Microsoft and IBM. It was released under both the IBM and Microsoft brands, so you had MS OS/2 and IBM OS/2 which were essentially the same product. Google, or look at a boot screen or some promotional material.

$ wc --lines /etc/hosts
12954 /etc/hosts
$ grep doubleclick /etc/hosts | wc --lines
262

I get very, very few banners, and mozilla deals with any popup that might get through. The site I got that list from seems to be down, so I've put it here.

I see a lot of posts pointing out the infexibility of software objects/components and the need for custom "wheels." I think the former can largely be blamed on the direction modern, statically-compiled programming languages took in their use of data hiding and mandatory encapsulation as "abstractions." Kiczales' Open Implementation group at PARC showed that this actually inhibits code reuse by preventing the customization of "the wheel." Open Implementation is supported by reflection and some aspects of the Meta-Object Protocol (although in most cases this is total overkill), and this is the central idea behind Kiczales' current work in Aspect-Oriented Programming. But in practice, I find relatively simple things, like function advising (and more recently Costanza's dynamically scoped functions), and CLOS's before, after, and around methods are enough to take care of almost all customization problems that arise. Sometimes, breaking data hiding rules can also be useful.

First, embedded systems are no longer thought of, or designed from the perspective of being, "closed". A very simple digital watch is the an example of a "closed" embedded system, being that it does not have to communicate with or rely on another device's logic/input to function (closed loop). On the other hand, the embedded systems found in cars/routers/switches/cellphones/servers etc. are not, and cannot be described as "closed systems" - they rely on input from other digital devices such as sensors or other embedded logic in order to function. By definition, there is NO communication/input in a closed system. Learn. Learn more.

"In order to be flexible enough to do everythign a computer can do, computer languages have to be allowed to crash the computer. Otherwise you are severly limiting what they can do and slowing thigns down."

Yes, as we have learned, if you want to create a system that is based on any type of varibles/input, it has to be open. You do not seem to understand that an embedded system is called "embedded" because the OS instructions are contained in the chip architecture. Instead writing code which uses a defined chip architecture (x86,PPC,Alpha), the code/logic is "embedded" in the chip. You can write software for imbedded devices - my cell phone runs java apps. There are many devices which utilize embedded linux, I have a webcam that runs its own apache webserver. So, no, embedded devices are not "severly" limited, and they most defiantly not slow! They instantly boot when turned on! Ha.

"1) accept a restricted operating system that will never be able to compete with a commercial system like Windows."

Your assumption of being restricted is wrong, check out Transmeta - and what does windows being "commercial" have to do with anything? How is an embedded system not commercial? Why can't a "non-commercial" system compete with a "commercial" system? Is my cellphone not commercial? Do you know the definition of commercial?

"2) Never install a program that was not A) created by the same company/group that wrote your operating sytem, B) specifically designed for your particular computer, and C) designed to be used with and thoroughly tested against all the other software that is currently installed on your PC."

How does something being created by "the same company/group" have anything to do with embedded systems, and/or system stability? (proprietary/opensorce) Not designed for my PC? I thought we were talking about embedded devices... What does your misinformed/erronous ideas about embedded devices have to do with a PC?

Your argument is based on numerous false assumptions which makes it untrue, and your misuse of words and their definitions makes your reasoning/correlations invalid. Basically, you have no idea what you are talking about.

First, embedded systems are no longer thought of, or designed from the perspective of being, "closed". A very simple digital watch is the an example of a "closed" embedded system, being that it does not have to communicate with or rely on another device's logic/input to function (closed loop). On the other hand, the embedded systems found in cars/routers/switches/cellphones/servers etc. are not, and cannot be described as "closed systems" - they rely on input from other digital devices such as sensors or other embedded logic in order to function. By definition, there is NO communication/input in a closed system. Learn. Learn more.

"In order to be flexible enough to do everythign a computer can do, computer languages have to be allowed to crash the computer. Otherwise you are severly limiting what they can do and slowing thigns down."

Yes, as we have learned, if you want to create a system that is based on any type of varibles/input, it has to be open. You do not seem to understand that an embedded system is called "embedded" because the OS instructions are contained in the chip architecture. Instead writing code which uses a defined chip architecture (x86,PPC,Alpha), the code/logic is "embedded" in the chip. You can write software for imbedded devices - my cell phone runs java apps. There are many devices which utilize embedded linux, I have a webcam that runs its own apache webserver. So, no, embedded devices are not "severly" limited, and they most defiantly not slow! They instantly boot when turned on! Ha.

"1) accept a restricted operating system that will never be able to compete with a commercial system like Windows."

Your assumption of being restricted is wrong, check out Transmeta - and what does windows being "commercial" have to do with anything? How is an embedded system not commercial? Why can't a "non-commercial" system compete with a "commercial" system? Is my cellphone not commercial? Do you know the definition of commercial?

"2) Never install a program that was not A) created by the same company/group that wrote your operating sytem, B) specifically designed for your particular computer, and C) designed to be used with and thoroughly tested against all the other software that is currently installed on your PC."

How does something being created by "the same company/group" have anything to do with embedded systems, and/or system stability? (proprietary/opensorce) Not designed for my PC? I thought we were talking about embedded devices... What does your misinformed/erronous ideas about embedded devices have to do with a PC?

Your argument is based on numerous false assumptions which makes it untrue, and your misuse of words and their definitions makes your reasoning/correlations invalid. Basically, you have no idea what you are talking about.

The Prisoner's Dilemma is a useful device for understanding how rational decisions for the individual can lead to irrational decisions for the group. In addition to being used by game theorists and in AI (where readers of Slashdot may have seen it), it is a very basic illustrative tool used in political science to explain behavior.

Once the workers get experience with whatever they were doing, they are either moved to something else that they have no experience with, or they move to management (where they stop doing actual work). It's a vicious cycle...

It's called the Peter Principle.
It's as true today as it was back in 1969 when Dr. Laurence J. Peter first wrote his book as it is today.

The so-called "principle of parsimony" is commonly known as Occam's Razor.

What most people fail to realize is that the principle of parsimony is not a fundamental law, but merely a guideline and preferred mode of discourse.

Rhetorical question: Why should our bias be towards simpler theories?

1. A single male chromosomal ancestor
   
2. With three descendant male lineages
   
3. The third male lineage had seven sub-lineages
   
4. These seven sub-lineages from the third lineage populate all the world except the Middle East and Africa.
   

1. We are all descended from a single male ancestor - Noah
   
2. Noah had three male descendants
   
3. One of the three sons, Japeth, had seven sons
   
4. The Japeth lineage (his seven sons and their descendants) populated all the world except the Middle East and Africa.
   

1. The oldest records of civilizations date back around 5000 years
   
2. The oldest living trees (determined by tree rings on the same tree - not radiocarbon dating) are around 5000 years as well. Though there is no reason trees can't live longer.
   
3. Flood stories exist in many (most?) world cultures
   
4. To account for problems with evolutionary theory, a new theory, Punctuated Equilibrium has gained prominence
   

I would heartily agree that increased "top-down" adult supervision is killing innovation. See Robert Cringly's excellent article for a good description of the problem.

In addition, I would say we are also seeing The Peter Principal in action. The growth of the 90's has left us with people in charge who aren't capable of much more than lobbying politicians to pass anti-competitive laws to protect them.

I really don't see a downside to this. (Just kidding. heh heh.)

The problem is not that service providers pick the route that gets the packet to its destination quickest; it's that they pick the route that gets the packet off their network the fastest. Those two are not the same thing at all. Think about it geographically. Let's say I'm a square network and I receive a packet at the northern end of my western border destined for somewhere to my northeast. I know that the quickest way to get it to its destination is to move it east across my own network and deliver it to my eastern neighbor. However, I also know that if I pass it on to my northern neighbor it will still get there without coming to me again, and my northern neighbor is closer. So, if I'm a selfish bastard, what do I do? I ship it northward, minimizing the time that it spends on my own network but increasing the total time before it reaches its destination. If everyone does this same sort of "hot potato" routing, total load on the network increases for everyone. In fact, my northern neighbor might very well be doing the same for packets lying to our southwest. We'd both be better off if we'd "play nice" but since we're both trying to be selfish we both lose.

Yes, folks, it's an instance of the prisoners' dilemma and these researchers are not the first to notice the fact.

It's been around for about 7 years...still French consider themselves as pioneers.

I believe those who are skeptical, yet scientifically minded should consider Occam's Razor with repect to the question of UFO's and life beyond earth. In short, The simplest explanation is that life in the Universe is abundant, and probably pollinates, if you will, in a Universal sense.

What is SIMPLER? That we are the ONLY life in the Universe and we developed on our own through an accident. We are alone. Never to be repeated. A Universal, biochemical FLUKE.

OR

That life manifests all over the Universe, and Intelligent forms of life develop on potentially millions of planets, and that SOME of them have developed technology to travel to other systems. Some of them left stuff where they went. Probably multiple places.

OR

A magically, all powerful God created the WHOLE Universe and then made one planet and put us on it. And we are alone.

It's a tough one.
Occam's History

Another page

What about this one ? It may not be miss universe anymore, it may not be the easiest person to live/work with (I work in another department of the same university and we actively hate anyone from her department), but she is a very fine physics professor.

The great thing about pure collaborative filtering is that it can easily take into account anomalous preferences a human wouldn't otherwise think to put together. It can handle anomalous recommendations based on others who have similarly discordant viewing or listening habits. However, I do agree that sometimes you get unexpected results.

Maybe if I watch some gay porn, TiVo will record that Bissel Wet-Vac "it'll put any neatnick in hog heaven" commercial for me!

Um, I think social darwinism is more about trying to rationalize social inequality using the theory of natural selection (and it has generally been discredited as a reasonable philosophy)

Darwinism itself is a kind of useless null concept outside the bounds of history (i.e. evolutionary history). It basically states that those things which have survived... did, and those things which haven't... didn't.

Sort of...it's more of a "those which were better suited for the environment survived due to the qualities that made it better suited." It is certainly not a null concept outside of evolutionary history. The theory is visible in all ranges of history, long-term evolution or short-term sociological. People have proposed you explain cultural information by the same mechanism. Memes are created, evolve, and are left behind much like dinosaurs. The application of natural selection is used widely in many areas, biomedical research (phage display, directed evolution) to software (genetic programming). To limit the thoery to a useless historical adjective is rather short-sighted.

What you've argued is that charity isn't beneficial to society. Whether or not that is true, it has little to do with Darwinism or natural selection.

No, what was argued is that if you can't survive in a context (ie as a business you cant make money), then you are going to be left behind. The argument had nothing to do with charity or its benefit (or lack thereof) to society, rather it was saying that businesses, like nearly everything, are subject to natural selection.

-Ted

Occam's Razor requires that all simpler possible explanations be eliminated first.

Nope, quite the reverse. The principle states that one should not make more assumptions than the minimum needed.

Take a look here or here or do a search on Google.

since the original criteron for a cyborg was any self governing system which used sensory feedback to adapt to its environment. whether that feedback loop interaction is "it's too hot, better cool off with this fan" or "you have a instant message. you'd probably want to turn on the car autopilot while you respond..." is just a matter of scale.

• http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/~NRHM/volume4/a-1998-9. htm
• http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/460740.html
• http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/LEARNWEB.html
• http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june02/bollen/06bollen.ht ml

But I'm a little concerned about the "expensive" part. For those who aren't familiar with the Dutch language, I can tell you that "vrije" (as in "Amsterdam Vrije Universiteit") means "free." That is, it's a university without tuition, funded by socialist tax policies (this is very common in Europe).

OCaml is functional, you give the computer rules and then point it in the right direction.

That's not what "functional language" means. The magic of functional programming comes from the (sometimes typed) lambda calculus, in which functions can be passed as parameters. In this vein, we also have easier polymorphism (functions can take a type as a parameter) and fewer "side effects," which could mean fewer bugs.

See Why Functional Programming Matters. For the theoretically inclined, I enjoyed An Introduction to Polymorphic Lambda Calculus with Subtyping.

(Both links can be found on the pages I link to; I don't link to the articles because I don't know your document format of choice.)

For those who don't know what it is, and, like me, don't feel like registering to get into the NYT, here's the prisoners' Dilemma.

It's definitely time for a good smart-card based cash system. We need a good incentive for people to get smart card readers on their computers and then someone can start up a Paypal-esque system to use them...

Such as these for example?

I live in Brussels, and we have "Proton" (PDF link) here. It's electronic cash, and I can charge it at my bank, and if I get an appropriate telephone terminal, then I can charge the card with money at home!

As a result, I can leave home in the morning, buy a newspaper, go to work, buy a Coke from a vending machine, buy my lunch, and then do my grocery shopping on the way home, all without handling even a single cent of physical cash.

Electronic cash is the true way forward - I'm just waiting for bars and cafes to adopt Proton, then I'll almost never need to carry real metal or paper money around at all.

-- Pete.

You mean here

Does anyone have information on such work?

The ratings info is merely additional content that is to be shared P2P.

I imagine that P2P CF would be organized like Francis Heylighen's "Superorganism".

Good explanation of the line which is plotted in this situation. Sure, people who aren't criminals don't have anything to worry about...yet. Perhaps the original poster can help us in speculating what would happen in the case that nobody was a criminal anymore. Do you think the FBI would just shut down? "Our work is done here, folks! You're welcome."

No.

There is a bioscientific concept of "The Red Queen Syndrome" which has been adopted by the cybernetics people and says that as a system evolves far enough to solve its problems, more problems are revealed. In this context, as fewer and fewer people broke the law, more laws would be undoubtedly be deemed necessary. What would US Congress do in a situation of low crime? Your City Council? Making spying on ones constituents easier is not even a slippery slope, it's an increase in the degree of slipperiness.

..and read about economy of scale.

You've just described the Peter Principle

People seem to think that competition will somehow magically select the best product or company. To steal an idea from memetics, the only thing competition does is select the product or company who is best at competing.

Finally, let's not judge Teoma until it's completed. The page has changed at least cosmetically since I first visited it this morning; who knows what's going on underneath. Maybe it'll even stop sucking my ass once it's out of beta ;)

Gas taxes are much more reasonable. They're easy to collect and regulate. They're also an established and trusted way to do it, so there's no need to setup another tax collecition agency. As a side-effect, they reward people for having more engergy efficient vehicles.

I see this as an application of the KISS principle. Do the bare minimum to get it done.

This shouldn't be too hard (at least it doesn't look too hard sitting here on a Sunday morning, half way through my first cup of liquid brains). The key is to note that we can't (and therefore needn't bother trying to) enforce the topology at all times. Instead, we just want to bias the network towards the desired form. For example:

New nodes pick a random twenty+ bit ID. This would probably not be enough to prevent collisions, (cf the Birthday Paradox) but that can be dealt with presently. New nodes connect up to whoever then can find. This would be pretty much what happens on most p2p now. Once the node has the desired number of connections, it can rank them by comparing the number of bits its ID has in common with the IDs of each peer (the Hamming Distance between the IDs). As further peers are discovered, it can establish connections to any that are Hamming-closer than its worst ranked peer and drop the worst ranked peers from its connections. Likewise, if a node detects a pair of peers that are Hamming-closer to each other than either is to it, it can "introduce" them to each other. If two peers meet and discover they have the same randomly chosen ID, the younger can flip one bit (for each ID bit, count the number of ctive connections that differ on that bit; flip one with the max count) and continue. Fat pipe peers can run more than one ID if they wish (cf UltraPeers)

-- MarkusQ

The world seems to work on the Peter Principle where one is promoted to the level of their incompetence.

I couldn't find the link to their old robotic ecosystems projects, but here here is a link to their newer combo hardware/software system for language accusition through seeing. (click 'talking heads)

Biological evolution is probably over; after all, we are quite well adapted to our environment; there might be some genetic drift, but it won't be noticed in a couple million years.

However, humankind is being used as a vehicle for memetic evolution; ideas evolve, reproduce, and flow from one mind to another; and it does not seem like this is going to stop. Ever.

Mail clients should have a spam-vote button, a button that lets you vote for blacklisting the sender of the message you are just viewing.

If you press the button you get a warning, explaining what you're about to do. If you accept, a message including all the headers of the spam mail is created automatically and sent to a spam-vote server at your e-mail service provider. This vote server verifies that the vote comes from you, and then, possibly after some processing, sends your vote to one or more blacklisting services chosen by your e-mail service provider.

If there are just a few votes to blacklist a particular sender it's considered a mistake and no blacklisting occurs. The sender is blacklisted only if the number of votes is large. If a provider has a very large number of blacklisted senders, that provider may be blacklisted.

This would give technically clueless users a say in the matter. It would let clueless users send proper spam complaints, complete with all the headers. And it would allow people to stem the flood without revealing their e-mail address to fake opt-out lists that just increase the spamming.

When you press the spam-vote button, the mail client not only sends the spam vote. It also puts the sender in the client's own list of blocked senders, and removes all the messages that came from that sender. You can change your mind and remove the blocking, so you can receive messages from that sender again. Then the mail client creates another automatic message revoking the blacklist vote.

This way even the clueless will see what happens. A clueless user can't just keep sending a lot of blacklisting votes by mistake. Mistakes have consequences that have to be rectified.

At the server side, the system can be refined and improved over time. For instance, the voting services should count percentages rather than absolute numbers. They might also keep karma points and reputation scores. They might use collaborative filtering. Lots of different refinements are possible. Hopefully there would be several different services trying different strategies so the system evolves.

Users can then try different e-mail service providers with different spam-vote and spam-block policies. Probably many providers would let users choose among several alternatives. Tastes differ very much in this matter. You try different alternatives and see what works best for you.

Give a man a fish and you have fed him for one day. Teach him how to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime. Unfortunately, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.

roboguard google mirror

I think soon we will be living William Gibson's vision of the Garage Kubrick. Very soon the line in quality between talented amateur and seasoned pro will be very much blurrier. I can't wait to see that day.

Occam's Razor states that (basically), "when you have two competing theories which make exactly the same predictions, the one that is simpler is the better."
Literally (translated), his razor states that plurality should not be posited without necessity." Interprete as you may.

Of course, it depends on whose definition you use. By many technical standards cyborgs are already here:

A cyborg is a cybernetic mechanism, a hybrid of machine and organism

Or this one...

(1) an organism with a machine built into it with consequent modification of function; (2) an organism which is part animal and part machine.

By this definition, approximately 10% of the U.S. population (I don't have figures for other countries, sorry...) are already cybernetic. Take my own situation, for example. A motorcycle accident two years ago left me with a right proximal humerus made of chromium steel and titanium. In other words, I have a cybernetic shoulder. You can tell to look at it, and it functions completely normally, but it's there.

And yes, I set off the metal detectors in airports... :)

-drin

The Peter Principle was first introduced by L. Peter in a humoristic book (of the same title) describing the pitfalls of bureaucratic organization. The original principle states that in a hierarchically structured administration, people tend to be promoted up to their "level of incompetence". The principle is based on the observation that in such an organization new employees typically start in the lower ranks, but when they prove to be competent in the task to which they are assigned, they get promoted to a higher rank. This process of climbing up the hierarchical ladder can go on indefinitely, until the employee reaches a position where he or she is no longer competent. At that moment the process typically stops, since the established rules of bureacracies make that it is very difficult to "demote" someone to a lower rank, even if that person would be much better fitted and more happy in that lower position. The net result is that most of the higher levels of a bureaucracy will be filled by incompetent people, who got there because they were quite good at doing a different (and usually, but not always, easier) task than the one they are expected to do.

The evolutionary generalization of the principle is less pessimistic in its implications, since evolution lacks the bureaucratic inertia that pushes and maintains people in an unfit position. But what will certainly remain is that systems confronted by evolutionary problems will quickly tackle the easy ones, but tend to get stuck in the difficult ones. The better (more fit, smarter, more competent, more adaptive) a system is, the more quickly it will solve all the easy problems, but the more difficult the problem will be it finally gets stuck in. Getting stuck here does not mean "being unfit", it just means having reached the limit of one's competence, and thus having great difficulty advancing further. This explains why even the most complex and adaptive species (such as ourselves, humans) are always still "struggling for survival" in their niches as energetically as are the most primitive organisms such as bacteria. If ever a species would get control over all its evolutionary problems, then the "Red Queen Principle" would make sure that new, more complex problems would arise, so that the species would continue to balance on the border of its domain of incompetence. In conclusion, the generalized Peter principle states that in evolution systems tend to develop up to the limit of their adaptive competence.

The Peter Principle was first introduced by L. Peter in a humoristic book (of the same title) describing the pitfalls of bureaucratic organization. The original principle states that in a hierarchically structured administration, people tend to be promoted up to their "level of incompetence". The principle is based on the observation that in such an organization new employees typically start in the lower ranks, but when they prove to be competent in the task to which they are assigned, they get promoted to a higher rank. This process of climbing up the hierarchical ladder can go on indefinitely, until the employee reaches a position where he or she is no longer competent. At that moment the process typically stops, since the established rules of bureacracies make that it is very difficult to "demote" someone to a lower rank, even if that person would be much better fitted and more happy in that lower position. The net result is that most of the higher levels of a bureaucracy will be filled by incompetent people, who got there because they were quite good at doing a different (and usually, but not always, easier) task than the one they are expected to do.

The evolutionary generalization of the principle is less pessimistic in its implications, since evolution lacks the bureaucratic inertia that pushes and maintains people in an unfit position. But what will certainly remain is that systems confronted by evolutionary problems will quickly tackle the easy ones, but tend to get stuck in the difficult ones. The better (more fit, smarter, more competent, more adaptive) a system is, the more quickly it will solve all the easy problems, but the more difficult the problem will be it finally gets stuck in. Getting stuck here does not mean "being unfit", it just means having reached the limit of one's competence, and thus having great difficulty advancing further. This explains why even the most complex and adaptive species (such as ourselves, humans) are always still "struggling for survival" in their niches as energetically as are the most primitive organisms such as bacteria. If ever a species would get control over all its evolutionary problems, then the "Red Queen Principle" would make sure that new, more complex problems would arise, so that the species would continue to balance on the border of its domain of incompetence. In conclusion, the generalized Peter principle states that in evolution systems tend to develop up to the limit of their adaptive competence.

Whoever said that this was like a seventh grade report was right. This revolution came as no accident to people involved in it. Someone like Stafford Beer and other people working in cybernetics have held the changes in communication and the ability to move and access information could have profound positive effects on freedom. For starters try to find Stafford's book Designing Freedom, which is short, readable, and provides a great outline on how management cybernetcs might be applied both to individual freedom and a system as complex as a nation state at the same time. His concepts are further developed in his work on Syntegration.

The "Balkanization" mentioned is no such thing. In Beer's model it is essential that such "variety attenuation" occur. Think back to 1994, the big problem was that there was too much information (variety) on the web and no way to organize it in a useful fashion -- this would explain why search engines were among the first successful (ok, that is arguable) web ventures. Too much variety, not enough information. The lack of organization actually made the web less useful.

The question that everyone should be asking is this: should variety attenuation be a matter of of the government or industry, or should it be a matter of individual choice.

Lets clear the smoke.

If "two" (forget more for a second) "alien-things" happened to agree to use a messaging protocol, such as SOAP, well, right there we would have a minor (but cosmic , considering that "alien-things" are involved) miracle , since apparently they communicated their agreement without a common communication means. (No. Telepathy doesn't count.)

Smoke: XML messaging (SOAP) works miracles!

Fact: "[A]lien-things" first need a common mechanism for reaching consensus regarding communication of information..

So lets say they belong to the Inter-Galactic Alliance of Geeky "Alien-Things" [I-GAGA-T(TM)], governed by the I-GAGA-T's strict policies regarding communication means deployment. [Kinda like the saying "lets all use HTTP"]. Then, our two brave "alien-things", charter members of I-GAGA-T (affectionately known to each other as GAGAs), decide to communicate using SOAP, at which point they have fulfilled "the ONLY requirement when doing client/server" according to their recently hired communication consultant, an Earthling named garoush . [Believe me folks, I am not making this up. A true story from the GAGA archives.]

But have they?

No. One of the GAGAs decides to send a message using SOAP to its newly acquired friend! So the trusty (and somewhat rusty) SOAP client is fired up and the message is sent. And guess what? Promptly comes the standard error reply: "Message received, NOT understood. Ca va?"

Put simply, using SOAP, two or more 'alien-things' can communicate to each other as long as they agree on the SOAP protocol - which is the ONLY requirement when doing client/server using SOAP.

So, put simply, the above is a false statement.

[And this point in the story, we find an agitated and nervous garoush, furiously sending SOAPy messages to Earth: "<help>Me!!</help>" -- Lets hope that back on Earth, garoush's friends have first agreed on the Rescue-Message-Format! (But maybe they didn't, hey garoush? "Just use SOAP" he used to say back on Earth. Well ... Just use SOAP then :) )]

SOAP, and XML-RPC, both provide a means for one GAGA to send messages to another GAGA, even if the two GAGA have discovered each other for the very first time. And this messaging protocol , based on the well-understood [there!] request-reply paradigm, and utilizing a standard XML-based message container , delivers SOAP-compliant XML messages from the sender to the receiver.

So as garoush learned/will-learn [funny thing, this space-time continuum] from his consulting gig to the GAGAs, <help>Me!</help> is not defined. For the content of the message, which delivers information from garoush back to Earth, to be understood by the recipient's), he and his hoped-for-rescuers would have first needed to agree on the format of encoding information in your SOAPy messages.

Sure CORBA, DCOM, COM+, Java, etc. allow you to enable two different components to talk to each other, but those technologies do it in such a way that you must have a 'piece' of the server (called the client) to be delivered and used by the client developer. Thus, to talk with a 'server' you must meet the needs of the 'server' when using CORBA, DCOM, COM+, Java, etc. With SOAP, this is all eliminated. As long as the server publishes its API via the SOAP protocol, I can write my client to talk with the server using what ever I want. This frees me from having to 'embed' in my client a piece of the server -- thus there is no longer any 'hard-coupling' between two 'things'.

[We'll skip the fact that SOAP, CORBA, [D]COM[+], and "Java" are a rather orthogonal set of technologies ...]

What is apparently not understood by garoush is that CORBA, DCOM, COM+, Java RMI, do much much more than just simply pass messages from one GAGA to another. [I recommend this great book written specifically for GAGAs for more information on what real (i.e. working) Inter-GAGA Communication Protocols require to function. (Check out the GAGAs on the cover!)] .

Lets just take Java's RMI as an example. What's this with RMI you say? Why didn't they call it Java RPC? I'm glad you asked. See the 'M' in RMI? That's a method, which is a procedure bound to an object. The P in RPC refers to a procedure, which is not necessarily bound to anything. To invoke a method of an object, you first need to get a handle on the object, a remote reference. Any object you say? No. Objects which have been registered with a Registry/Directory Service ( UDDI anyone?) Then you pass the method invocation message to the remote object and a bit of infrastructure on the receiving end maps your method invocation message to an actual method call on the specific object you are invoking. This sub-process of mapping your messages to actual method calls on a specific object uses a messaging protocol which is analogous to what SOAP specifies.

So:

Smoke: SOAP (& XML-RPC) are distributed object technologies! [This goes beyond Smoke and verges on GAGA humor..]

Fact: SOAP is a Simple Xml-based Messaging Protocol (SXMP)

Fact: By the time you have implemented a true Simple Object Access Protocol using a SXMP, you will have something that will look awfully close to RMI. (With the exception that RMI doesn't shuffle needlessly verbose ASCII bits through its system-level plumbing, but your SOAP does.)

In short, by the time you have provided the functionality of an RMI mechanism, such as Java RMI, using SOAP (or any RPC mechanism), you will have accomplished, by the prerequisite functionality of the task at hand, a fairly complex bit of software engineering. Congratulations! (CORBA? Oh boy ...)

In short, using SOAP, we now enable a true 'smart' data-exchange-protocol between two systems such that development is now at the level of "data-exchange" rather than API, SDK, language, etc.

No. More likely, you will realize that having standardized on the data-exchange, you have in effect delegated the complexity of building a distributed object system to the client as opposed to the infrastructure.

Now that is smart. [Good going there Bill!]

[Meanwhile, back on Earth, garoush's friends and would-be rescuers [will] happen upon a long forgotten SOAP Server log file. There, buried among other debug and error messages is the messaging logging the error message the SOAP server sent back to garoush back on planet X. "Ouch" says one of garoush's friends. "I hope he is OK". Now, isn't it just great that XML messages are human readable? (Its too back Servers aren't human -- damn shameful waste of all that human readable information!)]

Smoke: SOAP/XML is a great leap forward!

Fact: Bubble Economies produce Bubble Technologies .

Isn't that the whole argument of the peter principle? (BTW, IANA sociologist) In corporate culture, people get promoted past their level of competency. That's not exactly the case here, it's more like this person is being promoted past his/her level of comfort. Anyway, the firing part sucks, but if you work at a place that will fire you for not taking a promotion, maybe you should work elsewhere. Like Kevin Spacey in American Beauty, "I'm looking for as little responsibility as possible." If you want to read more about the Peter principle, check here

The idea that progress is going through a sharp turn upward is not supported by the Kurzweil's reference to the "exponential", a curve that looks basically the same at any scale -- but on a more radical mathematical formulation that goes to infinity in finite time -- specifically by Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026 (give or take). No, this isn't just some New Age eschatology -- it was actually arrived at by looking at historic data and extrapolating into the future.

Here is an excerpt from "Spasim (1974) The First First-Person-Shooter 3D Multiplayer Networked Game" that discusses the origin of the Transhumanist conception of "The Singularity":

They were trying to realize a man-machine cybernetic vision of this magical little gnome named Heinz von Foerster and needed an email system to go along with it.
...
When the semester was over, I threw a few things into my '64 Chevy Impalla, and headed east on Interstate 80 across the Illinois border for Urbana and CERL. It was my first paying job as a programmer.

Arriving at the Mecca of networking and meeting the magical little gnome who founded second order cybernetics (symbolized by the Ouroboros) in his Biological Computer Laboratory was an amazing experience.
...
A vital side note: Heinz von Foerster had published a paper in 1960 on global population: von Foerster, H, Mora, M. P., and Amiot, L. W., "Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D." 2026, Science 132, 1291-1295 (1960). In this paper, Heinz shows that the best formula that describes population growth over known human history is one that predicts the population will go to infinity on a Friday the 13 in November of 2026. As Roger Gregory likes to say, "That's just whacko!" The problem is, after he published the paper, it kept predicting population growth better than the other models. (see section 4.1 "Systems Ecology Notes") One of Heinz's early University of Illinois colleagues was Richard Hamming of "Hamming code" fame. Once while visiting the Naval Postgraduate School, I asked Dr. Hamming what he thought of Heinz von Foerster. Professor Hamming's response was "Heinz von Foerster: Now there's a first class kook!" I suspect Heinz's publication of, what Transhumanists call, "the singularity" had really gotten to Hamming -- not that Heinz wasn't eccentric enough get Hamming's goat in any case. Well, to continue this digression so as to give the damn Transhumanists a much-deserved keyboard lashing: It's one thing to be a guy like Hamming and denounce Heinz as a "kook" for following his formulae where they lead -- it's another to turn Heinz's formulae into a virtual religion, call it "the singularity" and totally forget where the idea came from the first place. I suggest the Transhumanists cite Heinz in the future whenever they refer to "the singularity" and think about his assumptions -- the primary one being that societies success varies directly with population size. It might be good to see if his model fits the data subsequent to the last check of which I am aware -- 1973 -- which just happens to be right at the point high population density societies decided to abandon their forward progress toward the space frontier.