I've seen articles where some communities are already re-purposing their libraries into something else since they don't get enough business to serve as book libraries any more. Many are turning into large public internet cafes but without the coffee.
I know a white, leftist, retired academic who is of the opinion that there are to many of us white folks and not enough of the poor non-white people. He applauds his granddaughter for deciding not to have children. Of course, he is also a firm believer in Malthus who got the whole rich families have more children and poor families have less children bass-ackwards.
A lot of comments her make me think of Shrunken Head Ned, the world's only Shrunken Head Village Doctor that plies his trade in the Adventureland in Disneyland. (At least, he used to. I haven't been there for a few years.) That's the way a good many of these comments seem to lean, that Watson as a medical AI is just a sort of amusement that can't be trusted.
I wouldn't trust Watson as a sole source of medical advice either but in combination with the right doctor who knows how to examine and work with people, Watson would make a good tool. It takes a good personal interaction to get all the symptoms from individuals and if the doctor was running into something that he couldn't quite make sense of then Watson might make the connection between seemingly unrelated things to help put the doctor on track to a diagnosis.
It's not a replacement for the doctor but a tool that the doctors can use when they've run into a wall they can't scale themselves. (that's a metaphor, by the way, for all those who will be trying to think of why doctors would be scaling walls to make a diagnosis. quit being so dang literal.)
Problem is that Microsoft might start with an open standard then they'll add proprietary extensions that will make the open standard less open. They tried it with Internet Explorer and fortunately didn't quite succeed although it took years for an alternative to really take a foothold.
No, I rather not see a truly open standard be created only to become corrupted by Microsoft. Better to have a truly open standard and client that also is compatible with the Skype protocol through reverse engineering so they cannot claim copyright infringement. They can argue trade secrets but that hasn't stopped the creation of other tools compatible with Microsoft data formats.
Because they're keeping the process needed proprietary so it can't be copied by other companies and start a competition that would drive down the price.
5. Poor countries find themselves with disposable cash, adopt American Dream lifestyle, pave roads, buy cars, big houses and electronic gadgets and start adding to CO2 emissions but lose their carbon credits.
Let's see, the early IPCC reports warned us of 50 million climate refugees from flooded coastlines but 2010. I set up a couple of cots in my basement to help out but no one's come knocking at my door yet. In fact, as far as I've seen, no one's really displaced yet. There's a country in the south Pacific that leased a big chunk of Australia for just such and emergency but I haven't heard that they've moved there yet.
There's been a big problem with weather (i know, in know, weather and climate aren't supposed to be mentioned in the same article but you did already.) but that seem to the connected to a short period cooling and warming of the Pacific ocean called La Nina and El Nino.
Personally, I'd rather live in a world that's 4 degrees warmer than one that was 4 degrees colder. The amount of arable land is increased and plants grow faster and larger. Take the world back down by 4 degrees and them newly planted vineyards in England will die, most of Canada's breadbasket agricultural land returns to permafrost and you wouldn't want to think how bad Siberia would get. Of course, the return of the land bridge between Asia and north America would make it easier to get cargo from one place to the other. You wouldn't have to try building the bridge I've seen notes about in shows about mega projects.
Everyone seems to call on gas as an alternative to oil or coal for power generation but it's still a carbon compound and generates CO2 when burned. It might be a little cleaner than coal or oil but it's still a greenhouse gas producer.
How does switching to gas lighten the carbon dioxide load?
What the last year or so of arguments about discontinuing nuclear power plants, carbon dioxide "pollution", outlawing of agricultural chemicals, the continued drive to less and less power consumption, more and more use of natural materials, the slowing of technical progress (except as relates to lotus land type entertainment products) combined with the debt crisis is many western states just says to me that western civilization has already past its peak and we're just riding the downhill slope into obscurity.
You'll notice that the other competing states aren't calling for ends to power generation, ends to population replacement. China, India or the burgeoning Islamic religion that wants to create a new world state aren't going to be as liberal and caring to make themselves go extinct to save the planet. They'll keep generating power by whatever means possible whether it's building a new coal fired power plant a week or building newer technology nuclear reactors and they'll make sure their population controls don't drop below replacement rates. China has been easing up on their one child per family rules for a while now.
If you want a place in the future you might as well do as I've seen many do now. Get your higher education and jobs in China or India. They'll be leading humanity into the future not the West.
As for me, I'm just old enough to see this on it's way but will be cozily dead before the end really comes. (unless the US falters and doesn't raise it debt ceiling in time. Now that might be something to see. The cascade of state failures would be impressive.)
You're right in that the visible flames were from the coating on the Hindenburg but even if there'd been no visible flames the result would still have been the same, a crashed blimp, people dead and the formation of a distrust of Hydrogen as a lifting gas. The real irony is that it might have been averted if there hadn't been a tight control on who could buy Helium at the time.
Now, what are these new power generating floating windmills going to be made of? We have a new wonderfully non-flammable material that will be light enough and strong enough to carry the generator. If the gas bag fails, there will be a parachute to lightly waft the machinery to the ground?
Come on guys, you know that if these things make it into production they'll cut every corner they can to save weight and cost and put off that cost until something goes wrong. When has it ever been different?
Problem is that it will work and maybe even work well for some time then there will be an accident. Anything made by man will eventually fail or break. It won't even matter if it's over a city or not although, given the hubris of the species, they'll declare the things so safe that they will find themselves placed over cities just to reduce the cost of the transmission lines.
Anyway, eventually, one of them will fail and if it's full of hydrogen, it will fail spectacularly. This will prompt the powers that be to take the rest of them out of service until the problem can be determined and solved "so that it will never happen again." (god, i hate that phrase.)
Meanwhile there will have become people dependent on them and they'll be back to power rationing with little diesel generators or some such.
I tend more along the lines of solar power generation with solar cells, if people feel the must use high tech, or plain old heat collection and steam turbines; good old ground based boiler plate technology. There was version mentioned recently that used a salt as the medium. It had a high heat capacity and could actually store heat for a while when the sun was not available.
There are a lot of replies all over this thread that state all you need is a bunch or hydrogen and you can make helium and we have a shitload of hydrogen locked up in water and such. Unfortunately, the best material for fusion to make helium isn't plain hydrogen but deuterium. This is a hydrogen atom that includes a neutron with it's proton and that's not as common. There's still a lot of it nut not as much as plain hydrogen.
And, of course, now we have fellows trying to design large helium lifted windmills to generate power from the more consistent winds high in the atmosphere, A wonderful sustainable energy source tapped using a technique completely dependent on a completely non sustainable resource. Well, unless we start using Hydrogen to lift these electric power generators, that is. Yeah, that'll work real good.
"I don't have an anger management problem. I have an idiot management problem." Hank HIll
If you're going to introduce the idea of robotic overlords, let's be a little optimistic. We don't know that they'd be outright evil. We'd only think they were evil because we wouldn't even have the choice of the representative that might be abusing us.
I take it you've read or seen Colossus: the Forbin Project.
I don't think there are any really democratic countries left in the world. There might be some truly democratic villages but just about every example of what we call a democracy from my local city council to every country that declares themselves to be a bastion of democracy are not really democracies. They are republics. Citizens are occasionally polled on some issues but most legislation is passed by a small group of representatives who, once they are elected, don't bother thinking about the citizens they represent until it's time to make a new set of promises to get themselves elected again.
I'm commenting from Canada where our local minority national Government is using every legal technicality to stay in power including suspending the open house so they can't face a loss of confidence vote. Somehow, though, they still manage to pass legislation in committee.
To be clear, I'm not afraid that the little AIs will get together to make a bigger system that will take over, just that their interactions will swing out of control and become mindlessly dangerous in ways that we could never have predicted.
This is a personal opinion, of course, but I highly suspect that, like just about any other example of mega engineering you want to pick, something will have to go horribly wrong before we'll know what needs to be fixed, controlled or re-programmed. The only thing we can hope is that it won't go so badly wrong that there will still be someone around to fix it, or perhaps to say that there will be someone around that can still fix it for the rest of the masses.
I'm not worried so much about someone coming up with some massive uber AI that will debate with us and finally decide that it can run things better. I'm more concerned with the little specialty AIs that will operate independently of each other but whose interactions won't be foreseeable. One concern is stock trading. We've seen how stock trading programs can affect the market in ways that were not expected. As more physical systems are given over to more AIs what will their interactions be like. Suppose several power companies decide their grids can be run better using AIs. What happens when each of those AIs decides that more power is needed that can be sold somewhere else for more money. Yes, watch those terms. The AIs will incorporate whatever values the corporate heads decide should be included so they can be made greedy and decide that power is better sold for money than kept for users.
Large numbers of mini AIs with very specific rules and little general knowledge will create interactions that we cannot predict.
I was trying not to use my usual form of run on sentences that I tend to favor. Sorry for the confusion.
But now I have two programs, findimagedupes, which finds sets of visually similar images in a larger set of images, and judge, which rates the JPEG quality of an JPEG file. Given these two programs and a few rules of thumb I should be able to create a Python script that will do most of the work and just present me with a few things that really do need an eyeball inspection.
"The problem is image collections, and finding the better of near-duplicate images."
Perhaps this was said in too few words but what was meant was that in collections of images there are often sets of near duplicates and what is wanted is a way to find the best quality image of the set of nearly duplicate images.
I got judge to compile on my Ubuntu 8.04 system and tested it with a few known examples and it seems to do what I want. It certainly wasn't fooled by a low quality image resaved at a high quality setting. Now to call it from my little Python script that let's me oversee the process and see how it does on a wider set of examples.
Thanks to the many who took this as a serious question and didn't turn this into a "It's just pr0n so who cares." Some is pr0n, some isn't, the most consistent thing is humor.
Many ideas needed the original image to find the better quality of the copy and some asked where I get these images from. These are linked in that I get the images from the USENET, from forums and from artists' galleries. This means that there's only a small set, from the artists' galleries, that I know are original. Others may be original but it may not be the original that comes to me first. On occasion, an artist may even publish the same image in different forms depending on the limitations of the different forums he frequents.
There were some ideas that were nicely different from the directions I was following that they'll give me more to think about.
I'll also acknowledge those who said that how the image is represented is less important than what the image represents. That's quite true but if I have a machine that can find the best representation of something I enjoy then why not use it.
This is an interesting idea in that it really doesn't compare the features in the two images under consideration to each other. That's a break from the usual trail I've been following. Thanks for the suggestion.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen articles where some communities are already re-purposing their libraries into something else since they don't get enough business to serve as book libraries any more. Many are turning into large public internet cafes but without the coffee.
I know a white, leftist, retired academic who is of the opinion that there are to many of us white folks and not enough of the poor non-white people. He applauds his granddaughter for deciding not to have children. Of course, he is also a firm believer in Malthus who got the whole rich families have more children and poor families have less children bass-ackwards.
A lot of comments her make me think of Shrunken Head Ned, the world's only Shrunken Head Village Doctor that plies his trade in the Adventureland in Disneyland. (At least, he used to. I haven't been there for a few years.) That's the way a good many of these comments seem to lean, that Watson as a medical AI is just a sort of amusement that can't be trusted.
I wouldn't trust Watson as a sole source of medical advice either but in combination with the right doctor who knows how to examine and work with people, Watson would make a good tool. It takes a good personal interaction to get all the symptoms from individuals and if the doctor was running into something that he couldn't quite make sense of then Watson might make the connection between seemingly unrelated things to help put the doctor on track to a diagnosis.
It's not a replacement for the doctor but a tool that the doctors can use when they've run into a wall they can't scale themselves. (that's a metaphor, by the way, for all those who will be trying to think of why doctors would be scaling walls to make a diagnosis. quit being so dang literal.)
Problem is that Microsoft might start with an open standard then they'll add proprietary extensions that will make the open standard less open. They tried it with Internet Explorer and fortunately didn't quite succeed although it took years for an alternative to really take a foothold.
No, I rather not see a truly open standard be created only to become corrupted by Microsoft. Better to have a truly open standard and client that also is compatible with the Skype protocol through reverse engineering so they cannot claim copyright infringement. They can argue trade secrets but that hasn't stopped the creation of other tools compatible with Microsoft data formats.
I would have thought it would be full of methane.
Because they're keeping the process needed proprietary so it can't be copied by other companies and start a competition that would drive down the price.
Let me fill in 5 for you ...
5. Poor countries find themselves with disposable cash, adopt American Dream lifestyle, pave roads, buy cars, big houses and electronic gadgets and start adding to CO2 emissions but lose their carbon credits.
No pay bills get, credit cut off. Get credit cut, off no buy food at supermarket, no get power service, no get water service.
No power, water or food, no get to keep living.
Let's see, the early IPCC reports warned us of 50 million climate refugees from flooded coastlines but 2010. I set up a couple of cots in my basement to help out but no one's come knocking at my door yet. In fact, as far as I've seen, no one's really displaced yet. There's a country in the south Pacific that leased a big chunk of Australia for just such and emergency but I haven't heard that they've moved there yet.
There's been a big problem with weather (i know, in know, weather and climate aren't supposed to be mentioned in the same article but you did already.) but that seem to the connected to a short period cooling and warming of the Pacific ocean called La Nina and El Nino.
Personally, I'd rather live in a world that's 4 degrees warmer than one that was 4 degrees colder. The amount of arable land is increased and plants grow faster and larger. Take the world back down by 4 degrees and them newly planted vineyards in England will die, most of Canada's breadbasket agricultural land returns to permafrost and you wouldn't want to think how bad Siberia would get. Of course, the return of the land bridge between Asia and north America would make it easier to get cargo from one place to the other. You wouldn't have to try building the bridge I've seen notes about in shows about mega projects.
Everyone seems to call on gas as an alternative to oil or coal for power generation but it's still a carbon compound and generates CO2 when burned. It might be a little cleaner than coal or oil but it's still a greenhouse gas producer.
How does switching to gas lighten the carbon dioxide load?
What the last year or so of arguments about discontinuing nuclear power plants, carbon dioxide "pollution", outlawing of agricultural chemicals, the continued drive to less and less power consumption, more and more use of natural materials, the slowing of technical progress (except as relates to lotus land type entertainment products) combined with the debt crisis is many western states just says to me that western civilization has already past its peak and we're just riding the downhill slope into obscurity.
You'll notice that the other competing states aren't calling for ends to power generation, ends to population replacement. China, India or the burgeoning Islamic religion that wants to create a new world state aren't going to be as liberal and caring to make themselves go extinct to save the planet. They'll keep generating power by whatever means possible whether it's building a new coal fired power plant a week or building newer technology nuclear reactors and they'll make sure their population controls don't drop below replacement rates. China has been easing up on their one child per family rules for a while now.
If you want a place in the future you might as well do as I've seen many do now. Get your higher education and jobs in China or India. They'll be leading humanity into the future not the West.
As for me, I'm just old enough to see this on it's way but will be cozily dead before the end really comes. (unless the US falters and doesn't raise it debt ceiling in time. Now that might be something to see. The cascade of state failures would be impressive.)
You're right in that the visible flames were from the coating on the Hindenburg but even if there'd been no visible flames the result would still have been the same, a crashed blimp, people dead and the formation of a distrust of Hydrogen as a lifting gas. The real irony is that it might have been averted if there hadn't been a tight control on who could buy Helium at the time.
Now, what are these new power generating floating windmills going to be made of? We have a new wonderfully non-flammable material that will be light enough and strong enough to carry the generator. If the gas bag fails, there will be a parachute to lightly waft the machinery to the ground?
Come on guys, you know that if these things make it into production they'll cut every corner they can to save weight and cost and put off that cost until something goes wrong. When has it ever been different?
Problem is that it will work and maybe even work well for some time then there will be an accident. Anything made by man will eventually fail or break. It won't even matter if it's over a city or not although, given the hubris of the species, they'll declare the things so safe that they will find themselves placed over cities just to reduce the cost of the transmission lines.
Anyway, eventually, one of them will fail and if it's full of hydrogen, it will fail spectacularly. This will prompt the powers that be to take the rest of them out of service until the problem can be determined and solved "so that it will never happen again." (god, i hate that phrase.)
Meanwhile there will have become people dependent on them and they'll be back to power rationing with little diesel generators or some such.
I tend more along the lines of solar power generation with solar cells, if people feel the must use high tech, or plain old heat collection and steam turbines; good old ground based boiler plate technology. There was version mentioned recently that used a salt as the medium. It had a high heat capacity and could actually store heat for a while when the sun was not available.
There are a lot of replies all over this thread that state all you need is a bunch or hydrogen and you can make helium and we have a shitload of hydrogen locked up in water and such. Unfortunately, the best material for fusion to make helium isn't plain hydrogen but deuterium. This is a hydrogen atom that includes a neutron with it's proton and that's not as common. There's still a lot of it nut not as much as plain hydrogen.
And, of course, now we have fellows trying to design large helium lifted windmills to generate power from the more consistent winds high in the atmosphere, A wonderful sustainable energy source tapped using a technique completely dependent on a completely non sustainable resource. Well, unless we start using Hydrogen to lift these electric power generators, that is. Yeah, that'll work real good.
"I don't have an anger management problem. I have an idiot management problem." Hank HIll
If you're going to introduce the idea of robotic overlords, let's be a little optimistic. We don't know that they'd be outright evil. We'd only think they were evil because we wouldn't even have the choice of the representative that might be abusing us.
I take it you've read or seen Colossus: the Forbin Project.
I don't think there are any really democratic countries left in the world. There might be some truly democratic villages but just about every example of what we call a democracy from my local city council to every country that declares themselves to be a bastion of democracy are not really democracies. They are republics. Citizens are occasionally polled on some issues but most legislation is passed by a small group of representatives who, once they are elected, don't bother thinking about the citizens they represent until it's time to make a new set of promises to get themselves elected again.
I'm commenting from Canada where our local minority national Government is using every legal technicality to stay in power including suspending the open house so they can't face a loss of confidence vote. Somehow, though, they still manage to pass legislation in committee.
To be clear, I'm not afraid that the little AIs will get together to make a bigger system that will take over, just that their interactions will swing out of control and become mindlessly dangerous in ways that we could never have predicted.
This is a personal opinion, of course, but I highly suspect that, like just about any other example of mega engineering you want to pick, something will have to go horribly wrong before we'll know what needs to be fixed, controlled or re-programmed. The only thing we can hope is that it won't go so badly wrong that there will still be someone around to fix it, or perhaps to say that there will be someone around that can still fix it for the rest of the masses.
I'm not worried so much about someone coming up with some massive uber AI that will debate with us and finally decide that it can run things better. I'm more concerned with the little specialty AIs that will operate independently of each other but whose interactions won't be foreseeable. One concern is stock trading. We've seen how stock trading programs can affect the market in ways that were not expected. As more physical systems are given over to more AIs what will their interactions be like. Suppose several power companies decide their grids can be run better using AIs. What happens when each of those AIs decides that more power is needed that can be sold somewhere else for more money. Yes, watch those terms. The AIs will incorporate whatever values the corporate heads decide should be included so they can be made greedy and decide that power is better sold for money than kept for users.
Large numbers of mini AIs with very specific rules and little general knowledge will create interactions that we cannot predict.
I was trying not to use my usual form of run on sentences that I tend to favor. Sorry for the confusion.
But now I have two programs, findimagedupes, which finds sets of visually similar images in a larger set of images, and judge, which rates the JPEG quality of an JPEG file. Given these two programs and a few rules of thumb I should be able to create a Python script that will do most of the work and just present me with a few things that really do need an eyeball inspection.
Here's the core of what I feel the problem is ...
"The problem is image collections, and finding the better of near-duplicate images."
Perhaps this was said in too few words but what was meant was that in collections of images there are often sets of near duplicates and what is wanted is a way to find the best quality image of the set of nearly duplicate images.
I got judge to compile on my Ubuntu 8.04 system and tested it with a few known examples and it seems to do what I want. It certainly wasn't fooled by a low quality image resaved at a high quality setting. Now to call it from my little Python script that let's me oversee the process and see how it does on a wider set of examples.
Thanks to the many who took this as a serious question and didn't turn this into a "It's just pr0n so who cares." Some is pr0n, some isn't, the most consistent thing is humor.
Many ideas needed the original image to find the better quality of the copy and some asked where I get these images from. These are linked in that I get the images from the USENET, from forums and from artists' galleries. This means that there's only a small set, from the artists' galleries, that I know are original. Others may be original but it may not be the original that comes to me first. On occasion, an artist may even publish the same image in different forms depending on the limitations of the different forums he frequents.
There were some ideas that were nicely different from the directions I was following that they'll give me more to think about.
I'll also acknowledge those who said that how the image is represented is less important than what the image represents. That's quite true but if I have a machine that can find the best representation of something I enjoy then why not use it.
No. 28000 groups of similar images. Some of those groups, not many, may have upwards of ten members in the group.
This is an interesting idea in that it really doesn't compare the features in the two images under consideration to each other. That's a break from the usual trail I've been following. Thanks for the suggestion.