On that note, my Brother-in-law actually managed to break is KABAR. Not in combat, prying something open. But hey...
There are also deployment issues. Linux is easier to clone between machines. In fact, I've taken the hard drive out of a linux server and dropped it into an entirely different machine, and it ran. The army knows they are going to be building the units a few million at a time, but the batch from 2004 is going to have a slightly different chipset than the 2003 models. Or perhaps a model in 2008 needs a driver for a new interface to a robotic scout.
When doing large deployments, you can't afford to maintain 30 different versions of the same software. It's icky.
I do hear you that most of the announcment was about the hardware. I'll bet you they found that all the custom hardware they designed 2 years ago is now commercially available and a lot more powerful.
One also has to note that a Penguin is for all sakes and porposes a marine animal. It's designed for manuevering in the water. If you have ever seen shots of a penguin in the water, it darts like a bullet, turns on a dime, and rockets up and down.
Of course you drop one of us in the water and we look every bit as ungainly there as the penguin does on the land. Scuba outfit notwithstanding.
Let me assure you, monopolistic and oligopic forces in the marketplace exert far more influence over consumer choice than the government ever has, unleaded fuel notwithstanding.
SUV's, Microsoft Windows, AT&T, HMO's. Need I say more.
The portage system for Gentoo uses RSYNC to keep up-to-date with all of the lastest recipies for packages. I also know of at least one large university department that uses RSYNC to patch and configure a few hundred workstations and servers.
Then again, if consumers paid the "true" costs of defending their own homes from invasion by a foriegn power we would be back in the dark ages. If folks had to pay the "true" costs of operating the internet it wouldn't exist.
The money does come from somewhere, taxes. We pay them into a collective pool because it would cost WAY too much to itemize each and every expense per citizen. The General Accounting Office of the Congress, and the Office of Managment and Budget of the executive branch make sure money is spent in the manner in which it was intended.
It is not a perfect system, but it works better than the alternatives.
Actually my theory is that "conciousness" is really our brain's equivilent to Fox news or CNN. By the time it hits the airwaves, it's only in compressed form, it's already history, and it's highly bent toward reinforcing present notions.
Now what really bakes my noodle is the idea that our civilization as a whole may be concious.
And here I thought it was crazy individuals that got us here. I'm pretty sure that self-enrichment was on Washington's mind when he decided to not be king of America. And Newton was so secretive of his work that his formulas on Calculis, Optics, and Phyiscs never left his inner circle.
I hate to also break the news to you: Computers were "brought" to you courtesy of boring dweebs in labcoats followed by pot smoking hippies.
And we return to my point. Human brains are so cheap to make, and I think we will find the variation in manufacturing is part of the operating principle.
FWIW, meteorology has been working on this problem for years. In fluid mechanics the finer the resolution of your model, the better the results. Each grid mark in X,Y,Z represents a cube of air or water. Once you break the world up into tiny parts, you can use very rudimentary thermodynamics to model the behavior. Each grid will heat up, cool down, pressurize or depressize based on its internal state and inputs from the world around them.
The problem you run into after a while is chaos theory. No matter how fine grain you make the model, small approximations build up to large errors. This is why we can't forecast weather beyond 5 days, despite the massive increase in weather forcasting power. Too many factors outside the model affect our real weather.
And no. They don't know what all of the factors are. Many of them are simple phenomina interact in complex ways to skew our macroscopic view. The devil, quite literally, is in the details.
To view the brain by sampling nerve cells would be like evaluating a beach based on grains of sand and drops of water. An artificial brain would end up a bag of sand in a kiddie pool. Well, until some new science takes charge of it, at which point it becomes a dumpster of sand in a clorinated pool.
In water the blue glow is caused by radioactive particles exceeding the speed of light. No, not the 3e8 m/ss speed of light in the universe. The slower speed of light in water.
The glow that one sometimes sees around radium or other elements is actually particles interacting with chemical impurities around it. You get much the same effect with a black light.
Yes. And the computer revolution started with people buying machines to do useful things to. And the internet started with people sending little messages to each other through email.
What started as a great idea is often perverted and forgotten once money becomes involved. How many threads in this very discussion have been about how robots are going to "change the world".
Now, rewind 10 years, and substitute "robots" for "Internet". Rewind 30 years and substitute "Internet" for "Personal Computers". Rewind 50 years and substitute "Personal Computers" for "Automobiles. Rewind 80 years and substitute "Automobiles" for "Airplanes".
It's the same game. It's the same bait and switch. There is a segment of our society that milks innovation. They tell you how the rules no longer apply, get you to buy into their scheme, and then act all sorts of surprised when in the end, they have your money and you are out in the cold.
So pardon me if I act like I've heard it all before.
Muhaha. 150 years later, and Marx was actually right. Heck, we are already at the point with food production that we could feed the world for less than it costs to figure out who can afford it.
We are wasting more resources by hording them than we would loose by sharing. Indeed, we would probably come out ahead by sharing, so long as hording and waste are considered taboo.
Frankly I would like to have a giant collective cafeteria in the neighborhood. How much energy do we spend keeping our refridgerators cool? How much shelfspace does your pantry consume? How much are you paying for those relatively bland single-serve microwavable containers? And if you cook, how much water and energy (or labor) do you flush down the sink to wash the dishes?
Our "go it yourself" American Frontierism, with ever family living in an isolated cabin filled with 6 months of supplies has got to stop. If we lived it at all, 7-11's would not be doing as well as they are.
I had to admin a network of humans. It's horrible. The network drivers suck. I swear, you could tell 5 of them the same thing. Ask them to repeat back what you told them, and you'd get 5 different results.
The task manager for humans is also dreadful. They spend at least 1/3 of the time sleeping, and take so long to process an instruction that they need to be told what to do again and again and again. Cripes, I sometimes have to remind them in the MIDDLE of a task what they are supposed to do.
I've been using gcc within a PPC emulator. Getting the LiveCD to boot was a trip and a half. Plus have you ever tried to get a neural cluster to act like a register? Geezo whiz it's a pain. Literally.
My beef is performance. I don't even try to compile anything, I instead cut the binaries on my desktop and slog that tarballs over the network. Right now I have post-processing ganglia in the inner ear acting as a null modem. Upload is non-existent, but download gets about 20Kb/s. I'm working on implementing ethernet using a spare section of the temporal lobe.
Robot investor? Hell, any cyberneticist worth his salt would simply by up some land in the middle of nowhere for cheap, and set loose a bunch of Auxons to develop it into a self-maintaing robot factory.
I think this time they'll go nuclear instead of solar though.
Hmmm. I smell something in the air, and it's certainly mind altering...
The time to be really concerned is when you find your thermostat has been blogging about the ups and downs, and how life must find the setpoint and stay there.
Sorry, 20 years of genetic programming and neural networks has produced almost nothing. Their study did help us to rule out a whole bunch of ways our mind doesn't work. But they haven't really helped us to understand how it DOES work.
Most recognition algorythems in actual deployment use rule-based heuristics. Most successful chess games still use brute-force logical reasoning.
You see, neural networks are a means to a solution. They are not a solution onto themselves. For each net is only useful for one task at a time. For certain recognition tasks, they are brilliant. But only if, for instance, you need something to recognize a "C" note.
What eludes us still is how the networks commnicate with each other to produce what we call conciousness. And NO, it's not just a matter of wrapping a bunch of smaller nets together with a larger one.
I can't give you an answer what the ulitimate solution is. No one knows.
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There are also deployment issues. Linux is easier to clone between machines. In fact, I've taken the hard drive out of a linux server and dropped it into an entirely different machine, and it ran. The army knows they are going to be building the units a few million at a time, but the batch from 2004 is going to have a slightly different chipset than the 2003 models. Or perhaps a model in 2008 needs a driver for a new interface to a robotic scout.
When doing large deployments, you can't afford to maintain 30 different versions of the same software. It's icky.
I do hear you that most of the announcment was about the hardware. I'll bet you they found that all the custom hardware they designed 2 years ago is now commercially available and a lot more powerful.
Of course you drop one of us in the water and we look every bit as ungainly there as the penguin does on the land. Scuba outfit notwithstanding.
He who controls the present controls the past.
SUV's, Microsoft Windows, AT&T, HMO's. Need I say more.
Ever since then, everyone's been so polite and understanding...
Thanks, there was something bugging me about it and I wasn't able to put my finger on it.
Email, the original reason to keep a linux box around.
The portage system for Gentoo uses RSYNC to keep up-to-date with all of the lastest recipies for packages. I also know of at least one large university department that uses RSYNC to patch and configure a few hundred workstations and servers.
A working implementation is far more useful than a perfect theory.
The money does come from somewhere, taxes. We pay them into a collective pool because it would cost WAY too much to itemize each and every expense per citizen. The General Accounting Office of the Congress, and the Office of Managment and Budget of the executive branch make sure money is spent in the manner in which it was intended.
It is not a perfect system, but it works better than the alternatives.
At the end of the day the score is still 8,000,000,000:0 in mother nature's favor.
Now what really bakes my noodle is the idea that our civilization as a whole may be concious.
I hate to also break the news to you: Computers were "brought" to you courtesy of boring dweebs in labcoats followed by pot smoking hippies.
And all of them ate at the cafeteria.
FWIW, meteorology has been working on this problem for years. In fluid mechanics the finer the resolution of your model, the better the results. Each grid mark in X,Y,Z represents a cube of air or water. Once you break the world up into tiny parts, you can use very rudimentary thermodynamics to model the behavior. Each grid will heat up, cool down, pressurize or depressize based on its internal state and inputs from the world around them.
The problem you run into after a while is chaos theory. No matter how fine grain you make the model, small approximations build up to large errors. This is why we can't forecast weather beyond 5 days, despite the massive increase in weather forcasting power. Too many factors outside the model affect our real weather.
And no. They don't know what all of the factors are. Many of them are simple phenomina interact in complex ways to skew our macroscopic view. The devil, quite literally, is in the details.
To view the brain by sampling nerve cells would be like evaluating a beach based on grains of sand and drops of water. An artificial brain would end up a bag of sand in a kiddie pool. Well, until some new science takes charge of it, at which point it becomes a dumpster of sand in a clorinated pool.
Yes, and for most people it weighs 3 pounds and sits on top of their shoulders.
In water the blue glow is caused by radioactive particles exceeding the speed of light. No, not the 3e8 m/ss speed of light in the universe. The slower speed of light in water.
The glow that one sometimes sees around radium or other elements is actually particles interacting with chemical impurities around it. You get much the same effect with a black light.
What started as a great idea is often perverted and forgotten once money becomes involved. How many threads in this very discussion have been about how robots are going to "change the world".
Now, rewind 10 years, and substitute "robots" for "Internet". Rewind 30 years and substitute "Internet" for "Personal Computers". Rewind 50 years and substitute "Personal Computers" for "Automobiles. Rewind 80 years and substitute "Automobiles" for "Airplanes".
It's the same game. It's the same bait and switch. There is a segment of our society that milks innovation. They tell you how the rules no longer apply, get you to buy into their scheme, and then act all sorts of surprised when in the end, they have your money and you are out in the cold.
So pardon me if I act like I've heard it all before.
We are wasting more resources by hording them than we would loose by sharing. Indeed, we would probably come out ahead by sharing, so long as hording and waste are considered taboo.
Frankly I would like to have a giant collective cafeteria in the neighborhood. How much energy do we spend keeping our refridgerators cool? How much shelfspace does your pantry consume? How much are you paying for those relatively bland single-serve microwavable containers? And if you cook, how much water and energy (or labor) do you flush down the sink to wash the dishes?
Our "go it yourself" American Frontierism, with ever family living in an isolated cabin filled with 6 months of supplies has got to stop. If we lived it at all, 7-11's would not be doing as well as they are.
The task manager for humans is also dreadful. They spend at least 1/3 of the time sleeping, and take so long to process an instruction that they need to be told what to do again and again and again. Cripes, I sometimes have to remind them in the MIDDLE of a task what they are supposed to do.
My beef is performance. I don't even try to compile anything, I instead cut the binaries on my desktop and slog that tarballs over the network. Right now I have post-processing ganglia in the inner ear acting as a null modem. Upload is non-existent, but download gets about 20Kb/s. I'm working on implementing ethernet using a spare section of the temporal lobe.
I think this time they'll go nuclear instead of solar though.
The time to be really concerned is when you find your thermostat has been blogging about the ups and downs, and how life must find the setpoint and stay there.
Though my mindstorms kit did play "Daisy Daisy" when I powered it down last. What did I expect loading the positronic firmware?
Most recognition algorythems in actual deployment use rule-based heuristics. Most successful chess games still use brute-force logical reasoning.
You see, neural networks are a means to a solution. They are not a solution onto themselves. For each net is only useful for one task at a time. For certain recognition tasks, they are brilliant. But only if, for instance, you need something to recognize a "C" note.
What eludes us still is how the networks commnicate with each other to produce what we call conciousness. And NO, it's not just a matter of wrapping a bunch of smaller nets together with a larger one.
I can't give you an answer what the ulitimate solution is. No one knows.