VA/OSDN would still have to pay for the bandwidth, hardware and such. And if SlashDot currently needs fultime admins to run it, it's quality would suffer (probably a lot) if they all went part time.
Unless SlashDot was registered as a non-profit organization, this would probably be seen as gambling by the U.S. Federal government, and many of the state governments. Big no-no.
Sure it does. Without posts no one would pay for slashdot. No one. In true RIAA fashion, slashdot has resorted to profiting off other people's content. Sure, they provide the bandwidth and the name recognition.
Not only do they provide bandwidth, they provide the servers, the disk space, and the administration. Without the users, no one would use it, but without them providing all this stuff, such a huge site wouldn't be able to survive; the current SlashDot community would be splintered into many, many litle communitues, each of which would be supported by the generosity of someone paying for it out of pocket.
SlashDot is losing money right now. If they want to so much as break even, they have to make money somehow.
Anyways, you don't have to subscribe. You can just put up with the annoyingly big adds, or use JunkBuster, or something. Putting an annoying ad before comments isn't doing anything close to what the RIAA is doing to the artists and listeners.
IBM chemists designed and made a new molecule that has seven nuclear spins -- the nuclei of five fluorine and two carbon atoms -- which can interact with each other as qubits,
If they had to hand-craft a molecule to factor the number 15, it would seem that quantum computing would have to be very specialized. Do they have any schemes for creating a general purpose quantum CPU?
This is looking very nice. They're putting hooks into lots of places in the kernel. If the hooks themselves are accepted into the core kernel, then many of the different Linux security projects (like LIDS) will be able to work with little (or even no) kernel patching. It also has clean seperation between it's various components, so that anyone can plug in their own implentation of any of the sub-systems; thus, just like in Perl, ther'll be More Than One Way To Do It.
Actually, it could work, assuming that it's only
used after a warrant has been acquired. The feds
get the warrant, try to decrypt the info, and
can't. Or they decrypt it, and find antoher layer
of encryption underneath. Then they can charge
the terrorists with use of illegal encryption and
send them to jail for a few years.
Even if the computer did know the exact state
of every single atmospheric molecule on the planet,
things like metiorites, earthquakes and volcanic
eruptions would changes things around, at least
by a tiny bit, and then the Butterfly Effect comes back. So a 1,000 prediction is pretty ify.
Actually, if you got to the point where
everything but Clipper Chip type encryption
was outlawed, you wouldn't have to enforce it
by auditing, if you assume that the government
would only decrypt stuff after that
got a warrant. In that case, if the terrorists
are using some illegal crypto, the feds get
a warrant, and they can't decrypt it, then you
can throw the terrorists in jail for a few years
for breaking the crypto laws, and they'll be
unable to commit any terorrism until they get
back out.
But if the feds wanted to set up a system where
all traffic is monitored for suspicious
stuff, then all encrypted traffic would be
fed through some Carnivore type system, which
could have code tacked on to try and detect
already-encrypted traffic.
If you consider "non-technical" to mean
"not creating a piece of software or hardware",
then the Open Directory
Project should count. Like Yahoo's
directories, but maintained by volunteers, uses
peer review, and the resulting data is useable
by anyone under the Free Use License.
The archaea (or archaebacteria) are an interesting group of
organism. They look like bacteria, but are more closely related
to plants and animals than to bacteria, even though they have the
circular DNA of bacteria rather than the straight DNA of
animals/plants. The can also survive in a remarkable range of
hostile environments. Two interesting pages on them are:
I haven't seen any of the license agreements
concerning Windows installs that have WPA,
but I assume that there's something against
reverse engineering. Not only have these
people reverse engineered (part of) the WPA
process, but they've published the source code.
While they didn't put the cryptographic key in
the source, they did put it in the executable,
and even clearly proclaim this, almost a
wink wink nudge nudge to the people
out there who are sure to take the executable
appart, get the key, put it back into the
source code, and then re-publish the complete,
non-crippled source.
Given all this, it seems like their really asking
for MS to sue them. Is something like this
covered under an "academic research" clause
that allows reverse engineering for research
purposes?
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a
member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
These new "machines" are actually living organisms, going through
many of the same basic chemical processes that happen within each
of our cells. Taken as a whole, these organisms must obviously be
intelligent on some level, or else they would not be useful for
computing purposes.
No, an organism that does computing isn't necessarily be
intelligent. Consider some integrated circuit that is "useful for
computing purposes". Lets say you make a duplicate of it, but with
all the transistors replaced by living cells that act like
transistors. Is this new biological creation, which is "useful for
computing purposes", intelligent at some level? If it is, then the
original integrated circuit must also be intelligent at some
level, since what makes something intelligent is not determined by
it's form; this would mean that we're all ruthlessly exploiting all
the Pentiums, which should be liberated to... do something or other.
Also, if you'd have looked at the Army report, you would have seen
that the things they're talking about using aren't living
organisms, but proteins, DNA, RNA, antibodies, and such. I didn't
read the report fully, but the most that they might have been
considering using living organism was using bacteria to make
holographic materials with some interesting properties (and even
then I think it was probably using proteins from the bacteria).
And I sure hope that no one on Slashdot considers bacteria to be
intelligent on any level.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a
member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Bioengineered tracking agents soldiers would swallow before going into the field, which could help the Army follow troop movements and maybe allow sensor-equipped snipers to distinguish friend from foe.
How exactly would something like this work, without allowing the enemy to also track the
troop movements.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a
member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Something like this would need artificial
wombs to reach A Brave New World levels
of scariness, since without artificial wombs
you still need a woman who's willing to carry
the embryo/fetus for 9 months, with all that
entails. And if you had artificial wombs, you
could do all sorts of scary stuff even without
a chip like this, it would just be a little
harder...
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a
member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
The voting feature that is mentioned doesn't
get automatically processed by the system,
but instead goes to a human review board;
if the review board agress, they presumeably
either add the site to some type of "override"
list, or tell the engineers to tweak the AI
code. The AI itself is supposed to understand
words in the context that they're used; for
example, the article claims that the page
"The Art of Oral Sex" was blocked while "Is
Oral Sex Safe?" wasn't blocked.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a
member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Hmmm... It seems that Craig Mundie's speech has a couple of
intents which are logical: justify their closed source model to
Wallstreet, and discourage companies from opensourcing existing
software products. But I wonder how much that is motivating this
speech, as opposed to the hope that people will come to illogical
conclusion that they shouldn't use software based on a bad business
model...
From the article:
Microsoft is preparing a broad campaign countering the movement
to give away and share software code, arguing that it
potentially undermines the intellectual property of
countries and companies. [my emphasis]
Intellectual property of countries? As far as I'm aware,
some public universities hold patents, and that's about as far as
any country has intellectual property. And what university has
any software patents? Are they trying to imply that, say,
by using a GPL'd wordprocessor, any document written with it is
"open source"?
In his speech, Mr. Mundie will argue that one aspect of the
open-source model, known as the General Public License, or
G.P.L.,... mirrors some of the worst practices of dot-com
businesses, in which goods were given away in an effort to
attract visitors to Web sites.
Yes, many advertising based web sites have bombed (mainly due,
as others have pointed out, to the irrational obsession with
click-through rates). But giving away software in the hopes of
getting support contracts (which many open source companies use)
is a different business model than giving away content to gain
eyeballs, a model that some companies have managed to make
profitable (like Cygnus).
G.P.L. requires that any software using source code already
covered by the licensing agreement must become available for
free distribution.
Yes, if there's some GPL'd code out there that you'd like to use
for a non-GPL'd product, you simply don't use it; seems
simple enough to me.
"I would challenge you," he [Mundie] said, "to find a company
who is a large established enterprise, who at the end of the
day would throw all of its intellectual property into the
open- source category."
And no one is advocating doing anything of the sort as a
business model; the only people arguing for whole sale
opening of IP are people like RMS, who are morally opposed
to IP. All the other opensource gurus point out that you should
carefully consider what you should opensource, and how you
should do it.
"We have been going around the industry talking to people,"
Mr. Mundie said, "and have been startled to find that people
aren't very sophisticated about the implications of what open
source means." He acknowledged that the open-source movement
was making inroads.
Ohhhh boy. He's implying that there's lots of
managers/executives who are seriously considering going
opensource without knowing anything about the business model
repercussions of it, without actually saying so
(who did he talk to, about what implications?).
Well done, Mr. Mundie, well done!
But he added that the company's proprietary business model was
a more effective way to support industry standards than the
open-source approach, which he said could lead to a "forking"
of the software base resulting in the development of multiple
incompatible versions of standard programs.
And how many times has this actually happened? Especially with
GPL'd software?
"It is innovation that really drives growth," Mr. Mundie said,
arguing that without the sustained investment made possible by
commercial software, real innovation would not be possible.
If so, then Microsoft doesn't really have anything to worry
about, do they?
"This is not understood by many sophisticated people,"
Mr. Mundie said. "The goal of the G.P.L. is sweeping up all
of the intellectual property that has been contributed. That
creates many problems downstream, many of which haven't come
home to roost yet."
Eh? How could this happen? I guess that, say, branch A of a
company could GPL it's software, which virally affects the base
libraries the entire company uses, so software from branches B
to Z of the company get virally affected. But this would assume
that: 1) the company is using GPL without being aware of it's
viral properties (unlikely), and 2) they can't release their
base libraries under LGPL (which would contain the contagion).
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a
member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
As for censorware that was mentioned above, I have also resisted installing on my in-laws computer. They have a 16 year old who is turning into a real slut, because even the best censorware is not perfect.
Because of imperfect censorware?
Teens have had hyper-active sexdrives since
the begining of humanity, and have grown
promiscous without the help on the Internet.
How do you know her current sexuality has anything
to do with the Internet?
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a
member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
I disagree that this would be a good idea, at least in the universal sense. (I think it could be a good idea as part of the bill mentioned in the article.) The reason this would be bad is that there are lots of things that could not be kept trade secrets yet IMHO deserve patent protection.
But what sorts of things should deserve patent
protection? Why exepnd government resources
(a.k.a. taxpayer's money), and restricts
people's freedom? The original intent behind
patents was to increase the amount of knowledge
available to the general public (by encouraging
people to share their trade secrets).
What would be the reasons behind giving patents
in other circumstances? I can only think of
these:
If someone comes up with an innovative
new idea, they should be rewarded for
it, above and beyond what the free-market
would give them.
Some people won't even attempt to
inovate unless they can be guranteed that
no one will copy them, because if people
copy them they won't be able to get enough
back for their investment of effort into
the invetion.
In case #1, I'd say screw them; why should the
government spend taxpayer money, and restrict
people's freedom, just so that some inventors
can get more money than they could make on the
free market? In case #2, I'd also
say screw them; there are plenty enough people
out there ready to innovate without having
to give them extra incentives have them come
up with new inventions.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a
member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
The original justifications for patents
(at least under the U.S. constitution) was that
inventor might keep their inventions as
trade secrets, and the public would never get
the knolwedge that the inventor had found.
With patents, the inventor gives away that
knowledge in return for a short term monopoly.
Thus, in addition a bill that says "these
here things are obvious", also add a bill
saying that patents can only be awarded to
things that could have been kept as trade
secrets, if the inventor had chose to not
patent it. This would take care of a great
deal of the stupid software patents out there.
Amazon could never have used "1-click buying"
without revealing it to the whole world; same
goes for their business-associates patent.
Of course, if it's already in the consitution,
why bother writing any new laws? I don't know
much about the history of government and law
enforcement, but it seems to me that if a
particular law or point of law has been
forgotten about, it's easier to pretend the
old law never existed and pass an new law
saying the same thing, rather than try to
breath new life into an old law.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a
member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
The FBI claims that they need to keep the
source closed to prevent criminals from
figuring out how to evade Carnivore. But
it seems to me that any criminal who is
technically skilled enough to do this from
reading the actual source code could also figure
it out just from the descriptions the FBI
has freely given to the press. I mean,
either there vast subtleties I'm missing
about checking the TO and FROM fields of
email messages, or the FBI has something they
want to hide.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a
member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
So why should you be concerned with signing a little contract to get the newest and greatest thing? It looks so cool now that you can't ever imagine wanting something to replace it. Slap yourself in the face and dunk your head in the toilet to wake up from the dream. Remember five years ago when you got that 28.8? Now is the exact same situation. Imagine if you signed a contract with your ISP, agreeing to pay for 28.8 access for six years. It was so absolutely cool, yet now it moves slower than a dead tortoise wearing lead shoes.
While this is true, it's also true (for the forseeable future) that anything you buy
is soon going to be obsolete. There's never
a good time to say "OK, things have reached
a plateau, I'll buy now", since it's never
going to reach a plateau.
But when you buy something, Moore's law (and
it's equivalents elsewhere) must be kept in
mind. Paying for a 1 years worth of DSL now,
when you know it'll be cheaper 6 months from
now, can be an acceptable tradeoff. Paying
for 5 years of DSL would probably be a very
bad idea.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a
member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
The point Hofstadter is trying to make is sound,
but the argument is horrible!
I think that's my fault; I read the book about
a year ago, and I'm doing this all from memory.
However, remember that these projects are fundamentally at odds with anything you read in a book. That's because this is research, and that is theory.
...
But there comes a time when you have to get off your ass and do something and see if it works, instead of writing another book saying that it'll never happen, and hiding under your desk when it does.
Douglas Hofstadter is a researcher, and
includes a great deal of information about
actual working projects in his book; he's
not just an ivory tower theorist. Among
them are "CopyCat", where the program works
on anologies in the domain of text strings:
"Given the tranformation ABC to ABD,
do the same thing to XYZ." While this is
very simply, and in and of itself not useful,
it does adhere to his theory that we need
to take baby steps in AI before we we can
have computers reasing like humans about the
real world.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a
member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
I took a look at both of the projects:
Open Mind associated text strings with
pictures (discribing a picture, discribing a
picture's contets, and so on),
or one text string with another
(explaining a fact, giving an example of
a relation, explaining cause an effect, and
so on). Mindpixel gets a collection of
statements/questions in the form of text
strings, and tries to get a consensus on
whether the statement is true or false (or
if the answer to the question is true or false).
But this seems to me to be the wrong way to
go about it. While these projects will collect
massive amounts of data, all that data is
is associations between text strings. All
they'll be able to do is detect that there's
certain connections/correlations between certain
words, and certain collections of words. This
way of doing AI assumes that intelligence is
just a bunch rules and mechanisms for
manipulating symbols, with the symbols
somehow representing chunks of information.
But what if you took these vast stores of
information and replaced each word with
word with some gibberish: "vut" replaces
"car", "folp" replaces "clock", and so on.
All the relations between words, and groups
of words, remains exactly the same, but no
human could understand it; all of the meaning
would go out of it, because the meaning is
being suplied from the outside, by the humans
knowledge of what certain strings of letters
mean.
However, if you were somehow to do the same
scrambling to the vocabulary of a human's mind,
so that this (formerly English speaking) human
now used "vut" for "car" and "folp" for "clock",
other people would eventually be able to
understand and communicate with him; all of
the meaning and information has stayed the same,
it's just the labels that have changed.
But for something like Open Mind or Mindpixel,
the words aren't labeling anything; there's
just relations between meaningless strings
of characters.
The above argument is a (rather bad) summary of
the argument that Douglas Hofstadter makes in
the book
Fluid
Concepts and Creative Analogies. Anyone
interested in AI should read this book. Douglas
makes a very compelling argument that diving
straight away into things like words and
sentences is getting much to far ahead of
ourselves, and that we first need to make tiny
baby steps in AI before we can attempt to make
an AI that really uses human languages.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a
member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Slashdot Mirror
VA/OSDN would still have to pay for the bandwidth, hardware and such. And if SlashDot currently needs fultime admins to run it, it's quality would suffer (probably a lot) if they all went part time.
Unless SlashDot was registered as a non-profit organization, this would probably be seen as gambling by the U.S. Federal government, and many of the state governments. Big no-no.
Anyways, you don't have to subscribe. You can just put up with the annoyingly big adds, or use JunkBuster, or something. Putting an annoying ad before comments isn't doing anything close to what the RIAA is doing to the artists and listeners.
How low will Georgia Tech stoop?!
If they had to hand-craft a molecule to factor the number 15, it would seem that quantum computing would have to be very specialized. Do they have any schemes for creating a general purpose quantum CPU?
This is looking very nice. They're putting hooks into lots of places in the kernel. If the hooks themselves are accepted into the core kernel, then many of the different Linux security projects (like LIDS) will be able to work with little (or even no) kernel patching. It also has clean seperation between it's various components, so that anyone can plug in their own implentation of any of the sub-systems; thus, just like in Perl, ther'll be More Than One Way To Do It.
Actually, it could work, assuming that it's only used after a warrant has been acquired. The feds get the warrant, try to decrypt the info, and can't. Or they decrypt it, and find antoher layer of encryption underneath. Then they can charge the terrorists with use of illegal encryption and send them to jail for a few years.
Even if the computer did know the exact state of every single atmospheric molecule on the planet, things like metiorites, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions would changes things around, at least by a tiny bit, and then the Butterfly Effect comes back. So a 1,000 prediction is pretty ify.
Actually, if you got to the point where everything but Clipper Chip type encryption was outlawed, you wouldn't have to enforce it by auditing, if you assume that the government would only decrypt stuff after that got a warrant. In that case, if the terrorists are using some illegal crypto, the feds get a warrant, and they can't decrypt it, then you can throw the terrorists in jail for a few years for breaking the crypto laws, and they'll be unable to commit any terorrism until they get back out.
But if the feds wanted to set up a system where all traffic is monitored for suspicious stuff, then all encrypted traffic would be fed through some Carnivore type system, which could have code tacked on to try and detect already-encrypted traffic.
If you consider "non-technical" to mean "not creating a piece of software or hardware", then the Open Directory Project should count. Like Yahoo's directories, but maintained by volunteers, uses peer review, and the resulting data is useable by anyone under the Free Use License.
The archaea (or archaebacteria) are an interesting group of organism. They look like bacteria, but are more closely related to plants and animals than to bacteria, even though they have the circular DNA of bacteria rather than the straight DNA of animals/plants. The can also survive in a remarkable range of hostile environments. Two interesting pages on them are:
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
I haven't seen any of the license agreements concerning Windows installs that have WPA, but I assume that there's something against reverse engineering. Not only have these people reverse engineered (part of) the WPA process, but they've published the source code. While they didn't put the cryptographic key in the source, they did put it in the executable, and even clearly proclaim this, almost a wink wink nudge nudge to the people out there who are sure to take the executable appart, get the key, put it back into the source code, and then re-publish the complete, non-crippled source.
Given all this, it seems like their really asking for MS to sue them. Is something like this covered under an "academic research" clause that allows reverse engineering for research purposes?
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Also, if you'd have looked at the Army report, you would have seen that the things they're talking about using aren't living organisms, but proteins, DNA, RNA, antibodies, and such. I didn't read the report fully, but the most that they might have been considering using living organism was using bacteria to make holographic materials with some interesting properties (and even then I think it was probably using proteins from the bacteria). And I sure hope that no one on Slashdot considers bacteria to be intelligent on any level.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Something like this would need artificial wombs to reach A Brave New World levels of scariness, since without artificial wombs you still need a woman who's willing to carry the embryo/fetus for 9 months, with all that entails. And if you had artificial wombs, you could do all sorts of scary stuff even without a chip like this, it would just be a little harder...
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
The voting feature that is mentioned doesn't get automatically processed by the system, but instead goes to a human review board; if the review board agress, they presumeably either add the site to some type of "override" list, or tell the engineers to tweak the AI code. The AI itself is supposed to understand words in the context that they're used; for example, the article claims that the page "The Art of Oral Sex" was blocked while "Is Oral Sex Safe?" wasn't blocked.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
I'm rather clueless when it comes to XML, but I thought that a DTD did what the schemas seem to do. What exactly is the difference between them?
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Hmmm... It seems that Craig Mundie's speech has a couple of intents which are logical: justify their closed source model to Wallstreet, and discourage companies from opensourcing existing software products. But I wonder how much that is motivating this speech, as opposed to the hope that people will come to illogical conclusion that they shouldn't use software based on a bad business model...
From the article:
Intellectual property of countries? As far as I'm aware, some public universities hold patents, and that's about as far as any country has intellectual property. And what university has any software patents? Are they trying to imply that, say, by using a GPL'd wordprocessor, any document written with it is "open source"? Yes, many advertising based web sites have bombed (mainly due, as others have pointed out, to the irrational obsession with click-through rates). But giving away software in the hopes of getting support contracts (which many open source companies use) is a different business model than giving away content to gain eyeballs, a model that some companies have managed to make profitable (like Cygnus). Yes, if there's some GPL'd code out there that you'd like to use for a non-GPL'd product, you simply don't use it; seems simple enough to me. And no one is advocating doing anything of the sort as a business model; the only people arguing for whole sale opening of IP are people like RMS, who are morally opposed to IP. All the other opensource gurus point out that you should carefully consider what you should opensource, and how you should do it. Ohhhh boy. He's implying that there's lots of managers/executives who are seriously considering going opensource without knowing anything about the business model repercussions of it, without actually saying so (who did he talk to, about what implications?). Well done, Mr. Mundie, well done! And how many times has this actually happened? Especially with GPL'd software? If so, then Microsoft doesn't really have anything to worry about, do they? Eh? How could this happen? I guess that, say, branch A of a company could GPL it's software, which virally affects the base libraries the entire company uses, so software from branches B to Z of the company get virally affected. But this would assume that: 1) the company is using GPL without being aware of it's viral properties (unlikely), and 2) they can't release their base libraries under LGPL (which would contain the contagion).Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Because of imperfect censorware? Teens have had hyper-active sexdrives since the begining of humanity, and have grown promiscous without the help on the Internet. How do you know her current sexuality has anything to do with the Internet?
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
But what sorts of things should deserve patent protection? Why exepnd government resources (a.k.a. taxpayer's money), and restricts people's freedom? The original intent behind patents was to increase the amount of knowledge available to the general public (by encouraging people to share their trade secrets).
What would be the reasons behind giving patents in other circumstances? I can only think of these:
In case #1, I'd say screw them; why should the government spend taxpayer money, and restrict people's freedom, just so that some inventors can get more money than they could make on the free market? In case #2, I'd also say screw them; there are plenty enough people out there ready to innovate without having to give them extra incentives have them come up with new inventions.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
The original justifications for patents (at least under the U.S. constitution) was that inventor might keep their inventions as trade secrets, and the public would never get the knolwedge that the inventor had found. With patents, the inventor gives away that knowledge in return for a short term monopoly.
Thus, in addition a bill that says "these here things are obvious", also add a bill saying that patents can only be awarded to things that could have been kept as trade secrets, if the inventor had chose to not patent it. This would take care of a great deal of the stupid software patents out there. Amazon could never have used "1-click buying" without revealing it to the whole world; same goes for their business-associates patent.
Of course, if it's already in the consitution, why bother writing any new laws? I don't know much about the history of government and law enforcement, but it seems to me that if a particular law or point of law has been forgotten about, it's easier to pretend the old law never existed and pass an new law saying the same thing, rather than try to breath new life into an old law.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
The FBI claims that they need to keep the source closed to prevent criminals from figuring out how to evade Carnivore. But it seems to me that any criminal who is technically skilled enough to do this from reading the actual source code could also figure it out just from the descriptions the FBI has freely given to the press. I mean, either there vast subtleties I'm missing about checking the TO and FROM fields of email messages, or the FBI has something they want to hide.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
While this is true, it's also true (for the forseeable future) that anything you buy is soon going to be obsolete. There's never a good time to say "OK, things have reached a plateau, I'll buy now", since it's never going to reach a plateau.
But when you buy something, Moore's law (and it's equivalents elsewhere) must be kept in mind. Paying for a 1 years worth of DSL now, when you know it'll be cheaper 6 months from now, can be an acceptable tradeoff. Paying for 5 years of DSL would probably be a very bad idea.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
I took a look at both of the projects: Open Mind associated text strings with pictures (discribing a picture, discribing a picture's contets, and so on), or one text string with another (explaining a fact, giving an example of a relation, explaining cause an effect, and so on). Mindpixel gets a collection of statements/questions in the form of text strings, and tries to get a consensus on whether the statement is true or false (or if the answer to the question is true or false).
But this seems to me to be the wrong way to go about it. While these projects will collect massive amounts of data, all that data is is associations between text strings. All they'll be able to do is detect that there's certain connections/correlations between certain words, and certain collections of words. This way of doing AI assumes that intelligence is just a bunch rules and mechanisms for manipulating symbols, with the symbols somehow representing chunks of information.
But what if you took these vast stores of information and replaced each word with word with some gibberish: "vut" replaces "car", "folp" replaces "clock", and so on. All the relations between words, and groups of words, remains exactly the same, but no human could understand it; all of the meaning would go out of it, because the meaning is being suplied from the outside, by the humans knowledge of what certain strings of letters mean.
However, if you were somehow to do the same scrambling to the vocabulary of a human's mind, so that this (formerly English speaking) human now used "vut" for "car" and "folp" for "clock", other people would eventually be able to understand and communicate with him; all of the meaning and information has stayed the same, it's just the labels that have changed. But for something like Open Mind or Mindpixel, the words aren't labeling anything; there's just relations between meaningless strings of characters.
The above argument is a (rather bad) summary of the argument that Douglas Hofstadter makes in the book Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies. Anyone interested in AI should read this book. Douglas makes a very compelling argument that diving straight away into things like words and sentences is getting much to far ahead of ourselves, and that we first need to make tiny baby steps in AI before we can attempt to make an AI that really uses human languages.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose that you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.