The poll in TFA is funny: 98% against, 1% for, and 1% don't care.
I'm surprised the "don't care" isn't much higher given the level of apathy about ANY topic in this country, but who is the genius that instituted this policy, which is totally obvious to the most casual observer as being completely absurd?
There are some niche markets where price/performance or raw speed matter, but for the majority of buyers it's irrelevant. I've recently convinced my baby-boomer parents to get a new computer, and in the store they kept asking about the speed as though they would have any clue what 2.4GHz meant anyway. I finally convinced them it was the features other than speed they should consider, and as long as the computer has a modern CPU it was going to work for them just fine. Good enough is good enough for most people nowadays! There are some cases where it matters even for the average user (such as the differences between netbook processors) but for anything with a dual core or quad core, forget it. It is all "fast".
If they want to take on the handheld pc market, they have to get over the fact that Flash opens the door to other app development tools. Sandbox it, do whatever it takes, get Flash on the iTouch. Otherwise IMO it's still a glorified iPod, not a serious competitor in the handheld pc space. I love my iTouch, but would not want to upgrade to one with a 7" screen if it's deliberately crippled from most web content like the current iTouch is.
I have to agree on the first point about power. i have experienced that power has a big impact on stability, especially on linksys. I have had several linksys devices (WRT54G, WAP54G, WRT150N) and they all got flaky when too many devices were powered from the same outlet (I have a multiple monitor setup with a KVM and multiple computers). Moving these routers to another outlet in all cases helped, but it unfortunately was not convenient. I didn't try a UPS, but that seems logical. I have found that my Airport Extreme is less sensitive to the power on the same outlet. So I repurposed the Linksys devices, and keep the Airport near my desk, but lesson learned.
Agreed - the movie could have been called anything, but the title at minimum just let people know that it was based in Asimov's world of the 3 laws. The book as a collection of short stories was more similar to the movie they made of Bicentennial Man. So you could almost say they already made that movie, in a sense. And the I, Robot movie did incorporate more of the last story in the book.
If they want to make movies that are more easily adaptable from the robot series of books, the Caves of Steel and it's sequels could be a good source of material IMO.
Another example of a good SF book that was turned into a crap movie: Carl Sagan's "Contact".
With CGI capabilities of today, I'd love to see someone tackle Arthur C. Clarke's "Rendezvous with Rama" series. Or someone else mentioned Asimov's "Foundation", you would have like 200 hours of movie from the foundation series!
These are character-driven stories, so the essence of the movie has to be the characters. Fans get hung up on the mechanics of the action. I think you have to look at Hari Seldon like Frodo in that regard. The evolution of Muad'dib is more important than exposition on what the wierding way really is. My 2 cents....
The De Laurentiis "Dune" movie was cool, and if you get the DVD they have a longer cut of it, which helps fill in a lot of the perceived "gaps" in the original release. However, I think a lot of SF fans are too literal in how they want to see these stories on a big screen exactly how the book looked in their mind's eye when they read it. I thought that the original Dune movie left enough "whitespace" that there was something to think about afterwards, just like with "2001". It was more fun to think about who those big hulking beasts that breathe spice were, versus having the whole history of the guilds and folding space as 30 minutes of exposition.
The alternate cut does this, and I think it's less effective as a movie this way, unless the goal of the movie is to tell you everything important in the book. (Analogy in music: the rests are as important as the notes.)
There are other examples of this. I thought the "I, Robot" movie was a fun re-imagining of the original Asimov story. Not true to the original, but a good movie if you can mentally separate the movie from the book and look at each on its own merits.
Kurzweil's singularity is a hypothesis. Your critique is entirely based in conjecture. You have no more factual knowledge to support your reasoning behind it being "bullshit" than Kurzweil does to support his hypothesis, and I would go further to say that at least Kurzweil argues on the basis of some empirical data about the pace of innovation in various fields, though it is definitely not out of bounds to question the statistical analysis he's done. You assume that "inductive reasoning" is some unachievable goal of AI and then draw the grandiose conclusion that "Human level AIs are never going to be practical for real world problems". Is there any evidence that "inductive reasoning" is not achievable, or your conclusion about the practicality of AI? I don't see the logic behind modding the parent "insightful" when there is no insight being offered. That's like taking the opinion widely held prior to the Model T that "cars will never catch on, a horse is more reliable" and calling it prophecy.
Love the gapminder, figured someone would post that. If anyone is not familiar, this presentation from TED should shed some light on why this UN development is important. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92 I also encourage you to check out their podcast, just search "gapminder" on iTunes.
But I always felt that EULAs, especially 'shrinkwrap' ones, never met the old tests for a contract:
- a 'meeting of the minds'
- agreement in exchange for 'a valuable consideration received'
Credit card agreements don't meet those tests either. Wishful thinking: Maybe the EU will take a look at the credit card industry's practices next...
please mod khallow's comment up - the question raised of "overconsumption" is ridiculous. There is just consumption, "over" and "under" are words that do not have definition in this context. Unless you want to allow the government to decide who gets what energy and when, the market forces dictate where consumption happens by millions of small transactions occurring daily.
We need to grow our way out of this mess, by allowing more consumption of energy, not less. Developing countries need to stay on the path of development, and that requires energy. Developing countries need markets and partners in development in the developed world, and those developed countries require energy.
Moving to a more diversified mix of energy sources, especially nuclear which produces no carbon emissions and will enable other "green" technologies such as electric cars, is really the best option we have right now. Reducing energy use in the developed or developing world will only prolong the bad stuff that is happening (such as burning coal in homes for heating, which is prevalent in China) and delay the good stuff that could happen (such as hydrogen fuel cell cars, which need to get their energy input from somewhere.)
It also takes energy and economic prosperity to work on future technologies, like beaming solar power from orbit down to earth, or creating massive wind farms at sea. You can't do that when you're dealing with government-mandated rolling blackouts.
Makes sense in the context of a lawful arrest and a search incident to that arrest. But if the arrest is later found to be unlawful, does that make the search findings invalid? If you get arrested on spurious charges and they are thrown out, but in the meantime they find something incriminating on your cell phone, can they then charge you based on what they found on the phone as a second crime?
how does safety lead to the "death of millions [of people]"? It does so because in effect the rich white countries used DDT to eliminate malaria from their territories, then closed the door behind them, leaving Africa to suffer for many more decades with a horrible disease, and all we offered them were bed nets as a solution. Silent Spring was alarmist and took the worst case of DDT applied incorrectly. When used correctly (as it was in the "developed world" of the time) it can be quite effective, since you yourself probably don't sleep under a bed net and have half your family die from malaria. There's a big difference between product labeling and inspiring a cult of luddites.
Counting how many vulnerabilities have been found, and then drawing the conclusion that there are fewer vulnerabilities, is just plain stupid. You have to look at the severity of the vulnerabilities - was it in the wild without an available patch, is it remotely exploitable, does it grant the attacker root access, was it discovered by a responsible researcher who notified the vendor first, etc?
The key is that when a real hacker discovers a vuln, he's not telling you, or Microsoft, or anyone else about it - ergo, it's not in these stats at all. And the secondary point is that not all vulns are created equal. A lame attack that cannot be conducted remotely and doesn't give you root is not the same as a remote attack that roots a box over the Internet.
Microsoft already had one major vuln this year (MS08-001) and it's only January.
i don't know the details of the patent, so perhaps this doesn't apply, but part of the video shows a "pinch" zoom function which I thought apple had patented.
Have to agree with you here - and not just for new entrants to the job market, but when I am new to a job I only will work from home once a week or so until I get situated and know the others in the office. In an office environment where desks are first come, first served, that can take a few months of coming into the office to get to know everybody, since they only come into the office when they need to. I'm in technical sales, and work on a distributed team where our weekly team conference call is critical. I've seen it both ways - done poorly, and done well. When it's done well you really do get the team atmosphere even though it is over the phone, and maybe an annual meeting in person.
I think the main issue is that managers have to ensure that those who are tied to the office because of their job function get to collaborate and be as much a part of the team as those who telecommute. So just like we telecommuters have to have a good plan to keep the lines of communication and team building open, office workers have to have the same focus and make a similar effort. Regardless of in-office or remote, if you don't make the effort to have a cohesive team, you won't have one.
Ace of Base and ABBA *should* be given away. Not sure that good popular musicians will be too happy about working for free though. Somewhere between $0 and $0.99 per track has got to be the solution. Otherwise there will be not much music left, rock bands (I manage one) all want to be able to make a living at their craft, and starving artists don't want to stay starving forever. Eventually either they get a money-making gig (just a living, not talking about Jay-Z money here) or they give up and get a job. Don't throw out the baby with the bath water - you still want new music being created, right?
If you've never read this book you should check it out.
As far as being grounded for a month, property was damaged and people were hurt. I think he's going to get a bit more than "no TV for you, son!"
Exactly. IT's not going away, but it will evolve as the technology evolves. Innovation isn't stopping any time soon. So as applications become more intelligent (and therefore more transparent), the job of connecting everyone everywhere to everything is going to get even more critical, not less. I think if nothing else, most people will be working "in IT" - and until our robot overlords arrive, in services too. Think "WalMart" and "Google" as being the two basic job options for everyone {shudder}.
What would be nice is if NASA were to let Google Earth overlay all this non-visible wavelength data right in Google Earth. I think that other uses can be probably be found for this technique, and other interesting insights might be gained, if more people could view Google Earth at infrared and other wavelengths. Archaeology for the masses!
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The poll in TFA is funny: 98% against, 1% for, and 1% don't care. I'm surprised the "don't care" isn't much higher given the level of apathy about ANY topic in this country, but who is the genius that instituted this policy, which is totally obvious to the most casual observer as being completely absurd?
There are some niche markets where price/performance or raw speed matter, but for the majority of buyers it's irrelevant. I've recently convinced my baby-boomer parents to get a new computer, and in the store they kept asking about the speed as though they would have any clue what 2.4GHz meant anyway. I finally convinced them it was the features other than speed they should consider, and as long as the computer has a modern CPU it was going to work for them just fine. Good enough is good enough for most people nowadays! There are some cases where it matters even for the average user (such as the differences between netbook processors) but for anything with a dual core or quad core, forget it. It is all "fast".
If they want to take on the handheld pc market, they have to get over the fact that Flash opens the door to other app development tools. Sandbox it, do whatever it takes, get Flash on the iTouch. Otherwise IMO it's still a glorified iPod, not a serious competitor in the handheld pc space. I love my iTouch, but would not want to upgrade to one with a 7" screen if it's deliberately crippled from most web content like the current iTouch is.
I've had it running on my Moto Q for several months. Buggy but usable. Better than the Internet Explorer that comes with Win Mobile 5.
I have to agree on the first point about power. i have experienced that power has a big impact on stability, especially on linksys. I have had several linksys devices (WRT54G, WAP54G, WRT150N) and they all got flaky when too many devices were powered from the same outlet (I have a multiple monitor setup with a KVM and multiple computers). Moving these routers to another outlet in all cases helped, but it unfortunately was not convenient. I didn't try a UPS, but that seems logical. I have found that my Airport Extreme is less sensitive to the power on the same outlet. So I repurposed the Linksys devices, and keep the Airport near my desk, but lesson learned.
Agreed - the movie could have been called anything, but the title at minimum just let people know that it was based in Asimov's world of the 3 laws. The book as a collection of short stories was more similar to the movie they made of Bicentennial Man. So you could almost say they already made that movie, in a sense. And the I, Robot movie did incorporate more of the last story in the book. If they want to make movies that are more easily adaptable from the robot series of books, the Caves of Steel and it's sequels could be a good source of material IMO.
Forgot one - Bio of a Space Tyrant series by Piers Anthony! I always thought those books would make excellent movies...
Another example of a good SF book that was turned into a crap movie: Carl Sagan's "Contact".
With CGI capabilities of today, I'd love to see someone tackle Arthur C. Clarke's "Rendezvous with Rama" series. Or someone else mentioned Asimov's "Foundation", you would have like 200 hours of movie from the foundation series!
These are character-driven stories, so the essence of the movie has to be the characters. Fans get hung up on the mechanics of the action. I think you have to look at Hari Seldon like Frodo in that regard. The evolution of Muad'dib is more important than exposition on what the wierding way really is. My 2 cents....
The De Laurentiis "Dune" movie was cool, and if you get the DVD they have a longer cut of it, which helps fill in a lot of the perceived "gaps" in the original release. However, I think a lot of SF fans are too literal in how they want to see these stories on a big screen exactly how the book looked in their mind's eye when they read it. I thought that the original Dune movie left enough "whitespace" that there was something to think about afterwards, just like with "2001". It was more fun to think about who those big hulking beasts that breathe spice were, versus having the whole history of the guilds and folding space as 30 minutes of exposition.
The alternate cut does this, and I think it's less effective as a movie this way, unless the goal of the movie is to tell you everything important in the book. (Analogy in music: the rests are as important as the notes.) There are other examples of this. I thought the "I, Robot" movie was a fun re-imagining of the original Asimov story. Not true to the original, but a good movie if you can mentally separate the movie from the book and look at each on its own merits.
Kurzweil's singularity is a hypothesis. Your critique is entirely based in conjecture. You have no more factual knowledge to support your reasoning behind it being "bullshit" than Kurzweil does to support his hypothesis, and I would go further to say that at least Kurzweil argues on the basis of some empirical data about the pace of innovation in various fields, though it is definitely not out of bounds to question the statistical analysis he's done. You assume that "inductive reasoning" is some unachievable goal of AI and then draw the grandiose conclusion that "Human level AIs are never going to be practical for real world problems". Is there any evidence that "inductive reasoning" is not achievable, or your conclusion about the practicality of AI?
I don't see the logic behind modding the parent "insightful" when there is no insight being offered. That's like taking the opinion widely held prior to the Model T that "cars will never catch on, a horse is more reliable" and calling it prophecy.
Love the gapminder, figured someone would post that. If anyone is not familiar, this presentation from TED should shed some light on why this UN development is important.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/92
I also encourage you to check out their podcast, just search "gapminder" on iTunes.
- a 'meeting of the minds'
- agreement in exchange for 'a valuable consideration received'
Credit card agreements don't meet those tests either. Wishful thinking: Maybe the EU will take a look at the credit card industry's practices next...
please mod khallow's comment up - the question raised of "overconsumption" is ridiculous. There is just consumption, "over" and "under" are words that do not have definition in this context. Unless you want to allow the government to decide who gets what energy and when, the market forces dictate where consumption happens by millions of small transactions occurring daily. We need to grow our way out of this mess, by allowing more consumption of energy, not less. Developing countries need to stay on the path of development, and that requires energy. Developing countries need markets and partners in development in the developed world, and those developed countries require energy. Moving to a more diversified mix of energy sources, especially nuclear which produces no carbon emissions and will enable other "green" technologies such as electric cars, is really the best option we have right now. Reducing energy use in the developed or developing world will only prolong the bad stuff that is happening (such as burning coal in homes for heating, which is prevalent in China) and delay the good stuff that could happen (such as hydrogen fuel cell cars, which need to get their energy input from somewhere.) It also takes energy and economic prosperity to work on future technologies, like beaming solar power from orbit down to earth, or creating massive wind farms at sea. You can't do that when you're dealing with government-mandated rolling blackouts.
Makes sense in the context of a lawful arrest and a search incident to that arrest. But if the arrest is later found to be unlawful, does that make the search findings invalid? If you get arrested on spurious charges and they are thrown out, but in the meantime they find something incriminating on your cell phone, can they then charge you based on what they found on the phone as a second crime?
how does safety lead to the "death of millions [of people]"?
It does so because in effect the rich white countries used DDT to eliminate malaria from their territories, then closed the door behind them, leaving Africa to suffer for many more decades with a horrible disease, and all we offered them were bed nets as a solution. Silent Spring was alarmist and took the worst case of DDT applied incorrectly. When used correctly (as it was in the "developed world" of the time) it can be quite effective, since you yourself probably don't sleep under a bed net and have half your family die from malaria. There's a big difference between product labeling and inspiring a cult of luddites.
Counting how many vulnerabilities have been found, and then drawing the conclusion that there are fewer vulnerabilities, is just plain stupid. You have to look at the severity of the vulnerabilities - was it in the wild without an available patch, is it remotely exploitable, does it grant the attacker root access, was it discovered by a responsible researcher who notified the vendor first, etc? The key is that when a real hacker discovers a vuln, he's not telling you, or Microsoft, or anyone else about it - ergo, it's not in these stats at all. And the secondary point is that not all vulns are created equal. A lame attack that cannot be conducted remotely and doesn't give you root is not the same as a remote attack that roots a box over the Internet. Microsoft already had one major vuln this year (MS08-001) and it's only January.
i don't know the details of the patent, so perhaps this doesn't apply, but part of the video shows a "pinch" zoom function which I thought apple had patented.
Have to agree with you here - and not just for new entrants to the job market, but when I am new to a job I only will work from home once a week or so until I get situated and know the others in the office. In an office environment where desks are first come, first served, that can take a few months of coming into the office to get to know everybody, since they only come into the office when they need to. I'm in technical sales, and work on a distributed team where our weekly team conference call is critical. I've seen it both ways - done poorly, and done well. When it's done well you really do get the team atmosphere even though it is over the phone, and maybe an annual meeting in person. I think the main issue is that managers have to ensure that those who are tied to the office because of their job function get to collaborate and be as much a part of the team as those who telecommute. So just like we telecommuters have to have a good plan to keep the lines of communication and team building open, office workers have to have the same focus and make a similar effort. Regardless of in-office or remote, if you don't make the effort to have a cohesive team, you won't have one.
Ace of Base and ABBA *should* be given away. Not sure that good popular musicians will be too happy about working for free though. Somewhere between $0 and $0.99 per track has got to be the solution. Otherwise there will be not much music left, rock bands (I manage one) all want to be able to make a living at their craft, and starving artists don't want to stay starving forever. Eventually either they get a money-making gig (just a living, not talking about Jay-Z money here) or they give up and get a job. Don't throw out the baby with the bath water - you still want new music being created, right?
If you've never read this book you should check it out. As far as being grounded for a month, property was damaged and people were hurt. I think he's going to get a bit more than "no TV for you, son!"
Exactly. IT's not going away, but it will evolve as the technology evolves. Innovation isn't stopping any time soon. So as applications become more intelligent (and therefore more transparent), the job of connecting everyone everywhere to everything is going to get even more critical, not less. I think if nothing else, most people will be working "in IT" - and until our robot overlords arrive, in services too. Think "WalMart" and "Google" as being the two basic job options for everyone {shudder}.
What would be nice is if NASA were to let Google Earth overlay all this non-visible wavelength data right in Google Earth. I think that other uses can be probably be found for this technique, and other interesting insights might be gained, if more people could view Google Earth at infrared and other wavelengths. Archaeology for the masses!
Those are some serious-looking guns packaged with the NES-style Gold Leopard King consoles!
Don't forget about Brazil - huge e-banking fraud industry.
In TFA it says they are talking about IT-related patents only. My point is that IBM has a much broader scope of research than that.