I've been waiting for strong AI for decades. Progress has been very slow. (It was really slow during the "AI Winter", after expert systems turned out to be a dud.) But it's picking up, what with all the effort in statistical machine learning.
The big difference this time is commercial applications. Until about 10 years or so, the commercial value of AI was tiny. Now, serious money goes into it and profits result. This makes the technology self-supporting and growing, rather than dependent on research funding. A big chunk of what Google does now involves machine learning. Machine translation is getting to be reasonably good. A lot of industrial stuff that few people see has more self-adjusting capability than it used to.
Machines that move around in the real world by themselves and get stuff done are starting to work, and they're getting better each year.
There's a lot of noise about "conciousness", but once we get AI into the low end of the mammal range, moving up may not be that tough. All the mammals have roughly the same DNA, brain components and structure, after all.
Once machines get anywhere near human intelligence, they'll go way past it, of course. Computers scale up and network far better than biology does.
If you're locked into a Verizon contract, Verizon just gave you the option to cancel without paying a penalty. They've made a material change in the terms, and you now have the right to exit the contract.
But I think the author is also missing a generational issue. A lot of people of younger generations simply don't really care.
Others have observed that. About a decade ago, when phones started getting GPS capability, I asked some of the teenagers around Stanford (college students and high schoolers around the horse barn) how they'd feel if others could tell where they were. I thought they'd hate it. Most of them liked the idea. "I could see where my boyfriend is!" . "I wouldn't have to text so much to tell my friends where I am".
In 2005, Helio launched, as a phone brand aimed at the 16-25 crowd. They were the first to integrate social networking with phones - their phone could map your friends (if they had Helio phones) and worked with Myspace. They tried very hard to be cool; their Palo Alto store, across from the Apple store, had live bands. But no customers.
Then in 2007, the iPhone launched, and took phone based social networking mainstream. Now all smart phones do that.
I've been watching these protests, interested in seeing what might come out of them. Unfortunately, no one has stepped out and tried to distill all the chaos down to simple talking points that the masses can understand.
The Occupy Wall Street demands are starting to focus. They're all quite reasonable. This is a revolutionary movement that wants to pass HR 1489, the "Return to Prudent Banking Act". That's something that real conservatives ought to be supporting. It's about returning to the system that worked from 1933 to 1999, where banks had to stay out of the stock market and brokerages couldn't accept deposits. This separation prevented trouble on Wall Street from taking down banks.
The Occupy Wall Street movement wants the Department of Justice to get tough on crime on Wall Street. That, too, is completely in line with conservative tradition. They want a tougher Securities and Exchange Commission and restrictions on campaign spending. None of this is even slightly radical.
Everything on that list would have been supported by President Eisenhower, arguably the best Republican president in the last century. (Eisenhower delivered peace and prosperity while facing down the Soviet threat, which was quite real back then. He made it look easy; he'd often knock off around 3PM and go play golf. Of course, he'd already been in charge of winning WWII in Europe; compared to that, the presidency was a vacation. His greatest skill was that he could pick the right subordinate for the job and keep them on mission. He managed both Patton and Montgomery effectively during WWII.)
The Republicans have lost their way. (Look at the collection of losers and weirdos running for the Republican presidential nomination.) Republican moderates should be supporting Occupy Wall Street.
"Why is there no political system anywhere where the campaigns are funded by a flat levy, and ALL levels of government have equal elections where union and private donations, as well as politician's OWN FINANCES are banned from participating?"
There are. France runs elections that way. "Campaign finance is strictly regulated. All forms of paid commercial advertisements through the press or by any audiovisual means are prohibited during the three months preceding the election. Instead, political advertisements are aired free of charge on an equal basis for all of the candidates on national television channels and radio stations during the official campaign."
It really works that way. French campaigns are short and intense. I've been in Paris for one. The official poster boards go up in sets, one board for each candidate, and the candidates poster boards go on them. The minor and major candidates get equal billing. Everybody makes their pitch on TV in their allotted time slots, and it's discussed to death in Le Monde and ranted about in Libe. Then the citizens vote. France uses a two-round presidential election; if nobody gets an absolute majority on round 1, there's a runoff two weeks later.
That it did, but until the Mac came out, did you honestly remember reading anything at all about what they were doing at PARC back then?
There was a whole industry selling UNIX workstations with GUIs years before the Mac cam out. Apollo, Sun, Three Rivers, etc. They were quite nice, but cost upwards of $10K. The original Mac was a crappy imitation of those, with one floppy drive and no hard drive. Having used both, I wasn't impressed with the original Macintosh. And, in fact, it was a commercial flop. Not until the product line acquired a hard drive and 512K of memory did it cease to suck.
The Apple Lisa was actually a rather nice machine, but not only did it cost about $10K, Apple had built their own hard drive for it. The LisaFile was both slow and unreliable. Apple quickly exited the hard drive business.
Listen to this
Wildfire demo. 1990s technology. Used by Orange Mobile. Used a lot of compute power for the 1990s. Cost about $5/day originally; became cheaper by 2005 or so. Bought by Microsoft. Run into the ground. Sold off to a small company, Virtuosity. Still available.
I know the DoD has some overreaching powers over IP when it comes to national secrecy or times of war, but I haven't heard of them being able to just use someone's independently-developed patent outright without paying for it (aside from the regular government indemnification from being sued).
28 USC 1498. See this presentation on IP problems of DoD subcontractors. It's routine in DoD procurements to get one contractor to develop a technology, then award the production contract to the lowest bidder without paying for the technology. The developer can sue the Government, but that takes years (one case has been going on for 30 years) and the Government wins about 75% of the time. Many companies prefer to keep their technology secret from DoD and not deal with them at all because of this.
Once the public knows who you are, there's no guarantee that you'll ever be able to arrange for yourself to be forgotten.
Right.
Being famous, but not rich, is a huge pain. (The reverse is rather nice, though.) If you have enough money, you can live behind gates. You can go out to places with door control. Or hang out in places with enough celebrities that nobody cares about you. (Malibu and Stanford come to mind.) If not, weirdos can be a real problem.
Second-tier TV actors run into this problem. They don't make enough for the celebrity lifestyle, but get recognized too much. After a while, though, they're forgotten.
First, the link to the letter in the article tries to get you to sign up for some file storage service before reading the document. Here's the original from Sen. Wyden's U.S, Senate site.
The reason this isn't being submitted to the Senate for ratification as a treaty is because of a conflict between the pharmaceutical industry and the Department of Defense. The pharmaceutical industry insists that national governments not be allowed to override intellectual property laws to make low-cost drugs available to their citizens. That's in ACTA. DoD insists that they be allowed to override intellectual property laws when they want to use a technology without paying for patent rights first.
If ACTA were ratified by the Senate, it would be binding on the U.S. Goverment. This would give patent holders rights against the U.S. Government they dont' have now. DoD doesn't want that.
Member States shall guarantee every data subject the right to obtain from the controller:
(a) without constraint at reasonable intervals and without excessive delay or expense:
- confirmation as to whether or not data relating to him are being processed and information at least as to the purposes of the processing, the categories of data concerned, and the recipients or categories of recipients to whom the data are disclosed,
- communication to him in an intelligible form of the data undergoing processing and of any available information as to their source,
- knowledge of the logic involved in any automatic processing of data concerning him at least in the case of the automated decisions referred to in Article 15 (1);
(b) as appropriate the rectification, erasure or blocking of data the processing of which does not comply with the provisions of this Directive, in particular because of the incomplete or inaccurate nature of the data;
(c) notification to third parties to whom the data have been disclosed of any rectification, erasure or blocking carried out in compliance with (b), unless this proves impossible or involves a disproportionate effort.
Amazon can use a platform-based service because Amazon sells things for money. Allowing programs to find out about things Amazon has for sale is profitable, t Amazon's marketing info gets redistributed. Amazon's "cloud" is a pay service, and making pay services available makes money. So Amazon's platform is a win for Amazon.
Google, on the other hand, is entirely ad-based. (Yes, they get about 3%-7% of their revenue from actual products they sell. So what?) So they don't want their data repurposed, especially if repurposing deletes the ads.
Facebook is quite platform-oriented internally, with internal services making heavy use of interprocess communication. But little of that is exposed to the outside world. What is exposed is heavily restricted. Facebook games have to accept payment only in Facebook's private money, with a 30% take.
Google's priority is to return search results in under 100ms. That requires tight integration. It's all about cache management, not platform APIs. Some data has to be pushed to clients, rather than pulled through APIs, or performance will suffer badly.
Given Google's business model, they don't seem to be doing their infrastructure wrong.
Q: Were consultations with end users appropriate? Which groups were consulted? What were the nature and
content of these consultations?
A: As a registry operator, Verisign did not consult with the registrants of.com/.net/.name domain names.
Verisign is trying to expand their central but minor role as a registry operator into control of the whole system. Their agreement with ICANN expires on November 30, 2012, and, ICANN could choose to get another registry operator. Right now, no proprietary technology or big staff is needed to be the registry operator. This added complication would make it tougher for ICANN to switch registry operators.
One other ex-astronaut recently complained that NASA pulled his visitors badge for NASA Houston. There used to be a policy that astronauts could visit the old place, but no longer. NASA still has about 60 active astronauts on the payroll, which is about 40 more than they need. They haven't officially announced layoffs, but there is pressure to quit or retire.
One of the early search engines, I think Infoseek, worked this way. Machines were installed in blocks of 100 (this was before 1U servers) and never replaced individually. Failed machines were powered off remotely. When some fraction of the block had failed, about 20%, the whole cluster was replaced.
There's a lot to be said for this. You have less maintenance-induced failure. Operating costs are low.
The technology... is adapted to publishers' needs such as full-page "interstitial" ads placed between different pages. "We think there's an opportunity to rethink the ads on the Web," Lie said.
You've all seen those awful sites where each article is spread across many pages. There's a tiny block of text, flanked by ads to the left, ads to the right, ads above, and ads below. There's a whole industry turning out "Top 10 ways to..." ad farms, and "reviews" that take six screens to deliver one page of content.
Now imagine those with inter-page ads you can't skip.
Too bad they never had the resources to work on the efficiency like everyone did with piston engines.
The basic Wankel isn't a bad engine. But you can't vary the basic design much. The trochoid determines the shape of the combustion chamber. All the games that have been played with combustion chamber layout, from the hemi head to four valve engines, don't really apply. Valve timing, too, is determined by the geometry. All those have been tweaked to improve fuel economy and emissions. With a Wankel, there's not much to tweak.
Top priority is version control. Without that, you don't know where you are. Which version control system doesn't matter that much. They all work well for small projects.
This isn't new.
There's a shareware plug-in, "DeblurMyImage", for it.
There are two main cases - focus blur and motion blur. Dealing with focus blur is well understood, because what defocusing does to an image is well understood.
Motion blur is harder, because you have to extract a motion estimate first.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been waiting for strong AI for decades. Progress has been very slow. (It was really slow during the "AI Winter", after expert systems turned out to be a dud.) But it's picking up, what with all the effort in statistical machine learning.
The big difference this time is commercial applications. Until about 10 years or so, the commercial value of AI was tiny. Now, serious money goes into it and profits result. This makes the technology self-supporting and growing, rather than dependent on research funding. A big chunk of what Google does now involves machine learning. Machine translation is getting to be reasonably good. A lot of industrial stuff that few people see has more self-adjusting capability than it used to. Machines that move around in the real world by themselves and get stuff done are starting to work, and they're getting better each year.
There's a lot of noise about "conciousness", but once we get AI into the low end of the mammal range, moving up may not be that tough. All the mammals have roughly the same DNA, brain components and structure, after all.
Once machines get anywhere near human intelligence, they'll go way past it, of course. Computers scale up and network far better than biology does.
If you're locked into a Verizon contract, Verizon just gave you the option to cancel without paying a penalty. They've made a material change in the terms, and you now have the right to exit the contract.
But I think the author is also missing a generational issue. A lot of people of younger generations simply don't really care.
Others have observed that. About a decade ago, when phones started getting GPS capability, I asked some of the teenagers around Stanford (college students and high schoolers around the horse barn) how they'd feel if others could tell where they were. I thought they'd hate it. Most of them liked the idea. "I could see where my boyfriend is!" . "I wouldn't have to text so much to tell my friends where I am".
In 2005, Helio launched, as a phone brand aimed at the 16-25 crowd. They were the first to integrate social networking with phones - their phone could map your friends (if they had Helio phones) and worked with Myspace. They tried very hard to be cool; their Palo Alto store, across from the Apple store, had live bands. But no customers.
Then in 2007, the iPhone launched, and took phone based social networking mainstream. Now all smart phones do that.
Right. Auto fuel gauges have had some margin in them for decades.
Aviation fuel gauges, incidentally, do not. Zero is zero.
I've been watching these protests, interested in seeing what might come out of them. Unfortunately, no one has stepped out and tried to distill all the chaos down to simple talking points that the masses can understand.
The Occupy Wall Street demands are starting to focus. They're all quite reasonable. This is a revolutionary movement that wants to pass HR 1489, the "Return to Prudent Banking Act". That's something that real conservatives ought to be supporting. It's about returning to the system that worked from 1933 to 1999, where banks had to stay out of the stock market and brokerages couldn't accept deposits. This separation prevented trouble on Wall Street from taking down banks.
The Occupy Wall Street movement wants the Department of Justice to get tough on crime on Wall Street. That, too, is completely in line with conservative tradition. They want a tougher Securities and Exchange Commission and restrictions on campaign spending. None of this is even slightly radical.
Everything on that list would have been supported by President Eisenhower, arguably the best Republican president in the last century. (Eisenhower delivered peace and prosperity while facing down the Soviet threat, which was quite real back then. He made it look easy; he'd often knock off around 3PM and go play golf. Of course, he'd already been in charge of winning WWII in Europe; compared to that, the presidency was a vacation. His greatest skill was that he could pick the right subordinate for the job and keep them on mission. He managed both Patton and Montgomery effectively during WWII.)
The Republicans have lost their way. (Look at the collection of losers and weirdos running for the Republican presidential nomination.) Republican moderates should be supporting Occupy Wall Street.
"Why is there no political system anywhere where the campaigns are funded by a flat levy, and ALL levels of government have equal elections where union and private donations, as well as politician's OWN FINANCES are banned from participating?"
There are. France runs elections that way. "Campaign finance is strictly regulated. All forms of paid commercial advertisements through the press or by any audiovisual means are prohibited during the three months preceding the election. Instead, political advertisements are aired free of charge on an equal basis for all of the candidates on national television channels and radio stations during the official campaign."
It really works that way. French campaigns are short and intense. I've been in Paris for one. The official poster boards go up in sets, one board for each candidate, and the candidates poster boards go on them. The minor and major candidates get equal billing. Everybody makes their pitch on TV in their allotted time slots, and it's discussed to death in Le Monde and ranted about in Libe. Then the citizens vote. France uses a two-round presidential election; if nobody gets an absolute majority on round 1, there's a runoff two weeks later.
Losing Code Search is a loss. Somebody else, like SourceForge, needs to take that on.
This also raises the question of whether Google Code is a safe place to store open source projects.
Much better surveillance and pursuit ball from Japan. It would be easy enough to add more cameras to that thing.
Because it's Apple it is suddenly world changing technology.
You're assuming that the Jobs Reality Distortion Field will survive Jobs. Probably not.
That it did, but until the Mac came out, did you honestly remember reading anything at all about what they were doing at PARC back then?
There was a whole industry selling UNIX workstations with GUIs years before the Mac cam out. Apollo, Sun, Three Rivers, etc. They were quite nice, but cost upwards of $10K. The original Mac was a crappy imitation of those, with one floppy drive and no hard drive. Having used both, I wasn't impressed with the original Macintosh. And, in fact, it was a commercial flop. Not until the product line acquired a hard drive and 512K of memory did it cease to suck.
The Apple Lisa was actually a rather nice machine, but not only did it cost about $10K, Apple had built their own hard drive for it. The LisaFile was both slow and unreliable. Apple quickly exited the hard drive business.
Listen to this Wildfire demo. 1990s technology. Used by Orange Mobile. Used a lot of compute power for the 1990s. Cost about $5/day originally; became cheaper by 2005 or so. Bought by Microsoft. Run into the ground. Sold off to a small company, Virtuosity. Still available.
Way ahead of its time.
Mod parent up.
Not everything should be done in a web browser.
Take a look at the source code which stores SSH authentication information in browser cookies. In plaintext. In JSON. Idiots will start using this, and they'll open a back door into a remote server.
I know the DoD has some overreaching powers over IP when it comes to national secrecy or times of war, but I haven't heard of them being able to just use someone's independently-developed patent outright without paying for it (aside from the regular government indemnification from being sued).
28 USC 1498. See this presentation on IP problems of DoD subcontractors. It's routine in DoD procurements to get one contractor to develop a technology, then award the production contract to the lowest bidder without paying for the technology. The developer can sue the Government, but that takes years (one case has been going on for 30 years) and the Government wins about 75% of the time. Many companies prefer to keep their technology secret from DoD and not deal with them at all because of this.
Once the public knows who you are, there's no guarantee that you'll ever be able to arrange for yourself to be forgotten.
Right.
Being famous, but not rich, is a huge pain. (The reverse is rather nice, though.) If you have enough money, you can live behind gates. You can go out to places with door control. Or hang out in places with enough celebrities that nobody cares about you. (Malibu and Stanford come to mind.) If not, weirdos can be a real problem.
Second-tier TV actors run into this problem. They don't make enough for the celebrity lifestyle, but get recognized too much. After a while, though, they're forgotten.
First, the link to the letter in the article tries to get you to sign up for some file storage service before reading the document. Here's the original from Sen. Wyden's U.S, Senate site.
The reason this isn't being submitted to the Senate for ratification as a treaty is because of a conflict between the pharmaceutical industry and the Department of Defense. The pharmaceutical industry insists that national governments not be allowed to override intellectual property laws to make low-cost drugs available to their citizens. That's in ACTA. DoD insists that they be allowed to override intellectual property laws when they want to use a technology without paying for patent rights first.
If ACTA were ratified by the Senate, it would be binding on the U.S. Goverment. This would give patent holders rights against the U.S. Government they dont' have now. DoD doesn't want that.
But the article does not mention anything about Facebook violating EU regulations. It only mentions that it's Austrians raising the issues.
Austria is a member of the European Union. (I shouldn't have to post this.)
Unlike some governments, businesses are not subject to "Freedom of Information" queries.
In the European Union, businesses are.
THE DATA SUBJECT'S RIGHT OF ACCESS TO DATA
Member States shall guarantee every data subject the right to obtain from the controller:
(a) without constraint at reasonable intervals and without excessive delay or expense:
- confirmation as to whether or not data relating to him are being processed and information at least as to the purposes of the processing, the categories of data concerned, and the recipients or categories of recipients to whom the data are disclosed,
- communication to him in an intelligible form of the data undergoing processing and of any available information as to their source,
- knowledge of the logic involved in any automatic processing of data concerning him at least in the case of the automated decisions referred to in Article 15 (1);
(b) as appropriate the rectification, erasure or blocking of data the processing of which does not comply with the provisions of this Directive, in particular because of the incomplete or inaccurate nature of the data;
(c) notification to third parties to whom the data have been disclosed of any rectification, erasure or blocking carried out in compliance with (b), unless this proves impossible or involves a disproportionate effort.
Amazon can use a platform-based service because Amazon sells things for money. Allowing programs to find out about things Amazon has for sale is profitable, t Amazon's marketing info gets redistributed. Amazon's "cloud" is a pay service, and making pay services available makes money. So Amazon's platform is a win for Amazon.
Google, on the other hand, is entirely ad-based. (Yes, they get about 3%-7% of their revenue from actual products they sell. So what?) So they don't want their data repurposed, especially if repurposing deletes the ads.
Facebook is quite platform-oriented internally, with internal services making heavy use of interprocess communication. But little of that is exposed to the outside world. What is exposed is heavily restricted. Facebook games have to accept payment only in Facebook's private money, with a 30% take.
Google used to be more platform oriented. There was a Google SOAP search interface and a Google Web Search API. Both have been discontinued. They didn't push ads.
Google's priority is to return search results in under 100ms. That requires tight integration. It's all about cache management, not platform APIs. Some data has to be pushed to clients, rather than pulled through APIs, or performance will suffer badly.
Given Google's business model, they don't seem to be doing their infrastructure wrong.
Q: Were consultations with end users appropriate? Which groups were consulted? What were the nature and content of these consultations? .com/.net/.name domain names.
A: As a registry operator, Verisign did not consult with the registrants of
Verisign is trying to expand their central but minor role as a registry operator into control of the whole system. Their agreement with ICANN expires on November 30, 2012, and, ICANN could choose to get another registry operator. Right now, no proprietary technology or big staff is needed to be the registry operator. This added complication would make it tougher for ICANN to switch registry operators.
So that's why they're doing this.
One other ex-astronaut recently complained that NASA pulled his visitors badge for NASA Houston. There used to be a policy that astronauts could visit the old place, but no longer. NASA still has about 60 active astronauts on the payroll, which is about 40 more than they need. They haven't officially announced layoffs, but there is pressure to quit or retire.
One of the early search engines, I think Infoseek, worked this way. Machines were installed in blocks of 100 (this was before 1U servers) and never replaced individually. Failed machines were powered off remotely. When some fraction of the block had failed, about 20%, the whole cluster was replaced.
There's a lot to be said for this. You have less maintenance-induced failure. Operating costs are low.
What this is really about:
The technology ... is adapted to publishers' needs such as full-page "interstitial" ads placed between different pages. "We think there's an opportunity to rethink the ads on the Web," Lie said.
You've all seen those awful sites where each article is spread across many pages. There's a tiny block of text, flanked by ads to the left, ads to the right, ads above, and ads below. There's a whole industry turning out "Top 10 ways to ..." ad farms, and "reviews" that take six screens to deliver one page of content.
Now imagine those with inter-page ads you can't skip.
Someone posted
Too bad they never had the resources to work on the efficiency like everyone did with piston engines.
The basic Wankel isn't a bad engine. But you can't vary the basic design much. The trochoid determines the shape of the combustion chamber. All the games that have been played with combustion chamber layout, from the hemi head to four valve engines, don't really apply. Valve timing, too, is determined by the geometry. All those have been tweaked to improve fuel economy and emissions. With a Wankel, there's not much to tweak.
Top priority is version control. Without that, you don't know where you are. Which version control system doesn't matter that much. They all work well for small projects.
This isn't new. There's a shareware plug-in, "DeblurMyImage", for it.
There are two main cases - focus blur and motion blur. Dealing with focus blur is well understood, because what defocusing does to an image is well understood. Motion blur is harder, because you have to extract a motion estimate first.