Yes, I really wonder what they are after. Usually when you hear "thinking machine", Turing test comes to mind, and it's always seemed to me that the Turing test is too much a test of understanding natural language, which is only one measure of intelligence. I'm pretty sure that when they introduced BASIC, either Kemeney or Kurtz (or maybe it was someone else) announced that now we had a natural language interface to programming. Well, we didn't, and we still don't, but we have languages and interfaces with a certain amount of intelligence, making it relatively easy to program the computer to do complex tasks in a modest amount of time. That maybe a pretty meagre form of intelligence, but it's more than pure computational power.
The cynic in me says they were deliberately vague so they could claim success (or absence of failure) whatever happened. But I have to acknowledge that often some good ideas come out of efforts like this, even if it takes a while to recognize how good they are.
I question a lot of the assumptions that are used to develop password policies in the first place. It's been years - decades, in fact - since I actually read a research paper on password policies, but all of them focused on a single password on a single system. How many passwords do you have, and how do you remember them? If you had mechanisms on all those accounts that required you to change the passwords every two months, avoid anything that looked like a real word, or anything similar to a recent password, the only way to keep track of them all would be to write them all down, which they all say you should not do.
I envisage some sort of system like an RSA keyring you keep on a dedicated thumb drive, which is itself protected by a master passphrase. The software would be a tempting target for hackers, but there still might be a clean way to do it.
It gets awfully hot in Vegas. The way energy prices are going, how about putting a facility like this in, e.g., Edmonton? I realize that cold places probably don't have very good connectivity, but that seems like a solvable problem.
Put the thing in the basement of the West Edmonton Mall or the Mall of America and heat the whole place with it (just kidding).
It doesn't make sense to put a solar panel in a place that doesn't get a lot of sun, which, relatively speaking, is most of the world.
I'm not sure that a lot of thought has gone into putting solar panels at sea, if you look at a map, like this one, they don't seem to care about the ocean. It would seem that the air over the ocean would be more humid, in general, than air over land, and thus worse for solar collection.
I agree with your basic premise - there are lots of places where it would be a lot easier to place solar panels than the sea. Buildings in the desert, or power lines crossing the desert immediately come to mind.
And can we please spare the feckless comments on injuring birds, large size windmills move much too slowly to cause a bird damage unless they ploughed into it headlong, and any bird that would do that will have difficulties with flying into cliffs as well. I don't object to windmills, but the tip speed of the large windmills is quite fast. The article said these would be 80 meters in diameter, so if they rotated at one revolution every three seconds, that would be almost 200 miles per hour at the tip. I think that one of the main reasons large turbines do rotate so slowly is the high tip speed is difficult to deal with - at the speed of sound (340 m/s) shock waves become a problem, and structural problems show up at slower speeds. And of course, there are the birds.
I think if it were an improv group, they would have some sort of canned answer to the question "what are you waiting for?" Usually interacting with the audience is half the fun.
My uncle used to say that he preferred corrupt judges to incompetent judges, since the corrupt judges would be careful to get things right 95% of the time, so that they would be well placed when the time came to undermine the system. The incompetent judges, on the other hand, would screw things up far more frequently than that, and ruin far more lives than the corrupt judges.
A very few redirected queries could get lost in the huge number of correct responses, but still provide big benefits to a criminal. And if they compromised a secretive bank, or the Defense Department, it's unlikely that we would ever hear about it.
You can certainly test it using a site like speakeasy, and make a case - maybe not one that will stand up in court, but one that would convince anyone who had an open mind.
That begs the question, will they care? You can only find out if you try, and if they are unresponsive, my next stop would be the Attorney General's aconsumer protection division. In my experience, the office in my state appreciates learning about technology, as they don't have the internal budget to keep up with everything themselves.
If the AG isn't interested, then you really are out of luck, unless you want to mount a crusade, and even that is a long shot. But I would give the AG a try, after you have gathered a lot of evidence via speakeasy, etc.
I think that's part of it, but I have several friends who literally laugh at me, and say "under Windows, everything just works". At one point I did try to point out that that's only true if you define "everything" as "everything MS chooses to support", offering the World Wide Web as an example of something MS tried to sidestep, but my friends just said that until MS got involved, the Web had nothing to offer. I gave up after two very similar interactions like this.
I think that the germ of what make MS users so happy with Windows is that even part of a computer is so valuable that people who experience are very happy to have it. It would be like someone who is severely nearsighted getting a pair of glasses that is near their prescription, having never experienced corrective lenses before. Such a person would not want to give up those glasses, even if better ones were available.
I agree with the postings that say you have to elaborate on your question. If you haven't already read it, I recommend "A Gift of Fire". It will give you a lot of ideas and open up many possible lines of inquiry. You can refer to specific cases from that book, and may get more useful feedback here.
My Dad used to work for GE and did some work for them that they elected not to pursue and when he retired, he wanted to see if he could do something with it. He had to fill out several forms and shepherd them through several offices, but it was all standard stuff at GE, and they released the project to him.
Obviously, the way GE did it involved some overhead expense, but that appeared to be true with anything GE ever did. So the question is, can you make it worth the company's while to go through that for you.
If you can get them to sign a simple release, as some here have suggested. But as others have pointed out, they are in no way obliged to do so. In my Dad's case, he wouldn't be competing with anything GE was doing, so they went along with it. They maintained the program because they thought it improved morale of their engineers.
Good luck. If they understand open source, there are a lot of good points you can make to convince them.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I really wonder what they are after. Usually when you hear "thinking machine", Turing test comes to mind, and it's always seemed to me that the Turing test is too much a test of understanding natural language, which is only one measure of intelligence. I'm pretty sure that when they introduced BASIC, either Kemeney or Kurtz (or maybe it was someone else) announced that now we had a natural language interface to programming. Well, we didn't, and we still don't, but we have languages and interfaces with a certain amount of intelligence, making it relatively easy to program the computer to do complex tasks in a modest amount of time. That maybe a pretty meagre form of intelligence, but it's more than pure computational power. The cynic in me says they were deliberately vague so they could claim success (or absence of failure) whatever happened. But I have to acknowledge that often some good ideas come out of efforts like this, even if it takes a while to recognize how good they are.
I question a lot of the assumptions that are used to develop password policies in the first place. It's been years - decades, in fact - since I actually read a research paper on password policies, but all of them focused on a single password on a single system. How many passwords do you have, and how do you remember them? If you had mechanisms on all those accounts that required you to change the passwords every two months, avoid anything that looked like a real word, or anything similar to a recent password, the only way to keep track of them all would be to write them all down, which they all say you should not do. I envisage some sort of system like an RSA keyring you keep on a dedicated thumb drive, which is itself protected by a master passphrase. The software would be a tempting target for hackers, but there still might be a clean way to do it.
Also, I'm sure Erdos has priority. I remember people talking about Erdos numbers in the early 80s. I don't think Bacon number goes back before 1990.
It gets awfully hot in Vegas. The way energy prices are going, how about putting a facility like this in, e.g., Edmonton? I realize that cold places probably don't have very good connectivity, but that seems like a solvable problem. Put the thing in the basement of the West Edmonton Mall or the Mall of America and heat the whole place with it (just kidding).
It doesn't make sense to put a solar panel in a place that doesn't get a lot of sun, which, relatively speaking, is most of the world. I'm not sure that a lot of thought has gone into putting solar panels at sea, if you look at a map, like this one, they don't seem to care about the ocean. It would seem that the air over the ocean would be more humid, in general, than air over land, and thus worse for solar collection. I agree with your basic premise - there are lots of places where it would be a lot easier to place solar panels than the sea. Buildings in the desert, or power lines crossing the desert immediately come to mind.
I think if it were an improv group, they would have some sort of canned answer to the question "what are you waiting for?" Usually interacting with the audience is half the fun.
My uncle used to say that he preferred corrupt judges to incompetent judges, since the corrupt judges would be careful to get things right 95% of the time, so that they would be well placed when the time came to undermine the system. The incompetent judges, on the other hand, would screw things up far more frequently than that, and ruin far more lives than the corrupt judges. A very few redirected queries could get lost in the huge number of correct responses, but still provide big benefits to a criminal. And if they compromised a secretive bank, or the Defense Department, it's unlikely that we would ever hear about it.
You can certainly test it using a site like speakeasy, and make a case - maybe not one that will stand up in court, but one that would convince anyone who had an open mind.
That begs the question, will they care? You can only find out if you try, and if they are unresponsive, my next stop would be the Attorney General's aconsumer protection division. In my experience, the office in my state appreciates learning about technology, as they don't have the internal budget to keep up with everything themselves.
If the AG isn't interested, then you really are out of luck, unless you want to mount a crusade, and even that is a long shot. But I would give the AG a try, after you have gathered a lot of evidence via speakeasy, etc.
I think that's part of it, but I have several friends who literally laugh at me, and say "under Windows, everything just works". At one point I did try to point out that that's only true if you define "everything" as "everything MS chooses to support", offering the World Wide Web as an example of something MS tried to sidestep, but my friends just said that until MS got involved, the Web had nothing to offer. I gave up after two very similar interactions like this.
I think that the germ of what make MS users so happy with Windows is that even part of a computer is so valuable that people who experience are very happy to have it. It would be like someone who is severely nearsighted getting a pair of glasses that is near their prescription, having never experienced corrective lenses before. Such a person would not want to give up those glasses, even if better ones were available.
I agree with the postings that say you have to elaborate on your question. If you haven't already read it, I recommend "A Gift of Fire". It will give you a lot of ideas and open up many possible lines of inquiry. You can refer to specific cases from that book, and may get more useful feedback here.
My Dad used to work for GE and did some work for them that they elected not to pursue and when he retired, he wanted to see if he could do something with it. He had to fill out several forms and shepherd them through several offices, but it was all standard stuff at GE, and they released the project to him.
Obviously, the way GE did it involved some overhead expense, but that appeared to be true with anything GE ever did. So the question is, can you make it worth the company's while to go through that for you.
If you can get them to sign a simple release, as some here have suggested. But as others have pointed out, they are in no way obliged to do so. In my Dad's case, he wouldn't be competing with anything GE was doing, so they went along with it. They maintained the program because they thought it improved morale of their engineers.
Good luck. If they understand open source, there are a lot of good points you can make to convince them.