That is to say there should naturally be study and debate about what is or isn't going to benefit us all. I don't claim the case is made for providing insurance companies with that kind of information, just that it seems such a case could be made and that itself has ethical implications. We should study it.
Suspicion is all well and good too, but there has to be some reasonable point at which we are willing to admit the case is made. There may also be perfectly feasible ways to navigate between the extremes of totally trusting commercial entities and simply not collecting data at all. The most straightforward of which would be a real national health care system (at least WRT the case as it relates to health care).
What business do you have keeping information from the rest of society which could be used for a social good? Do you really think you live in some kind of vacuum where only you the individual matters?
How about if all these 'evil' insurance companies can drastically reduce the overall cost of health care to a point where it saves a large number of lives? Is it ethical for you to want to withhold that information simply because it benefits you personally to do so?
Human society is more than the sum of the individuals which make it up, and the interests of that society are more than the sum of the interests of its individual members.
Not that I think we should mindlessly surrender all privacy, but to insist on mindlessly guarding everything about ourselves we are paying a price, and that price may well be higher than the price of openness. It may also be a lot higher than we think it is. Seems to me the issue bears a lot more study.
Trading systems certainly don't appear to be written with the degree of care that would be required to insure nothing like that gets through. In fact I'd have to say that your garden variety broker system isn't any better tested than any garden variety commercial application with a decent sized user base.
The difference is more at the level of business process. Lets say a system like that (or some component of banking software for that matter) DOES screw up. There are all kinds of checks and balances within the business process of the firm that would catch the vast majority of errors. That and whoever the firm/bank is doing business with will certainly notice! As in the story with the CBA doing a double withdrawal, it just isn't going to go unnoticed for very long.
It would be lovely if iron clad levels of reliability and security could be incorporated into software. Problem is it would dwarf the actual development cost of the product and might not even then actually make much difference in practice. Reliability and security testing is going to have to get a LOT cheaper before many development shops can do it thoroughly.
First of all we CANNOT as far as I can see actually create a genuine neanderthal individual. We don't and probably never will have a 100% certainly complete neanderthal genome. At best we might do something like take a human genome and modify it in such a way that it incorporated all the differences we DO know of between our genome and theirs. So the resulting individual would not be exactly genetically identical to a neanderthal, it would have neanderthal characteristics, or at least some sort of characteristics that were different in some respects from us. (The same would be true in the case of a mammoth, it would be a 'modded' elephant).
Second it would have to be brought to term in a human host mother. This means it would be subject to the intrauterine environment of a human, not a neanderthal, and that would be bound to have some developmental implications.
Third we have no really clear notion of the role of epigenetics on organisms. Even assuming the DNA was 100% neanderthal these genes would have to be inserted in a human ovum since we certainly don't have any viable neanderthal cells to insert it into. It is entirely unclear what exactly the effects of that difference are.
Reasonably we could therefor expect the result to be an organism with some similarities to neanderthal man, but we would never be certain what exactly the degree of similarity would be and any conclusions we could draw from studying it would be subject to interpretation.
We can also draw a number of fairly reliable conclusions about the mental capabilities of this neanderthal simply from available evidence.
We know for example that neanderthal's lived in social groups, we know they made complex tools and made tools using other tools, they traded materials over distances, they decorated their bodies, buried their dead, made clothing, and exploited a wide variety of food sources.
Sounds like they were NOT dumb. Not at all. Given some anatomical differences in brain organization that seem to have existed vs modern humans they certainly may have been cognitively different, probably were, but chances are the differences were not all that radical given that they seem to have been technologically and culturally fairly close to the same level as modern humans, at least until late in their history.
Now we can consider the cultural environment our clone would be subject to. Even on the assumption he/she was not treated as a human it would be likely the clone would be brought up in an environment where it was provided with a wide range of opportunities to interact on an ongoing basis with humans. It certainly would be brought up in our culture and, as its faculties permitted, allowed to participate in that culture. Given the vast uncertainty we have as to the effects of environment on HUMANS we really can't say how that would impact our clone. It certainly wouldn't be going too far to say that it would obviously try to be as much like us as it could, just like a child reared in a culture different from its parents grows up with the values and traditions of the adopted culture.
Given all of this my question would be 'would this experiment have scientific value?' Potentially, but much of the same value might be achieved simply by creating some cells containing some of these neanderthal genes and studying them in culture (IE in a 'test tube'). This is what I would predict is a lot more likely than anyone ever making a clone individual. I just don't think that individual would be super useful. It would always be doubtful how close it really was to being a neanderthal at any level, and in many ways it would be MORE difficult to study its biology than to study the biology of tissue cultures. After all, the thing IS going to strike many/most people as being worthy of some rights. I seriously don't see anyone being allowed to conduct arbitrary experimentation on it.
Naturally people would rather get something at no cost than to pay for it. So if a free feature exists, people will use it. Furthermore if someone needs a feature, and they determine it is worth the cost of creating that feature, then they may well code it themselves, which they obviously can do with an OSS product.
However, most of the people who would perhaps add a feature to an OSS product are not mainly in the business of selling software, consulting, etc. They're businesses that do something entirely unrelated. In theory perhaps they could sell the new feature they've created (licensing issues are a whole other consideration of course) BUT they aren't interested in that because they lack the business structure to monetize their work and they're already making money, and they've already reaped some benefit from having the new feature.
So, given all of that it would seem to me that a potentially viable business model for the 'core' developer of an OSS product is to simply act as a consultancy and charge businesses for adding features to the product which those businesses need. That relieves them of ANY need to understand the software, pay someone to add to it, etc.
Now you can add a new feature, and even better you can add features NO ONE CUSTOMER could afford to pay for because you can simply say 'well, it will cost $X to build in this feature.' and several interested parties can pool their cash and get the feature added. There are already a number of places that cater to that sort of thing. You might want to look into it.
Of course this also means you have now created a business relationship with these users of your application, and you can leverage that into all sorts of other opportunities, like service provision, etc. You just have to really look carefully at the whole situation and try to find the model that works well for you.
Remember, relationships are always fundamental to business, so always consider them an asset, foster them, and think about ways to help those you have these relationships with. Good business is always business that adds to your customer's value and develops better relationships.
Agile works fine for us. Maybe we don't do it by some 'book', and I have no use for consultants, but what we do WORKS.
And I disagree that you have to have some exact certain people to implement it. Not that you can just take some random collection of developers and send them off to do agile development, but with one or two key people that can actually communicate and teach people how to do what needs to be done it works fine.
I've taken groups of nothing but myself and interns and done it, people with no industry experience at all. If you explain things to them and forget about being all up tight about exactly how things are structured you can build an agile work process that WORKS every time.
I don't delude myself that I know a LOT about ANY area of mathematics, lol.
What I do know has been vastly useful though. Just seemed like the OP was professing general ignorance about the topic in general, but you're probably right.
I also doubt there are any significant areas of mathematics which aren't subjects of current research either. Kind of the nature of math, there are always more questions you can ask about any area, new ways to look at things, etc. Truly the one topic which is genuinely inexhaustible.
Which is just another way to state the Axiom of Identity, A = A.
This is the idiocy of the 'reasoning' related to ANY form of the so-called anthropic principle. It is like you picked an ace of spades from a deck of cards at random, and then somehow it is an astounding fact that you have an ace of spades in your hand! Duh! You picked a card, so no shit, you had to have SOME card in your hand.
But it goes deeper than that. The only real definition of a thing is the thing itself. We exist, we are part of the Universe, inseparable from it. Asking 'why are we here' and not 'someplace else' is just plain illogical.
Sure a different Universe could exist. It wouldn't be OUR Universe, and since we're an inseparable part of THIS universe we wouldn't exist either, by definition. A != B, and if A = B, then by the Axiom of Identity A IS B.
The Anthropic Principle, and any reasoning based on it or about it, is fundamentally irrational because it can't be based on the Axiom of Identity and NO LOGICIAN IN THE HISTORY OF MAN has been able to even suggest that there is a form of logic or a method of rational discourse which does not start with the Axiom of Identity. In fact it is THE ONLY THING they all agree on unequivocally. You can argue about the Law of the Excluded Middle, but you can't even HAVE an argument without the Axiom of Identity.
I graduated in 1985 with a BS in Math & Chemistry. Partial Differential Equations was a required course back then, and the school I attended was nothing special in terms of what they required.
PDE is intermediate level calculus.
But to address the OP's question, try finding an advanced physical chemistry text. There are plenty of uses for PDEs in pchem. Your average introductory level texts won't bother to go that far into the math, probably just through you a few simple related rate equations, but when you get into multiple competing reactions and non equilibrium dynamics then you're pretty much in PDE land for sure.
Nice thing about pchem, it is pretty easy to visualize what they're talking about. A lot easier IMHO than when you're discussing electrodynamics, which is a lot less tangible (at least to me).
Naturally that leads to the question of emergent behavior. There are of course several ways to look at that as well. Not all of them admit of a qualitative difference.
Still, I disagree profoundly with the assertion that one is required to assert dualism. I think there is a misunderstanding of terms.
Certainly I would not expect a program which simulates chemical reactions in the breast to produce MILK, but I would certain assert that such a program might tell us much about the dynamics of the process. Likewise software can tell us much about the dynamics of thinking. Furthermore milk is a physical substance, thought on the other hand might be better considered as an information processing task, and it would be a fallacy to assert that a program cannot be expected to process information.
There are certainly other issues related to the question 'can a program think', but I would classify them as being related to the nature of consciousness and its relationship to sense input amongst other things.
Frankly I would say that it no more surprises me that AI research has not produced results on the order of something we would define as intelligent than it would surprise me that no child has built a 50 story sky scraper out of Lego bricks... The current technology is simply inadequate by MANY orders of magnitude. The most powerful machines available today by my estimation aren't deploying processing power any greater than your average flat worm. And they operate at roughly similar levels of intellect.
Nor do I in any way shape or form believe we are even close to understanding the algorithms which would be required for some hypothetically human brain level capability machine to actually think.
However, I do posit that were I in possession of such a program, and had I two machines I could run it on, that given similar inputs I would end up with similar minds, and what would stop me from transferring the state of one to the other and executing the copy? It would be in some essential character the same mind IMHO.
Hmmm, well, my knowledge of the low level details of disk drive geometry is certainly WAY dated. In the 'good old days' your drive controller still had to wait for the 'start of track' to come around, at which point you could write. So in effect every IOP had a built in latency on average equal to 1/2 a disk rotation. That really had nothing to do with file system layout, it was just a hard requirement dictated by the drive controller technology.
to me. Coming from high performance transaction processing land where an operation means 'the data is ON the platter' you can't do that more often than the platter rotates to the point where the head is over the sector where the write operation starts. Basic math, 15k RPM spindle = roughly 300 times/sec. Multiply by however many spindles you got, that's what you're max throughput is.
This is one reason why IN THEORY at least an SSD would be so great, that latency is much less. So basically I'm thinking they just aren't talking about what you're talking about, and maybe that makes sense, if you're running a trading operation say, you just DO NOT CARE what is buffered someplace, if it isn't physically on the drive, it doesn't exist.
John Searle is rubbish. His argument simply isn't cogent. Lets look at it this way. Obviously your brain has a vast array of capabilities, it is highly complex. Furthermore it performs a function (assisting your biological survival and reproduction) which is an ongoing constant task, it never ends, and it does not break down into any one closed set of sub goals.
Now, lets consider your calculator. It is quite simple and performs only a few specific functions. Furthermore its function is quite limited, it performs arithmetical operations on numbers which are input to it. Seems fairly safe to say it has no 'intentions'. These functions it performs are quite 'closed ended', addition is a procedure which begins at one state, and ends at another, at which point the machine simply halts and displays a result.
Those are rather the extreme cases.
Now. Lets look at your thermostat again. The thermostat is at least as simple as the calculator. It is a BIT more interesting though in that its function is open ended. There are states, but it doesn't ever halt.
Now, what about an ameoba? Obviously considerably more complex than the thermostat. Yet in essence there are simply a lot more states and a lot more outputs. In both cases inputs translate to outputs and there is feedback.
I challenge you to demonstrate to me that there is a QUALITATIVE DIFFERENCE between the thermostat, the ameoba, and you. There is absolutely a QUANTITATIVE difference. You're far more complex, you have a lot more states and a lot more inputs and outputs.
So the differences appear to be a matter of degree, not kind.
As for the rest of Searle's argument, it is just silly. Computer programs DO have states. One can make his argument with reference to a particular algorithm, but then all you're doing is looking at a tree and concluding it isn't a forest...
Now, it would have been a cogent argument to point out that a 'program' in the abstract isn't a system, but I could as well argue (and as meaningfully) that fictional characters in books don't have minds. Duh. The program certainly has to be instantiated in hardware to THINK.
Certainly seems to me that it is and can be valuable to study the characteristics of software programs in a cognitive sense. It is not 'mind' without instantiation, but nothing in Searle's argument suggests to me that we can't write software and study how it executes as a way of approaching general principals of intelligence.
Period, end of report. In the PC world there essentially is no other general purpose voice interface tech that is even worth bothering with.
That being said, there are much better ones for very specific vertical markets, but not for general use.
Note that this means you ARE restricted to Windows. The stuff built into OSX and Vista are not even worth messing around with. They might in theory meet some very casual or narrow specific need of particular users but they are literally an order of magnitude slower and less reliable than Naturally Speaking.
If you MUST use a Mac or Linux etc then basically the answer is, you're SOL, there's nothing. Yeah, there are a few OSS bits out there, but frankly they aren't even at the level of being really functional software, let alone meeting speed or accuracy required from this type of software. It would be AWESOME if there was something open, but the fact is this area is just so technically demanding it appears to be beyond the reach of non-commercial effort.
This will give you some ideas. Really seriously evaluate NoMachine's stuff, it is VERY efficient over a low bandwidth high latency connection. There are a choice of both free and commercial implementations too. (Note that it is not actually a Linux specific technology, works fine on windows).
Slashdot Mirror
That is to say there should naturally be study and debate about what is or isn't going to benefit us all. I don't claim the case is made for providing insurance companies with that kind of information, just that it seems such a case could be made and that itself has ethical implications. We should study it.
Suspicion is all well and good too, but there has to be some reasonable point at which we are willing to admit the case is made. There may also be perfectly feasible ways to navigate between the extremes of totally trusting commercial entities and simply not collecting data at all. The most straightforward of which would be a real national health care system (at least WRT the case as it relates to health care).
What business do you have keeping information from the rest of society which could be used for a social good? Do you really think you live in some kind of vacuum where only you the individual matters?
How about if all these 'evil' insurance companies can drastically reduce the overall cost of health care to a point where it saves a large number of lives? Is it ethical for you to want to withhold that information simply because it benefits you personally to do so?
Human society is more than the sum of the individuals which make it up, and the interests of that society are more than the sum of the interests of its individual members.
Not that I think we should mindlessly surrender all privacy, but to insist on mindlessly guarding everything about ourselves we are paying a price, and that price may well be higher than the price of openness. It may also be a lot higher than we think it is. Seems to me the issue bears a lot more study.
Trading systems certainly don't appear to be written with the degree of care that would be required to insure nothing like that gets through. In fact I'd have to say that your garden variety broker system isn't any better tested than any garden variety commercial application with a decent sized user base.
The difference is more at the level of business process. Lets say a system like that (or some component of banking software for that matter) DOES screw up. There are all kinds of checks and balances within the business process of the firm that would catch the vast majority of errors. That and whoever the firm/bank is doing business with will certainly notice! As in the story with the CBA doing a double withdrawal, it just isn't going to go unnoticed for very long.
It would be lovely if iron clad levels of reliability and security could be incorporated into software. Problem is it would dwarf the actual development cost of the product and might not even then actually make much difference in practice. Reliability and security testing is going to have to get a LOT cheaper before many development shops can do it thoroughly.
Burn her!
How about a BBG9000? lol.
First of all we CANNOT as far as I can see actually create a genuine neanderthal individual. We don't and probably never will have a 100% certainly complete neanderthal genome. At best we might do something like take a human genome and modify it in such a way that it incorporated all the differences we DO know of between our genome and theirs. So the resulting individual would not be exactly genetically identical to a neanderthal, it would have neanderthal characteristics, or at least some sort of characteristics that were different in some respects from us. (The same would be true in the case of a mammoth, it would be a 'modded' elephant).
Second it would have to be brought to term in a human host mother. This means it would be subject to the intrauterine environment of a human, not a neanderthal, and that would be bound to have some developmental implications.
Third we have no really clear notion of the role of epigenetics on organisms. Even assuming the DNA was 100% neanderthal these genes would have to be inserted in a human ovum since we certainly don't have any viable neanderthal cells to insert it into. It is entirely unclear what exactly the effects of that difference are.
Reasonably we could therefor expect the result to be an organism with some similarities to neanderthal man, but we would never be certain what exactly the degree of similarity would be and any conclusions we could draw from studying it would be subject to interpretation.
We can also draw a number of fairly reliable conclusions about the mental capabilities of this neanderthal simply from available evidence.
We know for example that neanderthal's lived in social groups, we know they made complex tools and made tools using other tools, they traded materials over distances, they decorated their bodies, buried their dead, made clothing, and exploited a wide variety of food sources.
Sounds like they were NOT dumb. Not at all. Given some anatomical differences in brain organization that seem to have existed vs modern humans they certainly may have been cognitively different, probably were, but chances are the differences were not all that radical given that they seem to have been technologically and culturally fairly close to the same level as modern humans, at least until late in their history.
Now we can consider the cultural environment our clone would be subject to. Even on the assumption he/she was not treated as a human it would be likely the clone would be brought up in an environment where it was provided with a wide range of opportunities to interact on an ongoing basis with humans. It certainly would be brought up in our culture and, as its faculties permitted, allowed to participate in that culture. Given the vast uncertainty we have as to the effects of environment on HUMANS we really can't say how that would impact our clone. It certainly wouldn't be going too far to say that it would obviously try to be as much like us as it could, just like a child reared in a culture different from its parents grows up with the values and traditions of the adopted culture.
Given all of this my question would be 'would this experiment have scientific value?' Potentially, but much of the same value might be achieved simply by creating some cells containing some of these neanderthal genes and studying them in culture (IE in a 'test tube'). This is what I would predict is a lot more likely than anyone ever making a clone individual. I just don't think that individual would be super useful. It would always be doubtful how close it really was to being a neanderthal at any level, and in many ways it would be MORE difficult to study its biology than to study the biology of tissue cultures. After all, the thing IS going to strike many/most people as being worthy of some rights. I seriously don't see anyone being allowed to conduct arbitrary experimentation on it.
Harter's Law.
"As a /. discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving George Bush approaches one."
They would be smarter. In case anyone has missed this, Neanderthal Man had a larger brain than us.
In fact recently some other 'early modern' human fossils from I believe South Africa have been dug up that have significantly bigger brains than us.
Whales and Elephants, etc have bigger brains too. Brain size isn't necessarily an exact correlate to intelligence.
I mean the shotgun takes too long to reload!
Naturally people would rather get something at no cost than to pay for it. So if a free feature exists, people will use it. Furthermore if someone needs a feature, and they determine it is worth the cost of creating that feature, then they may well code it themselves, which they obviously can do with an OSS product.
However, most of the people who would perhaps add a feature to an OSS product are not mainly in the business of selling software, consulting, etc. They're businesses that do something entirely unrelated. In theory perhaps they could sell the new feature they've created (licensing issues are a whole other consideration of course) BUT they aren't interested in that because they lack the business structure to monetize their work and they're already making money, and they've already reaped some benefit from having the new feature.
So, given all of that it would seem to me that a potentially viable business model for the 'core' developer of an OSS product is to simply act as a consultancy and charge businesses for adding features to the product which those businesses need. That relieves them of ANY need to understand the software, pay someone to add to it, etc.
Now you can add a new feature, and even better you can add features NO ONE CUSTOMER could afford to pay for because you can simply say 'well, it will cost $X to build in this feature.' and several interested parties can pool their cash and get the feature added. There are already a number of places that cater to that sort of thing. You might want to look into it.
Of course this also means you have now created a business relationship with these users of your application, and you can leverage that into all sorts of other opportunities, like service provision, etc. You just have to really look carefully at the whole situation and try to find the model that works well for you.
Remember, relationships are always fundamental to business, so always consider them an asset, foster them, and think about ways to help those you have these relationships with. Good business is always business that adds to your customer's value and develops better relationships.
He first drives mad. lol
Agile works fine for us. Maybe we don't do it by some 'book', and I have no use for consultants, but what we do WORKS.
And I disagree that you have to have some exact certain people to implement it. Not that you can just take some random collection of developers and send them off to do agile development, but with one or two key people that can actually communicate and teach people how to do what needs to be done it works fine.
I've taken groups of nothing but myself and interns and done it, people with no industry experience at all. If you explain things to them and forget about being all up tight about exactly how things are structured you can build an agile work process that WORKS every time.
My mod points evaporated, wouldn't you just know?
I don't delude myself that I know a LOT about ANY area of mathematics, lol.
What I do know has been vastly useful though. Just seemed like the OP was professing general ignorance about the topic in general, but you're probably right.
I also doubt there are any significant areas of mathematics which aren't subjects of current research either. Kind of the nature of math, there are always more questions you can ask about any area, new ways to look at things, etc. Truly the one topic which is genuinely inexhaustible.
Which is just another way to state the Axiom of Identity, A = A.
This is the idiocy of the 'reasoning' related to ANY form of the so-called anthropic principle. It is like you picked an ace of spades from a deck of cards at random, and then somehow it is an astounding fact that you have an ace of spades in your hand! Duh! You picked a card, so no shit, you had to have SOME card in your hand.
But it goes deeper than that. The only real definition of a thing is the thing itself. We exist, we are part of the Universe, inseparable from it. Asking 'why are we here' and not 'someplace else' is just plain illogical.
Sure a different Universe could exist. It wouldn't be OUR Universe, and since we're an inseparable part of THIS universe we wouldn't exist either, by definition. A != B, and if A = B, then by the Axiom of Identity A IS B.
The Anthropic Principle, and any reasoning based on it or about it, is fundamentally irrational because it can't be based on the Axiom of Identity and NO LOGICIAN IN THE HISTORY OF MAN has been able to even suggest that there is a form of logic or a method of rational discourse which does not start with the Axiom of Identity. In fact it is THE ONLY THING they all agree on unequivocally. You can argue about the Law of the Excluded Middle, but you can't even HAVE an argument without the Axiom of Identity.
I graduated in 1985 with a BS in Math & Chemistry. Partial Differential Equations was a required course back then, and the school I attended was nothing special in terms of what they required.
PDE is intermediate level calculus.
But to address the OP's question, try finding an advanced physical chemistry text. There are plenty of uses for PDEs in pchem. Your average introductory level texts won't bother to go that far into the math, probably just through you a few simple related rate equations, but when you get into multiple competing reactions and non equilibrium dynamics then you're pretty much in PDE land for sure.
Nice thing about pchem, it is pretty easy to visualize what they're talking about. A lot easier IMHO than when you're discussing electrodynamics, which is a lot less tangible (at least to me).
Now, I wonder what you can bribe a touchscreen terminal with? Windex?
IMPOSSIBLE! ;)
Naturally that leads to the question of emergent behavior. There are of course several ways to look at that as well. Not all of them admit of a qualitative difference.
Still, I disagree profoundly with the assertion that one is required to assert dualism. I think there is a misunderstanding of terms.
Certainly I would not expect a program which simulates chemical reactions in the breast to produce MILK, but I would certain assert that such a program might tell us much about the dynamics of the process. Likewise software can tell us much about the dynamics of thinking. Furthermore milk is a physical substance, thought on the other hand might be better considered as an information processing task, and it would be a fallacy to assert that a program cannot be expected to process information.
There are certainly other issues related to the question 'can a program think', but I would classify them as being related to the nature of consciousness and its relationship to sense input amongst other things.
Frankly I would say that it no more surprises me that AI research has not produced results on the order of something we would define as intelligent than it would surprise me that no child has built a 50 story sky scraper out of Lego bricks... The current technology is simply inadequate by MANY orders of magnitude. The most powerful machines available today by my estimation aren't deploying processing power any greater than your average flat worm. And they operate at roughly similar levels of intellect.
Nor do I in any way shape or form believe we are even close to understanding the algorithms which would be required for some hypothetically human brain level capability machine to actually think.
However, I do posit that were I in possession of such a program, and had I two machines I could run it on, that given similar inputs I would end up with similar minds, and what would stop me from transferring the state of one to the other and executing the copy? It would be in some essential character the same mind IMHO.
Hmmm, well, my knowledge of the low level details of disk drive geometry is certainly WAY dated. In the 'good old days' your drive controller still had to wait for the 'start of track' to come around, at which point you could write. So in effect every IOP had a built in latency on average equal to 1/2 a disk rotation. That really had nothing to do with file system layout, it was just a hard requirement dictated by the drive controller technology.
to me. Coming from high performance transaction processing land where an operation means 'the data is ON the platter' you can't do that more often than the platter rotates to the point where the head is over the sector where the write operation starts. Basic math, 15k RPM spindle = roughly 300 times/sec. Multiply by however many spindles you got, that's what you're max throughput is.
This is one reason why IN THEORY at least an SSD would be so great, that latency is much less. So basically I'm thinking they just aren't talking about what you're talking about, and maybe that makes sense, if you're running a trading operation say, you just DO NOT CARE what is buffered someplace, if it isn't physically on the drive, it doesn't exist.
But SUN is FAR from being the inventor of charging people $50k for something they could just as well get for free...
Name ANY big IT vendor, they all do it. My father can tell some amazing stories on that subject. Not a new phenomenon either.
Now, if you are the GOVERNMENT, they'll give you the special bonus public sector price, $150k!!!
John Searle is rubbish. His argument simply isn't cogent. Lets look at it this way. Obviously your brain has a vast array of capabilities, it is highly complex. Furthermore it performs a function (assisting your biological survival and reproduction) which is an ongoing constant task, it never ends, and it does not break down into any one closed set of sub goals.
Now, lets consider your calculator. It is quite simple and performs only a few specific functions. Furthermore its function is quite limited, it performs arithmetical operations on numbers which are input to it. Seems fairly safe to say it has no 'intentions'. These functions it performs are quite 'closed ended', addition is a procedure which begins at one state, and ends at another, at which point the machine simply halts and displays a result.
Those are rather the extreme cases.
Now. Lets look at your thermostat again. The thermostat is at least as simple as the calculator. It is a BIT more interesting though in that its function is open ended. There are states, but it doesn't ever halt.
Now, what about an ameoba? Obviously considerably more complex than the thermostat. Yet in essence there are simply a lot more states and a lot more outputs. In both cases inputs translate to outputs and there is feedback.
I challenge you to demonstrate to me that there is a QUALITATIVE DIFFERENCE between the thermostat, the ameoba, and you. There is absolutely a QUANTITATIVE difference. You're far more complex, you have a lot more states and a lot more inputs and outputs.
So the differences appear to be a matter of degree, not kind.
As for the rest of Searle's argument, it is just silly. Computer programs DO have states. One can make his argument with reference to a particular algorithm, but then all you're doing is looking at a tree and concluding it isn't a forest...
Now, it would have been a cogent argument to point out that a 'program' in the abstract isn't a system, but I could as well argue (and as meaningfully) that fictional characters in books don't have minds. Duh. The program certainly has to be instantiated in hardware to THINK.
Certainly seems to me that it is and can be valuable to study the characteristics of software programs in a cognitive sense. It is not 'mind' without instantiation, but nothing in Searle's argument suggests to me that we can't write software and study how it executes as a way of approaching general principals of intelligence.
Period, end of report. In the PC world there essentially is no other general purpose voice interface tech that is even worth bothering with.
That being said, there are much better ones for very specific vertical markets, but not for general use.
Note that this means you ARE restricted to Windows. The stuff built into OSX and Vista are not even worth messing around with. They might in theory meet some very casual or narrow specific need of particular users but they are literally an order of magnitude slower and less reliable than Naturally Speaking.
If you MUST use a Mac or Linux etc then basically the answer is, you're SOL, there's nothing. Yeah, there are a few OSS bits out there, but frankly they aren't even at the level of being really functional software, let alone meeting speed or accuracy required from this type of software. It would be AWESOME if there was something open, but the fact is this area is just so technically demanding it appears to be beyond the reach of non-commercial effort.
Nothing worth seeing here folks!
http://blog.lxpages.com/2007/03/13/remote-desktop-for-linux/
This will give you some ideas. Really seriously evaluate NoMachine's stuff, it is VERY efficient over a low bandwidth high latency connection. There are a choice of both free and commercial implementations too. (Note that it is not actually a Linux specific technology, works fine on windows).