I think study of evolution and psychology are very important to people working on AI. If you know how we developed our intelligence and why we behave the way we do then you are much more likely to be able to reproduce our intelligence.
I guess the real argument always comes down to the question of what intelligence is? A computer can certainly solve certain problems that most of us can't do, at least not as fast, but falls flat when presented with basics like object recognition. Yes, you can teach a computer to recognize objects but the point is that you have to teach it and this process involves a lot of domain specific programming and data collection and is still error prone. The computer still doesn't really understand - it just solves the same kind of problem using a brute force approach programmed into it. To improve the situation you have to move towards developing ways for the computer to teach itself and to motivate it to create it's own complex connections in it's thought processes - returning once again to basics of need and emotion. Is simply being able to process math, basic logic, and have a large memory the same as intelligence? I can't see such a machine ever creating an art or a science so I have to say no.
I would disagree and say that the smaller the intelligence the greater part of it which is based on animal instinct - ie emotion and basic internal needs. It's a heck of a lot easier to make something respond to a simple feedback loop than to invent a starship. Without feeling hunger or fear of future hunger a mosquito will not seek out blood.
This isn't so much an assumption as something I've learned through lots of trial and error and deep thought into making my own AI programs. If you give it these needs and emotions your program will learn and adapt much better, and in a lot less code and overhead, than if you try pure logic.
You certainly can process logic without emotions but that is what we consider a computer. You can make it faster and better but it will never really understand anything if it doesn't have needs and emotions. Intelligence is mostly the ability to intuit answers from complexity in order to serve a need. You can trace all complex behaviors in an intelligent being back to answering basic needs and the emotions those needs create.
The problem, I think, is that you can't create a really intelligent machine without giving it the ability to learn. If it can learn to any significant degree then eventually it's likely to be able to develop emotions, desires, protection from damage and destruction, etc. Many AI researchers have this foolish idea that you can make a can opener that can do anything you want but that in the end doesn't really think but my own research has always led me to believe that the easiest way to make a machine more intelligent is to give it emotions and feelings. A computer can tell you the average pigment color of an apple but an intelligence needs to know what a shiny red delectable apple is which is a completely different way of processing data. Sure, you can teach a limited number of rules to a program by sampling human inputs but the machine isn't really going to understand what it means unless it can feel.
If they'd make them available even for $100 wholesale then I'd buy a bunch and start selling them. I think if I started giving these away to the children of friends and relatives I'd quickly see people trying to buy these. So far they look really nice especially for the price. You can pay $50 for a little bit of junk toy laptop with a monocolor crystal screen. I know parents would pay $150-$200 for one of these for their kids. It's educational, a toy, and will keep them off mom and dad's computer. And it's less trouble than throwing the kids their own used or cheapy PC because you don't have to worry about viruses and hassles like that.
Do any browsers really do CSS right? Firefox is missing drop shadows and IE7, Safari, and Opera still don't center content correctly all the time. Still things are a lot better than with older browsers such as IE6.
I wish the standards would be realistic and just realize that no browser is ever going to be 100% perfect in how it renders a page and that in some cases the standard isn't going to be perfect either. I hate to praise IE but IE has a way to only load certains stylesheets for IE or even certain versions of IE. It'd be nice to see that built into the standard so it'd be easier to make minor tweaks for individual cases. If you can specify the stylesheet's media then why not browser? Heck, I like to switch stylesheets based on window size even so why not make that possible also without resorting to Javascript (which results in a minor jump as the page loads and changes stylesheet). Like print stylesheets, few developers might use such browser or size optional stylesheets but for those of us who do it'd make things easier for us and nicer for our users.
Overall, I love CSS though. It allows me to vary the look of my sites a lot and to do things that look good without requiring plug-ins like Flash and without making pages unusable for the disabled. I can't wait for the additional features of CSS3.
Don't you hate when marketing BS is written about as if it were something significant. If it ain't on Google then it isn't even on a website that knows how to get itself properly indexed.
I'm reminded of the book Distraction where the Chinese, and others, effectively crush the economic power of the US by totally ignoring all estern copyrights, patents, etc and making the content available for free over the Internet. I think if China followed that example they could destroy DRM and make a killing in hardware and software. Start with the software version of the players first and release all the content and then when they've kicked the feet out from under the US they could set their own market standards - and consumers would love them.
Win2k is the last version of Windows I use on a regular basis. I have XP but I rarely use it because it works so poorly. Even Win2k doesn't work very well (I have it narrowed down to having frequent crashes whenevr the mouse is being used since I switched to a Core 2 Duo processor). There is no way I'm ever going to use Vista. I've decided Vista is the line in the sand for me and I'm just not going to cross it. I'll be sticking mostly to Linux with other versions of Unix and the occassional use of Mac OS X and Win 2k/XP with Mac and Win being used mostly in VMWare to test code.
The best system I've had th pleasure to use was Ximian's Red Carpet. Their UI was easy to use and it worked well and geeks like me could stick to the command-line tool, rug, which was more coherent than any other packaging tool I've used (including apt, yum, etc). I wish that the developers of other packaging systems would make an effort to work as well and to be as easy to use as Ximian's system was.
I wonder if RedHat couldn't work with the Debian folks at making a real merge of the packaging systems. It'd be wonderful to do away with having to know multiple systems. The majority of distros are based on either Debian or RedHat so really those are the two most important systems - if they could find peace then everyone else would eventually fall into line. Tool developers could develop a single set of tools for dealing with packages without a lot of overlap.
Having to use their stuff and had to try to use their shitty support was what started me down the road of hatred for Microsoft. Their ongoing anti-competitive practices that make it difficult to avoid using their products make me really hate them. The large number of people who love Microsoft for the sheer reason that it's all they know just makes me loath the whole bunch.
Unfortunately, often the criminal justice system is used as a means of revenge rather than as a means to making society safer and healthier. We take people that could be useful members of society and instead throw them in prison so that they can live on the tax payer's dollar and become hardened criminals. Stop wasting tax payer dollars on vendettas. If these people do need to be dealt with it should be as a serious attempt to fix whatever issues have made them a detriment to society or if they can't be salvaged then we need to execute them.
[Disclaimer: I'm a white, born citizen of the US, and I pay taxes.] A recent example that's been big in the news locally is the factories that were just raided by immigration. They took people that were working at competitive salaries, feeding their families, paying taxes, etc and have now made them unemployed. Now people are in some cases being deported at the tax payer's expense while in a few months most of them will probably be back in the US but are likely not to try to take a semi-legal route, many of them won't be deported at all but are now unemployed and on welfare, and many are going to be jailed again at the tax payer's expense. Worse, many of these people have children that are US citizens that will now be living on welfare because we've taken their parent's jobs. Very foolish way to handle the situation of people who may be breaking the law but who overall are a benefit to society. The people who in this situation DO need to be caught and dealt with are the people selling these illegal immigrants stolen identities. These people are hurting our society and are probably legal US citizens and very likely they aren't hispanic. We need to stop using immigrants as a scrapegoat for our problems and spend our energy on actual reforms of our legal system, welfare system, etc.
Yeh, logic errors are a big deal whereas minor typos aren't. I have trouble not switching to psuedo code when using a whiteboard just ebcause that's what I'm used to doing on a whiteboard.
I don't see any reason we need pennies anymore. Even nickles are more annoying than they're worth. I'd suggest doing away with both and if people don't want to round off to the nearest 10 cents then they can use some form of check, credit card, or electronic cash. I have a big pile of pennies and nickles sitting in a drawer in my desk because it's to much hassle to spend them or convert them to more managable cash.
It's about time the government offers us some form of electronic cash that we can optionally use. It's stupid for consumers and vendors to both be paying credit card companies and banks high fees in order to do basic commerce. If the government doesn't provide a form of electronic cash then they shouldn't complain if somebody else does it - with the obvious side effect of it making commerce very hard to tax if it's done by a third party.
I'm shocked that no small country has figured out that electronic cash that is easy, secure, private, and doesn't have fees is the secret to making major profits. You don't have to offer the option to cash out so long as you can get enough businesses on board to begin with - easy enough as you can start your own. I've always imagined that instead of offering the ability to cash out of my electronic currency I'd set up some sort of online money market where others could convert between my currency and others while making a nice cut for themselves as part of the process.
I think code samples are great but you do need to be able to prove they were done by yourself. I suggest doing some opensource projects and posting the code to places such as Freshmeat and to include your name in your code. Create a sort of trail of authority proving you did the work. I think having done full-blown projects shows a lot more than having just thrown together a few bits of code anyway.
I never liked the whiteboard method because it's hard to code when you're nervous (like at a job interview) and coding on a whiteboard is very different than coding on a computer so it makes you prone to making minor errors. It just isn't a very realistic way to see how people code.
If he has to cheat he can't be very good at search engine optimization can he? Not much better than the lossers that use link farms or wiki spamming or similar sleazy techniques.
Seriously people. The easiest way to get something to rank high in Google is to put good content on the page and to remember to use words that people will actually be searching for in that content. If you're selling a Widget 2007 then you damn well better remember to say so, several times, in text, on the page or else nobody will ever find your page. Then simply make sure somebody is linking to your page so that there is some path for people, and search engines, to find you from. I suggest joining your chamber of commerce and getting added to their website. Easy.
Adding money to a system doesn't create wealth - it just creates inflation - but better controlling the flow of money can optimize the system so that wealth grows for us as a society and for us as individuals. Without taking care to balance the flow of money the system eventually becomes unbalanced for precisely the reasons you mention. Those with money can use their money to seize opportunities they want and crush opportunities they don't want. It becomes a form of power which is easily abused and that with our current unleashed system almost has to be abused in order to function. Unbridled capitalism is all about being clever and ruthless. It's survivial of the fittest which sounds good until you remember that a few over dominant species can throw an entire ecosystem out of wack which ends up hurting every species, including themselves, in the progress.
Like wildlife management, creating forces to keep capitalism balanced will help everyone involved including the super wealthy. It needs to be easy to climb economically but to grow more difficult the more you succeed. The rich need to reach a point where in order to grow their own wealth they are required to grow everyone's wealth. They'll still be at the top of the stack but they'll pull others up with them. Something close to the inverse situation happens now as it's very difficult to rise out of poverty into the middle class and it's difficult to climb from the middle class to be wealthy but it's easy for the wealthy to become wealthier. As you said those with money have far more opportunities.
I think it's important to point out that opportunity is not something that is in limited supply. I have twenty good ideas a day and could easily do my part to build the wealth of our society if I had the resources to do so. My pursuit of any of my good ideas would not decrease anybody elses opportunities. In fact it'd often create more opportunities for others to think of new products and services based on what I've created. If I write a book it does not decrease my neighbors chance to write a book also. Today the limiting factor is the ability of capitalism to reshuffle resources fast enough to allow opportunity to flourish for everyone. Unbalanced capitalism is actively slowing the growth of wealth for our society.
Money, in the end, is just a method of resource management. Choosing to take a blind eye is a foolish way to manage resources. I'm not saying there shouldn't be poor people and there shouldn't be rich people. Some people clearly work harder and have better ideas and make better choices. I'm saying that with better management we can make the system work better. Wealth tends to flow back to those who have it which is why I don't think trickle down theories work very well. It's much more functional to have the wealthy seed the bottom layers of society with a great deal of wealth and watch that wealth quickly flow back to them. Rinse, repeat, etc.
I certainly wouldn't redistribute wealth willy nilly either. It needs to be done with a comprehensive system designed to benefit those that make wise decisions that benefit all of society. Which is why I'd build a trust ranking network that works as a resource management balance that modifies the tax and allowance (inversed tax) rates of the cash system. Everyone would have equal access to the trust system - able to give a single vote for or against anyone else and thus able to help decide how resources will flow in a completely democratic way. Of course you need to use short circuiting to keep people from spiking the system up and down. I also would make votes expire, with a sliding scale of value, after a given time period and not allow people to vote for that person (or company) again until their vote had again reached a neutral value. So if I voted that I didn't trust George Bush then I might not be able to vote for or against George Bush again for a whole year and during that time my vote would gradually slide from a -1 to 0 in incremental steps. The exact processes could be fine tuned throug
The biggest point I'd make, from someone that's worked on his own schedule and from his own location, is that they need to make available quiet office space for people that want it. Even if people just check into whatever office space is open when they decide to come in and then take everything with them when they leave. It can be difficult to work when you have family members, annoying neighbors, and similar distractions bothering you at home. Not that these are worse than the average work enviroments meetings, interruptions from customers, co-workers, and bosses, ringing telephones, people talking in the background, attractive strangers, etc. You just need to have quiet offices with no windows available for people to work alone or in small groups when they choose to do so.
Other than that point I think this kind of work enviroment is great. I often get my best ideas or work through hard points I'm stuck on when I'm not working. I work better at night than I do during the day. I like having the freedom to pick my own location and hours - it greatly reduces my stress which is itself possibly the biggest distraction.
For workers I'd suggest trying to maintain a schedule but don't force yourself to it to strictly. If you're worrying about paying the gas bill then go pay the gas bill. If you're hungry then go ahead and eat. You're not doing yourself any favors by sitting at a desk thinking about some little worry but you need to make yourself get out of bed and work every day. It's not always easy but you can do it. The freedom is worth the responsiiblity.
For the employer I'd suggest also trying to minimize employee's other stresses. Employees will love you, stick with you, and do better work. In my own experience my biggest worry has been a company that doesn't respect me or my work. Relax dead lines a little when employees are doing an extra good job. Don't punish me for trying something new even if it doesn't work out in this case. Don't punish me for getting done early. Those little issues are important too.
A similar problem I've had - I worked in a retail store that was open 10 to 6 while the majority of it's customers wanted to shop after work which limited them from being able to. But the owner was happy with the hours the way he had randomly decided years ago.
Capitalism is an unbalanced system that leads to corrupt government. All these IP law issues are being caused by that central issue. IP can create lots of easy money and then those with that easy money use the money to influence politics which in turn influences if they get laws to protect their easy source of income.
The government needs to recognize that capitalism isn't really a democratic system and therefore does not align well with a democratic government. Of course they won't - because politicans stand to benefit to much from the play of these misaligned pillars of our society.
And no - I don't think socialism is better than capitalism. The problem is both systems are broken and will eventually destroy themselves. All because they have no checks and balances like most of our governments are designed with today. There needs to be counter forces put into place so wealth will gather to the middle with it being difficult to grow super poor or super wealthy. Force our society to grow wealth, so that all our lives are better, rather than fighting over each other's table scraps. Why doesn't wealth distribution fit a bell curve?
As someone that has been experimenting with a commercial venture based on bit torrent I can say that seeding isn't an issue because YOU seed the feeds. I have a server files are uploaded to that stores the files on another server which seeds to only other of my servers and essentially seeds the file all the time. My other seeding servers seed on demand by simply running a BT client that can take orders from the server so that when someone requests a download one of the seeds will grab a copy of the file and make it available to any users out there. Using a Java-applet based client users are running BT pretty much all the time when they are connected to my website so once they've downloaded the file they contribute to others downloading the file, taking a lot of bandwidth load off my servers, without even thinking about it. My client will track files even if users move them around so unless they modify or delete them they'll still be seeding those files.
BT can be ran over an http port, in part, so it's unlikely that users would be completely unable to use the service at work - it might just take off some features that make it faster for them. Besides, as more and more legitimate uses are made for BT I think we'll see less blocking.
BT clients often can detect bandwidth over use and throttle down so that users can use their connection normally. It's not a perfect solution but it works pretty well.
Zudeo doesn't have to use another program. They're crazy if they don't bundle in at least a lite version that works as a Java applet. You have to use a signed applet but it's not a big deal - most users okay it to run without a second thought.
BT can certainly stream files. You just need to tweak it to prefer it to do so. If you can provide your own seeds that can guarentee a minimum speed and availability then it's not a huge problem to stream. Besides, I hate streaming. I can't stand using YouTube because I have to watch 5 seconds, wait, watch another 5 seconds, wait, etc. Just download the whole damn file or at least a sizable chunk and then stream. I regually get 100+ kB/s on individual files I download with BT. I don't get that from YouTube.
The biggest reason YouTube has succeeded is that they make it easy to play any file. You don't have to figure out what codec it needs, what player will work best, etc. That is the area Zudeo needs to make sure they kick YouTube's ass in if they want to succeed.
Exactly. I haven't used Yahoo for years because they've become irrelevant. To bad - I remember when they were just a couple kids running out of their dorm room and you could still email them suggestions and get actual responses back.
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I think study of evolution and psychology are very important to people working on AI. If you know how we developed our intelligence and why we behave the way we do then you are much more likely to be able to reproduce our intelligence.
I guess the real argument always comes down to the question of what intelligence is? A computer can certainly solve certain problems that most of us can't do, at least not as fast, but falls flat when presented with basics like object recognition. Yes, you can teach a computer to recognize objects but the point is that you have to teach it and this process involves a lot of domain specific programming and data collection and is still error prone. The computer still doesn't really understand - it just solves the same kind of problem using a brute force approach programmed into it. To improve the situation you have to move towards developing ways for the computer to teach itself and to motivate it to create it's own complex connections in it's thought processes - returning once again to basics of need and emotion. Is simply being able to process math, basic logic, and have a large memory the same as intelligence? I can't see such a machine ever creating an art or a science so I have to say no.
I would disagree and say that the smaller the intelligence the greater part of it which is based on animal instinct - ie emotion and basic internal needs. It's a heck of a lot easier to make something respond to a simple feedback loop than to invent a starship. Without feeling hunger or fear of future hunger a mosquito will not seek out blood.
:)
This isn't so much an assumption as something I've learned through lots of trial and error and deep thought into making my own AI programs. If you give it these needs and emotions your program will learn and adapt much better, and in a lot less code and overhead, than if you try pure logic.
You certainly can process logic without emotions but that is what we consider a computer. You can make it faster and better but it will never really understand anything if it doesn't have needs and emotions. Intelligence is mostly the ability to intuit answers from complexity in order to serve a need. You can trace all complex behaviors in an intelligent being back to answering basic needs and the emotions those needs create.
Or at least so my own research has taught me.
The problem, I think, is that you can't create a really intelligent machine without giving it the ability to learn. If it can learn to any significant degree then eventually it's likely to be able to develop emotions, desires, protection from damage and destruction, etc. Many AI researchers have this foolish idea that you can make a can opener that can do anything you want but that in the end doesn't really think but my own research has always led me to believe that the easiest way to make a machine more intelligent is to give it emotions and feelings. A computer can tell you the average pigment color of an apple but an intelligence needs to know what a shiny red delectable apple is which is a completely different way of processing data. Sure, you can teach a limited number of rules to a program by sampling human inputs but the machine isn't really going to understand what it means unless it can feel.
If they'd make them available even for $100 wholesale then I'd buy a bunch and start selling them. I think if I started giving these away to the children of friends and relatives I'd quickly see people trying to buy these. So far they look really nice especially for the price. You can pay $50 for a little bit of junk toy laptop with a monocolor crystal screen. I know parents would pay $150-$200 for one of these for their kids. It's educational, a toy, and will keep them off mom and dad's computer. And it's less trouble than throwing the kids their own used or cheapy PC because you don't have to worry about viruses and hassles like that.
Do any browsers really do CSS right? Firefox is missing drop shadows and IE7, Safari, and Opera still don't center content correctly all the time. Still things are a lot better than with older browsers such as IE6.
I wish the standards would be realistic and just realize that no browser is ever going to be 100% perfect in how it renders a page and that in some cases the standard isn't going to be perfect either. I hate to praise IE but IE has a way to only load certains stylesheets for IE or even certain versions of IE. It'd be nice to see that built into the standard so it'd be easier to make minor tweaks for individual cases. If you can specify the stylesheet's media then why not browser? Heck, I like to switch stylesheets based on window size even so why not make that possible also without resorting to Javascript (which results in a minor jump as the page loads and changes stylesheet). Like print stylesheets, few developers might use such browser or size optional stylesheets but for those of us who do it'd make things easier for us and nicer for our users.
Overall, I love CSS though. It allows me to vary the look of my sites a lot and to do things that look good without requiring plug-ins like Flash and without making pages unusable for the disabled. I can't wait for the additional features of CSS3.
Don't you hate when marketing BS is written about as if it were something significant. If it ain't on Google then it isn't even on a website that knows how to get itself properly indexed.
I'm reminded of the book Distraction where the Chinese, and others, effectively crush the economic power of the US by totally ignoring all estern copyrights, patents, etc and making the content available for free over the Internet. I think if China followed that example they could destroy DRM and make a killing in hardware and software. Start with the software version of the players first and release all the content and then when they've kicked the feet out from under the US they could set their own market standards - and consumers would love them.
Win2k is the last version of Windows I use on a regular basis. I have XP but I rarely use it because it works so poorly. Even Win2k doesn't work very well (I have it narrowed down to having frequent crashes whenevr the mouse is being used since I switched to a Core 2 Duo processor). There is no way I'm ever going to use Vista. I've decided Vista is the line in the sand for me and I'm just not going to cross it. I'll be sticking mostly to Linux with other versions of Unix and the occassional use of Mac OS X and Win 2k/XP with Mac and Win being used mostly in VMWare to test code.
The best system I've had th pleasure to use was Ximian's Red Carpet. Their UI was easy to use and it worked well and geeks like me could stick to the command-line tool, rug, which was more coherent than any other packaging tool I've used (including apt, yum, etc). I wish that the developers of other packaging systems would make an effort to work as well and to be as easy to use as Ximian's system was.
I wonder if RedHat couldn't work with the Debian folks at making a real merge of the packaging systems. It'd be wonderful to do away with having to know multiple systems. The majority of distros are based on either Debian or RedHat so really those are the two most important systems - if they could find peace then everyone else would eventually fall into line. Tool developers could develop a single set of tools for dealing with packages without a lot of overlap.
Having to use their stuff and had to try to use their shitty support was what started me down the road of hatred for Microsoft. Their ongoing anti-competitive practices that make it difficult to avoid using their products make me really hate them. The large number of people who love Microsoft for the sheer reason that it's all they know just makes me loath the whole bunch.
Unfortunately, often the criminal justice system is used as a means of revenge rather than as a means to making society safer and healthier. We take people that could be useful members of society and instead throw them in prison so that they can live on the tax payer's dollar and become hardened criminals. Stop wasting tax payer dollars on vendettas. If these people do need to be dealt with it should be as a serious attempt to fix whatever issues have made them a detriment to society or if they can't be salvaged then we need to execute them.
[Disclaimer: I'm a white, born citizen of the US, and I pay taxes.] A recent example that's been big in the news locally is the factories that were just raided by immigration. They took people that were working at competitive salaries, feeding their families, paying taxes, etc and have now made them unemployed. Now people are in some cases being deported at the tax payer's expense while in a few months most of them will probably be back in the US but are likely not to try to take a semi-legal route, many of them won't be deported at all but are now unemployed and on welfare, and many are going to be jailed again at the tax payer's expense. Worse, many of these people have children that are US citizens that will now be living on welfare because we've taken their parent's jobs. Very foolish way to handle the situation of people who may be breaking the law but who overall are a benefit to society. The people who in this situation DO need to be caught and dealt with are the people selling these illegal immigrants stolen identities. These people are hurting our society and are probably legal US citizens and very likely they aren't hispanic. We need to stop using immigrants as a scrapegoat for our problems and spend our energy on actual reforms of our legal system, welfare system, etc.
Yeh, logic errors are a big deal whereas minor typos aren't. I have trouble not switching to psuedo code when using a whiteboard just ebcause that's what I'm used to doing on a whiteboard.
I don't see any reason we need pennies anymore. Even nickles are more annoying than they're worth. I'd suggest doing away with both and if people don't want to round off to the nearest 10 cents then they can use some form of check, credit card, or electronic cash. I have a big pile of pennies and nickles sitting in a drawer in my desk because it's to much hassle to spend them or convert them to more managable cash.
It's about time the government offers us some form of electronic cash that we can optionally use. It's stupid for consumers and vendors to both be paying credit card companies and banks high fees in order to do basic commerce. If the government doesn't provide a form of electronic cash then they shouldn't complain if somebody else does it - with the obvious side effect of it making commerce very hard to tax if it's done by a third party.
I'm shocked that no small country has figured out that electronic cash that is easy, secure, private, and doesn't have fees is the secret to making major profits. You don't have to offer the option to cash out so long as you can get enough businesses on board to begin with - easy enough as you can start your own. I've always imagined that instead of offering the ability to cash out of my electronic currency I'd set up some sort of online money market where others could convert between my currency and others while making a nice cut for themselves as part of the process.
I think code samples are great but you do need to be able to prove they were done by yourself. I suggest doing some opensource projects and posting the code to places such as Freshmeat and to include your name in your code. Create a sort of trail of authority proving you did the work. I think having done full-blown projects shows a lot more than having just thrown together a few bits of code anyway.
I never liked the whiteboard method because it's hard to code when you're nervous (like at a job interview) and coding on a whiteboard is very different than coding on a computer so it makes you prone to making minor errors. It just isn't a very realistic way to see how people code.
If he has to cheat he can't be very good at search engine optimization can he? Not much better than the lossers that use link farms or wiki spamming or similar sleazy techniques.
Seriously people. The easiest way to get something to rank high in Google is to put good content on the page and to remember to use words that people will actually be searching for in that content. If you're selling a Widget 2007 then you damn well better remember to say so, several times, in text, on the page or else nobody will ever find your page. Then simply make sure somebody is linking to your page so that there is some path for people, and search engines, to find you from. I suggest joining your chamber of commerce and getting added to their website. Easy.
Adding money to a system doesn't create wealth - it just creates inflation - but better controlling the flow of money can optimize the system so that wealth grows for us as a society and for us as individuals. Without taking care to balance the flow of money the system eventually becomes unbalanced for precisely the reasons you mention. Those with money can use their money to seize opportunities they want and crush opportunities they don't want. It becomes a form of power which is easily abused and that with our current unleashed system almost has to be abused in order to function. Unbridled capitalism is all about being clever and ruthless. It's survivial of the fittest which sounds good until you remember that a few over dominant species can throw an entire ecosystem out of wack which ends up hurting every species, including themselves, in the progress.
Like wildlife management, creating forces to keep capitalism balanced will help everyone involved including the super wealthy. It needs to be easy to climb economically but to grow more difficult the more you succeed. The rich need to reach a point where in order to grow their own wealth they are required to grow everyone's wealth. They'll still be at the top of the stack but they'll pull others up with them. Something close to the inverse situation happens now as it's very difficult to rise out of poverty into the middle class and it's difficult to climb from the middle class to be wealthy but it's easy for the wealthy to become wealthier. As you said those with money have far more opportunities.
I think it's important to point out that opportunity is not something that is in limited supply. I have twenty good ideas a day and could easily do my part to build the wealth of our society if I had the resources to do so. My pursuit of any of my good ideas would not decrease anybody elses opportunities. In fact it'd often create more opportunities for others to think of new products and services based on what I've created. If I write a book it does not decrease my neighbors chance to write a book also. Today the limiting factor is the ability of capitalism to reshuffle resources fast enough to allow opportunity to flourish for everyone. Unbalanced capitalism is actively slowing the growth of wealth for our society.
Money, in the end, is just a method of resource management. Choosing to take a blind eye is a foolish way to manage resources. I'm not saying there shouldn't be poor people and there shouldn't be rich people. Some people clearly work harder and have better ideas and make better choices. I'm saying that with better management we can make the system work better. Wealth tends to flow back to those who have it which is why I don't think trickle down theories work very well. It's much more functional to have the wealthy seed the bottom layers of society with a great deal of wealth and watch that wealth quickly flow back to them. Rinse, repeat, etc.
I certainly wouldn't redistribute wealth willy nilly either. It needs to be done with a comprehensive system designed to benefit those that make wise decisions that benefit all of society. Which is why I'd build a trust ranking network that works as a resource management balance that modifies the tax and allowance (inversed tax) rates of the cash system. Everyone would have equal access to the trust system - able to give a single vote for or against anyone else and thus able to help decide how resources will flow in a completely democratic way. Of course you need to use short circuiting to keep people from spiking the system up and down. I also would make votes expire, with a sliding scale of value, after a given time period and not allow people to vote for that person (or company) again until their vote had again reached a neutral value. So if I voted that I didn't trust George Bush then I might not be able to vote for or against George Bush again for a whole year and during that time my vote would gradually slide from a -1 to 0 in incremental steps. The exact processes could be fine tuned throug
The biggest point I'd make, from someone that's worked on his own schedule and from his own location, is that they need to make available quiet office space for people that want it. Even if people just check into whatever office space is open when they decide to come in and then take everything with them when they leave. It can be difficult to work when you have family members, annoying neighbors, and similar distractions bothering you at home. Not that these are worse than the average work enviroments meetings, interruptions from customers, co-workers, and bosses, ringing telephones, people talking in the background, attractive strangers, etc. You just need to have quiet offices with no windows available for people to work alone or in small groups when they choose to do so.
Other than that point I think this kind of work enviroment is great. I often get my best ideas or work through hard points I'm stuck on when I'm not working. I work better at night than I do during the day. I like having the freedom to pick my own location and hours - it greatly reduces my stress which is itself possibly the biggest distraction.
For workers I'd suggest trying to maintain a schedule but don't force yourself to it to strictly. If you're worrying about paying the gas bill then go pay the gas bill. If you're hungry then go ahead and eat. You're not doing yourself any favors by sitting at a desk thinking about some little worry but you need to make yourself get out of bed and work every day. It's not always easy but you can do it. The freedom is worth the responsiiblity.
For the employer I'd suggest also trying to minimize employee's other stresses. Employees will love you, stick with you, and do better work. In my own experience my biggest worry has been a company that doesn't respect me or my work. Relax dead lines a little when employees are doing an extra good job. Don't punish me for trying something new even if it doesn't work out in this case. Don't punish me for getting done early. Those little issues are important too.
A similar problem I've had - I worked in a retail store that was open 10 to 6 while the majority of it's customers wanted to shop after work which limited them from being able to. But the owner was happy with the hours the way he had randomly decided years ago.
But what if your customers were using this ROWE system. How would you cope?
Capitalism is an unbalanced system that leads to corrupt government. All these IP law issues are being caused by that central issue. IP can create lots of easy money and then those with that easy money use the money to influence politics which in turn influences if they get laws to protect their easy source of income.
The government needs to recognize that capitalism isn't really a democratic system and therefore does not align well with a democratic government. Of course they won't - because politicans stand to benefit to much from the play of these misaligned pillars of our society.
And no - I don't think socialism is better than capitalism. The problem is both systems are broken and will eventually destroy themselves. All because they have no checks and balances like most of our governments are designed with today. There needs to be counter forces put into place so wealth will gather to the middle with it being difficult to grow super poor or super wealthy. Force our society to grow wealth, so that all our lives are better, rather than fighting over each other's table scraps. Why doesn't wealth distribution fit a bell curve?
As someone that has been experimenting with a commercial venture based on bit torrent I can say that seeding isn't an issue because YOU seed the feeds. I have a server files are uploaded to that stores the files on another server which seeds to only other of my servers and essentially seeds the file all the time. My other seeding servers seed on demand by simply running a BT client that can take orders from the server so that when someone requests a download one of the seeds will grab a copy of the file and make it available to any users out there. Using a Java-applet based client users are running BT pretty much all the time when they are connected to my website so once they've downloaded the file they contribute to others downloading the file, taking a lot of bandwidth load off my servers, without even thinking about it. My client will track files even if users move them around so unless they modify or delete them they'll still be seeding those files.
BT can be ran over an http port, in part, so it's unlikely that users would be completely unable to use the service at work - it might just take off some features that make it faster for them. Besides, as more and more legitimate uses are made for BT I think we'll see less blocking.
BT clients often can detect bandwidth over use and throttle down so that users can use their connection normally. It's not a perfect solution but it works pretty well.
Zudeo doesn't have to use another program. They're crazy if they don't bundle in at least a lite version that works as a Java applet. You have to use a signed applet but it's not a big deal - most users okay it to run without a second thought.
BT can certainly stream files. You just need to tweak it to prefer it to do so. If you can provide your own seeds that can guarentee a minimum speed and availability then it's not a huge problem to stream. Besides, I hate streaming. I can't stand using YouTube because I have to watch 5 seconds, wait, watch another 5 seconds, wait, etc. Just download the whole damn file or at least a sizable chunk and then stream. I regually get 100+ kB/s on individual files I download with BT. I don't get that from YouTube.
The biggest reason YouTube has succeeded is that they make it easy to play any file. You don't have to figure out what codec it needs, what player will work best, etc. That is the area Zudeo needs to make sure they kick YouTube's ass in if they want to succeed.
Exactly. I haven't used Yahoo for years because they've become irrelevant. To bad - I remember when they were just a couple kids running out of their dorm room and you could still email them suggestions and get actual responses back.
One more reason not to use Yahoo. They've sided with the evil empire.
Okay, how this cares to existing forms of solar power shuch as photovoltics. Duh - like anyone needed that explained.
You assume the government, or anybody, has the right to tax.