increasing secularism (EU, see for example banning of headscarves) vs increasing evangelicalism (US/Jesusland)
It's not clear there is significantly increased secularism in Europe. The headscarf thing is more an instance of the long standing level of French institutional secularism (paranoid bordering on religious-from-the-other-side) being applied to Islam, which has become much more visible in recent decades.
The current UK governemnt is slipping away from secularism. The level of protection given to the church of england is unsupportable on equality grounds, but removing it is politically impossible, the least spine-demanding way out of this is to hand out similar protection to any sufficiantly large group who can claim to be a religion. Hence, we have a proposal for what is,indirectly, a universally applicable blasphamy law, though with any luck the Courts may sit on it.
The only lightish spot is that the demands from the christian (especially catholic) organisations that the proposed new EU constitution be explicitly religious in foundation were seen off.
Perhaps Europe seems to be getting more secular from the US POV. Ever since the 50s and the `under God' thing the US has been going in the other direction so fast that it would be hard for Europe to keep up.
I though the problem with the airline industry wasn't plane capacity but the more nimble competitors cherrypicking the mist profitable connections.
The long haul routes are hard to cherry pick, because they are, in general, handed out by governments, so they go to whoever buys the most politicians.
AIUI, airbus is gambling on lower cost per seat per mile being attractive to the companies who have been handed some of those routes since it allows them to increase profit (or in the case of US airlines, lose less money:-)).
That may give the big operators spare cash to compete on the short-haul and internal routes, or they may give up on those routes as not being worth the candle.
Then there is the charter market. A big tourist operation may be able to fill one of these monsters per day to each of the the big destinations, again increasing the margin over having to put on a couple of jumboes.
Actually George has said several times that part of the reason why the prequels were so long in coming was that he didn't like the fact that people were devoting their lives to his movies and he wanted to discourage them from doing this.
You sure you're not missrememberring the rationalle for the quality of the prequels?
If Lucas saw this guy sitting there then most likely he would tell him to get the fuck up and get a job.
No, he'd paint him over with an obvious computer graphic and then adjust the scene so that Greedo is ahead of him in the queue.
TV is about 6-minute chucks of instant gratification and resolving every problem within a half hour.
You're right,The Sims can't manage anything that long and complex. When the votes have sent every character to have a crap, a shower and a shag, the series, let alone the episode, will be over.
Mind you, I suppose Sex in the City and Star Trek Voyager got by for a while with plots little more complex than that.
Space travel has not progressed like it should have in the decades following the amazing progress of the 1960s.
That rather depends on what you think should have happened. Since there seem to be few people who want to actually go anywhere enough to pay the cost to do so, what progress would you expect? Transport systems should follow demand. If, in the 70s, a million people had thrown $10,000 each into a pot to buy a suborbital flight, someone would probably have had a go at providing it.
If you want to compare it to European colonialism, remember that many of the the people involved threw everything they owned, incluing their lives and those of theor families into the project of their choice. States threw in resources at a level which endangered their stability and/or existance. How much have you thrown into the pot compared to your net worth? How many of your neighbours would vote to have the US governemnt spend at a level which had a noticable chance of crashing the entire economy? (well, OK, they have done when they put Bush back in, but not for anything as interesting as space travel).
Space exploration, on the other hand, has gone on quite well, mostly limited by the US government's obsession with the space scuttle, which sucked up a great deal of money which might otherwise have gone to something interesting, and Europe's lack of interest. Still, we know a hell of a lot more about the solar system than we did in the 60s, and I think we've been learning it at a higher rate than we did in the 60s.
That intellectual "property" law applied to genetics is unjust and wrong.
But the situation described in this stoy is not about IP law, simply contract law. IP doesn't come up. A seed company could put that clause in their contracts for perfectly standard seeds whose DNA they had no idea about, and if you singed and then broke the agreement you would deserve to be sued.
There is no moral issue about a contract which says `I will not do X', unless X is something extreme like `eat'. Harvesting seed is clearly not in that league.
A farmer who objects to monsanto's IP behaviour would simply not sign that contract and buy seeds from someone else. If you object to Microsoft's IP policy, don't sign a NDA with Microsoft.
A farmer who signs up with monsanto and then collects and replants seed is acknowleding monsanto's right to control the IP, and then breaking what they have agreed to. Hence they are being bastards from either POV about the IP.
There is an interesting moral issue about harvesting seed from self-seeded plants. If you haven't signed a NDA with Microsoft, and some information falls into your lap because of a missfeature in XP, then... what? For computer stuff we have copyright, which says you can pass on the information you found, if you are willing to put some minimal work into explaining it rather than just copying the literal bits.
For GM organisms, I think we have a perfect compromise. I think we can safely give people IP right overthe genetic sequences they create (rather than copy from nature). If you legitimately get hold of an organism contianing that sequence (eg it self seeds on your land), YOU wouldn't be allowed to copy it, but if the organism does so, let monsanto sue them. The case of monsanto vs. a stalk of wheat would be worth seeing. if you design a photocopier which prints a copy of it's own plans after each job, then you cant sue me for having copies of your blueprints, you forced them on me, using my paper and toner!
If we did it that way, the IP would have the effect of allowing monsanto to block competitors from just nicking their roundup-immunity gene in the lab, but it would mean that once the GM seed was out in the real world, it would be on a level playing field to compete with other seeds. farmers who want guaranteed properties in their crop buy new seed, those who are willing to live with drift over generations collect seed.
For the current discussion, I think I'll limit myself to some examples and counter examples. It is not what you get more of if you add more processing power or network bandwidth, and it's not what you get more of if you improve your underlying math (eg better statistical analysis of chess positions or a better dynamical model of the flight of a football). It's the thing whose lack causes a bird to fly into a window the second time, and whose presence may be indicated when they learn to open milk bottles.
Artificial intelligence is, well, the study (and implementation) of intelligent behavior in artificial constructs.
No, AI is the creation of intteligent behaviour in artificial constructs. If we ever create any worth studying then we'll have to think of a name for studying it (artificial psychology?).
The important point is `intelligent'. A modern chess programme is not intelligent, any more than Word is, it is the result of applying lots of processing power and good algorithms to a well understood problem. Similarly a robot foorball team designed primarily to play football well would almost certainly not be using anything usefully called intelligence. People (and other animals) use intelligence to do such things because they are basicly crap as computing devices:-).
Consider what we might call `artificial locomotion'. There are all kinds of interesting things you could investigate by creating artificial muscle analogiues etc and neural nets or heuristic algorithms to control them and so on to achive bipedal locomotion. However, if you just say to some engineers that you want something to get from A to B as well as possible, you'll get a car or a plane or a segway or something with stair climbing wheel clusters, or a bullet, depending on how you phraise the spec.
Please.... A subscription model for computing? That's -so- 1970s mainframe era....
It's working for the mobile phone industry. I'm paying (or rather the comapny is:-)) something like 5 quid a month (with 100 quid down at the start) for the computing device which I use to run my always-on telecoms application+alarm clock and anoyingly addictive pool game.
If you think of this box as a fixed-line equivalent of a modern mobule phone, rather than a PC equivalent it makes a bit more sense.
Mind you, Amstrad tried this in the UK with their emailer and that doesn't seem to have set the world on fire. ASDA (Walmart's UK tenticle) was more or less giving them away last I saw.
Actually, a big part of soccer is coordinating with a group, which is arguably an important part of AI.
But a robot football team could have a secure, high bandwidth connection amongst themselves, making such coordination a matter of scheduling and message passing and shared data structures. Interesting IT problem, but no more AI than any other distributed computing problem.
Even if you impose a limit to very low bandwidth to model human players shouting at each other and waving their arms, the fact that you can create players with identical models which make all kinds of assumptions about the inner workings of each other makes the problem different in kind. No robot will be thinking of his girlfriend, or have decisions influenced by ego or the fight with the left winger he had this morning or the guy in the crowd shouting robotist abuse or...
This is the kind of thing I meant by comparing with chess. Work on getting such a team to coordinate it's attack by planning on a shared world model etc is not going to throw any light on what David Beckham is doing with his meat based ZX80 equivalent.
It announced as something that will be done ten years into the future, not next year's competition.
They can play soccer (poorly) now, whereas the USA couldn't get a man on the moon in 63. So the differecne seems sensible. ``We will do what we can do now better next year, lets see who does best'' is hardly a ridiculous strategy.
a fifty year target, specially in such a non-priority area as robot soccer is just publicity seeking.
And getting some test pilots to play golf on the moon was such an important priority?
In both cases a ridiculously pointless objective was set because the objective was eye catching and it was believed that moves towards that pointless objective would be useful.
The really silly bit in this soccer thing is the association with AI. It's clearly not AI any more. They are off where computer chess was a few decades ago when the technology reached the point when the problem was finally tractable, because the AI people had produced a few spin off technologies which the boring old engineering world could apply to the problem. This competition will hopefully produce lots of useful advances is mechanics and control systems and whatnot, but it's not going to throw light on intelligence or mind, anymore than Deep Blue did.
(I was on an HPUX machine with no emacs at the weekend. The combination of traditional vi and no worthwhile job control was pure nostalgia. I kept wonderring if I needed to worry about changing the ribbon or cleaning chad out of the punch).
Yes: install the calendar plugin to use while waiting for sunbird to be useable.
That way lies madness. Mozilla's main problem is that it inherited the Netscape politics of trying to replace as much of Windows as possible, rather than just being a good web browser.
We already have one program which can do everything - emacs. Everything else should be designed to do just one thing and do it
better/prettier than emacs.
A less snake-oil-ish approach would have been to set out more or less achievable tasks and start with those as competitions,
The nice thing about sprot, as opposed to real world, as an application area is that sports have evolved over centuries to provide those small challenges within the overall challenge. Directly competative sports (as opposed to things like golf) also have a self balancing difficulty level. Beyond the very initial level of standing up and kicking the ball somewhere within 60 degrees of where you wanted it to go, the challenge is the opposition, not the intentionally very simple environment. Since everyone is working at the current state of the art, your problem gets harder at roughly the same level as your abilities. This is why 5 year olds can play football (at least soccer) as sucessfully (in the sense of having a good game) as top level professionals. This useful property is not found in search and rescue.
And JFK _did_ anounce the big target, not `we will, within one month, have a design for an air hose'. It's useful to keep the end target in mind.
As for robot service in restaurants, if we went down that path, what would all those people studying for MSCE status do for a living?
Skills that seem magical to Caley, whose discretionary spending affords only a dialup connection.
So, before broadband into the home, everyone in the world was employed washing dishes?
It will coem as a suprise to you kiddies, but most of the people who developed the fundamentals of the tools you are talking about did it without a computer at home at all.
This kind of argument used to come up about use of computers in schools. People claiming to be from the real world arguing that the important thing was to teach kids to do trivial things with this week's version of Word and Excel, rather than to educate them about IT and the issues it would raise for them in their adult life. The result has been even more time wasted in schools on things which could be picekd up in the first day on the job by anyone worth employing in the first place.
These novelty applications (Word, Web chatting, I'm sure there is a drive to teach iPod operation in schools now, whatever) are not imporant. What underlies them is. If you have the choice of where to spend limited money on a kid between broadband and education, pick education. They will find porn some other way. Same priorities need to be applied with public money.
The disconnect on the info superhighway that leaves little Jane unable to google for video when she graduates high school will certainly put a damper on her earning power.
I can see it now, some red-faced congressman speaking in support fo his bill:
``Our children need guaranteed access to real-time porn feeds to compete in the modern world: it's a national shame that the average US teenager sees 23% fewewr penetrations and 16% fewer orgasms than their contemporaries in Korea!
My No Child Left Without Seeing Behinds bill will guarantee every young American the bandwidth they need to feed their natural urges!
And of course, there is the impact on the paper-handkerchief industry...''
What we need is a huge panel of lights, say a meter square, which plugs into the memory bus without IDing itself as memory and changes the pattern of lights based on the pattern of address access.
Computers have never looked like REAL computers since they didn't have that kind of thing on the front panel.
Add a hacked reel-to-reel tape deck which swiches back and forth in time to system activity, and perhaps some magnisium wiring set to go bang and emit sparks whenever there is a small error and we'd be back on course for Star Trek and Lost In Space!
DNS name of the box, with.s changed to -s. Very obvious which one is which that way, and if you have a half way reasonable domain people who need to know will know it is yours.
Of course, then you have to come up with a decent DNS name. Mine is `gaga', because it was all I can hear due to the nice heavy masonry walls of these traditional blocks.
Here in the U.S it's the people vs. In Europe it's the state vs.
And how many European legal systems did you research to come up with that statement? How many of them use English for their legal cases?
You realise, of course, that fundamental principles of what law is differ between jurisdictions, even within states. Trying to identify a difference by a one word difference between a US formality and one you made up is just silly.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not clear there is significantly increased secularism in Europe. The headscarf thing is more an instance of the long standing level of French institutional secularism (paranoid bordering on religious-from-the-other-side) being applied to Islam, which has become much more visible in recent decades.
The current UK governemnt is slipping away from secularism. The level of protection given to the church of england is unsupportable on equality grounds, but removing it is politically impossible, the least spine-demanding way out of this is to hand out similar protection to any sufficiantly large group who can claim to be a religion. Hence, we have a proposal for what is ,indirectly, a universally applicable blasphamy law, though with any luck the Courts may sit on it.
The only lightish spot is that the demands from the christian (especially catholic) organisations that the proposed new EU constitution be explicitly religious in foundation were seen off.
Perhaps Europe seems to be getting more secular from the US POV. Ever since the 50s and the `under God' thing the US has been going in the other direction so fast that it would be hard for Europe to keep up.
The long haul routes are hard to cherry pick, because they are, in general, handed out by governments, so they go to whoever buys the most politicians.
AIUI, airbus is gambling on lower cost per seat per mile being attractive to the companies who have been handed some of those routes since it allows them to increase profit (or in the case of US airlines, lose less money:-)).
That may give the big operators spare cash to compete on the short-haul and internal routes, or they may give up on those routes as not being worth the candle.
Then there is the charter market. A big tourist operation may be able to fill one of these monsters per day to each of the the big destinations, again increasing the margin over having to put on a couple of jumboes.
You sure you're not missrememberring the rationalle for the quality of the prequels?
If Lucas saw this guy sitting there then most likely he would tell him to get the fuck up and get a job.
No, he'd paint him over with an obvious computer graphic and then adjust the scene so that Greedo is ahead of him in the queue.
You're right,The Sims can't manage anything that long and complex. When the votes have sent every character to have a crap, a shower and a shag, the series, let alone the episode, will be over.
Mind you, I suppose Sex in the City and Star Trek Voyager got by for a while with plots little more complex than that.
Does anyone know how I can get my obvious spam modded up to 4?
That rather depends on what you think should have happened. Since there seem to be few people who want to actually go anywhere enough to pay the cost to do so, what progress would you expect? Transport systems should follow demand. If, in the 70s, a million people had thrown $10,000 each into a pot to buy a suborbital flight, someone would probably have had a go at providing it.
If you want to compare it to European colonialism, remember that many of the the people involved threw everything they owned, incluing their lives and those of theor families into the project of their choice. States threw in resources at a level which endangered their stability and/or existance. How much have you thrown into the pot compared to your net worth? How many of your neighbours would vote to have the US governemnt spend at a level which had a noticable chance of crashing the entire economy? (well, OK, they have done when they put Bush back in, but not for anything as interesting as space travel).
Space exploration, on the other hand, has gone on quite well, mostly limited by the US government's obsession with the space scuttle, which sucked up a great deal of money which might otherwise have gone to something interesting, and Europe's lack of interest. Still, we know a hell of a lot more about the solar system than we did in the 60s, and I think we've been learning it at a higher rate than we did in the 60s.
That, surely, depends whether they are stupid hippies.
I suspect most of them are too young to be hippies.
But the situation described in this stoy is not about IP law, simply contract law. IP doesn't come up. A seed company could put that clause in their contracts for perfectly standard seeds whose DNA they had no idea about, and if you singed and then broke the agreement you would deserve to be sued.
There is no moral issue about a contract which says `I will not do X', unless X is something extreme like `eat'. Harvesting seed is clearly not in that league.
A farmer who objects to monsanto's IP behaviour would simply not sign that contract and buy seeds from someone else. If you object to Microsoft's IP policy, don't sign a NDA with Microsoft.
A farmer who signs up with monsanto and then collects and replants seed is acknowleding monsanto's right to control the IP, and then breaking what they have agreed to. Hence they are being bastards from either POV about the IP.
There is an interesting moral issue about harvesting seed from self-seeded plants. If you haven't signed a NDA with Microsoft, and some information falls into your lap because of a missfeature in XP, then... what? For computer stuff we have copyright, which says you can pass on the information you found, if you are willing to put some minimal work into explaining it rather than just copying the literal bits.
For GM organisms, I think we have a perfect compromise. I think we can safely give people IP right overthe genetic sequences they create (rather than copy from nature). If you legitimately get hold of an organism contianing that sequence (eg it self seeds on your land), YOU wouldn't be allowed to copy it, but if the organism does so, let monsanto sue them. The case of monsanto vs. a stalk of wheat would be worth seeing. if you design a photocopier which prints a copy of it's own plans after each job, then you cant sue me for having copies of your blueprints, you forced them on me, using my paper and toner!
If we did it that way, the IP would have the effect of allowing monsanto to block competitors from just nicking their roundup-immunity gene in the lab, but it would mean that once the GM seed was out in the real world, it would be on a level playing field to compete with other seeds. farmers who want guaranteed properties in their crop buy new seed, those who are willing to live with drift over generations collect seed.
Oh no! They will be MUTANTS with SUPER POWERS.
Yeah, but given how huge luna is, I don't think we have cause for moon-envy. Earth is the planitary equivalent of hung like a horse.
I am being very careful not to try:-).
For the current discussion, I think I'll limit myself to some examples and counter examples. It is not what you get more of if you add more processing power or network bandwidth, and it's not what you get more of if you improve your underlying math (eg better statistical analysis of chess positions or a better dynamical model of the flight of a football). It's the thing whose lack causes a bird to fly into a window the second time, and whose presence may be indicated when they learn to open milk bottles.
Each emailer comes with a rubber mask you have to wear while using it. That way everyone looks the same and the compression goes waaaaay up.
No, AI is the creation of intteligent behaviour in artificial constructs. If we ever create any worth studying then we'll have to think of a name for studying it (artificial psychology?).
The important point is `intelligent'. A modern chess programme is not intelligent, any more than Word is, it is the result of applying lots of processing power and good algorithms to a well understood problem. Similarly a robot foorball team designed primarily to play football well would almost certainly not be using anything usefully called intelligence. People (and other animals) use intelligence to do such things because they are basicly crap as computing devices:-).
Consider what we might call `artificial locomotion'. There are all kinds of interesting things you could investigate by creating artificial muscle analogiues etc and neural nets or heuristic algorithms to control them and so on to achive bipedal locomotion. However, if you just say to some engineers that you want something to get from A to B as well as possible, you'll get a car or a plane or a segway or something with stair climbing wheel clusters, or a bullet, depending on how you phraise the spec.
It's working for the mobile phone industry. I'm paying (or rather the comapny is :-)) something like 5 quid a month (with 100 quid down at the start) for the computing device which I use to run my always-on telecoms application+alarm clock and anoyingly addictive pool game.
If you think of this box as a fixed-line equivalent of a modern mobule phone, rather than a PC equivalent it makes a bit more sense.
Mind you, Amstrad tried this in the UK with their emailer and that doesn't seem to have set the world on fire. ASDA (Walmart's UK tenticle) was more or less giving them away last I saw.
But a robot football team could have a secure, high bandwidth connection amongst themselves, making such coordination a matter of scheduling and message passing and shared data structures. Interesting IT problem, but no more AI than any other distributed computing problem.
Even if you impose a limit to very low bandwidth to model human players shouting at each other and waving their arms, the fact that you can create players with identical models which make all kinds of assumptions about the inner workings of each other makes the problem different in kind. No robot will be thinking of his girlfriend, or have decisions influenced by ego or the fight with the left winger he had this morning or the guy in the crowd shouting robotist abuse or...
This is the kind of thing I meant by comparing with chess. Work on getting such a team to coordinate it's attack by planning on a shared world model etc is not going to throw any light on what David Beckham is doing with his meat based ZX80 equivalent.
They can play soccer (poorly) now, whereas the USA couldn't get a man on the moon in 63. So the differecne seems sensible. ``We will do what we can do now better next year, lets see who does best'' is hardly a ridiculous strategy.
a fifty year target, specially in such a non-priority area as robot soccer is just publicity seeking.
And getting some test pilots to play golf on the moon was such an important priority?
In both cases a ridiculously pointless objective was set because the objective was eye catching and it was believed that moves towards that pointless objective would be useful.
The really silly bit in this soccer thing is the association with AI. It's clearly not AI any more. They are off where computer chess was a few decades ago when the technology reached the point when the problem was finally tractable, because the AI people had produced a few spin off technologies which the boring old engineering world could apply to the problem. This competition will hopefully produce lots of useful advances is mechanics and control systems and whatnot, but it's not going to throw light on intelligence or mind, anymore than Deep Blue did.
Emacs does vi better than vi does.
(I was on an HPUX machine with no emacs at the weekend. The combination of traditional vi and no worthwhile job control was pure nostalgia. I kept wonderring if I needed to worry about changing the ribbon or cleaning chad out of the punch).
That way lies madness. Mozilla's main problem is that it inherited the Netscape politics of trying to replace as much of Windows as possible, rather than just being a good web browser.
We already have one program which can do everything - emacs. Everything else should be designed to do just one thing and do it better/prettier than emacs.
The nice thing about sprot, as opposed to real world, as an application area is that sports have evolved over centuries to provide those small challenges within the overall challenge. Directly competative sports (as opposed to things like golf) also have a self balancing difficulty level. Beyond the very initial level of standing up and kicking the ball somewhere within 60 degrees of where you wanted it to go, the challenge is the opposition, not the intentionally very simple environment. Since everyone is working at the current state of the art, your problem gets harder at roughly the same level as your abilities. This is why 5 year olds can play football (at least soccer) as sucessfully (in the sense of having a good game) as top level professionals. This useful property is not found in search and rescue.
And JFK _did_ anounce the big target, not `we will, within one month, have a design for an air hose'. It's useful to keep the end target in mind.
As for robot service in restaurants, if we went down that path, what would all those people studying for MSCE status do for a living?
So, before broadband into the home, everyone in the world was employed washing dishes?
It will coem as a suprise to you kiddies, but most of the people who developed the fundamentals of the tools you are talking about did it without a computer at home at all.
This kind of argument used to come up about use of computers in schools. People claiming to be from the real world arguing that the important thing was to teach kids to do trivial things with this week's version of Word and Excel, rather than to educate them about IT and the issues it would raise for them in their adult life. The result has been even more time wasted in schools on things which could be picekd up in the first day on the job by anyone worth employing in the first place.
These novelty applications (Word, Web chatting, I'm sure there is a drive to teach iPod operation in schools now, whatever) are not imporant. What underlies them is. If you have the choice of where to spend limited money on a kid between broadband and education, pick education. They will find porn some other way. Same priorities need to be applied with public money.
I can see it now, some red-faced congressman speaking in support fo his bill:
ISTM that if you have to physically take your computer somewhere, you are missing something quite fundamental about this internet thing.:-)
And taking a computer to a party,... well... come on guys, beer and a MOTAS is traditional and hard to improve on.
Computers have never looked like REAL computers since they didn't have that kind of thing on the front panel.
Add a hacked reel-to-reel tape deck which swiches back and forth in time to system activity, and perhaps some magnisium wiring set to go bang and emit sparks whenever there is a small error and we'd be back on course for Star Trek and Lost In Space!
Of course, then you have to come up with a decent DNS name. Mine is `gaga', because it was all I can hear due to the nice heavy masonry walls of these traditional blocks.
And how many European legal systems did you research to come up with that statement? How many of them use English for their legal cases?
You realise, of course, that fundamental principles of what law is differ between jurisdictions, even within states. Trying to identify a difference by a one word difference between a US formality and one you made up is just silly.