The world of 2008 is very different from the world of 1999.
DVDs replaced VHS tapes. People went from one large set of difficult-to-copy physical media to another. Not much changed.
In 2008, blu-ray is replacing DVD discs which a lot of people have gotten used to being able to copy discs to their computers, play back discs from any region, and in general do what they want. Even people who have no idea what DRM is like to import movies from different parts of the world and convert movies for their iPod. I have friends who are extremely computer illiterate but still have VLC installed to get around region problems.
Price is probably a much bigger issue. The cost for a blu-ray movie is just way too high. But I think it's incorrect to say that DVD uptake was fine with DRM so it can't be affecting blu-ray now.
What kind of logic is that? The fact that modern chemistry is the direct descendant of medieval alchemy doesn't change the fact that modern chemistry is a rigorous scientific field and medieval alchemy was a total load of crap.
Alternative medicine is essentially crap by definition. Because when alternative medicine works, regular medicine co-opts it and it ceases to become alternative. The parts that stay outside the mainstream are almost necessarily the parts that don't actually work.
Any field which tolerates the existence of the dreck you find in things like Homeopathy is fully deserving of as much ridicule as one can provide.
The range of human hearing is far less precise than you make it out to be. Pretty much any sample rate between 40-50kHz could be easily justified on physiological grounds, and possibly an even bigger range than that. (And DVD-A supports up to 192kHz!) Even just 44 is an awfully specific number just for that, let alone 44.1.
If I get fired because of an unfounded accusation by a single person, then that is the fault of the person who fired me without any reasonable cause, not the fault of the person making the unfounded accusation.
So if I understand you correctly, you think that AIs would exceed human intelligence but that this fact would be, at best, barely visible to the human population.
I'm not sure about that. There's a big difference between something like a stock market, which is incomprehensible merely because it's complex, and an entity which is incomprehensible because it's many times more intelligent than you are.
But you may be right. It's an interesting idea at the very least.
Are you assuming that the FTL drives also travel back in time? (This is not particularly absurd. The only way that relativity "prohibits" FTL is because an FTL drive that obeys relativity would also function as a time machine, and scientists hate violating causality.) Because otherwise it's hard to have people leave after you and arrive centuries before you when your trip only took a decade.
The problem is that they take direct talk for insults, and direct answers for patronizing. People come onto these lists with the attitude that they're smarter than everyone, yet somehow they still need help. If your question is wrong then it's in everybody's best interests if someone points out that the question is wrong and guides you on how to approach things better, and it's in nobody's best interests to take it at face value and be happy and polite while leading you both into darkness.
I don't believe that. If they have enough infrastructure to enforce a cap then they have enough infrastructure to encourage people to upgrade to a business class service, or to the next tier of whatever plans they offer. Plenty of other ISPs manage to do this just fine.
That is true but incomplete. There are both fixed costs and changing costs. I'm not saying that I should pay 10-100x less because I use 10-100x less, but it is perfectly reasonable that I should pay something less, because I use less of resources whose cost changes depending on use.
For some reason many people prefer to have polite, useless help than have someone who directly solves their problem without a bunch of extra words on the side. It boggles the mind, and it's a large part of why I significantly curtailed the time I spend helping people work through their problems. For some reason, a whole lot of people with questions get angry with people who ask things like "what are you actually trying to do here?" or who tell them that their whole approach is wrong, but are perfectly fine with people who go along answering questions politely and wrongly for dozens of messages.
Funny, your description of what it will take to achieve AI matches my ideas, but I don't see it as being nearly as easy as you state. AI right now is a bunch of vague theories of the human mind, and is extremely distant from actually being able to produce anything.
A space elevator, on the other hand, is simply waiting on the right materials, and that's already getting pretty close at hand. If nanotubes of proper strength were to suddenly be produced in large quantity, and if the political will were present, a space elevator could be launched basically immediately.
Whereas AI is still at the stage of mapping large-scale areas of the human brain. Kind of like building a PC and still wondering exactly which component is the CPU and which component is the RAM. That's a hell of a long way from being able to fabricate a billion transistors on a chip. I see this as being a vastly more difficult problem. I also see it as being potentially solved sooner, but just because that field is moving vastly faster.
As for your singularity musings, that's interesting, but once human-equivalent AI happens what stops them from continuing to get smarter at an accelerating pace? You seem to assume that they get to human equivalence and then halt there. The whole idea of the singularity is that they just keep going, since we can probably design an AI that's a little bit smarter than a human, and then it could then design an AI that's smarter than that, and the whole thing just takes off. I don't know that this is what would actually happen, but why do you think that it would stop at a human level?
A space elevator essentially just needs certain advances in materials science. It's a big engineering project, but nothing more than that.
AI, on the other hand, is something that nobody in the world has any clue how to achieve. They're simply not comparable. We may very well see AI before a space elevator, but it will be because computer technology advances vastly more quickly than space technology.
And just for the record, I did not claim that FTL is impossible, merely that it's impossible according to accepted physical theory. And that statement is absolutely true.
What's your point? I said that the materials would become physically real within a decade, not that you'd see a space elevator any time soon. The simple fact of the matter is that a space elevator is "just an engineering problem" at this point. And while that still implies massive technological advances and massive amounts of work, that doesn't change the fact that we know the essentials of it. The same is manifestly not true of FTL, AI, human-equivalent robots, or world peace. To make the comparison is to be either ignorant or deliberately stupid.
Well, no. Modern materials are within a factor of 3 or so of what's required for a space elevator, and known materials with sufficient theoretical strength exist, it just needs to be figured out how to build them. It would not be surprising to have those materials move from theory to reality within a decade or so.
AI, human-indistinguishable androids, and world peace, on the other hand, are not things that people have any idea how to achieve. And FTL drives are prohibited by currently accepted physical theory. To compare a space elevator to any of those is either deliberately being stupid, or a result of profound ignorance about either space elevators or all the other things you mentioned.
A space elevator is certainly not going to be as easy as a Popular Science article makes it sound. But on the other hand it's not anywhere near as difficult as the pipe dreams you named.
And as a sub-subnote, this is approximately the cost of developing a complete conventional man-rated rocket launch system. I'm skeptical of the quoted price tag, but it would be extremely cheap if it could be achieved.
Personally I think providers should provide fewer, not more, services. I ought to be able to pay for a straight pipe to the internet and nothing else. I use usenet, but I never used Comcast's feed (I am a Comcast subscriber). I use e-mail, but I never use Comcast's e-mail servers, neither incoming nor outgoing. I host a web site, but certainly never use the web space they give me. Maybe if they just provided a plain old pipe, they could shave a few bucks off my bill.
No, I'm not going to whine. Why would I whine? I'm not one of these unprincipled morons who only thinks that other people should be hit with charges.
If I indeed use way more than you do, I should certainly pay more than you do. By all rights there ought to be a super-light-user subscription that gives you a 1GB cap and costs some ridiculously small amount, like $15/month. That there is not is just another example of how the system fails. It's foolish that you should have to pay the same $60/month for cable internet as I do.
Oh, but thanks for assuming I'm a jackass with no evidence. Good to know that blind people can be total jerks just like the rest of us.
If my neighbor's use is so legitimate then he can very well pay for it. If I use 10-100x less than him, why should I still have to pay the same amount of money? The Slashdot population's insistence that everyone pay exactly the same amount no matter how much they use makes no sense to me.
First rule of internal company dynamics: they are not nearly as well staffed, as organized, as thorough, or as competent as you think they are. They are in all probability just as quick and careless as you would be doing the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but that was stupid.
The world of 2008 is very different from the world of 1999.
DVDs replaced VHS tapes. People went from one large set of difficult-to-copy physical media to another. Not much changed.
In 2008, blu-ray is replacing DVD discs which a lot of people have gotten used to being able to copy discs to their computers, play back discs from any region, and in general do what they want. Even people who have no idea what DRM is like to import movies from different parts of the world and convert movies for their iPod. I have friends who are extremely computer illiterate but still have VLC installed to get around region problems.
Price is probably a much bigger issue. The cost for a blu-ray movie is just way too high. But I think it's incorrect to say that DVD uptake was fine with DRM so it can't be affecting blu-ray now.
What kind of logic is that? The fact that modern chemistry is the direct descendant of medieval alchemy doesn't change the fact that modern chemistry is a rigorous scientific field and medieval alchemy was a total load of crap.
Alternative medicine is essentially crap by definition. Because when alternative medicine works, regular medicine co-opts it and it ceases to become alternative. The parts that stay outside the mainstream are almost necessarily the parts that don't actually work.
Any field which tolerates the existence of the dreck you find in things like Homeopathy is fully deserving of as much ridicule as one can provide.
The range of human hearing is far less precise than you make it out to be. Pretty much any sample rate between 40-50kHz could be easily justified on physiological grounds, and possibly an even bigger range than that. (And DVD-A supports up to 192kHz!) Even just 44 is an awfully specific number just for that, let alone 44.1.
If I get fired because of an unfounded accusation by a single person, then that is the fault of the person who fired me without any reasonable cause, not the fault of the person making the unfounded accusation.
Free speech is not a right for minors to be lewd.
No, but it does include the right for minors to not be punished by the government for being lewd.
So if I understand you correctly, you think that AIs would exceed human intelligence but that this fact would be, at best, barely visible to the human population.
I'm not sure about that. There's a big difference between something like a stock market, which is incomprehensible merely because it's complex, and an entity which is incomprehensible because it's many times more intelligent than you are.
But you may be right. It's an interesting idea at the very least.
Are you assuming that the FTL drives also travel back in time? (This is not particularly absurd. The only way that relativity "prohibits" FTL is because an FTL drive that obeys relativity would also function as a time machine, and scientists hate violating causality.) Because otherwise it's hard to have people leave after you and arrive centuries before you when your trip only took a decade.
The problem is that they take direct talk for insults, and direct answers for patronizing. People come onto these lists with the attitude that they're smarter than everyone, yet somehow they still need help. If your question is wrong then it's in everybody's best interests if someone points out that the question is wrong and guides you on how to approach things better, and it's in nobody's best interests to take it at face value and be happy and polite while leading you both into darkness.
I don't believe that. If they have enough infrastructure to enforce a cap then they have enough infrastructure to encourage people to upgrade to a business class service, or to the next tier of whatever plans they offer. Plenty of other ISPs manage to do this just fine.
That is true but incomplete. There are both fixed costs and changing costs. I'm not saying that I should pay 10-100x less because I use 10-100x less, but it is perfectly reasonable that I should pay something less, because I use less of resources whose cost changes depending on use.
For some reason many people prefer to have polite, useless help than have someone who directly solves their problem without a bunch of extra words on the side. It boggles the mind, and it's a large part of why I significantly curtailed the time I spend helping people work through their problems. For some reason, a whole lot of people with questions get angry with people who ask things like "what are you actually trying to do here?" or who tell them that their whole approach is wrong, but are perfectly fine with people who go along answering questions politely and wrongly for dozens of messages.
I thought it was pretty clear from the context that we were talking about human-equivalent AI.
Funny, your description of what it will take to achieve AI matches my ideas, but I don't see it as being nearly as easy as you state. AI right now is a bunch of vague theories of the human mind, and is extremely distant from actually being able to produce anything.
A space elevator, on the other hand, is simply waiting on the right materials, and that's already getting pretty close at hand. If nanotubes of proper strength were to suddenly be produced in large quantity, and if the political will were present, a space elevator could be launched basically immediately.
Whereas AI is still at the stage of mapping large-scale areas of the human brain. Kind of like building a PC and still wondering exactly which component is the CPU and which component is the RAM. That's a hell of a long way from being able to fabricate a billion transistors on a chip. I see this as being a vastly more difficult problem. I also see it as being potentially solved sooner, but just because that field is moving vastly faster.
As for your singularity musings, that's interesting, but once human-equivalent AI happens what stops them from continuing to get smarter at an accelerating pace? You seem to assume that they get to human equivalence and then halt there. The whole idea of the singularity is that they just keep going, since we can probably design an AI that's a little bit smarter than a human, and then it could then design an AI that's smarter than that, and the whole thing just takes off. I don't know that this is what would actually happen, but why do you think that it would stop at a human level?
A space elevator essentially just needs certain advances in materials science. It's a big engineering project, but nothing more than that.
AI, on the other hand, is something that nobody in the world has any clue how to achieve. They're simply not comparable. We may very well see AI before a space elevator, but it will be because computer technology advances vastly more quickly than space technology.
And just for the record, I did not claim that FTL is impossible, merely that it's impossible according to accepted physical theory. And that statement is absolutely true.
What's your point? I said that the materials would become physically real within a decade, not that you'd see a space elevator any time soon. The simple fact of the matter is that a space elevator is "just an engineering problem" at this point. And while that still implies massive technological advances and massive amounts of work, that doesn't change the fact that we know the essentials of it. The same is manifestly not true of FTL, AI, human-equivalent robots, or world peace. To make the comparison is to be either ignorant or deliberately stupid.
I'll start... two months of war^H^H^Hoccupation^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmilitary presence in Iraq!
Well, no. Modern materials are within a factor of 3 or so of what's required for a space elevator, and known materials with sufficient theoretical strength exist, it just needs to be figured out how to build them. It would not be surprising to have those materials move from theory to reality within a decade or so.
AI, human-indistinguishable androids, and world peace, on the other hand, are not things that people have any idea how to achieve. And FTL drives are prohibited by currently accepted physical theory. To compare a space elevator to any of those is either deliberately being stupid, or a result of profound ignorance about either space elevators or all the other things you mentioned.
A space elevator is certainly not going to be as easy as a Popular Science article makes it sound. But on the other hand it's not anywhere near as difficult as the pipe dreams you named.
And as a sub-subnote, this is approximately the cost of developing a complete conventional man-rated rocket launch system. I'm skeptical of the quoted price tag, but it would be extremely cheap if it could be achieved.
Personally I think providers should provide fewer, not more, services. I ought to be able to pay for a straight pipe to the internet and nothing else. I use usenet, but I never used Comcast's feed (I am a Comcast subscriber). I use e-mail, but I never use Comcast's e-mail servers, neither incoming nor outgoing. I host a web site, but certainly never use the web space they give me. Maybe if they just provided a plain old pipe, they could shave a few bucks off my bill.
Each and every webforum that has an NNTP interface sucks for either one or the other.
But every web forum sucks as a web forum, this is a hard and fast rule. So wouldn't a non-suck NNTP side still be some improvement?
No, I'm not going to whine. Why would I whine? I'm not one of these unprincipled morons who only thinks that other people should be hit with charges.
If I indeed use way more than you do, I should certainly pay more than you do. By all rights there ought to be a super-light-user subscription that gives you a 1GB cap and costs some ridiculously small amount, like $15/month. That there is not is just another example of how the system fails. It's foolish that you should have to pay the same $60/month for cable internet as I do.
Oh, but thanks for assuming I'm a jackass with no evidence. Good to know that blind people can be total jerks just like the rest of us.
If my neighbor's use is so legitimate then he can very well pay for it. If I use 10-100x less than him, why should I still have to pay the same amount of money? The Slashdot population's insistence that everyone pay exactly the same amount no matter how much they use makes no sense to me.
Try downloading at your maximum rate 24/7 for an entire month, and see if there's still no cap. You may be unpleasantly surprised.
First rule of internal company dynamics: they are not nearly as well staffed, as organized, as thorough, or as competent as you think they are. They are in all probability just as quick and careless as you would be doing the same thing.