To each his own, of course. For me, I wasn't bothered at all by any pretentiousness on the author's part regarding his narrative voice, because I was damned impressed with his narrative voice.
The "wouldn't it be cool if" tone is probably because that's exactly how the story got started. There was a thread on soc.history.what-if which sort of covered the basic ideas in the story, and Stross saw it and ran with it. (The discussion was split into a couple of different threads, but you can get to the biggest one on Google Groups here.
I've run into far too many people who think my favorite books are crap to be annoyed or even surprised by it. People just like different things. Personally, I read this story (for the second time, what was I thinking?) right before bed one night, and woke up at something like 3AM sweating and with my heart pounding. If it didn't do it for you, them's the breaks.
Re:What the fuck happened in the end?
on
Singularity Sky
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My interpretation is to take everything literally. So, Roger and a good chunk of the upper crust of the US government escape to a secret facility on another planet. Everyone left behind is nuked (if they're lucky) or eaten by Cthulhu, where they live forever as he explores all the possible endings to their lives. Delightful.
This story is one of the best I've ever read, and it's the only work of fiction I have ever encountered, on paper or on the screen, that actually managed to give me nightmares. Go read it if you haven't!
Being a jackass, even to a police officer, is not and never should be a crime. As much I would enjoy seeing certain people I've run across get fined or put away for being such jerks or idiots, being jailed or fined for mouthing off is a defining characteristic of a non-free police state.
It doesn't how stupid, uncooperative, or non-physically abusive this guy was being, and it doesn't weaken his position at all.
If that is true, then they and the people who believe them are either willfully misrepresenting the situation or they are morons. Nobody died of terrorism in the US in the two years before The Unpleasantness Of One September Tuesday Morning either.
But of course you knew that. I don't see any reason to be careful, though.
I didn't think I was being an asshole, it was just clarification. I don't know the depth of your misunderstanding, so I had to explain it all. No offense intended. I just get annoyed when people take what I say and blow it up into something I didn't say.
Please notice the difference between these two statements:
1) Every issue that is overblown has been used to take my rights away. 2) Every issue that has been used to take my rights away is overblown.
Do you see the difference? I said #2. In other words, there exist things which are overblown and aren't used to take away my rights (like AIDS). There do not exist things which are used to take away my rights and are not overblown.
Re:Why such a fat book?
on
Practical C++
·
· Score: 1
Larger books are a result of using a language that is roughly sixteen zillion (yes, that is a technical term) times more complicated than Scheme or Algol-60.
Re:The C++ Programming Language
on
Practical C++
·
· Score: 1
That doesn't make any sense at all.
Unless somebody royally screwed up (and I did have a textbook like this once), the typos will only be in print. If there is a companion CD, the CD should have the correct version of the code.
In that case, the newbie will be typing this code into the computer. He will make mistakes during this process. You don't need to put potentially destructive typos in the book, the human factor will take care of it! Better yet, they'll compile, it won't work, then they can go back and compare with the book and find their mistake. They still have the learning process from seeing the error message and the fix, but without the hair part. Wonderful!
No, terrorism is the most overblown out of proportion issue in the US.
Imagine, total invasion of privacy, random searches, mandatory ID checks, and a large hit on our right to travel, all to counteract something that has killed about 3,000 people in the US in the past five or so years, and has killed exactly zero people in the US in the past two years.
Drunk driving comes in pretty badly, though, I must admit. As does child pornography, AIDS, and lots of other things. Come to think of it, every single issue that people have used as an excuse to eliminate our rights is completely overblown. What an incredible coincidence.
Economics is not a zero-sum game. Everybody who talks like it is needs to reinvestigate the matter, because such discussions are basically pointless ramblings with no connection to reality.
You haven't addressed my fundamental objection, which is that the definition of AI changes.
You stated two things. First, a definition of AI today. Second, that nothing Spirit does fits this definition.
I have no argument with this.
My complaint is that what Spirit is doing would have been considered AI twenty years ago. And twenty years from now, when we have a super-rover on Mars that is doing some of the stuff you quote, the definition of AI will have changed yet again so that it will only include things that computers can't do.
Again, is there an example of something that would be considered an AI technique that is in actual practical use today? I submit that there will never be a technique that is simultaneously considered to be AI and in actual practical use until we manage to create a full human-equivalent intelligence.
"tasks commonly associated with the higher intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience...."
What exactly is a 'higher' process? Obvious! It's something a human can do but a computer can't. The trouble is that this is a moving target.
Ok, so Spirit's fancy image-processing stuff isn't AI by today's standards. But I bet if you'd asked in 1980, people would have considered it AI. I'll also bet that once computers are able to generalize or learn from past experience, that will pass from the domain of AI and into the realm of ho-hum everyday. There are tons of AI techniques that are less than what a complete human can do, but I think that nobody will really recognize AI in a computer process until that computer can pass, say, a Turing Test, when it's impossible to deny.
Can you name an example of an AI technique that is used in a production system and not just a fancy research toy? It looks to me that everything which is considered as "AI" turns into "blah, boring" as soon as it becomes good enough to work in real situations.
That sure sounds like the classic definition of AI as "anything a computer can't do yet". At one point, translation of high-level statements into machine code was considered AI. Then Fortran came along and it's not AI, it's solved, see? Decent speaker-dependent voice recognition was once AI, now it's something you can buy in the store and nobody considers it to be AI.
All the stuff you describe sounds an awful lot like AI to me. Just because it's actually doable with known techniques shouldn't disqualify it.
The problem is that as solid-state storage becomes smaller and cheaper, hard drives do the same. You can get 1GB of flash for not too much money these days, and you could easily use it to replace your hard drive, but nobody does it. One reason is that flash doesn't have an infinite lifespan, and it doesn't like tons of writes, of course. But the main reason is that for the same amount of money, you can get a moving-parts failure-prone hard drive that's eighty times bigger. I'm not sure which technology is growing faster, but even if flash is catching up, it's going to be quite a long time before it's competitive with hard drives.
Oh, and I already have a 1" thick laptop with low power consumption that is both durable and powerful.:-) (Although the intermittent failures it's been having lately have made me wonder just how well it actually survived the drop it had two summers ago.)
There's no need to seed or download a torrent to get IPs from the tracker, it's totally separate. A normal BT client will get IPs from the tracker, and provide its own IP, then use that information to make connections and start downloading and uploading. It is trivial to connect to the tracker and ask it for the IP of everybody currently on that torrent, along with their status (seeding, downloading, how much progress). This is why using BT for illegal activity is extremely boneheaded. I doubt if the speed jump was related to MS's tracking, unless they were being stupid.
Would you accept it if you bought a car and one of the cylinders doesn't work? No? Then why are we supposed to accept missing pixels on lcd's?
Because only selling 100% perfect LCDs would drive their price up enormously. If there were a market for guaranteed perfect LCDs at a much higher price, then somebody would already be selling them. The fact that nobody is selling them is proof that nobody is willing to pay X times more money for one.
Would accept a book with 30% of the words mispelled but they are gonna fix it anyday now? Then why do you accept buggy software?
Likewise, because bug-free software is costly software. If there were a market for software that was bug-free but cost 10 times as much as buggy software, companies would be selling it.
Cars and books aren't perfect either. Would you accept a 500,000 word book where two of the words are misspelled? (And any book of this length is going to have some misspellings, guaranteed.) So why not a 500,000-pixel display with a couple of bad pixels?
The problem is that it currently takes more fossil fuels to create corn than you could get from that corn in the form of fuel. Unless that changes, it's a net-loss situation even if everything uses ethanol fuel.
You know, I had this exact same question six months ago.
So how did I answer it? I went to the local department store, hit the electronics section, and looked for MP3 CD players. I looked until I found one that said it read CD-R and CD-RW and recognized directories, then I looked for the cheapest one with this feature set. Total cost, $40, and it works great. Is that really so hard?
I'm basing this on vague memories from reading through BT's tech info a while ago, so buyer beware....
There is no ratio. BT keeps a certain number of active upload connections going at any given time. It's always looking out for new upload connections to open, but there's a maximum, so they tend to shift around. One of the major criteria for deciding where to start uploading is how much each node has uploaded itself. So you get into a nice balancing situation where the nodes that upload the most also download the most, because they are preferred by the other peers.
This means that if there are a ton of seeders and few downloaders, the network isn't going to limit its speed just because the downloaders aren't sharing. A seed will go all-out even if all of the peers it can connect to aren't uploading. Your ratio is only a problem if there are enough people out there with a better ratio than you who can get the big uploaders to connect to them instead of you.
There's a difference between not intending something and not forseeing something. It's entirely possible he knew what people would do with it but still wasn't aiming for that market.
You're right, it's 12GB, my bad. I was going on my experience working with DV footage on a teeny 6GB partition, and I remembered that it held around 20 minutes of stuff, but I forgot about the other junk on that partition and the fact that editing creates more files.
The price is what I actually paid on a couple of separate occasions. One was TDK tapes from Amazon, another was a box of tapes I got in China, which shouldn't count but surprisingly the price was basically the same. It helps to buy several at once, of course; you'd never get away with $4 a tape if you just bought one.
The optics on cheap DV cameras are enough to keep me happy, but all I film are family events and things like that. I'll make no claim to professional quality. But even with a high-end expensive professional camera, I can't see flash taking over any time soon. In a few years you'll probably be able to buy enough flash for an hour of video for less than the cost of the high-end camera, but that's still a lot more expensive than tape. Even if the cost of media is quite a bit less than the cost of the camera, you're limited to an hour of shooting in the field. With tapes, you just pop the old one out, pop the new one in, and keep going, at an insignificant cost.
I'd love to see flash take over in this area, or any other kind of random-access media, but I don't see it happening any time soon.
The T1 is totally obsolete as a unit of "wow that's a lot of bandwidth". It offers 1.5MBps which is often beat by common DSL and cable services. I suggest talking about T3s in the future, at least until we can get that much bandwidth into the home and consumer prices.
Slashdot Mirror
To each his own, of course. For me, I wasn't bothered at all by any pretentiousness on the author's part regarding his narrative voice, because I was damned impressed with his narrative voice.
The "wouldn't it be cool if" tone is probably because that's exactly how the story got started. There was a thread on soc.history.what-if which sort of covered the basic ideas in the story, and Stross saw it and ran with it. (The discussion was split into a couple of different threads, but you can get to the biggest one on Google Groups here.
I've run into far too many people who think my favorite books are crap to be annoyed or even surprised by it. People just like different things. Personally, I read this story (for the second time, what was I thinking?) right before bed one night, and woke up at something like 3AM sweating and with my heart pounding. If it didn't do it for you, them's the breaks.
My interpretation is to take everything literally. So, Roger and a good chunk of the upper crust of the US government escape to a secret facility on another planet. Everyone left behind is nuked (if they're lucky) or eaten by Cthulhu, where they live forever as he explores all the possible endings to their lives. Delightful.
If anybody is interested in seeing a glimpse of what this author can produce, his short story "A Colder War" is available online for free at http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.ht m.
This story is one of the best I've ever read, and it's the only work of fiction I have ever encountered, on paper or on the screen, that actually managed to give me nightmares. Go read it if you haven't!
"Vision correction" means anything that corrects your vision, such as glasses, contact lenses, or horrible invasive surgery.
Therefore, the beginning of your post doesn't make a whole lot of sense....
Ho
ly
FUCK.
Are you serious?
Being a jackass, even to a police officer, is not and never should be a crime. As much I would enjoy seeing certain people I've run across get fined or put away for being such jerks or idiots, being jailed or fined for mouthing off is a defining characteristic of a non-free police state.
It doesn't how stupid, uncooperative, or non-physically abusive this guy was being, and it doesn't weaken his position at all.
If that is true, then they and the people who believe them are either willfully misrepresenting the situation or they are morons. Nobody died of terrorism in the US in the two years before The Unpleasantness Of One September Tuesday Morning either.
But of course you knew that. I don't see any reason to be careful, though.
I didn't think I was being an asshole, it was just clarification. I don't know the depth of your misunderstanding, so I had to explain it all. No offense intended. I just get annoyed when people take what I say and blow it up into something I didn't say.
Please notice the difference between these two statements:
1) Every issue that is overblown has been used to take my rights away.
2) Every issue that has been used to take my rights away is overblown.
Do you see the difference? I said #2. In other words, there exist things which are overblown and aren't used to take away my rights (like AIDS). There do not exist things which are used to take away my rights and are not overblown.
Larger books are a result of using a language that is roughly sixteen zillion (yes, that is a technical term) times more complicated than Scheme or Algol-60.
That doesn't make any sense at all.
Unless somebody royally screwed up (and I did have a textbook like this once), the typos will only be in print. If there is a companion CD, the CD should have the correct version of the code.
In that case, the newbie will be typing this code into the computer. He will make mistakes during this process. You don't need to put potentially destructive typos in the book, the human factor will take care of it! Better yet, they'll compile, it won't work, then they can go back and compare with the book and find their mistake. They still have the learning process from seeing the error message and the fix, but without the hair part. Wonderful!
No, terrorism is the most overblown out of proportion issue in the US.
Imagine, total invasion of privacy, random searches, mandatory ID checks, and a large hit on our right to travel, all to counteract something that has killed about 3,000 people in the US in the past five or so years, and has killed exactly zero people in the US in the past two years.
Drunk driving comes in pretty badly, though, I must admit. As does child pornography, AIDS, and lots of other things. Come to think of it, every single issue that people have used as an excuse to eliminate our rights is completely overblown. What an incredible coincidence.
Economics is not a zero-sum game. Everybody who talks like it is needs to reinvestigate the matter, because such discussions are basically pointless ramblings with no connection to reality.
You haven't addressed my fundamental objection, which is that the definition of AI changes.
You stated two things. First, a definition of AI today. Second, that nothing Spirit does fits this definition.
I have no argument with this.
My complaint is that what Spirit is doing would have been considered AI twenty years ago. And twenty years from now, when we have a super-rover on Mars that is doing some of the stuff you quote, the definition of AI will have changed yet again so that it will only include things that computers can't do.
Again, is there an example of something that would be considered an AI technique that is in actual practical use today? I submit that there will never be a technique that is simultaneously considered to be AI and in actual practical use until we manage to create a full human-equivalent intelligence.
That definition agrees with what I said, IMO:
"tasks commonly associated with the higher intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience...."
What exactly is a 'higher' process? Obvious! It's something a human can do but a computer can't. The trouble is that this is a moving target.
Ok, so Spirit's fancy image-processing stuff isn't AI by today's standards. But I bet if you'd asked in 1980, people would have considered it AI. I'll also bet that once computers are able to generalize or learn from past experience, that will pass from the domain of AI and into the realm of ho-hum everyday. There are tons of AI techniques that are less than what a complete human can do, but I think that nobody will really recognize AI in a computer process until that computer can pass, say, a Turing Test, when it's impossible to deny.
Can you name an example of an AI technique that is used in a production system and not just a fancy research toy? It looks to me that everything which is considered as "AI" turns into "blah, boring" as soon as it becomes good enough to work in real situations.
That sure sounds like the classic definition of AI as "anything a computer can't do yet". At one point, translation of high-level statements into machine code was considered AI. Then Fortran came along and it's not AI, it's solved, see? Decent speaker-dependent voice recognition was once AI, now it's something you can buy in the store and nobody considers it to be AI.
All the stuff you describe sounds an awful lot like AI to me. Just because it's actually doable with known techniques shouldn't disqualify it.
The problem is that as solid-state storage becomes smaller and cheaper, hard drives do the same. You can get 1GB of flash for not too much money these days, and you could easily use it to replace your hard drive, but nobody does it. One reason is that flash doesn't have an infinite lifespan, and it doesn't like tons of writes, of course. But the main reason is that for the same amount of money, you can get a moving-parts failure-prone hard drive that's eighty times bigger. I'm not sure which technology is growing faster, but even if flash is catching up, it's going to be quite a long time before it's competitive with hard drives.
:-) (Although the intermittent failures it's been having lately have made me wonder just how well it actually survived the drop it had two summers ago.)
Oh, and I already have a 1" thick laptop with low power consumption that is both durable and powerful.
There's no need to seed or download a torrent to get IPs from the tracker, it's totally separate. A normal BT client will get IPs from the tracker, and provide its own IP, then use that information to make connections and start downloading and uploading. It is trivial to connect to the tracker and ask it for the IP of everybody currently on that torrent, along with their status (seeding, downloading, how much progress). This is why using BT for illegal activity is extremely boneheaded. I doubt if the speed jump was related to MS's tracking, unless they were being stupid.
Would you accept it if you bought a car and one of the cylinders doesn't work? No? Then why are we supposed to accept missing pixels on lcd's?
Because only selling 100% perfect LCDs would drive their price up enormously. If there were a market for guaranteed perfect LCDs at a much higher price, then somebody would already be selling them. The fact that nobody is selling them is proof that nobody is willing to pay X times more money for one.
Would accept a book with 30% of the words mispelled but they are gonna fix it anyday now? Then why do you accept buggy software?
Likewise, because bug-free software is costly software. If there were a market for software that was bug-free but cost 10 times as much as buggy software, companies would be selling it.
Cars and books aren't perfect either. Would you accept a 500,000 word book where two of the words are misspelled? (And any book of this length is going to have some misspellings, guaranteed.) So why not a 500,000-pixel display with a couple of bad pixels?
The problem is that it currently takes more fossil fuels to create corn than you could get from that corn in the form of fuel. Unless that changes, it's a net-loss situation even if everything uses ethanol fuel.
You know, I had this exact same question six months ago.
So how did I answer it? I went to the local department store, hit the electronics section, and looked for MP3 CD players. I looked until I found one that said it read CD-R and CD-RW and recognized directories, then I looked for the cheapest one with this feature set. Total cost, $40, and it works great. Is that really so hard?
It works ok for me (and the server is on the other side of the atlantic, so this isn't as silly as it sounds). Try again?
I'm basing this on vague memories from reading through BT's tech info a while ago, so buyer beware....
There is no ratio. BT keeps a certain number of active upload connections going at any given time. It's always looking out for new upload connections to open, but there's a maximum, so they tend to shift around. One of the major criteria for deciding where to start uploading is how much each node has uploaded itself. So you get into a nice balancing situation where the nodes that upload the most also download the most, because they are preferred by the other peers.
This means that if there are a ton of seeders and few downloaders, the network isn't going to limit its speed just because the downloaders aren't sharing. A seed will go all-out even if all of the peers it can connect to aren't uploading. Your ratio is only a problem if there are enough people out there with a better ratio than you who can get the big uploaders to connect to them instead of you.
There's a difference between not intending something and not forseeing something. It's entirely possible he knew what people would do with it but still wasn't aiming for that market.
You're right, it's 12GB, my bad. I was going on my experience working with DV footage on a teeny 6GB partition, and I remembered that it held around 20 minutes of stuff, but I forgot about the other junk on that partition and the fact that editing creates more files.
The price is what I actually paid on a couple of separate occasions. One was TDK tapes from Amazon, another was a box of tapes I got in China, which shouldn't count but surprisingly the price was basically the same. It helps to buy several at once, of course; you'd never get away with $4 a tape if you just bought one.
The optics on cheap DV cameras are enough to keep me happy, but all I film are family events and things like that. I'll make no claim to professional quality. But even with a high-end expensive professional camera, I can't see flash taking over any time soon. In a few years you'll probably be able to buy enough flash for an hour of video for less than the cost of the high-end camera, but that's still a lot more expensive than tape. Even if the cost of media is quite a bit less than the cost of the camera, you're limited to an hour of shooting in the field. With tapes, you just pop the old one out, pop the new one in, and keep going, at an insignificant cost.
I'd love to see flash take over in this area, or any other kind of random-access media, but I don't see it happening any time soon.
This is stupid and OT, but I can't resist.
The T1 is totally obsolete as a unit of "wow that's a lot of bandwidth". It offers 1.5MBps which is often beat by common DSL and cable services. I suggest talking about T3s in the future, at least until we can get that much bandwidth into the home and consumer prices.