I think usenet is more efficient, because most of the traffic is confined to the link between you and your ISP, and it's not clogging up the internet proper. But yes, automated bittorrent would be my second choice. I think that much of the protocol would have to change, though. As it stands now, I think you need the hash of the whole file to make a tracker. The new system would require a dynamically updating tracker. Maybe there would be an empty tracker posted by someone with the intention of recording a show, and then hashes for the little parts would be added to the tracker as they get encoded. Totally feasible, I think, and probably worth writing. This would be an awesome application.
I don't think I'm alone in preferring big cups of very strong coffee (made with an espresso machine), but I'm not always interested in the huge shot of caffine that a large, dense cup of espresso gives me. I get jittery, post unwise things online, and generally have to pace for a while before the peak buzz wears off and I can get real work done. So if this stuff could be bred with some of the really tasty beans to produce a delicious coffee that has, say 20% of the caffine, that's the stuff I'd be buying. (As long as FairTrade growers grew it.)
I always had this fantasy that one could encode 1-min chunks of encoded video from TV and auto-post it to a newsgroup as soon as the encode of the minute is done. This would be especially great if there was a plugin for a video player that could download binary attachments from a newsgroup as they come in, so you can start watching before the last minutes are uploaded, and the player itself would fetch them. That would allow near-simultaneous world-wide access to important TV programs.
This would be especially great for sports, like various national soccer league games. Real soccer junkies want to watch, for example, Dutch league games, but they don't tend to be broadcast outside of the Netherlands. (Of course, I'm thinking about this because I'm trapped in the USA without pay-per-view during Euro 2004, and I'd love some prompt online posting.)
I think the joke taps into the old image of boy-Bush and Daddy Cheney (played here by the colonel) who makes all the decisions in the house and keeps the boy out of trouble and looking presentable. Maybe you're too anti-Bush to get it. It requires seeing Bush as somebody who's not inherently evil, only because he is borderline retarded. He just gets manipulated into doing evil, but all he really wants is to play with trains and baseball cards, and shoot up "bad guys."
Yeah, I agree. This is ugly. I just wrote the following angry message in the feedback box on their contacts form. I hope they write back.
I thought I was someone who would automatically support your causes you champion until I read the NYTimes editorial about your inexplicable support for paperless Diebold voting machines, and your willingness to take bribes for the disenfranchisement of women.
Surely you are aware that you are in the pocket of a sleazy company which is itself in the pocket of the Bush administration, and both will do their best to see to it that women die rather than receive an abortion or govenment support in raising children.
To lobby for a fundamentally corrupt and opaque voting system puts you at odds with those who spent their lives fighting to give women political representation. You are voluntarily laying it down.
If you have abandoned your fight for the fairness of our democracy, there is no need for your organization to continue. And if the soulless corpse of your PAC attaches like a leech to the belly of Diebold, you owe it to women to change your name to something which better describes your current motivations, something with the word "WHORES".
It's where the money goes. See, Diebold is trying to sell as many of their crappy paperless machines as possible.
After they saturate the market, they'll grab their foreheads and say "oh, these machines need to be replaced with ones that provide a paper trail" we must avoid recount debacles like 2000 and 2004... so we propose... like... OUR NEW MODEL! Buy buy buy! It's only tax money!
In the meanwhile, they might well steal another election for Bush, which might do wonders for their bottom line.
Fine, some new, low-priced graphics cards are slower than old, expensive ones (8500 is a good example). But my point is that this in not the case with the Sempron. It will DEFINITELY be faster than my 2500, probably faster even than a P4 3GHz. In other words, really, really fast. To say it can "only" do so-and-so is stupid. The truth is, we haven't yet released a consumer application that this thing can't do incredibly well. I'm just trying to keep things in perspective.
Wow, thank you! Since IANAL, is it fair to summarize what you said as: Virtual child porn is, right now, perfectly legal? Interesting. I bet this will be tested soon.
I expect lawyers to argue that virtual child porn actually protects children, since it dilutes the supply and so decreases the demand for the actual, exploitative child porn. I'd honestly feel weird about virtual child porn sites, but if I were a judge, I can't imagine finding anything unconstitutional about it. If we start banning artistic creations (books, drawings, etc) we wouldn't be setting a very good example for the world.
I wish I could mod in this thread, thanks for the good info!
I'm sorry, have you never read Plato on sex with young boys? BTW, he made a big comeback at the end of the 19th century.
What could possibly be your point in saying that people once disapproved of depicting sex with children (leaving aside that you're factually wrong)? Is it that we should be greatful for our leaders just because they're less bad than some of their predecessors long ago? Yes, we once gassed Jews in Germany, vivisected atheists in Spain, burned witches and used Christians for cat food. I like to think we can meet a higher moral standard now. Just because certain things were once punished doesn't mean they were, or are, wrong. So the relevance of what you wrote is totally puzzling to me.
The stuff I read about nano-self-duplication really makes me think it won't happen, at least not on the "bacteria" model of self-duplication. Arranging matter atom by atom, as Drexler imagines, is chemically impossible.
But I think there might be self-duplication on a larger scale. For example, I've been thinking up a scenario on which autonomous mining devices could self-duplicate on the planet Mercury. The "seed" robots would need an energy source, and automated factories that can make the following things: mining equipment, ore-separation equipment, solar cells, parts for more factories made from the ore, and factory-assembling robots. We are not far from being able to produce such things. Once the mining and the building is automated, it really can grow exponentially, provided that it doesn't run short on energy or mineable ore, both of which would be plentiful on Mercury. I imagine that some of the factories can later convert to manufacturing something useful to us, like space station parts.
The point is that you can have self-replication without voodoo physics. You just need to think on a larger scale.
But if Drexler thinks we can make useful nanobots only in dedicated macro-scale nanobot factories and not "in the wild", the next question is: Could nanobots so produced even manufacture a dedicated macro-scale nanobot factory? If so, we have self-replication yet again (on a much more reasonable model, seems to me).
Games don't need realistic physics engines - just consistent and psychologically predictable ones. Or, you can begin with realism and then tweak some parameters. For example, you can increase the strength of a human-looking arm far past that of human limitations, but then it would act simply as a super-strong arm in an ordinary-world-physics engine. In the game fiction you can make human skin much tougher than it actually is, and human organs much more resistant to damage, but apart from this not depart from real-world physics, specifically in matters of conservation of momentum and energy. I think this is how to make game physics look really cool.
Pretty nice! It looks like synthetic child porn is very close. Wasn't there some US law that was being considered about sexually explicit rendered pictures depicting children? Will there be laws that forbid you from drawing certain scenes? That would be weird, but we're living in weird times.
I'd wager that when this comes out, it will be faster than what's in your primary home computer. Sorry. I'm just sick of people talking about how this won't be "powerful" only because it's got a smaller cache. The fact there will be faster chips does not somehow decrease this thing's performance.
Just to put things in perspective: A car that's faster than 95% of all cars on the road couldn't be described as having "little actual performance." And this processor will be faster than 95% of all computers in use.
Hey, update your FUD. The last Athlon that had the burn-up problem you describe was the 1400MHz... that's right, way back when they actually used the freqency as the model number. Now they just shut down.
Since then, the Pentium4's have also been running considerably hotter than Athlons.
You're right... but by most people's standards, these will be screaming fast processors! My Athlon 2500 is almost a year old and still feels screaming fast to me. It is fast compared to any of the other computers I am around.
I think it's weird that when a budget processor comes out, people write it off as something that's OK if all you do is email and surf the net. Those very same snobs would be slobbering to have that processor just 18 months earlier. Have their needs really changed that much in those 18 months? Do they resign themselves only to email and web surfing once their computer is 18 months old?
My point is that this thing will be cheap and screaming fast, and do everything effortlessly except for playing games that don't yet exist. Yet I'm sure that slimy salesmen at CompUSA will say that you shouldn't buy one unless what you do is just email and internet. Bah! I bet you when this comes out, it will be faster than what 90% of CompUSA employees run at home!
If you hire a Ph.D. to just be a code monkey, your company will not make it far. The point is that Ph. D.'s don't do the same work as the coders. Some might do big-picture code architecturing, but most, I imagine, do research related to statistical testing.
Agreed, but I also think this functionality would best be separated out and made into an extension. It makes sense in this case.
And I think they should be aiming to repackage Thunderbird as a Firefox xpi extension, as a fork of the Thunderbird stand-alone app. That way, if you run both, you don't need to have Gecko in memory twice.
Great comment. I totally agree. I teach philosophy as well, and I just had a great semester with some impressive papers. No, I couldn't give my precious papers over to a machine application, because I know we don't have anything that could grade them. You're right, merely formal criteria won't do it.
But I'm really intrigued with the idea of helping to write a semantic evaluator for philosophy papers, one that could see common conceptual mistakes, misinterpretations, etc., and then comment on them. I almost do this myself. I stated printing feedback comments because very similar mistakes are repeated over and over, so I explain the problem once in detail, and paste it in wherever it applies. Now, if a computer could spot that sort of problem and paste in similar comments, we'd be getting somewhere. Yes, this will require huge advances in natural language processing, but they are just a matter of time.
Yeah, if the grade is just a number and no explanation, that's as good as useless pedagogically.
I don't think that automatized, high-school-level grading is an all-bad thing. We can call it unfair if we like, but as someone who grades a lot of stuff I can tell you that I'm nothing like fair. I don't always even know how to distinguish a B- from a C+, and I just go with my gut, which, as far as I can tell, is much like flipping an internal coin. If we looked at human grade assigners as an algorithm, we would find a whole lot of stuff wrong, even among those of us who try hard to be fair (cover author names, compare close grades for consistency, keep a constant mood, that sort of stuff).
But I think that if a computer grading program which is no worse than humans could be devised, it would be a great learning tool. A lot of people make it to college as borderline illiterates. I'm not kidding. I read a lot of their crap. That's because their HS teachers were too overworked to grade their writing, so they didn't assign much. If a computer program could auto-grade and give detailed comments on how to improve the writing, high school students could be assigned an essay per week, and really get the hang of writing well. Teachers could focus on teaching instead of tedium.
Sure, the first grading applications are going to make a few serious errors. This is the first stage of every application when a computer is asked to interpret rich data. Early voice recognition sucked. Now it sucks much less, and it will just keep getting better. Same with OCR, chess software, machine translation, etc. So the right debate to have is about when this will be good enough for school use, and not whether. I'm prepared to admit that the answer to the right question is "not yet" (I'm sure how deep the current problems go), but I fully support working on this system until it works right.
You're right that the safety issues are different in this case as opposed to a vaccine - where "uncrippling" means the vaccine gives you AIDS when you didn't have AIDS before. Yeah, it sounds like a promising strategy, and maybe they were thinking exactly what you wrote when they were confident mutations will not cause much of a problem. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
There are a lot of fundamentalist religious groups in the world who would love to see a "super-AIDS" wipe out the homosexuals and scare the rest of us into monogamy or abstinence. If manipulating the virus genome is this cheap, and information is widely available, it's only a matter of time before someone tries it. I don't know if there have been studies done on how to infect large groups of people with HIV. One idea: kidnap some hosts, infect them, and when the virus spread is at its max (not long after infection), smear their blood on bomb shrapnel, etc. Gruesome, but cheap - and it sure would scare people. Or imagine a "suicide gigalo", much like a suicide bomber. Yuck. But there are terrible people in the world; just look at the pictures in the news!
The article gives no reason for the scientists' confidence that mutations of HIV will not outflank this new virus. Plus, as we know, if this is an HIV-like virus itself, it's sure to mutate as well.
$200K is not enough to test that mutations will be stopped. And if HIV didn't mutate so tenaciously, we would have had a cure years ago.
Remember the "vaccine" based on a "crippled" HIV virus unable to cause the disease. Test it on monkeys and give it some time, and it turns out it "uncripples" itself by mutation once in a while. Ooops! Good thing that never made it to human trials! HIV sucks.
Just because a virus is artificial doesn't mean it's going to be controllable.
Wow, thank you for that excellent post. I am very pleased that this sort of idea has made some progress beyond the "idea stage". Though the target audience I am imagining is different from the one your project aimed at, many of the issues you mention would reappear in the project I describe. I saved the links and your email address, and if this goes further, you might hear from me.
It really is a shame that the licensing issues basically left this thing impossible to resurrect. The next time grant-committes throw money to a similar idea, I hope they realize the GPL will give them the most bang for the buck.
I re-read my post and I don't want to make it sound like we have a working group that is looking to do some grant-writing. Disclaimers: Actually, I'm still not done with my dissertation, so my/. name is a bit premature. And when my dissertation is finished, it will be in Philosophy (though I did Physics as an undergrad and had some awesome professors who made me "see" the principles - and this is what inspired me to do this multimedia book idea).
There is a project I'm involved with, which really is accreting material: we are reading classics of philosophy, ones that students are commonly assigned, and releasing the performances into the public domain in.mp3 format. So far we have all of Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Undertanding, and the website for the project is due to go live later this summer. My students have already given me very positive reviews about the readings. But this open-source textbook project could be a huge, potentially world-changing thing. So if anyone finds some grant money for innovative education projects, you don't have to credit me to get the project rolling.
Slashdot Mirror
I think usenet is more efficient, because most of the traffic is confined to the link between you and your ISP, and it's not clogging up the internet proper. But yes, automated bittorrent would be my second choice. I think that much of the protocol would have to change, though. As it stands now, I think you need the hash of the whole file to make a tracker. The new system would require a dynamically updating tracker. Maybe there would be an empty tracker posted by someone with the intention of recording a show, and then hashes for the little parts would be added to the tracker as they get encoded. Totally feasible, I think, and probably worth writing. This would be an awesome application.
I don't think I'm alone in preferring big cups of very strong coffee (made with an espresso machine), but I'm not always interested in the huge shot of caffine that a large, dense cup of espresso gives me. I get jittery, post unwise things online, and generally have to pace for a while before the peak buzz wears off and I can get real work done. So if this stuff could be bred with some of the really tasty beans to produce a delicious coffee that has, say 20% of the caffine, that's the stuff I'd be buying. (As long as FairTrade growers grew it.)
This would be especially great for sports, like various national soccer league games. Real soccer junkies want to watch, for example, Dutch league games, but they don't tend to be broadcast outside of the Netherlands. (Of course, I'm thinking about this because I'm trapped in the USA without pay-per-view during Euro 2004, and I'd love some prompt online posting.)
I think the joke taps into the old image of boy-Bush and Daddy Cheney (played here by the colonel) who makes all the decisions in the house and keeps the boy out of trouble and looking presentable. Maybe you're too anti-Bush to get it. It requires seeing Bush as somebody who's not inherently evil, only because he is borderline retarded. He just gets manipulated into doing evil, but all he really wants is to play with trains and baseball cards, and shoot up "bad guys."
$5.6 Million will buy about 45 minutes of Iraq occupation (do the match - Wolfowitz said $5B/month).
After they saturate the market, they'll grab their foreheads and say "oh, these machines need to be replaced with ones that provide a paper trail" we must avoid recount debacles like 2000 and 2004... so we propose... like... OUR NEW MODEL! Buy buy buy! It's only tax money!
In the meanwhile, they might well steal another election for Bush, which might do wonders for their bottom line.
Fine, some new, low-priced graphics cards are slower than old, expensive ones (8500 is a good example). But my point is that this in not the case with the Sempron. It will DEFINITELY be faster than my 2500, probably faster even than a P4 3GHz. In other words, really, really fast. To say it can "only" do so-and-so is stupid. The truth is, we haven't yet released a consumer application that this thing can't do incredibly well. I'm just trying to keep things in perspective.
I expect lawyers to argue that virtual child porn actually protects children, since it dilutes the supply and so decreases the demand for the actual, exploitative child porn. I'd honestly feel weird about virtual child porn sites, but if I were a judge, I can't imagine finding anything unconstitutional about it. If we start banning artistic creations (books, drawings, etc) we wouldn't be setting a very good example for the world.
I wish I could mod in this thread, thanks for the good info!
What could possibly be your point in saying that people once disapproved of depicting sex with children (leaving aside that you're factually wrong)? Is it that we should be greatful for our leaders just because they're less bad than some of their predecessors long ago? Yes, we once gassed Jews in Germany, vivisected atheists in Spain, burned witches and used Christians for cat food. I like to think we can meet a higher moral standard now. Just because certain things were once punished doesn't mean they were, or are, wrong. So the relevance of what you wrote is totally puzzling to me.
But I think there might be self-duplication on a larger scale. For example, I've been thinking up a scenario on which autonomous mining devices could self-duplicate on the planet Mercury. The "seed" robots would need an energy source, and automated factories that can make the following things: mining equipment, ore-separation equipment, solar cells, parts for more factories made from the ore, and factory-assembling robots. We are not far from being able to produce such things. Once the mining and the building is automated, it really can grow exponentially, provided that it doesn't run short on energy or mineable ore, both of which would be plentiful on Mercury. I imagine that some of the factories can later convert to manufacturing something useful to us, like space station parts.
The point is that you can have self-replication without voodoo physics. You just need to think on a larger scale.
But if Drexler thinks we can make useful nanobots only in dedicated macro-scale nanobot factories and not "in the wild", the next question is: Could nanobots so produced even manufacture a dedicated macro-scale nanobot factory? If so, we have self-replication yet again (on a much more reasonable model, seems to me).
Games don't need realistic physics engines - just consistent and psychologically predictable ones. Or, you can begin with realism and then tweak some parameters. For example, you can increase the strength of a human-looking arm far past that of human limitations, but then it would act simply as a super-strong arm in an ordinary-world-physics engine. In the game fiction you can make human skin much tougher than it actually is, and human organs much more resistant to damage, but apart from this not depart from real-world physics, specifically in matters of conservation of momentum and energy. I think this is how to make game physics look really cool.
Pretty nice! It looks like synthetic child porn is very close. Wasn't there some US law that was being considered about sexually explicit rendered pictures depicting children? Will there be laws that forbid you from drawing certain scenes? That would be weird, but we're living in weird times.
Just to put things in perspective: A car that's faster than 95% of all cars on the road couldn't be described as having "little actual performance." And this processor will be faster than 95% of all computers in use.
Since then, the Pentium4's have also been running considerably hotter than Athlons.
I think it's weird that when a budget processor comes out, people write it off as something that's OK if all you do is email and surf the net. Those very same snobs would be slobbering to have that processor just 18 months earlier. Have their needs really changed that much in those 18 months? Do they resign themselves only to email and web surfing once their computer is 18 months old?
My point is that this thing will be cheap and screaming fast, and do everything effortlessly except for playing games that don't yet exist. Yet I'm sure that slimy salesmen at CompUSA will say that you shouldn't buy one unless what you do is just email and internet. Bah! I bet you when this comes out, it will be faster than what 90% of CompUSA employees run at home!
Thank you!
If you hire a Ph.D. to just be a code monkey, your company will not make it far. The point is that Ph. D.'s don't do the same work as the coders. Some might do big-picture code architecturing, but most, I imagine, do research related to statistical testing.
And I think they should be aiming to repackage Thunderbird as a Firefox xpi extension, as a fork of the Thunderbird stand-alone app. That way, if you run both, you don't need to have Gecko in memory twice.
But I'm really intrigued with the idea of helping to write a semantic evaluator for philosophy papers, one that could see common conceptual mistakes, misinterpretations, etc., and then comment on them. I almost do this myself. I stated printing feedback comments because very similar mistakes are repeated over and over, so I explain the problem once in detail, and paste it in wherever it applies. Now, if a computer could spot that sort of problem and paste in similar comments, we'd be getting somewhere. Yes, this will require huge advances in natural language processing, but they are just a matter of time.
Yeah, if the grade is just a number and no explanation, that's as good as useless pedagogically.
But I think that if a computer grading program which is no worse than humans could be devised, it would be a great learning tool. A lot of people make it to college as borderline illiterates. I'm not kidding. I read a lot of their crap. That's because their HS teachers were too overworked to grade their writing, so they didn't assign much. If a computer program could auto-grade and give detailed comments on how to improve the writing, high school students could be assigned an essay per week, and really get the hang of writing well. Teachers could focus on teaching instead of tedium.
Sure, the first grading applications are going to make a few serious errors. This is the first stage of every application when a computer is asked to interpret rich data. Early voice recognition sucked. Now it sucks much less, and it will just keep getting better. Same with OCR, chess software, machine translation, etc. So the right debate to have is about when this will be good enough for school use, and not whether. I'm prepared to admit that the answer to the right question is "not yet" (I'm sure how deep the current problems go), but I fully support working on this system until it works right.
You're right that the safety issues are different in this case as opposed to a vaccine - where "uncrippling" means the vaccine gives you AIDS when you didn't have AIDS before. Yeah, it sounds like a promising strategy, and maybe they were thinking exactly what you wrote when they were confident mutations will not cause much of a problem. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
There are a lot of fundamentalist religious groups in the world who would love to see a "super-AIDS" wipe out the homosexuals and scare the rest of us into monogamy or abstinence. If manipulating the virus genome is this cheap, and information is widely available, it's only a matter of time before someone tries it. I don't know if there have been studies done on how to infect large groups of people with HIV. One idea: kidnap some hosts, infect them, and when the virus spread is at its max (not long after infection), smear their blood on bomb shrapnel, etc. Gruesome, but cheap - and it sure would scare people. Or imagine a "suicide gigalo", much like a suicide bomber. Yuck. But there are terrible people in the world; just look at the pictures in the news!
$200K is not enough to test that mutations will be stopped. And if HIV didn't mutate so tenaciously, we would have had a cure years ago.
Remember the "vaccine" based on a "crippled" HIV virus unable to cause the disease. Test it on monkeys and give it some time, and it turns out it "uncripples" itself by mutation once in a while. Ooops! Good thing that never made it to human trials! HIV sucks.
Just because a virus is artificial doesn't mean it's going to be controllable.
It really is a shame that the licensing issues basically left this thing impossible to resurrect. The next time grant-committes throw money to a similar idea, I hope they realize the GPL will give them the most bang for the buck.
I re-read my post and I don't want to make it sound like we have a working group that is looking to do some grant-writing. Disclaimers: Actually, I'm still not done with my dissertation, so my /. name is a bit premature. And when my dissertation is finished, it will be in Philosophy (though I did Physics as an undergrad and had some awesome professors who made me "see" the principles - and this is what inspired me to do this multimedia book idea).
There is a project I'm involved with, which really is accreting material: we are reading classics of philosophy, ones that students are commonly assigned, and releasing the performances into the public domain in .mp3 format. So far we have all of Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Undertanding, and the website for the project is due to go live later this summer. My students have already given me very positive reviews about the readings. But this open-source textbook project could be a huge, potentially world-changing thing. So if anyone finds some grant money for innovative education projects, you don't have to credit me to get the project rolling.