Re:One of the reasons the markets went down
on
Tech Stocks Tumble
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· Score: 1
Fed indicator of inflation:
Alan Greenspan goes to see his regular Saturday night callgirl. On the way he stops at the drugstore to pick up some condoms. He opens his wallet, only has a fiver, and the package he wants is $5.50. Hameesh, the clerk at the 7-eleven tells him, sorry, you cannot buy these condoms. Greenspan curses and swears, and thinks back, DAMN, these things were only four and a half bucks a week ago, what gives? Looks like I'm gonna have to raise interest rates again!
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
but brand DOES count. You're going to cheapbooks, but you're not aware of boofoobooks.com, which sells books at a level 20% under what you're paying. . .
It's all about mindshare. But that can be rather fluid, and that IS your real point.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Re:The reason why it *IS* relevent to slashdot..
on
Tech Stocks Tumble
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· Score: 1
Actually, Linux is a LOT like the stock market. It's all mindshare - to use an icky marketroid word.
The more Microsoft commercials Joanie Smith sees, the more likely she is to log onto eBay on her new iMac, and buy more shares, multiply by 10000 lemmings, and the price goes up. Hooray. Same effect goes for Ricky Martin albums. And, in some regard, Linux programmers.
Give those programmers something more interesting to work on, and I guarantee you, Linux will be dropped like the hottest potato in Idaho. (proof: how many programmers work on the "sexy" stuff, and how many work on the "uninteresting" parts of Linux?) Granted, I don't see anything remotely possible coming along to steal mindshare away from all the otherwise idle hackers out there, but then again, nobody saw YHOO coming too far before March of '96 either.
Someday, some other "thing" is going to come along, with similar opportunities, with more pizzazz, and more motivation, and all those guys are going to dump Linux, and code for this other project, and the tulip bulb phenomenon will cease. There will still be Linux die-hards out there, but eventually, they'll end up like the die-hard OS/2 users of today.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
If Microsoft was truly dedicated to providing a superior and secure product to their customers, as all their press releases seem to claim, then they owe it not only to their customers, but especially to their customers' customers, to not only FIRE these naughty "security-through-obscurity scofflaws", but to bring legal action against them as well. Hell, knowing how many government contracts MS has, I would even venture to say that these hoodlums might be up for TREASON. Shine up those firing-squad rifles boys!
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Yes, neuropsychologists can look back down the road, see where they've been, and state that they've travelled a long, long way.
On the other hand, I don't believe anybody REALLY knows how far away "the destination" is, therefore, since "know quite a bit" is a relative term, with nothing to compare to, I still say it's not jack squat. Being proud of walking one mile is one thing, until you realize you have about 30 trillion more miles to walk.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
oh, and college has nothing to do with marketing and making money off of hype.
I'm not saying that it's not a legitimate field of study, I'm just saying that the frankensteinian goal of creating an artificial human is totally nonscientific, and aimed only at titilation. The goal should be, making smarter machines; making better tools for mankind. The term "AI" carries too many flaky connotations anymore.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
encryption of communications is unlawful in France because it represents communication in a language other than French, the language of Balzac. The French are becoming very sensitive to the real danger of barbarian cultures and languages coming in and taking over, and replacing the French culture. This is why English-language music is forbidden from being broadcast in France.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I'm pretty far south, I didn't think I'd be able to see anything at all. What I did see was a very faint flickering of the whole southern sky, at about 10 minutes to midnight, and again at about 5 minutes to midnight. The second one had a definate greenish tint. Nothing like the auroras I saw about 10 years ago in Northern Wisconsin, rays and curtains of green and red light. That is a sight I shall never forget.
I'm in Arroyo Grande, CA, fairly rural, definately free of light pollution, and other pollution. About 250 miles south of San Francisco.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
>(And for what it's worth, I'm a Christian too, >but I believe that God's word and commands are > rational, logical, and >understandable, even if they sometimes require >faith.)
or, better put:
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." -Galileo Galilei
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Just because we can't come up with a well-specified and testable human capability that cannot be modelled by an artificial mind, doesn't mean that Hard AI is possible.
It just means that we don't know jack squat about human capability.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I'll argue that nobody has a frickin clue about how the human mind works. This is why I don't think we're going to end up with something identical to a human mind. But I do think that we'll eventually end up with something damn smart. Will it resemble the way humans think? It could probably emulate it. But God (or random Evolution, pick what you prefer) slapped the human machine together, and reverse engineering that is something I feel is going to be beyond our capabilities.
Will machine thinking be better than human thinking? Define "better"? and design your machine for specific tasks, and it will do better at those tasks. I already have a $2.00 calculator that does math faster and more accurately than I do.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
So you're saying (and I agree with you) that the end goal is not actually an engineering problem. It's a legal, or probably a political problem. At what point do we define a thinking machine as a legal individual? The equivalent of a human?
Simple answer. When IBM bribes enough congressmen. That's all it would take. I'm sure in theory, a coffee machine could be declared a responsible, independent individual with rights and stuff. Would it happen? No. Too many level-headed folks would object. There will be a point where machines will become so advanced, that enough level-headed folks will stroke their beards, and nod their heads quietly. Doesn't necessarily have to be what we might define as AI. There will be a "close enough" thinking machine someday. And judging from the success of Microsoft Windows, I'm sure commercial pressures will necessarily dictate that such a machine will be far short of the complexity of thought processes that go on inside a natural human mind.
Then again, you can make all the laws you want, but there really is only one law in the end; survival of the fittest. No matter how intelligent we make machines, if they threaten our survival (as they inevitably will), there will be no debate about rights or souls or any of that. It will be us or them.
We'll hope, of course that the designers of such machines will sufficiently understand the programming to prevent this kind of conflict. Like the folks who write Windows can prevent BSODs. ..
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
What's also true is that there may be MANY different methods of creativity. What is the goal here? To create a machine that can think it's way out of a paper bag? Write a sonnet? Bend a spoon?
I'm sure we'll have machines that can do all that someday - but if the stated goal is to duplicate a human mind, it is my firm belief that we will probably be able to emulate it, perhaps indistinguishably, but I doubt we will ever truly duplicate it. I'm sure enough snazzy code can be laid down to create UI's and heuristics, and the logic to back it up, so that a human interacting with the machine will be fooled, even armed with a sophisticated array of intelligence and psychological tests. But it won't be the same.
Will humans be surpassed? Replaced? Is that your real question?
I don't think it would even take very sophisticated AI to do that. Put something very stupid in a robust and versitile enough shell, and it could easily run afoul of humanity's survival mechanisms. Whether humanity's replacement will last forever is another question.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Why isn't this information in the FAQ? I'm getting pretty sick of seeing this topic (and resulting flame wars) come up over and over in/. threads. I'm not coming down on mr. AC here for posting the correct information, but the people who still use "virii", and the ones who flamed him in response (and the moderators who let those flames stay at score >=2).
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
it only needs to do one thing to beat IE. Replace it in AOL's package. If AOL were to use Netscape instead of IE, it would turn the whole game around, probably within 6 months, and you know it. Bill Gates probably doesn't give a rat's ass about the gummint. He has trouble sleeping at night over AOL, and the potential they have to snatch from him the world he was about to take over.
It's not interesting yet.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
You put your whole head in. You put your whole head out. You put your whole head in, and you shake it all about. You do the hokey-pokey and you turn yourself around. That's what it's all about.
The preceeding was a source-code message from me to you, instructions on what you're to do. The fact that it's instructions - whether the outcome of those instructions creates an unbreakable encrypted message (well, to the Centauri Ambassador, Londo, it was), or whether it's fun, or whether it induces banned behavior (I'm sure the baptists wouldn't like this sort of flagrant use of human body parts for mere amusement), is immaterial. Speech is speech. It is not good, it is not evil. It does not endanger anyone. The act of one human being hurting another human being has nothing to do with any speech they've heard, it has to do with a conscious act of will. This is what laws ideally need to address. The bad acts. Not the means by which bad acts are executed.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Slashdot Mirror
Fed indicator of inflation:
Alan Greenspan goes to see his regular Saturday night callgirl. On the way he stops at the drugstore to pick up some condoms. He opens his wallet, only has a fiver, and the package he wants is $5.50. Hameesh, the clerk at the 7-eleven tells him, sorry, you cannot buy these condoms. Greenspan curses and swears, and thinks back, DAMN, these things were only four and a half bucks a week ago, what gives? Looks like I'm gonna have to raise interest rates again!
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
but brand DOES count. You're going to cheapbooks, but you're not aware of boofoobooks.com, which sells books at a level 20% under what you're paying. . .
It's all about mindshare. But that can be rather fluid, and that IS your real point.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Actually, Linux is a LOT like the stock market. It's all mindshare - to use an icky marketroid word.
The more Microsoft commercials Joanie Smith sees, the more likely she is to log onto eBay on her new iMac, and buy more shares, multiply by 10000 lemmings, and the price goes up. Hooray. Same effect goes for Ricky Martin albums. And, in some regard, Linux programmers.
Give those programmers something more interesting to work on, and I guarantee you, Linux will be dropped like the hottest potato in Idaho. (proof: how many programmers work on the "sexy" stuff, and how many work on the "uninteresting" parts of Linux?) Granted, I don't see anything remotely possible coming along to steal mindshare away from all the otherwise idle hackers out there, but then again, nobody saw YHOO coming too far before March of '96 either.
Someday, some other "thing" is going to come along, with similar opportunities, with more pizzazz, and more motivation, and all those guys are going to dump Linux, and code for this other project, and the tulip bulb phenomenon will cease. There will still be Linux die-hards out there, but eventually, they'll end up like the die-hard OS/2 users of today.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
hm. But if one bought all of those like that, then one would be a dumbass, would one not?
Force me to buy schlocky VHS once, shame on you.
Force me to buy schlocky VHS twice, shame on me.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Well, I just bought my Apex DVD player with the secret menu on eBay, so bring on that Ep1 DVD, I'm ready for it - heh heh heh
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
oh yeah, and I also believe their MANAGERS should be held responsible too.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
If Microsoft was truly dedicated to providing a superior and secure product to their customers, as all their press releases seem to claim, then they owe it not only to their customers, but especially to their customers' customers, to not only FIRE these naughty "security-through-obscurity scofflaws", but to bring legal action against them as well. Hell, knowing how many government contracts MS has, I would even venture to say that these hoodlums might be up for TREASON. Shine up those firing-squad rifles boys!
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
i suck at math, and it takes me weeks to tune any batch file of > 100 lines.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Yes, neuropsychologists can look back down the road, see where they've been, and state that they've travelled a long, long way.
On the other hand, I don't believe anybody REALLY knows how far away "the destination" is, therefore, since "know quite a bit" is a relative term, with nothing to compare to, I still say it's not jack squat. Being proud of walking one mile is one thing, until you realize you have about 30 trillion more miles to walk.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
oh, and college has nothing to do with marketing and making money off of hype.
I'm not saying that it's not a legitimate field of study, I'm just saying that the frankensteinian goal of creating an artificial human is totally nonscientific, and aimed only at titilation. The goal should be, making smarter machines; making better tools for mankind. The term "AI" carries too many flaky connotations anymore.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
encryption of communications is unlawful in France because it represents communication in a language other than French, the language of Balzac. The French are becoming very sensitive to the real danger of barbarian cultures and languages coming in and taking over, and replacing the French culture. This is why English-language music is forbidden from being broadcast in France.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I'm pretty far south, I didn't think I'd be able to see anything at all. What I did see was a very faint flickering of the whole southern sky, at about 10 minutes to midnight, and again at about 5 minutes to midnight. The second one had a definate greenish tint. Nothing like the auroras I saw about 10 years ago in Northern Wisconsin, rays and curtains of green and red light. That is a sight I shall never forget.
I'm in Arroyo Grande, CA, fairly rural, definately free of light pollution, and other pollution. About 250 miles south of San Francisco.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
>(And for what it's worth, I'm a Christian too, >but I believe that God's word and commands are
> rational, logical, and >understandable, even if they sometimes require >faith.)
or, better put:
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."
-Galileo Galilei
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
no, the term "AI" is now strictly a video-game (and sci-fi book/movie) marketing term.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Just because we can't come up with a well-specified and testable human capability that cannot be modelled by an artificial mind, doesn't mean that Hard AI is possible.
It just means that we don't know jack squat about human capability.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
I'll argue that nobody has a frickin clue about how the human mind works. This is why I don't think we're going to end up with something identical to a human mind. But I do think that we'll eventually end up with something damn smart. Will it resemble the way humans think? It could probably emulate it. But God (or random Evolution, pick what you prefer) slapped the human machine together, and reverse engineering that is something I feel is going to be beyond our capabilities.
Will machine thinking be better than human thinking? Define "better"? and design your machine for specific tasks, and it will do better at those tasks. I already have a $2.00 calculator that does math faster and more accurately than I do.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
So you're saying (and I agree with you) that the end goal is not actually an engineering problem. It's a legal, or probably a political problem. At what point do we define a thinking machine as a legal individual? The equivalent of a human?
.
Simple answer. When IBM bribes enough congressmen.
That's all it would take. I'm sure in theory, a coffee machine could be declared a responsible, independent individual with rights and stuff. Would it happen? No. Too many level-headed folks would object. There will be a point where machines will become so advanced, that enough level-headed folks will stroke their beards, and nod their heads quietly. Doesn't necessarily have to be what we might define as AI. There will be a "close enough" thinking machine someday. And judging from the success of Microsoft Windows, I'm sure commercial pressures will necessarily dictate that such a machine will be far short of the complexity of thought processes that go on inside a natural human mind.
Then again, you can make all the laws you want, but there really is only one law in the end; survival of the fittest. No matter how intelligent we make machines, if they threaten our survival (as they inevitably will), there will be no debate about rights or souls or any of that. It will be us or them.
We'll hope, of course that the designers of such machines will sufficiently understand the programming to prevent this kind of conflict. Like the folks who write Windows can prevent BSODs. .
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
What's also true is that there may be MANY different methods of creativity. What is the goal here? To create a machine that can think it's way out of a paper bag? Write a sonnet? Bend a spoon?
I'm sure we'll have machines that can do all that someday - but if the stated goal is to duplicate a human mind, it is my firm belief that we will probably be able to emulate it, perhaps indistinguishably, but I doubt we will ever truly duplicate it. I'm sure enough snazzy code can be laid down to create UI's and heuristics, and the logic to back it up, so that a human interacting with the machine will be fooled, even armed with a sophisticated array of intelligence and psychological tests. But it won't be the same.
Will humans be surpassed?
Replaced?
Is that your real question?
I don't think it would even take very sophisticated AI to do that. Put something very stupid in a robust and versitile enough shell, and it could easily run afoul of humanity's survival mechanisms. Whether humanity's replacement will last forever is another question.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
There's nothing to fear but fire itself.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
Why isn't this information in the FAQ? I'm getting pretty sick of seeing this topic (and resulting flame wars) come up over and over in /. threads. I'm not coming down on mr. AC here for posting the correct information, but the people who still use "virii", and the ones who flamed him in response (and the moderators who let those flames stay at score >=2).
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
it only needs to do one thing to beat IE. Replace it in AOL's package. If AOL were to use Netscape instead of IE, it would turn the whole game around, probably within 6 months, and you know it. Bill Gates probably doesn't give a rat's ass about the gummint. He has trouble sleeping at night over AOL, and the potential they have to snatch from him the world he was about to take over.
It's not interesting yet.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
come on. Netrape corporation was pulling that FartDownload crap long before they were flushed down the toilet into the AOL septic tank.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
You put your whole head in.
You put your whole head out.
You put your whole head in,
and you shake it all about.
You do the hokey-pokey and you turn yourself around.
That's what it's all about.
The preceeding was a source-code message from me to you, instructions on what you're to do.
The fact that it's instructions - whether the outcome of those instructions creates an unbreakable encrypted message (well, to the Centauri Ambassador, Londo, it was), or whether it's fun, or whether it induces banned behavior (I'm sure the baptists wouldn't like this sort of flagrant use of human body parts for mere amusement), is immaterial. Speech is speech. It is not good, it is not evil. It does not endanger anyone. The act of one human being hurting another human being has nothing to do with any speech they've heard, it has to do with a conscious act of will. This is what laws ideally need to address. The bad acts. Not the means by which bad acts are executed.
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
To quote Batman:
"Crime doesn't pay"
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
why,oog? Why must it?
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".