IIRC, at the time IBM sold the laptop division, the speculation was that this was to give them an entree into the China market, not because it wasn't profitable enough. (OTOH, if it had been extremely profitable, then IBM would definitely have held onto it more strongly.)
Well, I don't use GMail, but if I ever get things like that, I probably just assume that it's spam, or maybe phishing, and feed it to my junk filter. I've got to admit I never read the stuff carefully. (I don't even read the stuff actually adressed to me carefully. There's FAR too much.)
If that were true, then non-Euclidean geometries would have had a much earlier start. It wasn't. Nobody in the West understood Russian, so Lobachevsky's work was ignored.
Sorry, my mistake. He wasn't even contacted, so he also wasn't arrested. Doesn't make me any happier with the company, however. And doesn't make me any more likely to report a vulnerability.
You need to look up the definition of arrested. He was arrested, but not booked or charged. The company tried to have him jailed. The cops didn't cooperate, this time.
So he was arreseted, but not charged. The company, however, tried to have him prosecuted. The message is nearly the same, modified only by "not all cops are brutal idiots", which is true enough. But all too many of them are.
What response that includes integrity do you recommend that has not been reported to be harshly punished?
If you want to be a martyr there are plenty of opportunities. Most martyrs, however, don't receive ANY benefit in this life. Do you have a religious faith that promises that revealing computer vulnerabilities responsibly will be rewarded in the next? (A Hindu might have such a belief, I can't think of any other off-hand. A Buddhist might say "right livlihood" and "all is suffering", and not care, but I don't think any Buddhist that dedicated would be hacking in the first place.)
It is extremely unfortunate, but the way things are heading that's becoming less of a joke.
It is not in my nature to trust strong authority, and evidence is repeatedly showin that my nature is correct. OTOH, anarchy is an unstable condition, and tends to quickly devolve into islands of strong authority that are at war with each other. That's probably worse. What is needed is a modified federal system, where the federal government has NO power over the citizens, but only over it's constituent governments. Perhaps that would work better. Or perhaps governments run by humans are inherently untrustworthy.
FWIW, I propose, as a less drastic measure, replacing elections by a lottery. That way the candidates can't be corrupted during the process of their selection.
The thing is, I've seen use cases for the smartphone that make sense for me. For a tablet I've seen nothing. So why would I want a compromise?
FWIW, a few years ago I saw an variation that I might consider resonable. It was a desktop dock for a tablet. If I had a use for a tablet, I might consider that reasonable. It gives you a keyboard and a large disk store for when you're at the dock, and portability for when you aren't. I just don't have any uses for the tablet that don't involve typing, and that makes a tablet a very poor choice. So what I might find reasonable would be a dock that a smartphone fit into. The times when I need to access the smartphone with a large screen and a keyboard (and a larger disk) are infrequent, but I can see that they would exist. (As it is I'm planning on using a usb cable in those circumstances. If I get a smartphone, which isn't yet decided. I may just get a "smarter" phone. It is, however, time to change.)
Tablets don't have decent keyboards. Smart phone additionally have screens that are too small.
There are a lot of use cases where tablets and smartphones are sufficient. There's a huge number where they aren't. But people will use what they have on hand even if it's poorly adapted to the job.
FWIW, I'm considering getting a smartphone. It has a use-case that makes sense. I can't see ANY case for a tablet...except for things like warehouse worker, or inventory control. The ergonomics of keyboards are bad enough.
The point is that that's a quite dangerous way to set things up, not that it wasn't legal, or that it didn't match the terms of service. I agree, it's a quite dangerous way to set things up. And the danger is born by then end users (both the web site builder and the user of said site.) I'm quite dubious about letting a web site host have the ability to hold my data. In my case this is academic, as I don't have a web site, but were I to do so I'd be reluctant to trust it to a host that could...I can't think of a better word than steal it. They would be depriving me of the use of it and allowing themselves the use of it, so it's not just copying.
If the laws are reasonably fair, then yes. There are plenty of examples, however, of cases where this doesn't happen. Still, the downside cost of living without laws is pretty high, so it needs to be egregious before that seems like a good idea.
I agree with your point, but I think his (the gp's) point was that Watson is not AI. I sort of disagree. Watson is a part of AI. So is Alpha-Beta pruning. So are robot cars. None of them are a complete AI. We haven't seen one yet...but the pieces are being built and put together into larger pieces.
I think you are too convinced that this approach will lead to true AI. It will probably be quite useful, but that's a different matter. And it *MIGHT* lead to true AI.
OTOH, I don't know exactly how it is implemented. An AI will clearly need to use something like genetic programming, and perhaps this does. Another approach that is heading towards true AI is the robot car. (Robots generally have too weak a brain, but that's not basic, so perhaps I should just say robots.) Smart phones seem to also be headed towards being a true AI, but most of their intellignece is remote. Some parts of AI are being addressed by automated security devices, but not many. Some parts are addressed by automated factories. (Industrial robots are separate problems from the individual robots, but they seem to be getting smart enough to not disassemble people working near them, though most of the intelligence resides in the factory itself rather than in the robots.)
My take on things is that true AI will emerge when these separate approaches start merging. And I still estimate the (next) inflection point of the singularity as being 2030. Please note: There will not be an actual singularity, in the sense of the curve going to infinity. It will just get extremely large extremely quickly. Also note that extreme intelligence doesn't automatically translate into extreme capabilities, though it certainly seems to lead there over time. But you need time to build stuff, and I don't think that by 2030 we'll have nano-assemblers.
P.S.: Read Vinge's original paper. He maps several different routes that lead to different "technological singularity" breakthroughs. It seems pretty clear that at least one of these (or some other that he didn't think of) will happen if we don't kill ourselves off first. Computer AI is only one of the ways he considers. He also considers, among other things, genetic manipulation. I think, though, that computer AI will show up first.
I think you understand it, but too many people think of skyhooks as some sort of magic, so:
RE: That means you need to fly up to the contact point without air to support you. I assume that made sense when you wrote it. I meant you can's use wings on the moon. Rather obvious, but people tend to do most of their thinking with habit. The reason this was important was that if you miss a contact, you can't just glide or parachute back.
RE: Except "altitude" is not "orbit". Every bit of delta-v you gain from the tether is less propellant you need to carry on the lander. Since propellant requirements scale exponentially with delta-v, it makes a huge different to payload ratios. It takes about 2000m/s to go from the lunar surface to low lunar orbit, but only about 300m/s to get to low lunar altitude.
Altitude isn't momentum. It's true that the tether allows one to avoid the requirement of getting up to orbital velocity, but only by robing momentum from the "tether system". Which means that the mass of the tether system needs to be large compared to the freight being moved. (Still, this is cheaper than an elevator.) But the best way to do this involves having an asteroid in orbit that the tether hangs from. And you still need to ship as much down as you ship up.
RE: "Rotating tethers need to correct for energy lost when flinging payloads, but you can use slow ion drives over time, while the payload gets the entire burst in one hit. The tether therefore acts as a delta-v battery, turning low-thrust solar-powered ion-drive into high-thrust delta-v."
That's a good poiint. Momentum is conserved, but it does imply that you've got a mass on the tether much larger than the mass of freight being moved. Otherwise your orbit will be broken before you can correct things.
Is a "Rotating lunar tethers" a skyhook? Then it depends on a large mass to accept the momentum of the freight it is lifting, or dropping. I suppose you could use the mass of the tether as the item that accepted the momentum, but that would *really* limit the amount of freight you could handle unless you had an extremely heavy tether. The center of mass of the entire system (including the freight) stays constant during the lifting of lowering of the freight. Then the freight is disengaged, and the new center of mass if the current orbital position of the skyhook.
The small tethers used so far were not an exception to this. They only dealt with light loads. But if you want to move freight you need a heavy mass in orbit. And you still need to lower as much mass as you raise, or your orbit will decay over time.
Once the cars are at all practical, those laws are dead meat. And the reason isn't the cars, it's the trucks. Imagine the efficiencies of automated trucks between automated warehouses and automated factories. Probably to automated ports with automated ships. (Actually, the ships are nearly automated already, as are many of the factories and the warehouses.)
If the teamsters saw what was coming, they'd be up in arms. But the unions are a lot weaker than they were when the longshoremen's union negotiated over port automation.
Not necessarily. When I saw Intel's advertisement of their new 72 core chip on Slashdot recently, my second thought was "This is aimed at autonomous vehicles!" You'd probably still need several of them to run the car, but several chips is a lot cheaper than the current prototypes.
FWIW, until they streamline the cars a lot, and reduce their power needs, the space they require to store their brains, etc. it's NOT going to be popular. But that's the kind of thing that specialized chips are really good at.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, at the time IBM sold the laptop division, the speculation was that this was to give them an entree into the China market, not because it wasn't profitable enough. (OTOH, if it had been extremely profitable, then IBM would definitely have held onto it more strongly.)
How about that. Most intelligence is just multiple layers of pretty simple stuff.
If you don't believe that, why not? To me it seems quite likely.
How about:
Intelligence is the ability to draw probably correct conclusions from incomplete information.
Well, I don't use GMail, but if I ever get things like that, I probably just assume that it's spam, or maybe phishing, and feed it to my junk filter. I've got to admit I never read the stuff carefully. (I don't even read the stuff actually adressed to me carefully. There's FAR too much.)
Personally, I choose to neither block not disable the ads. This is a part of my support for Slashdot.
OTOH, I also don't have Flash installed, and Java is disabled in my browser. Because I'm not stupid.
Yes. It should be in English, because that's the language I speak.
If that were true, then non-Euclidean geometries would have had a much earlier start. It wasn't. Nobody in the West understood Russian, so Lobachevsky's work was ignored.
That's why studies need to be replicated. It's wrong for all the credit to go to the initial discoverers/reporters.
Sorry, my mistake. He wasn't even contacted, so he also wasn't arrested. Doesn't make me any happier with the company, however. And doesn't make me any more likely to report a vulnerability.
You need to look up the definition of arrested. He was arrested, but not booked or charged. The company tried to have him jailed. The cops didn't cooperate, this time.
So he was arreseted, but not charged. The company, however, tried to have him prosecuted. The message is nearly the same, modified only by "not all cops are brutal idiots", which is true enough. But all too many of them are.
What response that includes integrity do you recommend that has not been reported to be harshly punished?
If you want to be a martyr there are plenty of opportunities. Most martyrs, however, don't receive ANY benefit in this life. Do you have a religious faith that promises that revealing computer vulnerabilities responsibly will be rewarded in the next? (A Hindu might have such a belief, I can't think of any other off-hand. A Buddhist might say "right livlihood" and "all is suffering", and not care, but I don't think any Buddhist that dedicated would be hacking in the first place.)
It is extremely unfortunate, but the way things are heading that's becoming less of a joke.
It is not in my nature to trust strong authority, and evidence is repeatedly showin that my nature is correct. OTOH, anarchy is an unstable condition, and tends to quickly devolve into islands of strong authority that are at war with each other. That's probably worse. What is needed is a modified federal system, where the federal government has NO power over the citizens, but only over it's constituent governments. Perhaps that would work better. Or perhaps governments run by humans are inherently untrustworthy.
FWIW, I propose, as a less drastic measure, replacing elections by a lottery. That way the candidates can't be corrupted during the process of their selection.
The thing is, I've seen use cases for the smartphone that make sense for me. For a tablet I've seen nothing. So why would I want a compromise?
FWIW, a few years ago I saw an variation that I might consider resonable. It was a desktop dock for a tablet. If I had a use for a tablet, I might consider that reasonable. It gives you a keyboard and a large disk store for when you're at the dock, and portability for when you aren't. I just don't have any uses for the tablet that don't involve typing, and that makes a tablet a very poor choice. So what I might find reasonable would be a dock that a smartphone fit into. The times when I need to access the smartphone with a large screen and a keyboard (and a larger disk) are infrequent, but I can see that they would exist. (As it is I'm planning on using a usb cable in those circumstances. If I get a smartphone, which isn't yet decided. I may just get a "smarter" phone. It is, however, time to change.)
Tablets don't have decent keyboards. Smart phone additionally have screens that are too small.
There are a lot of use cases where tablets and smartphones are sufficient. There's a huge number where they aren't. But people will use what they have on hand even if it's poorly adapted to the job.
FWIW, I'm considering getting a smartphone. It has a use-case that makes sense. I can't see ANY case for a tablet...except for things like warehouse worker, or inventory control. The ergonomics of keyboards are bad enough.
Yeah, but they've got nearly the same EULA as MS machines have. Which makes them unusable.
The point is that that's a quite dangerous way to set things up, not that it wasn't legal, or that it didn't match the terms of service. I agree, it's a quite dangerous way to set things up. And the danger is born by then end users (both the web site builder and the user of said site.) ...I can't think of a better word than steal it. They would be depriving me of the use of it and allowing themselves the use of it, so it's not just copying.
I'm quite dubious about letting a web site host have the ability to hold my data. In my case this is academic, as I don't have a web site, but were I to do so I'd be reluctant to trust it to a host that could
If the laws are reasonably fair, then yes. There are plenty of examples, however, of cases where this doesn't happen. Still, the downside cost of living without laws is pretty high, so it needs to be egregious before that seems like a good idea.
I agree with your point, but I think his (the gp's) point was that Watson is not AI. I sort of disagree. Watson is a part of AI. So is Alpha-Beta pruning. So are robot cars. None of them are a complete AI. We haven't seen one yet...but the pieces are being built and put together into larger pieces.
I think you are too convinced that this approach will lead to true AI. It will probably be quite useful, but that's a different matter. And it *MIGHT* lead to true AI.
OTOH, I don't know exactly how it is implemented. An AI will clearly need to use something like genetic programming, and perhaps this does. Another approach that is heading towards true AI is the robot car. (Robots generally have too weak a brain, but that's not basic, so perhaps I should just say robots.) Smart phones seem to also be headed towards being a true AI, but most of their intellignece is remote. Some parts of AI are being addressed by automated security devices, but not many. Some parts are addressed by automated factories. (Industrial robots are separate problems from the individual robots, but they seem to be getting smart enough to not disassemble people working near them, though most of the intelligence resides in the factory itself rather than in the robots.)
My take on things is that true AI will emerge when these separate approaches start merging. And I still estimate the (next) inflection point of the singularity as being 2030.
Please note: There will not be an actual singularity, in the sense of the curve going to infinity. It will just get extremely large extremely quickly. Also note that extreme intelligence doesn't automatically translate into extreme capabilities, though it certainly seems to lead there over time. But you need time to build stuff, and I don't think that by 2030 we'll have nano-assemblers.
P.S.: Read Vinge's original paper. He maps several different routes that lead to different "technological singularity" breakthroughs. It seems pretty clear that at least one of these (or some other that he didn't think of) will happen if we don't kill ourselves off first. Computer AI is only one of the ways he considers. He also considers, among other things, genetic manipulation. I think, though, that computer AI will show up first.
IIUC, it doesn't really seem to be planar enough. Perhaps, though, the "axis of evil" is some systematic error.
I think you understand it, but too many people think of skyhooks as some sort of magic, so:
RE: That means you need to fly up to the contact point without air to support you.
I assume that made sense when you wrote it.
I meant you can's use wings on the moon. Rather obvious, but people tend to do most of their thinking with habit. The reason this was important was that if you miss a contact, you can't just glide or parachute back.
RE: Except "altitude" is not "orbit". Every bit of delta-v you gain from the tether is less propellant you need to carry on the lander. Since propellant requirements scale exponentially with delta-v, it makes a huge different to payload ratios. It takes about 2000m/s to go from the lunar surface to low lunar orbit, but only about 300m/s to get to low lunar altitude.
Altitude isn't momentum. It's true that the tether allows one to avoid the requirement of getting up to orbital velocity, but only by robing momentum from the "tether system". Which means that the mass of the tether system needs to be large compared to the freight being moved. (Still, this is cheaper than an elevator.) But the best way to do this involves having an asteroid in orbit that the tether hangs from. And you still need to ship as much down as you ship up.
RE: "Rotating tethers need to correct for energy lost when flinging payloads, but you can use slow ion drives over time, while the payload gets the entire burst in one hit. The tether therefore acts as a delta-v battery, turning low-thrust solar-powered ion-drive into high-thrust delta-v."
That's a good poiint. Momentum is conserved, but it does imply that you've got a mass on the tether much larger than the mass of freight being moved. Otherwise your orbit will be broken before you can correct things.
Is a "Rotating lunar tethers" a skyhook? Then it depends on a large mass to accept the momentum of the freight it is lifting, or dropping. I suppose you could use the mass of the tether as the item that accepted the momentum, but that would *really* limit the amount of freight you could handle unless you had an extremely heavy tether. The center of mass of the entire system (including the freight) stays constant during the lifting of lowering of the freight. Then the freight is disengaged, and the new center of mass if the current orbital position of the skyhook.
The small tethers used so far were not an exception to this. They only dealt with light loads. But if you want to move freight you need a heavy mass in orbit. And you still need to lower as much mass as you raise, or your orbit will decay over time.
Once the cars are at all practical, those laws are dead meat. And the reason isn't the cars, it's the trucks. Imagine the efficiencies of automated trucks between automated warehouses and automated factories. Probably to automated ports with automated ships. (Actually, the ships are nearly automated already, as are many of the factories and the warehouses.)
If the teamsters saw what was coming, they'd be up in arms. But the unions are a lot weaker than they were when the longshoremen's union negotiated over port automation.
Not necessarily. When I saw Intel's advertisement of their new 72 core chip on Slashdot recently, my second thought was "This is aimed at autonomous vehicles!" You'd probably still need several of them to run the car, but several chips is a lot cheaper than the current prototypes.
FWIW, until they streamline the cars a lot, and reduce their power needs, the space they require to store their brains, etc. it's NOT going to be popular. But that's the kind of thing that specialized chips are really good at.