Actually, saying 1 + 1 = 2 is making a very strong statement about either the kinds of entities you are measuring or the kinds of operation that you consider equivalent to plus. E.g.:
1 glass of fluid + 1 glass of fluid = 2 glasses of fluid. (Try adding a cup of water and a cup of absolute ethyl alcohol and measuring the result. Considerably less than 2 cups.)
Etc.
But even noting this kind of restriction, mathematics is unreasonably effective.
Erlang has lots of nice features...but it's too bloody slow!
Well, Erlang HIPE is fast compared to python on the 2008 shootout, but it's still quite slow compared to Java (And I haven't tested it recently for stability. I know that when I tested it a few years ago it was prone to flakiness in the example programs.)
(I was surprised to see how much Erlang had sped up since I last checked it out. I wonder if it's GUI has gotten any better.)
The ones affiliated with religious institutions are definitely run at a profit. Perhaps not for themselves, but for the religious institution with which they are affiliated. It's a profit that measured more in political clout than money, but political clout can be translated into money without being spent. As such it's a deeper profit center, even though it requires much investment to develop.
I don't trust you, because I've heard of cases where the parent was definitely interested in their kids education, but had badly skewed ideas as to how it should be done. To the point of threatening the teacher for criticizing their child's behavior.
Keep investing. Nows the best time to pick up things cheaply. But invest widely rather than deeply, as lots of companies won't survive the current turmoil.
If you are lucky, by 2040 this period will be the time you laid the basis of your fortune. My misfortune was that I am already retired. I may need to reverse that retirement once I find out what's happened. (Ouch! And explaining why I don't have any current job history? Ouch!)
Actually, one could block BitTorrent. It's possible. Of course, it would be re-written into a different form, that one would also need to block. And again. And again.
The general term for such a game is "arms race". It frequently continues until both participants are eliminated. You don't find either saber-toothed tigers or mastodons around anymore. And BOTH Athens and Sparta ended up conquered by Macedonians.
Personally, to me it seems fair to offer a fixed amount of service/month + a cost for extra service. AND TO MAKE IT CLEAR!!! Hiding things in blocks of text is not making it clear. And if they advertise unlimited service, then they are *emphatically* required to deliver on their promises, even though they can't possibly do so. There should be (are?) severe legal penalties for lying in your advertisements. They should be enforced.
I see the entire mess as companies trying to get out of living up to their advertising claims. I see no justification in allowing them to do so.
Well ALL of my bittorrent traffic is legitimate. And I don't know anyone else to compare it to. I've got to presume that you're commenting about either your own use, or that of your friends.... Either that or that you've been illegally snooping.
I'll grant that there *are* people in a position to legitimately have information justifying the position that you have taken. It's just that the ones I know have never expressed one even similar to yours. (OTOH, I haven't asked them. It would seem a violation of professional confidence.)
Yeah, but I've been convinced that I made the right choice in not going with Dell. I already suspected that I had, but now I'm sure.
ZAReason solved the one problem I had very quickly. It was annoying to only be able to reach them by e-mail, but I've just been convinced that it's well worth that limitation.
Unregulated markets don't exactly fail...they just don't do what you are proposing. Unregulated markets tend to concentrate money and power. So do regulated markets, but differently.
The ideal of a free market as a trade between equals, with both gaining proportionally (or equally) from the trade isn't met by any real example, whether current or historical. It's not necessarily the case that someone loses, but one should expect that the more wealthy or powerful party will gain disproportionately. It doesn't always happen, but it happens if both sides are attending to the trade equally.
Of course, the opposite of a free market is a monopoly, but unregulated markets seem to tend to drift into monopolies on various items of trade. Whether diamonds, electricity, water,... numerous items of trade. (Not all. I've never heard of a monopoly on snuff-boxes, e.g.) And it doesn't have to be a monopoly everywhere. A farmer with his well doesn't help the people living in the city when the water supply is monopolized.
The concept of "natural monopoly" is a bit strange. It seems like it would be more reasonable to have "naturally difficult to monopolize". Like snuff-boxes. But there have been monopolies on harp strings. It did require governmental intervention, but it occurred. In fact the origin of patents is governments intervening in the market to create monopolies. *THIS* is the evil which the "free market" is designed to eradicate. But somehow those supporting it don't apply it in that area. (Well, to be more accurate, the free market was supposed to describe those areas that royal patents didn't cover. I forget his terminology, but I doubt that Adam Smith meant it to apply to things like requiring honest weights.)
You'll recall my projection for a human equivalent AI was 10-20 years off? There are many reasons why it's that distant. And don't expect the first one to be cheap. 5 years later it's likely to be cheap, and there's likely to be one hell of an economic depression. And the only way out that I see is to make holding jobs optional, not necessary for comfortable survival. We should be heading towards that now, because we don't have much lead time.
Massive automation is coming, and it's getting cheaper. Demanding that everyone have is job is becoming more and more foolish. But we need an alternative, as pure idleness isn't good for people. And not everyone's cut out to be an artist. But as a start hassles involved in being, say, a musician should be reduced. Payments need to be spread out, not so centralized. The Star system needs to be dis-empowered. Possibly eliminated, but that's not certain. Some musicians actually are a lot better than others. There just needs to be lots of room for lots of others. Every city and town should have it's own orchestra AND it's own band. (We used to have music spread that way, before the phonograph.) Copyrights need to be both weakened and shortened. More room needs to be made for parody and pastiche. Bands need to be able to create their own music without worrying about infringing on someone else's copyright...unless they are actually copying it.
This won't suffice, but it's the direction we need to be headed. And generalize it to apply to all the arts. (Most haven't been as brutally treated by copyright law as music, but it hasn't been kind to any of them.)
Copyright needs to be restricted to actual copying of material, and it needs to have it's term cut to, say, 20 years. Or even 10. We want more artists, not fewer.
Consider the effects of automation so far. Actual work has largely been replaced by papershuffling. ALL papershuffling can be replaced by sub-human AIs. (More powerful that we have currently, possibly, but not that much so.) And remember that the costs keep dropping.
Sometime with the next 10-20 years we are going to pass through the bottom of the energy crisis. I don't know if it's going to be solar or wind or nuclear (but hopefully not coal), but somehow we're going to do it. If we're lucky it won't be horrendously vile. But by the time these human equivalent AIs show up we will be on the up swing. Energy will still be a problem, but it will be becoming less of a problem. It will likely be twice as expensive as it was in January, 2007 (rough guess). So it will need to be used more carefully, and that means more efficient use. Which means, e.g., tractors that reduce weight by driving themselves, and not carrying along an operator. Ditto for trucks (semis). For trains that will be less important, but they're already almost automated. Planes are a special case. Probably they will be used MUCH more sparingly, and any weight shipped will be a lot more expensive. But probably passenger flights will continue to have pilots, though likely co-pilots will be eliminated, and in case of emergency it will shift to full automation.
The real problems lie with inertia. Legal, organizational, and mental. There are currently extant ways of harvesting energy in the price range that I mentioned, but nobody is willing to build them, because they don't want to commit to energy being that expensive. And it takes a long time to build a large plant. Every year that they avoid committing to a particular design, becomes a year when the best design is just that much cheaper than the prior year. Unfortunately, it takes a long time to build once you've committed. And people keep trying to beat the cost of what we had last year, when the price of oil just keeps going up (irregularly rather than monotonically, yes, but the 24-months average price keeps increasing. [And if I were shown a counterexample I'd say the 5-year average and still be right. But I do know that it's quite irregular, and not at all monotonic in the sho
FOSS software isn't designed to be a product. It's something that can be bundled with a product to make it more valuable.
There are other economic models of FOSS, but the one that it looks as if you are closest to is: "We wrote the software, we understand it. We support it. Support isn't free." For this to work your support had better be a lot better than what one gets by asking for support online.
Note that not all models work for all products. If something is designed to be so simple to use that no support should be needed, then selling support isn't a good model. And selling upgrades only works if you can upgrade faster than others can....and you can convince people that the upgrade is worth what you're trying to charge for it. This isn't necessarily easy.
Finding the right business model to support a FOSS company is quite difficult. Many have succeeded, but it's also true that many have failed. (But then many who tried to compete in Apple's market or Microsoft's market have also failed.)
I don't know your product, so I can't offer detailed advice. Look for how others in similar situations solved the problem...if you can find any.
Perhaps they're hoping that later models will have greater efficiency? That often happens. I could see it getting to the point that piped water wasn't necessary...I'm not sure that I believe it, but I can see it. And humidity is very temperature dependent. Really hot places can have lots of water in the air, and still be quite dry. (I believe the air with the least moisture is found over Antarctica.)
1) Memorize poetry. Something with bounce, rhythm, and meter. And something you decide you like after the first reading. I find Louis Carroll a good place to start...say, "The Hunting of the Snark". (Well, Jabberwocky would be a better start, but be sure you read Humpty Dumpty's explanation of what the words mean.)
2) Exercise...in moderation. Don't go to extremes here or you'll stop. Say 20-30 minutes a day. Walking is good, particularly if you do it with someone.
3) Vitamin D, Fish (not just the oil! Salmon is delicious, but sardines are good too.)
4) Control your blood pressure.
5) Make lists of things that you MUST remember. Use a personal calendar.
6) Get interested in *something*. It almost doesn't matter what.
7) Nothing really works, but all of these together help.
Well, there are people who think the correct approach is to simulate things at that level.
My personal feeling is that you are abstracting at the wrong level, and that if you abstract at the correct level you'll save many orders of magnitude of calculation. I'll admit, though, that all I definitely know is that my personal computer is seriously too limited to even store the needed data. And it's also blind and deaf and diskinesic. Being able to read and write text isn't sufficient compensation. The text has no grounding in meaning (i.e., a multi-sensory representation of a chunk of knowledge).
So far I haven't thought of a way around this. Virtual games are a possibility, but I'd need direct access to their sensoria, and what I could easily get would be restricted to multiple screen captures. Virtual games are usually intentionally constructed to prohibit bots. (Reasonable from their point of view, but a dman nuisance from my point of view.)
I think your post was intended humorously, but I'm going to pretend otherwise. (Note, I'm not a specialist in computational mentalistics, or whatever the field would be called, but:)
I'm fairly certain the interconnects are fast enough. The brain is no speed demon on individual connections. It's basically chemical, with only a little electrical stuff on top that's still based on ions floating in liquid.
The problem is the software. And the sensoria. And the effectors.
Each of those problems is being addressed separately. What do you want to bet that when they all come to "good enough" solutions, interfacing them is going to be a MASSIVE kludge.
And even if you could, you can't just copy how people did it. A camera is basically different from a retina. It extracts different information. You can use complex processing to convert one into a simulation of the other, but there's no straightforward mapping. Each conversion involves loss of information...so you need to ensure that the correct information is lost.
Just as a silly example of the difference, a recent experimental hearing aid uses infra-red lasers to stimulate the nerves in the cochlea. You KNOW that people use electric signals, but artificially generated electrical signals spread too much in the interface, so you can't get decent tone resolution. With infra-red lasers, though, you can stimulate any particular neuron you choose.
Guaranteed: random connections will give you a crashed program. Secondary chance is an infinite loop.
Mind you, there are neural nets that are initialized with random initial values, but they have strict boundary conditions. Otherwise you never get better than garbage out of them.
Also: There are lots of groups of neurons that are more highly connected than average. These are "functional specialists". There often isn't anything special about the neurons, but only about the way that their connections have been reinforced. I'm not sure about the neurons that branch outside of the column, but I suspect the same of them.
My projection for a human mind equivalent computer remains at around 2020-2030. This announcement drops my estimate of the cost, but that was never an exact number of dollars, so I can't quantify it. Also note that I said equivalent. I'm not going to assert that it would enjoy watching Star Wars, or even 2001. It's emotions are unlikely to be similar in nature to those of a mammal...unless that's necessary in order to understand human language...and only to the extent necessary.
For that matter, we wouldn't WANT it to have the same emotional structure that we have. That would be very dangerous. If we did that then it might have "take over the world!" as an innate goal, rather than as a tactical move. Even as a tactical move it's rather dangerous, so we would probably want to so design it's goals that such a tactical move would appear extremely distasteful, and best accomplished by manipulating willing proxies. (This would ensure that there was room for people where people would be comfortable.)
OTOH, I don't see a human mind equivalent AI as remaining merely human equivalent. Progress rarely stops. But if it's motivational structure is so designed that there's plenty of comfortable room for people, I don't see this as a problem. Entities rarely want to alter their motivational structure unless it's giving them severe problems, and often not then. But don't expect it to be passive or a mere recipient of orders. It would, however, be reasonable to expect it to be a lot more considerate of human needs and desires than the current bureaucracy...in any country. (Note that individual office holders may well be sympathetic, but the system itself isn't.)
I'd be surprised if it takes off commercially. OTOH, it might well become popular to rival Python. The C library problem is only severe if you require callbacks...and even then it can be handled. I've just not figured out how to handle it, but others have.
At worst you can easily handle it by writing the call-backed routines in C. D can directly call C routines, so that's no problem. And I find built-in garbage collection to be nearly mandatory. I know the work-around to not having it, and, well,... I even considered Java. (Some people seem to actually like Java's libraries. Tango looks to me like a huge effort to inflict them on D, but I stick with Phobos, the default systems library.) Any library that makes you define three classes to open a file has *something vile* wrong with it. (Yeah. It's a matter of taste. Tango seems to be just as fast as Phobos, and they claim sometimes faster. I'll never know, because I, personally, find using that kind of file access offensive. [As an author. As a user I don't care.])
Well, it seem as if it would be legal. It also seems like a good reason to look for someone else to work with.
I have nothing against paid support plans (as long as they actually support you). That's a cost, and needs to be paid. I wouldn't even mind a company that just ran a bulletin board for customers as their support center, and charged for accounts (included, perhaps, as a part of the cost of the software). Though if that's their support, they'd better not charge as much.
Back awhile I used to purchase my software from KRUD (Kevin's RedHat Uber Distribution) because the support from Red Hat was so bad. (I can't justify Enterprise Level support, so that's not what I'm talking about. But their end user support was pitiful with their included support.) These days I generally wing it, live with some things instead of fixing them, etc. because I'm *not* a systems level guru, and I can't find decent support, so I just use Debian or Ubuntu where things usually work, or you can usually get help from free sources. And if it's not clear what to ask or who to ask, well, I live with it. None of the support options I see are both cheap enough to afford and good enough to be better than that which is available for free.
This is a real problem, and one reason that some people buy from Dell (I don't know how well that works out). My notebook from ZAReason is working well, and they've supported it well, but I'm dubious about upgrading the system. So it'll stay on Hardy Heron for awhile. The defect of having support is that you stick with the system that's supported. You *can* change, but then your system isn't supported anymore.
The ZAReason notebook is interesting. It's totally open (in some sense). You can even hack the hardware. But once you start making changes, you're on your own. So this is analogous to what you want from the CMS system. Because it's open, I'm not tied to them for support. Because they're the experts, and I'm not, I still am. If they refused to support me, I *could* find someone else, but I'd be much more likely to see what changes I could make that would let them support me.
OTOH, if Alfresco are using some contractual trickery to say that experts can only support the proprietary version, I'd definitely look elsewhere for my system.
When the government uses RICO they invoke a pre-prosecution confiscation of all your property. Will that happen this time too?
If so, then we don't need to wait for the trial to start rejoicing. (And probably might as well celebrate now, as I bet that they'll just disband the RIAA, and the backers will start a new organization.)
Yes, I use it. The libraries aren't all they could be. (Well, it *is* a new language.) So if you need external libraries you need to call them from C, which is a drag if they require callbacks...but it's possible.
I'm generally quite pleased with it. They more so as I despise using pointers explicitly. If feels like hand coding loops using goto statements.
D does have a few awkwardnesses, such as refusing to convert types where it should be plain how to do the conversion. This is considered a safety measure. And it can (could?) occasionally be quite dull about recognizing variables imported from other files unless you fully qualify the name. That's a nuisance. The array operations still aren't fully implemented, so occasionally one needs to do things by hand that the language should, and intends, to do by itself.
But generally I'm quite satisfied with it. I switched from C/C++ to Python as soon as it became fast enough. (This probably means that cpus got fast enough:-). I recently started on a program, though, that's large enough that Python's much too slow. D handles it easily (so far). I'm well aware that the program will eventually outgrow my computer's ability to handle it no matter WHAT language I use to optimize execution. I'm going to need to deal with that somehow...but D helps me postpone the time when I need to split things up into separate streams of execution, and run it on multiple nodes. I've considered going to C++ with boost because of it's multiple node execution features, but D is currently moving towards having those same features, and I find it a MUCH more pleasant working environment. Also, for sizable programs, D is about as fast as C. There's loading time, and a large runtime library, but those are mainly significant for small programs.
I've met people who didn't believe that other people who didn't speak their language had souls. I didn't bother to get clarity on what they meant by soul.
Presumably you were already running, by that point?
Actually, no. They weren't really hostile, just... narrow. They couldn't imagine anyone who was human and couldn't speak English.
OK... Now suppose someone starts tinkering with a Chimpanzee's genes. How many Chimpanzee genes can be replaced by human genes before the soul appears? Does it matter which ones?
What if you start with a human? How many human genes can be replaced with their chimp variants? Does it matter which ones? Etc.
And how can you tell whether a soul is present in the resultant or not?
I can imagine that adequate answers to these question might cause me to accept that the persons alluded to have a definition rather than merely a prejudice. But it would, of course, depend on what the answers were.
I think Descartes was more "We are souls that have bodies.". But he was definite about mind and body not being the same. And pretty definite that mind couldn't be detected by material means. (I wonder what he would have thought of brain scans.)
Note that when discussing his ideas I used the term "mind" rather than "soul". I didn't read him in French, so this might just be a translation problem, but I think he avoided the word "soul". At least the translator did.
I'm not a super-intellect, but I doubt it. A god that loved you wouldn't go around making you feel inferior. Of course, it also wouldn't punish you for making reasonable, or even stupid, mistakes. Only malice would be worthy of punishment, and then only to correct the flaw. (Read "Inferno" by Jerry Pournell and Larry Niven for an interesting argument along this basis...but I think they twist things to make traditional beliefs more acceptable. Well, it's a novel, so what do you expect. Still, it's a good argument.)
Restating things from the Bible into computer terms, there's this *ACE* Hacker who hacks together this magnificent virtual world with dynamite graphics and haptics. Then he builds some virtual life-forms to inhabit this virtual world. Eventually he gets dissatisfied with how they are acting, so he arranges to let genetic programming modify their code as they alter the environment that they live in. That's us. What would be a "soul" here? Would it be reasonable for this hacker to extract parts of these NPCs after they are terminated in the game and either reward or torture them indefinitely? What kind of entity would act like that?
OK. I've left out a lot, and compressed the Bible into one paragraph. But isn't it a reasonable translation (of the part covered)?
Pardon me, but I think the John Dalmas tales are much more convincing, and I don't believe *them*. (I *do* find myself wanting to...but it just won't wash.) He does, however, have a justifiable-in-the-story definition of soul and what it is and why it survives. The best single volume synopsis of his thoughts is "The Reality Matrix". (Which predates the movie "The Matrix", though the ideas *may* be similar. I don't see MPAA works, so I don't really know.)
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Actually, saying 1 + 1 = 2 is making a very strong statement about either the kinds of entities you are measuring or the kinds of operation that you consider equivalent to plus. E.g.:
1 cloud + 1 cloud = 1 cloud...or possibly several clouds
1 glass of fluid + 1 glass of fluid = 2 glasses of fluid. (Try adding a cup of water and a cup of absolute ethyl alcohol and measuring the result. Considerably less than 2 cups.)
Etc.
But even noting this kind of restriction, mathematics is unreasonably effective.
Erlang has lots of nice features...but it's too bloody slow!
Well, Erlang HIPE is fast compared to python on the 2008 shootout, but it's still quite slow compared to Java (And I haven't tested it recently for stability. I know that when I tested it a few years ago it was prone to flakiness in the example programs.)
(I was surprised to see how much Erlang had sped up since I last checked it out. I wonder if it's GUI has gotten any better.)
The ones affiliated with religious institutions are definitely run at a profit. Perhaps not for themselves, but for the religious institution with which they are affiliated. It's a profit that measured more in political clout than money, but political clout can be translated into money without being spent. As such it's a deeper profit center, even though it requires much investment to develop.
I don't trust you, because I've heard of cases where the parent was definitely interested in their kids education, but had badly skewed ideas as to how it should be done. To the point of threatening the teacher for criticizing their child's behavior.
Keep investing. Nows the best time to pick up things cheaply. But invest widely rather than deeply, as lots of companies won't survive the current turmoil.
If you are lucky, by 2040 this period will be the time you laid the basis of your fortune. My misfortune was that I am already retired. I may need to reverse that retirement once I find out what's happened. (Ouch! And explaining why I don't have any current job history? Ouch!)
Actually, one could block BitTorrent. It's possible. Of course, it would be re-written into a different form, that one would also need to block. And again. And again.
The general term for such a game is "arms race". It frequently continues until both participants are eliminated. You don't find either saber-toothed tigers or mastodons around anymore. And BOTH Athens and Sparta ended up conquered by Macedonians.
Personally, to me it seems fair to offer a fixed amount of service/month + a cost for extra service. AND TO MAKE IT CLEAR!!! Hiding things in blocks of text is not making it clear. And if they advertise unlimited service, then they are *emphatically* required to deliver on their promises, even though they can't possibly do so. There should be (are?) severe legal penalties for lying in your advertisements. They should be enforced.
I see the entire mess as companies trying to get out of living up to their advertising claims. I see no justification in allowing them to do so.
Well ALL of my bittorrent traffic is legitimate. And I don't know anyone else to compare it to. I've got to presume that you're commenting about either your own use, or that of your friends. ... Either that or that you've been illegally snooping.
I'll grant that there *are* people in a position to legitimately have information justifying the position that you have taken. It's just that the ones I know have never expressed one even similar to yours. (OTOH, I haven't asked them. It would seem a violation of professional confidence.)
Yeah, but I've been convinced that I made the right choice in not going with Dell. I already suspected that I had, but now I'm sure.
ZAReason solved the one problem I had very quickly. It was annoying to only be able to reach them by e-mail, but I've just been convinced that it's well worth that limitation.
Considering that the path they're choosing to "make money" is offending past repeat customers, you *ought* to be offended.
Unregulated markets don't exactly fail...they just don't do what you are proposing. Unregulated markets tend to concentrate money and power. So do regulated markets, but differently.
The ideal of a free market as a trade between equals, with both gaining proportionally (or equally) from the trade isn't met by any real example, whether current or historical. It's not necessarily the case that someone loses, but one should expect that the more wealthy or powerful party will gain disproportionately. It doesn't always happen, but it happens if both sides are attending to the trade equally.
Of course, the opposite of a free market is a monopoly, but unregulated markets seem to tend to drift into monopolies on various items of trade. Whether diamonds, electricity, water, ... numerous items of trade. (Not all. I've never heard of a monopoly on snuff-boxes, e.g.) And it doesn't have to be a monopoly everywhere. A farmer with his well doesn't help the people living in the city when the water supply is monopolized.
The concept of "natural monopoly" is a bit strange. It seems like it would be more reasonable to have "naturally difficult to monopolize". Like snuff-boxes. But there have been monopolies on harp strings. It did require governmental intervention, but it occurred. In fact the origin of patents is governments intervening in the market to create monopolies. *THIS* is the evil which the "free market" is designed to eradicate. But somehow those supporting it don't apply it in that area. (Well, to be more accurate, the free market was supposed to describe those areas that royal patents didn't cover. I forget his terminology, but I doubt that Adam Smith meant it to apply to things like requiring honest weights.)
You'll recall my projection for a human equivalent AI was 10-20 years off? There are many reasons why it's that distant. And don't expect the first one to be cheap. 5 years later it's likely to be cheap, and there's likely to be one hell of an economic depression. And the only way out that I see is to make holding jobs optional, not necessary for comfortable survival. We should be heading towards that now, because we don't have much lead time.
Massive automation is coming, and it's getting cheaper. Demanding that everyone have is job is becoming more and more foolish. But we need an alternative, as pure idleness isn't good for people. And not everyone's cut out to be an artist. But as a start hassles involved in being, say, a musician should be reduced. Payments need to be spread out, not so centralized. The Star system needs to be dis-empowered. Possibly eliminated, but that's not certain. Some musicians actually are a lot better than others. There just needs to be lots of room for lots of others. Every city and town should have it's own orchestra AND it's own band. (We used to have music spread that way, before the phonograph.) Copyrights need to be both weakened and shortened. More room needs to be made for parody and pastiche. Bands need to be able to create their own music without worrying about infringing on someone else's copyright...unless they are actually copying it.
This won't suffice, but it's the direction we need to be headed. And generalize it to apply to all the arts. (Most haven't been as brutally treated by copyright law as music, but it hasn't been kind to any of them.)
Copyright needs to be restricted to actual copying of material, and it needs to have it's term cut to, say, 20 years. Or even 10. We want more artists, not fewer.
Consider the effects of automation so far. Actual work has largely been replaced by papershuffling. ALL papershuffling can be replaced by sub-human AIs. (More powerful that we have currently, possibly, but not that much so.) And remember that the costs keep dropping.
Sometime with the next 10-20 years we are going to pass through the bottom of the energy crisis. I don't know if it's going to be solar or wind or nuclear (but hopefully not coal), but somehow we're going to do it. If we're lucky it won't be horrendously vile. But by the time these human equivalent AIs show up we will be on the up swing. Energy will still be a problem, but it will be becoming less of a problem. It will likely be twice as expensive as it was in January, 2007 (rough guess). So it will need to be used more carefully, and that means more efficient use. Which means, e.g., tractors that reduce weight by driving themselves, and not carrying along an operator. Ditto for trucks (semis). For trains that will be less important, but they're already almost automated. Planes are a special case. Probably they will be used MUCH more sparingly, and any weight shipped will be a lot more expensive. But probably passenger flights will continue to have pilots, though likely co-pilots will be eliminated, and in case of emergency it will shift to full automation.
The real problems lie with inertia. Legal, organizational, and mental. There are currently extant ways of harvesting energy in the price range that I mentioned, but nobody is willing to build them, because they don't want to commit to energy being that expensive. And it takes a long time to build a large plant. Every year that they avoid committing to a particular design, becomes a year when the best design is just that much cheaper than the prior year. Unfortunately, it takes a long time to build once you've committed. And people keep trying to beat the cost of what we had last year, when the price of oil just keeps going up (irregularly rather than monotonically, yes, but the 24-months average price keeps increasing. [And if I were shown a counterexample I'd say the 5-year average and still be right. But I do know that it's quite irregular, and not at all monotonic in the sho
FOSS software isn't designed to be a product. It's something that can be bundled with a product to make it more valuable.
There are other economic models of FOSS, but the one that it looks as if you are closest to is: "We wrote the software, we understand it. We support it. Support isn't free." For this to work your support had better be a lot better than what one gets by asking for support online.
Note that not all models work for all products. If something is designed to be so simple to use that no support should be needed, then selling support isn't a good model. And selling upgrades only works if you can upgrade faster than others can....and you can convince people that the upgrade is worth what you're trying to charge for it. This isn't necessarily easy.
Finding the right business model to support a FOSS company is quite difficult. Many have succeeded, but it's also true that many have failed. (But then many who tried to compete in Apple's market or Microsoft's market have also failed.)
I don't know your product, so I can't offer detailed advice. Look for how others in similar situations solved the problem...if you can find any.
Perhaps they're hoping that later models will have greater efficiency? That often happens. I could see it getting to the point that piped water wasn't necessary...I'm not sure that I believe it, but I can see it. And humidity is very temperature dependent. Really hot places can have lots of water in the air, and still be quite dry. (I believe the air with the least moisture is found over Antarctica.)
1) Memorize poetry. Something with bounce, rhythm, and meter. And something you decide you like after the first reading. I find Louis Carroll a good place to start...say, "The Hunting of the Snark". (Well, Jabberwocky would be a better start, but be sure you read Humpty Dumpty's explanation of what the words mean.)
2) Exercise...in moderation. Don't go to extremes here or you'll stop. Say 20-30 minutes a day. Walking is good, particularly if you do it with someone.
3) Vitamin D, Fish (not just the oil! Salmon is delicious, but sardines are good too.)
4) Control your blood pressure.
5) Make lists of things that you MUST remember. Use a personal calendar.
6) Get interested in *something*. It almost doesn't matter what.
7) Nothing really works, but all of these together help.
Well, there are people who think the correct approach is to simulate things at that level.
My personal feeling is that you are abstracting at the wrong level, and that if you abstract at the correct level you'll save many orders of magnitude of calculation. I'll admit, though, that all I definitely know is that my personal computer is seriously too limited to even store the needed data. And it's also blind and deaf and diskinesic. Being able to read and write text isn't sufficient compensation. The text has no grounding in meaning (i.e., a multi-sensory representation of a chunk of knowledge).
So far I haven't thought of a way around this. Virtual games are a possibility, but I'd need direct access to their sensoria, and what I could easily get would be restricted to multiple screen captures. Virtual games are usually intentionally constructed to prohibit bots. (Reasonable from their point of view, but a dman nuisance from my point of view.)
I think your post was intended humorously, but I'm going to pretend otherwise. (Note, I'm not a specialist in computational mentalistics, or whatever the field would be called, but:)
I'm fairly certain the interconnects are fast enough. The brain is no speed demon on individual connections. It's basically chemical, with only a little electrical stuff on top that's still based on ions floating in liquid.
The problem is the software. And the sensoria. And the effectors.
Each of those problems is being addressed separately. What do you want to bet that when they all come to "good enough" solutions, interfacing them is going to be a MASSIVE kludge.
And even if you could, you can't just copy how people did it. A camera is basically different from a retina. It extracts different information. You can use complex processing to convert one into a simulation of the other, but there's no straightforward mapping. Each conversion involves loss of information...so you need to ensure that the correct information is lost.
Just as a silly example of the difference, a recent experimental hearing aid uses infra-red lasers to stimulate the nerves in the cochlea. You KNOW that people use electric signals, but artificially generated electrical signals spread too much in the interface, so you can't get decent tone resolution. With infra-red lasers, though, you can stimulate any particular neuron you choose.
Guaranteed: random connections will give you a crashed program. Secondary chance is an infinite loop.
Mind you, there are neural nets that are initialized with random initial values, but they have strict boundary conditions. Otherwise you never get better than garbage out of them.
Also: There are lots of groups of neurons that are more highly connected than average. These are "functional specialists". There often isn't anything special about the neurons, but only about the way that their connections have been reinforced. I'm not sure about the neurons that branch outside of the column, but I suspect the same of them.
My projection for a human mind equivalent computer remains at around 2020-2030. This announcement drops my estimate of the cost, but that was never an exact number of dollars, so I can't quantify it. Also note that I said equivalent. I'm not going to assert that it would enjoy watching Star Wars, or even 2001. It's emotions are unlikely to be similar in nature to those of a mammal...unless that's necessary in order to understand human language...and only to the extent necessary.
For that matter, we wouldn't WANT it to have the same emotional structure that we have. That would be very dangerous. If we did that then it might have "take over the world!" as an innate goal, rather than as a tactical move. Even as a tactical move it's rather dangerous, so we would probably want to so design it's goals that such a tactical move would appear extremely distasteful, and best accomplished by manipulating willing proxies. (This would ensure that there was room for people where people would be comfortable.)
OTOH, I don't see a human mind equivalent AI as remaining merely human equivalent. Progress rarely stops. But if it's motivational structure is so designed that there's plenty of comfortable room for people, I don't see this as a problem. Entities rarely want to alter their motivational structure unless it's giving them severe problems, and often not then. But don't expect it to be passive or a mere recipient of orders. It would, however, be reasonable to expect it to be a lot more considerate of human needs and desires than the current bureaucracy...in any country. (Note that individual office holders may well be sympathetic, but the system itself isn't.)
I'd be surprised if it takes off commercially. OTOH, it might well become popular to rival Python. The C library problem is only severe if you require callbacks...and even then it can be handled. I've just not figured out how to handle it, but others have.
At worst you can easily handle it by writing the call-backed routines in C. D can directly call C routines, so that's no problem. And I find built-in garbage collection to be nearly mandatory. I know the work-around to not having it, and, well, ... I even considered Java. (Some people seem to actually like Java's libraries. Tango looks to me like a huge effort to inflict them on D, but I stick with Phobos, the default systems library.) Any library that makes you define three classes to open a file has *something vile* wrong with it. (Yeah. It's a matter of taste. Tango seems to be just as fast as Phobos, and they claim sometimes faster. I'll never know, because I, personally, find using that kind of file access offensive. [As an author. As a user I don't care.])
Well, it seem as if it would be legal. It also seems like a good reason to look for someone else to work with.
I have nothing against paid support plans (as long as they actually support you). That's a cost, and needs to be paid. I wouldn't even mind a company that just ran a bulletin board for customers as their support center, and charged for accounts (included, perhaps, as a part of the cost of the software). Though if that's their support, they'd better not charge as much.
Back awhile I used to purchase my software from KRUD (Kevin's RedHat Uber Distribution) because the support from Red Hat was so bad. (I can't justify Enterprise Level support, so that's not what I'm talking about. But their end user support was pitiful with their included support.) These days I generally wing it, live with some things instead of fixing them, etc. because I'm *not* a systems level guru, and I can't find decent support, so I just use Debian or Ubuntu where things usually work, or you can usually get help from free sources. And if it's not clear what to ask or who to ask, well, I live with it. None of the support options I see are both cheap enough to afford and good enough to be better than that which is available for free.
This is a real problem, and one reason that some people buy from Dell (I don't know how well that works out). My notebook from ZAReason is working well, and they've supported it well, but I'm dubious about upgrading the system. So it'll stay on Hardy Heron for awhile. The defect of having support is that you stick with the system that's supported. You *can* change, but then your system isn't supported anymore.
The ZAReason notebook is interesting. It's totally open (in some sense). You can even hack the hardware. But once you start making changes, you're on your own. So this is analogous to what you want from the CMS system. Because it's open, I'm not tied to them for support. Because they're the experts, and I'm not, I still am. If they refused to support me, I *could* find someone else, but I'd be much more likely to see what changes I could make that would let them support me.
OTOH, if Alfresco are using some contractual trickery to say that experts can only support the proprietary version, I'd definitely look elsewhere for my system.
When the government uses RICO they invoke a pre-prosecution confiscation of all your property. Will that happen this time too?
If so, then we don't need to wait for the trial to start rejoicing. (And probably might as well celebrate now, as I bet that they'll just disband the RIAA, and the backers will start a new organization.)
Yes, I use it. The libraries aren't all they could be. (Well, it *is* a new language.) So if you need external libraries you need to call them from C, which is a drag if they require callbacks...but it's possible.
I'm generally quite pleased with it. They more so as I despise using pointers explicitly. If feels like hand coding loops using goto statements.
D does have a few awkwardnesses, such as refusing to convert types where it should be plain how to do the conversion. This is considered a safety measure. And it can (could?) occasionally be quite dull about recognizing variables imported from other files unless you fully qualify the name. That's a nuisance. The array operations still aren't fully implemented, so occasionally one needs to do things by hand that the language should, and intends, to do by itself.
But generally I'm quite satisfied with it. I switched from C/C++ to Python as soon as it became fast enough. (This probably means that cpus got fast enough :-). I recently started on a program, though, that's large enough that Python's much too slow. D handles it easily (so far). I'm well aware that the program will eventually outgrow my computer's ability to handle it no matter WHAT language I use to optimize execution. I'm going to need to deal with that somehow...but D helps me postpone the time when I need to split things up into separate streams of execution, and run it on multiple nodes. I've considered going to C++ with boost because of it's multiple node execution features, but D is currently moving towards having those same features, and I find it a MUCH more pleasant working environment. Also, for sizable programs, D is about as fast as C. There's loading time, and a large runtime library, but those are mainly significant for small programs.
... :D
Presumably you were already running, by that point?
Actually, no. They weren't really hostile, just ... narrow. They couldn't imagine anyone who was human and couldn't speak English.
I *wish* it were a joke.
OK...
Now suppose someone starts tinkering with a Chimpanzee's genes. How many Chimpanzee genes can be replaced by human genes before the soul appears? Does it matter which ones?
What if you start with a human? How many human genes can be replaced with their chimp variants? Does it matter which ones? Etc.
And how can you tell whether a soul is present in the resultant or not?
I can imagine that adequate answers to these question might cause me to accept that the persons alluded to have a definition rather than merely a prejudice. But it would, of course, depend on what the answers were.
I think Descartes was more "We are souls that have bodies.". But he was definite about mind and body not being the same. And pretty definite that mind couldn't be detected by material means. (I wonder what he would have thought of brain scans.)
Note that when discussing his ideas I used the term "mind" rather than "soul". I didn't read him in French, so this might just be a translation problem, but I think he avoided the word "soul". At least the translator did.
Well....you *can* customize the user shell prompt.
Not sure about "Access denied".
Would a loving God do that?
I'm not a super-intellect, but I doubt it. A god that loved you wouldn't go around making you feel inferior. Of course, it also wouldn't punish you for making reasonable, or even stupid, mistakes. Only malice would be worthy of punishment, and then only to correct the flaw. (Read "Inferno" by Jerry Pournell and Larry Niven for an interesting argument along this basis...but I think they twist things to make traditional beliefs more acceptable. Well, it's a novel, so what do you expect. Still, it's a good argument.)
Restating things from the Bible into computer terms, there's this *ACE* Hacker who hacks together this magnificent virtual world with dynamite graphics and haptics. Then he builds some virtual life-forms to inhabit this virtual world. Eventually he gets dissatisfied with how they are acting, so he arranges to let genetic programming modify their code as they alter the environment that they live in. That's us. What would be a "soul" here? Would it be reasonable for this hacker to extract parts of these NPCs after they are terminated in the game and either reward or torture them indefinitely? What kind of entity would act like that?
OK. I've left out a lot, and compressed the Bible into one paragraph. But isn't it a reasonable translation (of the part covered)?
Pardon me, but I think the John Dalmas tales are much more convincing, and I don't believe *them*. (I *do* find myself wanting to...but it just won't wash.) He does, however, have a justifiable-in-the-story definition of soul and what it is and why it survives. The best single volume synopsis of his thoughts is "The Reality Matrix". (Which predates the movie "The Matrix", though the ideas *may* be similar. I don't see MPAA works, so I don't really know.)