Mainframes were *EXPENSIVE*. Someone like that wouldn't have been trusted with more than janitorial or bookkeeping duties. (Not that bookkeepers aren't skilled...janitors are too...but they aren't technically trained.)
The most likely answer to the puzzle is that he was lying.
Point releases are, indeed, infrequent. Incremental releases, however, happen frequently.
OTOH, Mark Shuttleworth is another option. Ubuntu may not actually be releasing every six months (the current release has a hold), but it's close. If frequent releases are your metric, he's a good choice.
Note that NONE of these managers are operating in a command driven environment. NONE. This should tell you something.
Perhaps projects beyond a certain size NEED a distributed development protocol?
Re:Seeing is believing. NASA == cancelled projects
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No, I'm not young any more. I've been disappointed many times. This current administration is the worst in my memory.
But why should that signify? Also I would deny that the current gods of the various sects of jews and christians are either unitary or the same as the older versions. I've read that bloody book, and the god of the older chapters is closer to Yog Sototh than to the god of most of the later chapters. I'm not sure of the spelling, but Yog Sototh is from H.P. Lovecraft. You can almost hear him slavering "The blood is the life! The blood is the life!" as you read some of the earlier books of the bible. Not at all what you encounter in the later books. Or read Job again, and then tell me that this is the same loving god spoken of by Jesus.
Yes, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is recent. Why is that any argument that it isn't the one true god? Perhaps the entire universe was created within the last five minutes? In that case the FSM would be "older than the universe", and you can't demonstrate that this is impossible, merely that it's not a parsimonious assumption. But then believing in any god at all is not a parsimonious assumption. And if you believe in one, why should any one option be favored over the others. Because my mother said so is not an acceptable answer. Perhaps my mother said something different.
There is evidence that evolution is correct. I have encountered no plausible evidence that evolution is incorrect. Therefore I tentatively accept evolution. (Everything is tentative. Certainty is an illusion. Don't take this as an argument against evolution.)
I have encountered no plausible evidence that creationism is correct. It violates Occam's Razor to accept it. This isn't proof. Occam's Razor isn't always correct, but it's the best heuristic we have.
I don't see a dichotomy. It would be logically consistent to have both creationsism and evolution, and also to lack both, and have some other explanation (yet to be devised). Therefore it's not Creationism vs. Evolution. That is a false picture. But I also don't see any reason for including Creationism.
I see your point, but do you see mine? There isn't any evidence for creationism. None. What evidence would you accept as proof that creationism was incorrect?
(P.S.: This is a rhetorical question. I won't believe what you say, because I've argued with creationists before, and if I successfully produce the evidence they have always defaulted. I may be being unfair to you, but I'm more willing to be unfair to you than to expect you to live up to the agreement. I don't think you know yourself well enough. [I'm accepting that you are arguing honestly. I admit this is an assumption, but it's one that seems reasonable.])
Seeing is believing. NASA == cancelled projects
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I'll believe this when I see it. More and more I think that under this administration NASA is a PR flack that cancels anything practical, but spins dazzling visions of the future (as long as there isn't any budget requirement).
They haven't earned much trust recently. And as fiction writers, they need to work on plotting, pacing, and character development.
And Dawkins was heretical when he originally published "The Selfish Gene". (Actually, I think that was a popularization of something more technical.)
But no scientist worthy of then name is against evolution, except for some minor details. The evidence is just too strong.
N.B.: This doesn't mean that no scientist accepts creationism. The Deists have modern descendants who still believe that "God created the universe in the distant past, and then sat on his hands to watch the fireworks" (my phrasing). But even those, if they are scientists, believe in evolution.
Personally, I see as much evidence for the Flying Spaghetti Monster as I do for the objectively external God. I.e., there are many facts that don't contradict that assumption, but no fact, or collection of facts, that is best explained by presuming it. (Note that I said external. I do believe not only God, but gods are genuine entities, however I differ as to where they reside and how they operate. [Hint: The kingdom of God is within you.])
Sorry. You are making lots of assumptions about the facts. The facts are that objects with certain characteristics have been observed (are reported to have been observed) in certain backgrounds.
These become fossils when you assume that these objects are the remains of previously existing animals. Detecting patterns of changes requires presuming dates. (Yes, there is evidence, and I find it convincing, but the dates aren't facts, they are deductions.)
Etc.
Evolution doesn't show up until you are quite distant from the original raw facts.
OTOH, Evolution isn't only biological. One can observe evolution, as "the survival of the most stable" in everything from sub-atomic particles to topography to galactic structures to mathematical proofs. Biological Evolution is the most complex, and thus the one with more unexplained nooks and crannies. (Others are hard to observe, and this can generate it's own unexplained nooks and crannies.)
People have the strongest emotional response to biological evolution, particularly when it touches on their own ancestry. This doesn't make it the only form of evolution, but it tends to be the only place where evolution is ever disputed.
I can definitely imagine forms of "Intelligent Design" that occupy the middle ground. That's not what we are being offered. We are being offered sewage, and told that it's "good for you".
Pan Spermia is a plausible scenario, and there's nothing that says that those original seed carrying meteors couldn't have been intelligently built. THAT'S a middle ground hypothesis. There's still no way to prove it, but it's middle ground.
What you are asking is that people first accept the conclusion that you wish to reach, and then shape their evidence to fit that conclusion. This is... evil is too strong a word, because you don't intend harm. Nevertheless you are committing evil actions by arguing in this way to those who may not recognize the fallacy. To hold a fallacious belief is error, not evil. To attempt to induce others to hold it may not have an evil motive, but it *IS* an evil action.
From what I can see of OpenG, it doesn't seem to be even a vastly simplified version of Prograf. There was never any question that Prograf was a full programming language. It had merely abstracted things in a way that removed the if/then construct from the language. (Naturally they DID implement tests which controlled DataFlow.)
It doesn't really matter, except that it is an existence proof that such things are possible. I do consider it a shame that it died, but I also acknowledge that even had things been favorable it would have lead a fringe existence. One thing that might have helped it was multi-processing systems, as it was inherently parallelizeable. True, the interperter/compiler would have needed to be enhanced to properly use such, but the characteristics WERE built into the language. However it died decades ago, when such beasts were mainframe-only devices.
...SQL is a good example of a language that doesn't need logic checks to perform it's task. I'm not saying that SQL is great or anything, but it's a good example of how data can be managed without being told how to t...
Hunh?? I have had literally DOZENS of hairpulling error tracing problems because SQL doesn't do any decent error control. Error control is MANDATORY for any language that is to be seriously considered for anything complex. I'm not claiming that any particular error handling scheme is needed, merely that there needs to be one (and it needs to be overrideable). E.g., this dialog box in my browser highlights both Hunh and SQL in red. This is an error flag that I am intentionally ignoring. But this kind of flag is O, soincredibly useful. (I tend to be a bit dyslexic. This reduces the number of spelling error that pass through to be posted by at least an order of magnitude. [But, sigh, not to zero.])
Also existing, but too expensive for normal end users, are the 3-D printers. Some of them will even allow you to specify which bits should be electrically conductive. They're limited, but they can turn out quite cute models. (One of the companies that uses them is a car company.)
I think I even read that someone had printed out a working scale model V-8. Not sure I believe this, though. That seems rather unlikely.
Scientists never were the mythic figures that hagiographers have created them as. OTOH, social forces used to favor the open and free dissimination of knowledge by scientists. This is what has changed. Part of the change is due to changes in the patent laws, and part is due to changes in the tax laws. There are probably also other causes with less effect.
As to treating churches as the devil, how else should they expect to be treated? The very concept is native to the church...even to the christian church. (The Jews meant something very different by the term, closer to God's DA). Now as to whether I consider that everything done by a church is evil...no. I wouldn't go that far. I consider them socially destructive parasites, by and large, but not totally destructive, and most people who go to them intend to be good people. Many of them will help people who they know need help. Etc. But many actions taken by the church qua church, and many speeches by prominent churchmen, I find morally offensive. It's true that they aren't much worse than any other large corporation, most of them aren't. They aren't any better, either. And much of their "morality" is as destructive of society as a chemical plant situated upstream of your city. (I have a particular instance in mind, which consciously and intentionally poisoned a city for decades because they calculated that even after fines it would be cheaper than cleaning up their waste. They were right, too.)
"The devil"? Perhaps you need to define your terms. Then I could be more explicit and accurate in my criticisms of your "defense".
The singularitarians tend to focus on computers, because that's what's currently hot. This doesn't mean that they are committed to AI. Nanotech, both biological and otherwise, is also one form that's considered. Instantaneous communicators are also considered (though not frequently...that won't lead to a singularity until a civilization is spread far enough that light-speed delays become very significant). Little attention is paid to things that can't be predicted not because they are unlikely, but because they can't be predicted.
If you insist that the "technological singularity" will arrive in some one particular form, then you aren't a singulartarian, but a follower of some other philosophy. (And there ARE groups that are totally devoted to the idea of a singularity based around an AI. Perhaps they are singularitians. Perhaps not. It depends on what they say about what happens after this AI is achieved. If they feel they know or can predict what would happen, then they aren't singularitarians. If they just believe that this will bring on a singularity, then they are. They may or may not be correct, but they ARE singularitarians.)
Also, the very concept of the "Technological Singularity" is an ill-defined term. I'm not sure that this is of it's essence, but it's certainly true at the moment. This is highlighted by Charles Stross in one scene in Acclerando where he has a reporter asking three different people when they think the singularity occurred. One person said "When the first TCP/IP packet was transmitted. The world since then could not have been predicted by anyone living before then." If you think about it, that's rather hard to argue with. It's consistent with the current definition of "Technological singularity", and it implies that we can look back on a minimum of hundreds of such events. But it's clearly not what we think we mean. So what, actually, DO we mean?
It will be software. It will require sufficient hardware support. It won't be easy.
It will require many functionally specialized modules that will need to be created separately and merged together smoothly. It won't be easy.
It's in process now. You just aren't noticing, because we are still in the early days, also most hardware isn't sufficiently powerful to support it. But there have been noticeable improvements in just the past year. Most places still find voice recognition systems to be too expensive for the return, but the phone company uses a primitive form, and some companies use more advanced/experimental forms. Video recognizers are primitive, but they are improving every year.
Still do be done is anything that will reasonably handle grammar. Nobody seems to have a handle on that one. There are other basic modules that haven't yet been reasonably started, but most have at least sketches of a plan for implementation.
Currently there are probably fewer than five computers on the planet that could run a full-scale human equivalent AI if one were around. In 10 years they will be much more common.
OTOH, I'm not really convinced that we need a full-scale human equivalent AI to achieve most of the benefits (for those living outside of a simulation). Much of our brain is dedicated to running our body. It's not at all clear just how much is involved in consciousness. A mind in a computer wouldn't necessarily need to have an autonomic system to keep the disk drive spinning, it could depend on hardware and ASICs for that. So if you don't need to model that part of a mind, you can have an AI with much less hardware. Of course, it might have a hard time understanding human motivations...
For that matter, we probably wouldn't WANT a fully human AI. Humans have a lot of characteristics that are probably less than desireable for an entity that would need to "instinctively" understand how to operate around an OS, and is also self-willed and intelligent. We wouldn't want any such entity to be driven to seek power. Even self-defense we would want to be a mere shadow of what it is in people. I'm not sure about curiosity. But do note that any such entity will need to have SOME drives. And since it will have only a rudimentary understanding of what people ARE (the interfaces being what they are, this is unavoidable), it's not clear what those drives should be. Clearly, though, understanding the physical world will be an advanced exercise for such a creature. Maneuvering around the internet will, by comparison, be nursery school.
It's not that simple. New technologies do change rapidly for a brief while. There is no guarantee for just how long they will continue to change rapidly. Also, long stable technologies will sometimes be changed by external events, and begin changing quite rapidly.
When I was in high school I tended to model this by a helix, with different technologies distributed around the circumference of the bounding circle, and the bright spot of rapid change climbing along the rising helix. This gave me a rough guide. I didn't realize the causal mechanism behind what I was trying to model, but it was a better means of predicting than the simple linear model. It let me see that biological advances would be coming, but not rapidly enough for me to select that as my major. Eventually I picked statistics and became a programmer. This was a quite fortunate choice. (I was surprised at how long that career path carried me. I expected programmers to be obsolete before now, but AI has been a much more resistant problem than anyone expected.) Still, while there is much to be said for the helix model, the system is really stocastic. But the bright spot of hot development *does* move from area to area, and it tends to avoid the locations where it has just been resident. OTOH, I'm not convinced that it isn't getting larger and splitting into fragments. The internet is probably the cause for this, as it allows anyone who thinks some particular field is hot to form the nucleus of a group around which development can crystalise. This would tend to imply that any field that can be developed by small groups with limited funding can be pushed forwards without the prior need for access to mass media publicity (so the potentially interested folk can find each other).
OTOH, some social phenomena appear to INSIST on high localization, even without obvious need. Cases in point are "Kansas City Music", "The San Francisco Sound", "The Classical Composers". In all of those cases it isn't obvious why there was a short, sharp, localized burst of creativity. But they were all very localized, and very brief. And they swept far beyond their local environment.
There have been languages that made a great start at handling this problem. Unfortunately they died.
One of my favorite examples is Prograf, a data stream language. It was excellent...well, sort of. There wasn't any good way to textually represent it. And it was proprietary. And it was written for the Mac. Small * small * small. As with many good Mac products, it died attempting the transition to MSWind. But the real problem was that while programs were logically small, physically they were HUGE. A graphic printout would have lines of control leading all over it. It was literally like reading a flowchart, except that the flowchart didn't abstract the program, but included every necessary detail for execution. This meant that a program written for Prograf and printed would be about three or four times the size of a similar program written in, say, Fortran IV or Ada (I'm picking moderately verbose languages). Perhaps 6 to 8 times the size of one written in Python. This made thinking about the programs very difficult.
If you want another example, you could look at the Helix database, but that didn't abstract away the if/then statement. Still, it was another good program killed by no convenient way of seeing large chunks of the code at once.
Until we can develop a true AI, the best progress that we can make will be based on chunking. There are various ways of doing this, libraries are one popular way. So is "higher order languages". Every language that steps above binary is created through a chunking of lower level concepts into higher level ones. The if/then construct itself is a chunking of lower level concepts (usually test and branch if zero/not-zero, but other tests occur). Very few languages have chunked the if/then construct away, however. Prograf is the only one I can think of. (Unless you allow the Lisp (cond()) statement...which is really a series of if tests in one wrapper. And I think that current Lisp dialects also include a simple If test, but I'm not sure about that.) However you might check J (a language descendant from APL). It also handles chunks in a highly divergent way, and may have eliminate the if/then construct.
What would be nice would be if someone could resurrect Prograf with it's warts polished off. I remain convinced that this was a language with great promise that was stiffled by... well largely by circumstance, but the lack of a viable printed representation was also significant.
Although I like the idea of exploring space and all the neat things that we could do up there, I'm gald we've said forget it. I'd rather have cheap entertainment and cell phones than have "a man" walk on the moon.
To my mind this is very short-sighted. Perhaps it's appropriate that we have fallen back to regroup, but not going into space in a large scale is suicidal -- not on an individual basis, but for the species. The only question is the appropriate time frame. Perhaps it's appropriate that we stop and do a bit more development before another big push. This is very different from "stop and sit on our hands", however.
Toys are fun, but they're only really important if they're a step towards getting where you need to go. I enjoy computer games, but I don't really consider them important...except that gamers have helped push the development of computer technology.
I really doubt that you can dramatically improve things by adding another geometric dimension. If you want to improve the interface, then the improvement will need to be based on the improved understanding (by the computer) of the interface. A 3-D interface is probably not going to be particularly useful. Various people keep trying to prove me wrong about this, but to my mind what that would do is increase the computational requirements on the user, with minimal to no improvement on the information throughput. This is the opposite of what is needed.
If you want to improve the interface, you need to make it more TRANSPARENT. Less something that gets in the way. This is, indeed, a difficult thing to accomplish. Currently the text interface to computers is based around ink on paper, the most efficient technique that people have ever developed for transmitting information asynchronously. It's made some moderate improvements, but I still prefer to read a book than to read a computer screen. The book is more transparent.
The main advantage that computers, as a media, currently have (besides eye-candy) is during the creative process. I've *used* typewriters. Computers are so much better it's nearly unbelievable. But for reading, ink on paper is better. (Immersive games are something different...but I think that they are apart from the rest of what I'm saying. They can be educational tools, but when adapted for that purpose they are often quite dull, and they don't seem to have any other use. Prove me wrong!)
One possibility that I see for an interface which would, in certain circumstances, be superior is based around physical modeling. This requires the computer to better understand the physical world, so that if can interpret what a camera is seeing. This would be an interface for telefactors that highlighted things needing attention. Unfortunately, this isn't one simple thing, but a complex, where different uses of telefactors would require different understandings. A surgeon might use this interface to operate on a patient in Paris from Tokyo, e.g. Here the potential improvement would be to clarify the boundaries between internal organs, and remove clouding caused by blood (either by visual processing, or by controlling some local entity, human, robot, or telefactor, and causing them to clear the visual field.
As you can see while this would be important, it would also be very specialized. A telefactor pulling cables would need a different system.
Notes: A telefactor is the controlling mechanism for a waldo. If a human is operating the telefactor, the resultant system is called telepresence. If a computer is operating the telefactor, the resultant system is called a robot. I have no idea what you call a system that switches back and forth between being controlled by a computer and a human.
Guess how that virus got control of the nuclear plant? All of the official contact points with the outside world were heavily firewalled, and the traffic that DID get through the firewall was limited, screened, and safe.
Ans.: A contractor hired to monitor a part of the network had an unsafe connection to the internet. (I don't know the details. I wasn't there, and I wouldn't have trusted the new account even if it had gone into details. So the contractor may have been a fall guy. OTOH, this story is all too believable.)
Fortunately, the virus didn't do anything dangerous. But it COULD have.
That brings up an interesting scenario. I recently heard that Britain had a destroyer that was operated by MSWind (I don't know which release), and I was just imagining... I presume that there's usually time for a ship to reboot, but suppose there had been some repairs. I can just see that ship sitting there until the navy gets through the MSHelp line for a re-activation key...
Now I'm *certain* that MS would never intentionally ship a version that required reauthorization after system mods to the navy. And that the never make a mistake. So this would never happen. Really. But just imagine WHEN a destroyer is most likely to need repairs QUICKLY.
I wouldn't have allowed closed source software on voting machines. I would have demanded not only open source, but signed binaries with signatures that could be checked by the poll workers. I got Diebold, and a bunch of people who don't even understand why I'm upset. Who made the decision? It was made at a "secret" meeting between upper level city management and the vendors. (I say "secret", because it may have been announced somewhere, under some label. So, technically, it may not have been secret.)
Depend on it. If DRM becomes widespread it will be used in MANY ways that no sensible person would use it. At least, no sensible person who had any concern with the rights and safety of the general citizenry. Sometimes I can't tell the difference between stupid and evil. (If you can't tell the difference, does a difference exist?... Well, yes. But if the DON'T learn, and DO stay in charge, then I'm no longer certain...but I lean towards "No".)
A comment from a Doctor I visit (in the US). This is a paraphrase, so I'm not using quotes: Most doctors in this area are over 50, and few new doctors are coming in. The doctors who are here are retiring faster than new ones are showing up. The insurance companies are less and less willing to cover expenses. I'm not sure how much longer I'll be willing to put up with the increasingly worse conditions.
Canada made a better choice. Possibly at the moment the systems are in a state of rough equality, but the Canadian system is relatively stable, and the US system is in the process of collapsing. More quickly, of course, in the poorer areas, but EVERYWHERE, because conditions are becoming so bad that doctors don't want their kids to be doctors.
Then there's the problems that nurses are facing. No rational decision would cause one to become a nurse. Their situation is worse than that of the doctors, and they don't even get the "high status" part of the reward. They are also increasingly denied any opportunity to be aware that they are helping people, which is the main emotional energy that causes people to choose nursing rather than, say, real estate in the first place.
Canada made the better choice. With a smaller investment they have arrived at a superior system. There may have been the cost of an initial period of lesser efficiency, but that period is ending, or, possibly, has ended.
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Mainframes were *EXPENSIVE*. Someone like that wouldn't have been trusted with more than janitorial or bookkeeping duties. (Not that bookkeepers aren't skilled...janitors are too...but they aren't technically trained.)
The most likely answer to the puzzle is that he was lying.
I take it you don't use apt-get.
Point releases are, indeed, infrequent. Incremental releases, however, happen frequently.
OTOH, Mark Shuttleworth is another option. Ubuntu may not actually be releasing every six months (the current release has a hold), but it's close. If frequent releases are your metric, he's a good choice.
Note that NONE of these managers are operating in a command driven environment. NONE. This should tell you something.
Perhaps projects beyond a certain size NEED a distributed development protocol?
No, I'm not young any more. I've been disappointed many times. This current administration is the worst in my memory.
But why should that signify? Also I would deny that the current gods of the various sects of jews and christians are either unitary or the same as the older versions. I've read that bloody book, and the god of the older chapters is closer to Yog Sototh than to the god of most of the later chapters. I'm not sure of the spelling, but Yog Sototh is from H.P. Lovecraft. You can almost hear him slavering "The blood is the life! The blood is the life!" as you read some of the earlier books of the bible. Not at all what you encounter in the later books. Or read Job again, and then tell me that this is the same loving god spoken of by Jesus.
Yes, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is recent. Why is that any argument that it isn't the one true god? Perhaps the entire universe was created within the last five minutes? In that case the FSM would be "older than the universe", and you can't demonstrate that this is impossible, merely that it's not a parsimonious assumption. But then believing in any god at all is not a parsimonious assumption. And if you believe in one, why should any one option be favored over the others. Because my mother said so is not an acceptable answer. Perhaps my mother said something different.
There is evidence that evolution is correct. I have encountered no plausible evidence that evolution is incorrect. Therefore I tentatively accept evolution. (Everything is tentative. Certainty is an illusion. Don't take this as an argument against evolution.)
I have encountered no plausible evidence that creationism is correct. It violates Occam's Razor to accept it. This isn't proof. Occam's Razor isn't always correct, but it's the best heuristic we have.
I don't see a dichotomy. It would be logically consistent to have both creationsism and evolution, and also to lack both, and have some other explanation (yet to be devised). Therefore it's not Creationism vs. Evolution. That is a false picture. But I also don't see any reason for including Creationism.
I see your point, but do you see mine? There isn't any evidence for creationism. None. What evidence would you accept as proof that creationism was incorrect?
(P.S.: This is a rhetorical question. I won't believe what you say, because I've argued with creationists before, and if I successfully produce the evidence they have always defaulted. I may be being unfair to you, but I'm more willing to be unfair to you than to expect you to live up to the agreement. I don't think you know yourself well enough. [I'm accepting that you are arguing honestly. I admit this is an assumption, but it's one that seems reasonable.])
I'll believe this when I see it. More and more I think that under this administration NASA is a PR flack that cancels anything practical, but spins dazzling visions of the future (as long as there isn't any budget requirement).
They haven't earned much trust recently. And as fiction writers, they need to work on plotting, pacing, and character development.
And Dawkins was heretical when he originally published "The Selfish Gene". (Actually, I think that was a popularization of something more technical.)
But no scientist worthy of then name is against evolution, except for some minor details. The evidence is just too strong.
N.B.: This doesn't mean that no scientist accepts creationism. The Deists have modern descendants who still believe that "God created the universe in the distant past, and then sat on his hands to watch the fireworks" (my phrasing). But even those, if they are scientists, believe in evolution.
Personally, I see as much evidence for the Flying Spaghetti Monster as I do for the objectively external God. I.e., there are many facts that don't contradict that assumption, but no fact, or collection of facts, that is best explained by presuming it. (Note that I said external. I do believe not only God, but gods are genuine entities, however I differ as to where they reside and how they operate. [Hint: The kingdom of God is within you.])
Sorry. You are making lots of assumptions about the facts. The facts are that objects with certain characteristics have been observed (are reported to have been observed) in certain backgrounds.
These become fossils when you assume that these objects are the remains of previously existing animals. Detecting patterns of changes requires presuming dates. (Yes, there is evidence, and I find it convincing, but the dates aren't facts, they are deductions.)
Etc.
Evolution doesn't show up until you are quite distant from the original raw facts.
OTOH, Evolution isn't only biological. One can observe evolution, as "the survival of the most stable" in everything from sub-atomic particles to topography to galactic structures to mathematical proofs. Biological Evolution is the most complex, and thus the one with more unexplained nooks and crannies. (Others are hard to observe, and this can generate it's own unexplained nooks and crannies.)
People have the strongest emotional response to biological evolution, particularly when it touches on their own ancestry. This doesn't make it the only form of evolution, but it tends to be the only place where evolution is ever disputed.
I can definitely imagine forms of "Intelligent Design" that occupy the middle ground. That's not what we are being offered. We are being offered sewage, and told that it's "good for you".
... evil is too strong a word, because you don't intend harm. Nevertheless you are committing evil actions by arguing in this way to those who may not recognize the fallacy. To hold a fallacious belief is error, not evil. To attempt to induce others to hold it may not have an evil motive, but it *IS* an evil action.
Pan Spermia is a plausible scenario, and there's nothing that says that those original seed carrying meteors couldn't have been intelligently built. THAT'S a middle ground hypothesis. There's still no way to prove it, but it's middle ground.
What you are asking is that people first accept the conclusion that you wish to reach, and then shape their evidence to fit that conclusion. This is
"Within a year" is a rather short time span for a scam. Usually by that point the investors would need to already be on board.
I'm not going to put a lot of credence into this, but I'm also not going to dismiss it. And I'll hope for the best.
Since he still publishes in prestigious journals, perhaps you could give a few references. With specificity.
From what I can see of OpenG, it doesn't seem to be even a vastly simplified version of Prograf. There was never any question that Prograf was a full programming language. It had merely abstracted things in a way that removed the if/then construct from the language. (Naturally they DID implement tests which controlled DataFlow.)
It doesn't really matter, except that it is an existence proof that such things are possible. I do consider it a shame that it died, but I also acknowledge that even had things been favorable it would have lead a fringe existence. One thing that might have helped it was multi-processing systems, as it was inherently parallelizeable. True, the interperter/compiler would have needed to be enhanced to properly use such, but the characteristics WERE built into the language. However it died decades ago, when such beasts were mainframe-only devices.
...SQL is a good example of a language that doesn't need logic checks to perform it's task. I'm not saying that SQL is great or anything, but it's a good example of how data can be managed without being told how to t...
Hunh?? I have had literally DOZENS of hairpulling error tracing problems because SQL doesn't do any decent error control. Error control is MANDATORY for any language that is to be seriously considered for anything complex. I'm not claiming that any particular error handling scheme is needed, merely that there needs to be one (and it needs to be overrideable). E.g., this dialog box in my browser highlights both Hunh and SQL in red. This is an error flag that I am intentionally ignoring. But this kind of flag is O, so incredibly useful. (I tend to be a bit dyslexic. This reduces the number of spelling error that pass through to be posted by at least an order of magnitude. [But, sigh, not to zero.])
Also existing, but too expensive for normal end users, are the 3-D printers. Some of them will even allow you to specify which bits should be electrically conductive. They're limited, but they can turn out quite cute models. (One of the companies that uses them is a car company.)
I think I even read that someone had printed out a working scale model V-8. Not sure I believe this, though. That seems rather unlikely.
Scientists never were the mythic figures that hagiographers have created them as. OTOH, social forces used to favor the open and free dissimination of knowledge by scientists. This is what has changed. Part of the change is due to changes in the patent laws, and part is due to changes in the tax laws. There are probably also other causes with less effect.
As to treating churches as the devil, how else should they expect to be treated? The very concept is native to the church...even to the christian church. (The Jews meant something very different by the term, closer to God's DA).
Now as to whether I consider that everything done by a church is evil...no. I wouldn't go that far. I consider them socially destructive parasites, by and large, but not totally destructive, and most people who go to them intend to be good people. Many of them will help people who they know need help. Etc. But many actions taken by the church qua church, and many speeches by prominent churchmen, I find morally offensive. It's true that they aren't much worse than any other large corporation, most of them aren't. They aren't any better, either. And much of their "morality" is as destructive of society as a chemical plant situated upstream of your city. (I have a particular instance in mind, which consciously and intentionally poisoned a city for decades because they calculated that even after fines it would be cheaper than cleaning up their waste. They were right, too.)
"The devil"? Perhaps you need to define your terms. Then I could be more explicit and accurate in my criticisms of your "defense".
I think you misunderstand.
The singularitarians tend to focus on computers, because that's what's currently hot. This doesn't mean that they are committed to AI. Nanotech, both biological and otherwise, is also one form that's considered. Instantaneous communicators are also considered (though not frequently...that won't lead to a singularity until a civilization is spread far enough that light-speed delays become very significant). Little attention is paid to things that can't be predicted not because they are unlikely, but because they can't be predicted.
If you insist that the "technological singularity" will arrive in some one particular form, then you aren't a singulartarian, but a follower of some other philosophy. (And there ARE groups that are totally devoted to the idea of a singularity based around an AI. Perhaps they are singularitians. Perhaps not. It depends on what they say about what happens after this AI is achieved. If they feel they know or can predict what would happen, then they aren't singularitarians. If they just believe that this will bring on a singularity, then they are. They may or may not be correct, but they ARE singularitarians.)
Also, the very concept of the "Technological Singularity" is an ill-defined term. I'm not sure that this is of it's essence, but it's certainly true at the moment. This is highlighted by Charles Stross in one scene in Acclerando where he has a reporter asking three different people when they think the singularity occurred. One person said "When the first TCP/IP packet was transmitted. The world since then could not have been predicted by anyone living before then." If you think about it, that's rather hard to argue with. It's consistent with the current definition of "Technological singularity", and it implies that we can look back on a minimum of hundreds of such events. But it's clearly not what we think we mean. So what, actually, DO we mean?
It will be software. It will require sufficient hardware support. It won't be easy.
It will require many functionally specialized modules that will need to be created separately and merged together smoothly. It won't be easy.
It's in process now. You just aren't noticing, because we are still in the early days, also most hardware isn't sufficiently powerful to support it. But there have been noticeable improvements in just the past year. Most places still find voice recognition systems to be too expensive for the return, but the phone company uses a primitive form, and some companies use more advanced/experimental forms. Video recognizers are primitive, but they are improving every year.
Still do be done is anything that will reasonably handle grammar. Nobody seems to have a handle on that one. There are other basic modules that haven't yet been reasonably started, but most have at least sketches of a plan for implementation.
Currently there are probably fewer than five computers on the planet that could run a full-scale human equivalent AI if one were around. In 10 years they will be much more common.
OTOH, I'm not really convinced that we need a full-scale human equivalent AI to achieve most of the benefits (for those living outside of a simulation). Much of our brain is dedicated to running our body. It's not at all clear just how much is involved in consciousness. A mind in a computer wouldn't necessarily need to have an autonomic system to keep the disk drive spinning, it could depend on hardware and ASICs for that. So if you don't need to model that part of a mind, you can have an AI with much less hardware. Of course, it might have a hard time understanding human motivations...
For that matter, we probably wouldn't WANT a fully human AI. Humans have a lot of characteristics that are probably less than desireable for an entity that would need to "instinctively" understand how to operate around an OS, and is also self-willed and intelligent. We wouldn't want any such entity to be driven to seek power. Even self-defense we would want to be a mere shadow of what it is in people. I'm not sure about curiosity. But do note that any such entity will need to have SOME drives. And since it will have only a rudimentary understanding of what people ARE (the interfaces being what they are, this is unavoidable), it's not clear what those drives should be. Clearly, though, understanding the physical world will be an advanced exercise for such a creature. Maneuvering around the internet will, by comparison, be nursery school.
It's not that simple. New technologies do change rapidly for a brief while. There is no guarantee for just how long they will continue to change rapidly. Also, long stable technologies will sometimes be changed by external events, and begin changing quite rapidly.
When I was in high school I tended to model this by a helix, with different technologies distributed around the circumference of the bounding circle, and the bright spot of rapid change climbing along the rising helix. This gave me a rough guide. I didn't realize the causal mechanism behind what I was trying to model, but it was a better means of predicting than the simple linear model. It let me see that biological advances would be coming, but not rapidly enough for me to select that as my major. Eventually I picked statistics and became a programmer. This was a quite fortunate choice. (I was surprised at how long that career path carried me. I expected programmers to be obsolete before now, but AI has been a much more resistant problem than anyone expected.) Still, while there is much to be said for the helix model, the system is really stocastic. But the bright spot of hot development *does* move from area to area, and it tends to avoid the locations where it has just been resident. OTOH, I'm not convinced that it isn't getting larger and splitting into fragments. The internet is probably the cause for this, as it allows anyone who thinks some particular field is hot to form the nucleus of a group around which development can crystalise. This would tend to imply that any field that can be developed by small groups with limited funding can be pushed forwards without the prior need for access to mass media publicity (so the potentially interested folk can find each other).
OTOH, some social phenomena appear to INSIST on high localization, even without obvious need. Cases in point are "Kansas City Music", "The San Francisco Sound", "The Classical Composers". In all of those cases it isn't obvious why there was a short, sharp, localized burst of creativity. But they were all very localized, and very brief. And they swept far beyond their local environment.
There have been languages that made a great start at handling this problem. Unfortunately they died.
... well largely by circumstance, but the lack of a viable printed representation was also significant.
One of my favorite examples is Prograf, a data stream language. It was excellent...well, sort of. There wasn't any good way to textually represent it. And it was proprietary. And it was written for the Mac. Small * small * small. As with many good Mac products, it died attempting the transition to MSWind. But the real problem was that while programs were logically small, physically they were HUGE. A graphic printout would have lines of control leading all over it. It was literally like reading a flowchart, except that the flowchart didn't abstract the program, but included every necessary detail for execution. This meant that a program written for Prograf and printed would be about three or four times the size of a similar program written in, say, Fortran IV or Ada (I'm picking moderately verbose languages). Perhaps 6 to 8 times the size of one written in Python. This made thinking about the programs very difficult.
If you want another example, you could look at the Helix database, but that didn't abstract away the if/then statement. Still, it was another good program killed by no convenient way of seeing large chunks of the code at once.
Until we can develop a true AI, the best progress that we can make will be based on chunking. There are various ways of doing this, libraries are one popular way. So is "higher order languages". Every language that steps above binary is created through a chunking of lower level concepts into higher level ones. The if/then construct itself is a chunking of lower level concepts (usually test and branch if zero/not-zero, but other tests occur). Very few languages have chunked the if/then construct away, however. Prograf is the only one I can think of. (Unless you allow the Lisp (cond()) statement...which is really a series of if tests in one wrapper. And I think that current Lisp dialects also include a simple If test, but I'm not sure about that.) However you might check J (a language descendant from APL). It also handles chunks in a highly divergent way, and may have eliminate the if/then construct.
What would be nice would be if someone could resurrect Prograf with it's warts polished off. I remain convinced that this was a language with great promise that was stiffled by
Although I like the idea of exploring space and all the neat things that we could do up there, I'm gald we've said forget it. I'd rather have cheap entertainment and cell phones than have "a man" walk on the moon.
To my mind this is very short-sighted. Perhaps it's appropriate that we have fallen back to regroup, but not going into space in a large scale is suicidal -- not on an individual basis, but for the species. The only question is the appropriate time frame. Perhaps it's appropriate that we stop and do a bit more development before another big push. This is very different from "stop and sit on our hands", however.
Toys are fun, but they're only really important if they're a step towards getting where you need to go. I enjoy computer games, but I don't really consider them important...except that gamers have helped push the development of computer technology.
I really doubt that you can dramatically improve things by adding another geometric dimension. If you want to improve the interface, then the improvement will need to be based on the improved understanding (by the computer) of the interface. A 3-D interface is probably not going to be particularly useful. Various people keep trying to prove me wrong about this, but to my mind what that would do is increase the computational requirements on the user, with minimal to no improvement on the information throughput. This is the opposite of what is needed.
If you want to improve the interface, you need to make it more TRANSPARENT. Less something that gets in the way. This is, indeed, a difficult thing to accomplish. Currently the text interface to computers is based around ink on paper, the most efficient technique that people have ever developed for transmitting information asynchronously. It's made some moderate improvements, but I still prefer to read a book than to read a computer screen. The book is more transparent.
The main advantage that computers, as a media, currently have (besides eye-candy) is during the creative process. I've *used* typewriters. Computers are so much better it's nearly unbelievable. But for reading, ink on paper is better. (Immersive games are something different...but I think that they are apart from the rest of what I'm saying. They can be educational tools, but when adapted for that purpose they are often quite dull, and they don't seem to have any other use. Prove me wrong!)
One possibility that I see for an interface which would, in certain circumstances, be superior is based around physical modeling. This requires the computer to better understand the physical world, so that if can interpret what a camera is seeing. This would be an interface for telefactors that highlighted things needing attention. Unfortunately, this isn't one simple thing, but a complex, where different uses of telefactors would require different understandings. A surgeon might use this interface to operate on a patient in Paris from Tokyo, e.g. Here the potential improvement would be to clarify the boundaries between internal organs, and remove clouding caused by blood (either by visual processing, or by controlling some local entity, human, robot, or telefactor, and causing them to clear the visual field.
As you can see while this would be important, it would also be very specialized. A telefactor pulling cables would need a different system.
Notes:
A telefactor is the controlling mechanism for a waldo. If a human is operating the telefactor, the resultant system is called telepresence. If a computer is operating the telefactor, the resultant system is called a robot. I have no idea what you call a system that switches back and forth between being controlled by a computer and a human.
Guess how that virus got control of the nuclear plant? All of the official contact points with the outside world were heavily firewalled, and the traffic that DID get through the firewall was limited, screened, and safe.
Ans.: A contractor hired to monitor a part of the network had an unsafe connection to the internet. (I don't know the details. I wasn't there, and I wouldn't have trusted the new account even if it had gone into details. So the contractor may have been a fall guy. OTOH, this story is all too believable.)
Fortunately, the virus didn't do anything dangerous. But it COULD have.
That brings up an interesting scenario. I recently heard that Britain had a destroyer that was operated by MSWind (I don't know which release), and I was just imagining...
I presume that there's usually time for a ship to reboot, but suppose there had been some repairs. I can just see that ship sitting there until the navy gets through the MSHelp line for a re-activation key...
Now I'm *certain* that MS would never intentionally ship a version that required reauthorization after system mods to the navy. And that the never make a mistake. So this would never happen. Really. But just imagine WHEN a destroyer is most likely to need repairs QUICKLY.
Who is making the decision?
... Well, yes. But if the DON'T learn, and DO stay in charge, then I'm no longer certain...but I lean towards "No".)
I wouldn't have allowed closed source software on voting machines. I would have demanded not only open source, but signed binaries with signatures that could be checked by the poll workers. I got Diebold, and a bunch of people who don't even understand why I'm upset. Who made the decision? It was made at a "secret" meeting between upper level city management and the vendors. (I say "secret", because it may have been announced somewhere, under some label. So, technically, it may not have been secret.)
Depend on it. If DRM becomes widespread it will be used in MANY ways that no sensible person would use it. At least, no sensible person who had any concern with the rights and safety of the general citizenry. Sometimes I can't tell the difference between stupid and evil. (If you can't tell the difference, does a difference exist?
A comment from a Doctor I visit (in the US). This is a paraphrase, so I'm not using quotes:
Most doctors in this area are over 50, and few new doctors are coming in. The doctors who are here are retiring faster than new ones are showing up. The insurance companies are less and less willing to cover expenses. I'm not sure how much longer I'll be willing to put up with the increasingly worse conditions.
Canada made a better choice. Possibly at the moment the systems are in a state of rough equality, but the Canadian system is relatively stable, and the US system is in the process of collapsing. More quickly, of course, in the poorer areas, but EVERYWHERE, because conditions are becoming so bad that doctors don't want their kids to be doctors.
Then there's the problems that nurses are facing. No rational decision would cause one to become a nurse. Their situation is worse than that of the doctors, and they don't even get the "high status" part of the reward. They are also increasingly denied any opportunity to be aware that they are helping people, which is the main emotional energy that causes people to choose nursing rather than, say, real estate in the first place.
Canada made the better choice. With a smaller investment they have arrived at a superior system. There may have been the cost of an initial period of lesser efficiency, but that period is ending, or, possibly, has ended.