I found this article to be generally frustrating for several reasons:
1. They never referenced any specific law or court
interpretation of a law.
What law are they talking about specifically? How can we
check to ensure our company practices are in compliance with
"the law". Does this law apply equally to all employers or
does it only apply to employers with federal contracts as
many of the equal opportunity laws do?
2. They throw out terms like "under it's most rigid
interpretation" and "the federal governments definition".
By who's interpretation? The courts? The Equal Employment
Office? Are there any court cases we can refer to in order
to further define these interpretations? Where is this
defined? How can we verify this?
3. They don't give any specific guidelines for battling the
problem.
Is this article just writting to freak people out? They
don't even mention how long you are "required" to keep the
resumes on file, only that many people keep them on file for
a year or two. Is this their preference, or is that what
this "law" specifies.
Overall, very frustrating and light on details. How can we as a company change our policies to be in accordance with some law, that is being rigidly interpreted by someone, somewhere?
Unfortunately this is something we've all known has been a long time in coming. When it comes to the government and collecting "their" money, they won't let any opportunity pass them by.
It will be interesting to see how this will impact online retailing though. Not having to pay sales tax has been helpful to sites like Amazon for keeping their costs lower than brick and mortar stores. Although I think many people don't figure the cost of sales tax into the purchase of an item as frequently as they should (I know I don't), so it may not have that large of an effect.
One interesting sales tax law in my home state (Utah) is that if you buy something from a state that doesn't have sales tax (Oregon) then you have to pay sales tax to Utah. Just one of the lovely little "bend over and grab your ankles" type of laws on the books. I'm hopeful they won't enact the same type of law for internet commerce, but I don't have much hope.
There are so many different angles to attack this issue from, and unfortunately there are more sides to the issue than we'd like to admit. However I think there are several areas that would be good to discuss:
- Closed source has more bugs, and the exploits are typically more severe. - Actual turn around time for Closed source is much slower than open source for new features and enhancements. - Closed source hampers IT productivity as the fear of sharing "Intellectual Property" infects and permeates many people that work in closed source environments
This article addresses what many people consider to be open source's weekpoint. It is however it's strongest point. This is a fantastic read and is a must in any presentation to management about open source and open standards in general.
I strongly agree with Reiser on this issue. Although he doesn't necessarily argue for "slathering" software with attributions, rather he argues convincingly IMO that the credit for a piece of software should remain visible to the public users. This can be tastefully done easily, the point is that leaving the credit for writing the software in the source code is pointless as most people don't ever read the source code.
It isn't even so much that someone can't supply a new spalsh screen, it just needs to include attributions to the original authors. I think he makes some very interesting and very valid points. It is interesting to note as he states, that although Stallman is a huge contributor to many projects, he rarely gets credited on anything. I feel the same way as Reiser on this, even though Stallman doesn't want to burden the software with licensing restrictions, it bothers me that he gets so little in the way of credit for what he has helped to bring about.
At work I've used dotnet for the past year and half full time. I've built websites with it, I've build desktop apps with it, I've even built auto-updating distributed apps with it.
Dotnet has some good things to it and some bad things just like any other technology. Before dotnet, most of my work solutions were written in VB *shudder*, but when dotnet was released I switched immediately to C#. C# does some things right that Java didn't do too well on, but those are honestly pretty rare. IMO, C# is very much like an immature version of Java. That being said, Microsoft is pushing dotnet pretty hard.
When it comes to dotnet for game development, it is a possibility. Mainly because Microsoft is putting so much emphasis on it. With good native integration into DirectX, they could push a lot of DirectX developers into using C# or Managed C++, maybe. It will only happnen if MS can make the integration fast and tight, and even then I don't think everyone doing DirectX will use dotnet, it imposes too many rules on you as the developer and really hides the low level details that are so critical to many high performance games (yes even using unsafe code). On the other hand it could be a good language for someone to learn to write games in, for just that reason.
Of course, that really only applies to people who want to use a Microsoft product for building games. The ubiquity of dotnet within the MS world will have little to no effect on the OpenGL programmers, except that they may need to find a different editor *if* they have been using Visual Studio.
In reality I think dotnet is what everyone thinks, a competitor to Java. How many highgrade professional games are written in Java currently?
Props to Linus
on
Linus on DRM
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
What Linus is saying makes complete sense to me. I think the Kernel level of Linux is the wrong place to make a political stand like that. What has made Linux successful, and what will make it ultimately *the* OS is it's an Evolvable System
The fact that people can use Linux for whatever they need to is what makes it such a compelling system. The fact that you can tinker with it, change the source, in short make it work for you is what makes Linux successful.
He also makes a good point, there is a difference between allowing DRM and forcing everyone that uses the OS to use DRM (as M$ want). There are some times when DRM is very legitimate (Goverment Top Secret Docs, Litigation Confidential information etc), and there are the times when I consider it to be un-ethical (most other situations I can think of).
I have to say way to go Linus. Keep the system evolvable. Ultimately isn't it a catch 22 anyway? If he prohibits DRM, isn't that sort of like saying "this is my software and you can't do XX with it".
LookSmart hopes to tap the altruistic nature of many Internet users.
That unfortunately seems like a naively optimistic hope. While the vast majority of people may be altruistic, it only takes a few unscrupulous individuals to completely undermine a fair result.
It's interesting that this idea is an extension to Google's model in many ways. Essentially Google is able to index so much of the interent by having 50,000+ servers. I don't think that's what makes Google such a useful search tool, rather I think it's accuracy and relevancy. If my search results started getting poluted with bogus hits, I would stop using it almost immediately.
Unfortunately, by letting people run the client on their machine and having it send the results back to the server, I think spoofed results are inevitable. I don't think it will be possible to safeguard the results either, it will be interesting to see how well this project survives *when* people start spoofing results. It's been a problem for SETI@home, and it's something that undermined some peoples faith in the project as a whole. If the spoofed results are more widespread and have a larger impact as they would in a system like this, it may ultimately prove fatal to the project.
One factor that has been asbolutely critical to Google's success has been their ability to remain resistant to spoofing attempts. It's still a question mark how well grub will perform in that context.
This is a truly impressive article, even if this guy does have a little too much free time on his hands.
The breakdown of the Bio-Port is wonderful. It's really a fantastic explanation of how the Bio-Port could work, and what it would be doing.
The Red pill, I've always seen this as similar to some type of virus that is injected into the system. His deconstruction is similar in flavor to what I thought.
The power plant is great. Rather than humans being the energy source, they are a giant Beowulf cluster. Maybe Beowulf (the hero) was the first Beowulf after all.
I thought Entering and Exiting the Matrix was interesting, but I didn't find the arguments as compelling in this section for some reason. There just seem to be too many special exceptions for my taste.
Overall this article has some real potential, and definately helps with the suspension of disbelief process that is so crucial to any story telling. A bit of a warning though, it's long, really long.
According to the article 90% of them gave their password away, not 75%. 95% of the men and 85% of the women did.
It's sad because no matter how much I know this, people are still able to shock me. 90% of them gave their passwords away! I would've thought maybe 10% or 20%, but 90%?!?
As a corollary to this article, Kevin Mitnick's book "The Art of Deception" is fantastic. I tend to think of myself as fairly security conscious, but this book opened my eyes.
Social Engineering is a very real threat, something IMO will take decades to be addressed. At a certain level I think Social Engineering can never be totally defeated or even necessarily defeated to any large degree. The problem lies with efficiency. Any large organization that works with a large number of external organizations is *extremely* vulnerable to this type of attack, even with incredibly strong security measures in place.
The company that I work for has very, very stringent control policies for security. They are by far the most security conscious company that I have ever worked for, yet I am supremely confident that even a poorly executed Social Engineering attack would be highly successful. There is no doubt about it, when it comes to security humans are definately the weakest link.
I wonder if the reason the numbers were a little low last year was due to the september 11th attacks. After the attacks people were highly conscious of security, but as time passes people relax more and begin to trust other people more. They just don't realize how small pieces of information can incur such a large cost.
It seems like AT&T is directly at fault here, even though they are warning people to change their default password, this type of scam wouldn't be possible if they didn't have an automated system processing collect calls.
Not only that, but AT&T is the one that chooses the default password, by picking something that is easily guessable they are doubly guilty of allowing this to happen.
This is an interesting story, and there are several things we should note about it. First of all, it's posted in the "Entertainment News & Gossip" section of Yahoo! TV. That should be a fairly big give away. Second this guy allegedly got arrested January 28th, yet no major news outlet has picked the story up.
With those pieces of information let's look at the story. The story claims this guy made $350 million dollars in two weeks with only an $800 dollar investment by making 126 high-risk trades. It also alleges that he came out a winner every time. The article then leads you to believe the SEC thinks it's insider trading and that his story about being from the future is obviously false. Yet any person with reasonable intelligence will realize that even with insider information, there is no way someone could make 126 "high-risk" trades and come out on top every time. To have a record that perfect someone would need foreknowledge.
The article appears to be trying to persuade us that the man had insider knowledge, yet when you evaluate the story at face value you walk away thinking "no way, insider information isn't *that* good. He *must* be from the future".
The major problems with this story though lie in the basic facts:
1. There is no Andrew Carlssin being investigated by the SEC 2. The SEC does not have police powers and cannot arrest people 3. The alleged high risk trades didn't take place 4. There is in fact no record of *any* of the events mentioned
I could go on and on, however there is absolutely no solid factual information to back this story up. I saw this article a few days before April 1st, so I thought it was some type of elaborate April fools day joke, but I wanted to put it to rest once and for all, so I called the SEC Public Relations office.
They said the article is completely made up and has no basis in fact. It's not even based on an actual investigation.
Of course we knew all this because this story is posted in the "Gossip" section though.
"It hasn't had somebody like Novell worrying about making it robust, reliable and scalable. We think we can bring that to the Linux kernel."
I guess IBM, HP and the like are peanuts compared to Novell.
While his comments are certainly brash, and probably overly self-important, Netware really did make a good system. Ultimately they just got crushed under the Microsoft marketing machine. I've run both Microsoft and Novell networks and I definitely thought Netware was by far the superior product. As we've consistently seen in the IT world though, a good product isn't the only thing you need.
In a sense he has a point about Linux being an immature operating system, although that point seems a bit overstated. Personally though, I'd love to see Novell contributing to Linux. The beauty of Open Source and in this case the GPL, is that Novell can contribute to the development of Linux, but they can't hijack it. Having more good companies contribute to making it reliable and scalable is a good thing. I can't see a downside to having them make contributions to the project.
Ultimately the point is that Linux is catching on. Even companies like Sun and Novell that have their own operating systems are seeing the value and are beginning to support it. With broad industry support, Linux could supplant Microsoft as the dominant OS.
In a related move Osama Bin Laden has been appointed as the first ever Terror Czar. Bin Laden was not immediately available for comment.
From the article it sounds like this post will be more of a public relations position than anything. Rather than appointing someone who worked for a company notorious for trampling people's privacy rights, IMO they should have appointed someone who has a record of protecting an upholding our right to privacy. Had they appointed someone with that type of track record maybe the cabinet could have had an honest dialogue about privacy rights in general, rather than simply a discussion about how to phrase the wording of a news release so it doesn't freak out the privacy rights groups.
This is the same line of thinking that many people have followed for the last century. Every new technology has been heralded with predictions of doom and gloom. The 70's and 80's produced volumes of work predicting robots subjugating mankind to their will. As we progress with work on AI we find we are still a long way from that type of outcome.
The stories are too many to recount all of them, but a quick jaunt through history shows that people are resistant to change. They are slow to adopt technologies that change their world view, and they often react violently if that change will alter their religious view of the Universe. As an example look at the debate still raging over evolution.
That isn't to say we shouldn't be careful of new technologies and put good safeguards in place, however I for one am tired of overly alarmist predictions of every new technology. It would be nice to see some beautiful predictions of how the future might be better with the technology.
Maybe with Genetic Engineering we'll be able to eliminate the stupid gene. (That statement may set off a firestorm.)
This looks a lot like Woodstock for computer geeks.
The Tech Group (TG) has a page explaining the differences between a "LAN Party" and a "Computer Party", here is an excerpt:
"But LAN party and computer party is the same thing!" No. LAN party and computer party is NOT the same thing. At a LAN party everything is centered around the network. Everybody just sits there, staring at their screens whilst copying porn, warez and playing games. A computer party is much more. There are competitions, both in computer games and computer art. People meet, people talk, and there is plenty to see and experience even when away from you computer. (I didn't even bring my computer to TG01, and I had a great time!). Sometimes there are shows on the stage (LAN parties don't even have a stage), and even speeches you can go to to learn more computer stuff. How about learning something new and fun to impress your friends when you get back home?
If you want to read the full page go here: http://tg.nlc.no/notalan.html
It's good to see a study that debunks the myths being propagated in the media. Those of us who play online games know that the vast majority of the player base are not teenagers, rather they tend to be older, in their mid-twenties and up. I've known a few teen-age kids that played, however they usually weren't very successful and didn't stick with it long. Although not all teen-agers are this way, many of the ones that I've seen play were very impatient, they just wanted to level really fast and get all the "uber" weapons so they would have an "uber" character.
Most of the MMORG's that I've played require a significant amount of patience, diligence and some amount of strategy in order to develop a highly successful character. The few teenagers I saw playing these games didn't seem to excercise those traits in abundance.
I'd like to see them extend this study to "computer" games in general, and maybe compare those results to the demographics of people who play console based games. I suspect that console based games have a significatly higher population of teenagers than computer or desktop based games.
While I symphathize with the blind, there has to be a better way to make e-mail addresses available without publicly disclosing the information in text format. If we are forced to always disclose e-mail addresses in this way, there is simply no way to stop spammers.
Typically when you are posting it for some type of a government contract or any type of business page, the actual membership consists of a fairly closed set of individuals. If you have that set, you could easily make the e-mail address display in text for blind users, and display as an image for everyone else. Although you would have to implement a strict policy before allowing someone to register as a blind user.
I know it imposes hardships on some people, but the current system imposes hardships on everyone, including blind people.
It's interesting to see those results. While I knew that spammers harvested e-mail addresses from Web Sites, I didn't realize the magnitude of it.
of the 10,000 spam messages they received over the six month period, 8,609 of them were from simply posting it publicly to a web site. I always opt out of the subscription services where I can, and most of the time I avoid posting any of my e-mail addresses publicly, now I will redouble that effort.
They had some really useful suggestions also, my favorite was using multiple "disposable" e-mail addresses and forwarding them to a main e-mail address that you keep private. When you sign up for a site, create a new disposable e-mail address and use that. If you start getting spam from it, just shut off that disposable e-mail. That is incredibly good advice.
I like the idea of disguising or masking your e-mail address, although I think using HTML characters or a "Human readable" equivalent is something that spammers will easily be able to circumvent if the practice becomes widespread. They don't bother now because not many people do it.
What I would like to see is a standard practice of generating your posted e-mail address into an image. This would make it *significantly* more difficult to harvest e-mail addresses in mass, while remaining easy for a single use of sending someone an e-mail message.
Being a programmer I spend a lot of time staring at the screen. As a result I spend a lot of time making sure I have the proper setup. The monitor is typically the most expensive single component on any computer setup I get. However it also has the most longevity, so it's very imporant to get it right.
My favorite monitors are the View Sonic series. It's possible there are better monitors out there, but I am incredibly hesitant to switch from a brand that I know very well and trust implicitly. I now own my seventh ViewSonic (multiple computers) and I've had a good experience every time except once. On the most recent setup I have two computers on a monitor switch, on one of the computers the letters were slightly blurry. It was very apparent because the letters were crisp on the other computer. Getting a new video card fixed the problem.
In short here is my advice:
- Buy a brand well known for quality - Buy from a store with a good reputation - Go for good resolution and high refresh rate - Pick a video card that is compatible with your monitor - Talk extensively with people who have experience with the brand
you are considering.
If we start with the notion that thought is something special that can't arise from mechanical processes, we've answered our question by fiat.
I didn't specify that thinking was something special that couldn't arise in a mechanical process. Specifically I'm not saying that computer's can't think, nor did I say computers don't think necessarily.
Specifically to accept that there is a concept that exists which we call "thinking", then Human beings think. In other words the only place we can truly observe "Intelligent" behavior of the type we are discussing is in human beings. So if you accept the concept that thinking exists, you must accept that human beings think - since the term thinking arose from describing the mental processes of human beings.
The question is this: Is the thinking in human beings qualitatively different than the decision process of computers or is it only quantitatively different. Do we "think" the same way computers do, just at a more advanced level? Or do we "think" in an entirely different way than computers? If our thought processes are qualitatively different then no amount of extra hardware and no elaborate program could attain it simply by advancing the current state of AI. If our "thought" processes are qualitatively different, then it will take a qualitative shift in AI to make truly intelligent systems. Rather than just systems that behave "as if" they were intelligent.
As a follow up I want to clarify something, because I think we are combining to topics into one discussion.
I think there are two issues at hand here:
1) Can machines actually "think" or possess intelligence.
2) Can we build intelligent systems.
I think the first topic is a highly philosophical discussion that involves a lot of information that we don't currently have. It's questionable if this discussion would change anything about building intelligent systems.
You make some good points. Here are the problems I have with them though:
I think the axiomatic assumption that people think is part of the problem. If we cannot say why the claim is that people think, it's easy to just debunk any AI claims by outright statement. "People think, while computers are just machines." You can't really make any progress in the face of that.
When you are building any formal system you have to start with a set of Axioms. If you throw out the Axiom "people think" what do you have to go on? In essence by throwing out the axiom, you are setting up a situation where anything could be considered thinking, because there is no foundation to compare it with. I agree that "why" humans think, or "how" humans think needs further definition. If you can't say as a fundamental truth that Human beings "think" you can't even define what to think means.
I'm not arguing the mechanism of our thought, not only isn't it clear to me, I don't think it's clear to anyone yet. What I'm arguing is simply the fact that we do think is the first step in building a formal system.
The article itself gives pretty good coverage of Turings point of view. It gives better coverage of the Turing test than I've read in many AI books.
I tend to agree more with Searle though, whom he cites at the end of the article "John Searle argues against the claim that appropriately programmed computers literally have cognitive states". Being a programmer myself, I don't feel that programming something so that it can perform extremely well in a specific test is necessarily indicative of Artificial Intelligence or Intelligence in general. I agree with Turing that the question of "do computers think" is vague enough to be almost meaningless in a precise sense, but I think we understand the statement taken as a whole.
I don't particularly agree with this statement in response to the consciousness argument: "Turing makes the effective reply that he would be satisfied if he could secure agreement on the claim that we might each have just as much reason to suppose that machines think as we have reason to suppose that other people think" The question isn't whether or not other people think, people thinking is an axiomatic assumption when investigating Intelligence, unless you are investigating existence from a philosophical point of view as Descarte did. I guess I view AI from a more practical point of view, I am by no means an expert in AI, but I tend to think the goal of AI research is to produce systems that can learn and react appropriately in different situations that they were never programmed to handle or necessarily anticipate. If that isn't the goal of AI research, what separates it from writing programs on a large scale?
As a whole I found the article to be a good presentation of Turing's position, although I have a few philosophical differences with that position.
Slashdot Mirror
I found this article to be generally frustrating for several reasons:
1. They never referenced any specific law or court
interpretation of a law.
What law are they talking about specifically? How can we
check to ensure our company practices are in compliance with
"the law". Does this law apply equally to all employers or
does it only apply to employers with federal contracts as
many of the equal opportunity laws do?
2. They throw out terms like "under it's most rigid
interpretation" and "the federal governments definition".
By who's interpretation? The courts? The Equal Employment
Office? Are there any court cases we can refer to in order
to further define these interpretations? Where is this
defined? How can we verify this?
3. They don't give any specific guidelines for battling the
problem.
Is this article just writting to freak people out? They
don't even mention how long you are "required" to keep the
resumes on file, only that many people keep them on file for
a year or two. Is this their preference, or is that what
this "law" specifies.
Overall, very frustrating and light on details. How can we as a
company change our policies to be in accordance with some law,
that is being rigidly interpreted by someone, somewhere?
Unfortunately this is something we've all known has been a long
time in coming. When it comes to the government and collecting
"their" money, they won't let any opportunity pass them by.
It will be interesting to see how this will impact online
retailing though. Not having to pay sales tax has been helpful
to sites like Amazon for keeping their costs lower than brick
and mortar stores. Although I think many people don't figure
the cost of sales tax into the purchase of an item as frequently
as they should (I know I don't), so it may not have that large
of an effect.
One interesting sales tax law in my home state (Utah) is that if
you buy something from a state that doesn't have sales tax
(Oregon) then you have to pay sales tax to Utah. Just one of
the lovely little "bend over and grab your ankles" type of laws
on the books. I'm hopeful they won't enact the same type of law
for internet commerce, but I don't have much hope.
There are so many different angles to attack this issue from, and unfortunately there are more sides to the issue than we'd like to admit. However I think there are several areas that would be good to discuss:
- Closed source has more bugs, and the exploits are typically more severe.
- Actual turn around time for Closed source is much slower than open source for new features and enhancements.
- Closed source hampers IT productivity as the fear of sharing "Intellectual Property" infects and permeates many people that work in closed source environments
one of my favorite all time articles is written by Clay Shirky, entitled In Praise of Evolvable Systems
This article addresses what many people consider to be open source's weekpoint. It is however it's strongest point. This is a fantastic read and is a must in any presentation to management about open source and open standards in general.
I strongly agree with Reiser on this issue. Although he doesn't
necessarily argue for "slathering" software with attributions, rather
he argues convincingly IMO that the credit for a piece of software
should remain visible to the public users. This can be tastefully
done easily, the point is that leaving the credit for writing the
software in the source code is pointless as most people don't ever
read the source code.
It isn't even so much that someone can't supply a new spalsh screen,
it just needs to include attributions to the original authors. I
think he makes some very interesting and very valid points. It is
interesting to note as he states, that although Stallman is a huge
contributor to many projects, he rarely gets credited on anything.
I feel the same way as Reiser on this, even though Stallman doesn't
want to burden the software with licensing restrictions, it bothers
me that he gets so little in the way of credit for what he has helped
to bring about.
At work I've used dotnet for the past year and half full time.
I've built websites with it, I've build desktop apps with it,
I've even built auto-updating distributed apps with it.
Dotnet has some good things to it and some bad things just like
any other technology. Before dotnet, most of my work solutions
were written in VB *shudder*, but when dotnet was released I
switched immediately to C#. C# does some things right that Java
didn't do too well on, but those are honestly pretty rare. IMO,
C# is very much like an immature version of Java. That being
said, Microsoft is pushing dotnet pretty hard.
When it comes to dotnet for game development, it is a
possibility. Mainly because Microsoft is putting so much
emphasis on it. With good native integration into DirectX, they
could push a lot of DirectX developers into using C# or Managed
C++, maybe. It will only happnen if MS can make the integration
fast and tight, and even then I don't think everyone doing
DirectX will use dotnet, it imposes too many rules on you as the
developer and really hides the low level details that are so
critical to many high performance games (yes even using unsafe code). On the other hand it
could be a good language for someone to learn to write games in,
for just that reason.
Of course, that really only applies to people who want to use a
Microsoft product for building games. The ubiquity of dotnet
within the MS world will have little to no effect on the OpenGL
programmers, except that they may need to find a different
editor *if* they have been using Visual Studio.
In reality I think dotnet is what everyone thinks, a competitor
to Java. How many highgrade professional games are written in
Java currently?
What Linus is saying makes complete sense to me. I think the
Kernel level of Linux is the wrong place to make a political
stand like that. What has made Linux successful, and what will
make it ultimately *the* OS is it's an
Evolvable System
The fact that people can use Linux for whatever they need to is
what makes it such a compelling system. The fact that you can
tinker with it, change the source, in short make it work for you
is what makes Linux successful.
He also makes a good point, there is a difference between
allowing DRM and forcing everyone that uses the OS to use DRM
(as M$ want). There are some times when DRM is very legitimate
(Goverment Top Secret Docs, Litigation Confidential information
etc), and there are the times when I consider it to be
un-ethical (most other situations I can think of).
I have to say way to go Linus. Keep the system evolvable.
Ultimately isn't it a catch 22 anyway? If he prohibits DRM,
isn't that sort of like saying "this is my software and you
can't do XX with it".
LookSmart hopes to tap the altruistic nature of many Internet users.
That unfortunately seems like a naively optimistic hope. While the
vast majority of people may be altruistic, it only takes a few
unscrupulous individuals to completely undermine a fair result.
It's interesting that this idea is an extension to Google's model in
many ways. Essentially Google is able to index so much of the
interent by having 50,000+ servers. I don't think that's what makes
Google such a useful search tool, rather I think it's accuracy and
relevancy. If my search results started getting poluted with bogus
hits, I would stop using it almost immediately.
Unfortunately, by letting people run the client on their machine and
having it send the results back to the server, I think spoofed
results are inevitable. I don't think it will be possible to
safeguard the results either, it will be interesting to see how well
this project survives *when* people start spoofing results. It's
been a problem for SETI@home, and it's something that undermined some
peoples faith in the project as a whole. If the spoofed results are
more widespread and have a larger impact as they would in a system
like this, it may ultimately prove fatal to the project.
One factor that has been asbolutely critical to Google's success has
been their ability to remain resistant to spoofing attempts. It's
still a question mark how well grub will perform in that context.
If you want to read the article you can go here,
but beware my server isn't too beefy.
www.dailystatic.com/Matrix.html
You can read the article, but none of the links inside of it work.
This is a truly impressive article, even if this guy does have a
little too much free time on his hands.
The breakdown of the Bio-Port is wonderful. It's really a
fantastic explanation of how the Bio-Port could work, and what
it would be doing.
The Red pill, I've always seen this as similar to some type of
virus that is injected into the system. His deconstruction is
similar in flavor to what I thought.
The power plant is great. Rather than humans being the energy
source, they are a giant Beowulf cluster. Maybe Beowulf (the
hero) was the first Beowulf after all.
I thought Entering and Exiting the Matrix was interesting, but I
didn't find the arguments as compelling in this section for some
reason. There just seem to be too many special exceptions for
my taste.
Overall this article has some real potential, and definately
helps with the suspension of disbelief process that is so
crucial to any story telling. A bit of a warning though, it's
long, really long.
According to the article 90% of them gave their password away,
not 75%. 95% of the men and 85% of the women did.
It's sad because no matter how much I know this, people are
still able to shock me. 90% of them gave their passwords away!
I would've thought maybe 10% or 20%, but 90%?!?
As a corollary to this article, Kevin Mitnick's book "The Art of
Deception" is fantastic. I tend to think of myself as fairly
security conscious, but this book opened my eyes.
Social Engineering is a very real threat, something IMO will
take decades to be addressed. At a certain level I think Social
Engineering can never be totally defeated or even necessarily
defeated to any large degree. The problem lies with
efficiency. Any large organization that works with a large
number of external organizations is *extremely* vulnerable to
this type of attack, even with incredibly strong security
measures in place.
The company that I work for has very, very stringent control
policies for security. They are by far the most security
conscious company that I have ever worked for, yet I am
supremely confident that even a poorly executed Social
Engineering attack would be highly successful. There is no
doubt about it, when it comes to security humans are definately
the weakest link.
I wonder if the reason the numbers were a little low last year
was due to the september 11th attacks. After the attacks people
were highly conscious of security, but as time passes people
relax more and begin to trust other people more. They just
don't realize how small pieces of information can incur such a
large cost.
It seems like AT&T is directly at fault here, even though they are warning people to change their default password, this type of scam wouldn't be possible if they didn't have an automated system processing collect calls.
Not only that, but AT&T is the one that chooses the default password, by picking something that is easily guessable they are doubly guilty of allowing this to happen.
Only paying 30% of a scam like this is shameful.
I got the number from this page:
http://www.sec.gov/about/concise.shtml#phones
I think I called the Toll-Free Consumer Information No. and then got transferred, whoever answered the phone answered as "Public Relations".
This is an interesting story, and there are several things we
should note about it. First of all, it's posted in the
"Entertainment News & Gossip" section of Yahoo! TV. That should
be a fairly big give away. Second this guy allegedly got
arrested January 28th, yet no major news outlet has picked the
story up.
With those pieces of information let's look at the story. The
story claims this guy made $350 million dollars in two weeks
with only an $800 dollar investment by making 126 high-risk
trades. It also alleges that he came out a winner every time.
The article then leads you to believe the SEC thinks it's
insider trading and that his story about being from the future
is obviously false. Yet any person with reasonable intelligence
will realize that even with insider information, there is no way
someone could make 126 "high-risk" trades and come out on top
every time. To have a record that perfect someone would need
foreknowledge.
The article appears to be trying to persuade us that the man had
insider knowledge, yet when you evaluate the story at face
value you walk away thinking "no way, insider information isn't
*that* good. He *must* be from the future".
The major problems with this story though lie in the basic
facts:
1. There is no Andrew Carlssin being investigated by the SEC
2. The SEC does not have police powers and cannot arrest people
3. The alleged high risk trades didn't take place
4. There is in fact no record of *any* of the events mentioned
I could go on and on, however there is absolutely no solid
factual information to back this story up. I saw this article a
few days before April 1st, so I thought it was some type of
elaborate April fools day joke, but I wanted to put it to rest
once and for all, so I called the SEC Public Relations office.
They said the article is completely made up and has no basis in
fact. It's not even based on an actual investigation.
Of course we knew all this because this story is posted in the
"Gossip" section though.
"It hasn't had somebody like Novell worrying about making it
robust, reliable and scalable. We think we can bring that to the
Linux kernel."
I guess IBM, HP and the like are peanuts compared to Novell.
While his comments are certainly brash, and probably overly
self-important, Netware really did make a good system.
Ultimately they just got crushed under the Microsoft marketing
machine. I've run both Microsoft and Novell networks and I
definitely thought Netware was by far the superior product. As
we've consistently seen in the IT world though, a good product
isn't the only thing you need.
In a sense he has a point about Linux being an immature
operating system, although that point seems a bit overstated.
Personally though, I'd love to see Novell contributing to Linux.
The beauty of Open Source and in this case the GPL, is that
Novell can contribute to the development of Linux, but they
can't hijack it. Having more good companies contribute to
making it reliable and scalable is a good thing. I can't see a
downside to having them make contributions to the project.
Ultimately the point is that Linux is catching on. Even
companies like Sun and Novell that have their own operating
systems are seeing the value and are beginning to support it.
With broad industry support, Linux could supplant Microsoft as
the dominant OS.
In a related move Osama Bin Laden has been appointed as the
first ever Terror Czar. Bin Laden was not immediately available
for comment.
From the article it sounds like this post will be more of a
public relations position than anything. Rather than appointing
someone who worked for a company notorious for trampling
people's privacy rights, IMO they should have appointed someone
who has a record of protecting an upholding our right to
privacy. Had they appointed someone with that type of track
record maybe the cabinet could have had an honest dialogue about
privacy rights in general, rather than simply a discussion about
how to phrase the wording of a news release so it doesn't freak
out the privacy rights groups.
This is the same line of thinking that many people have followed
for the last century. Every new technology has been heralded
with predictions of doom and gloom. The 70's and 80's produced
volumes of work predicting robots subjugating mankind to their
will. As we progress with work on AI we find we are still a
long way from that type of outcome.
The stories are too many to recount all of them, but a quick
jaunt through history shows that people are resistant to
change. They are slow to adopt technologies that change their
world view, and they often react violently if that change will
alter their religious view of the Universe. As an example look
at the debate still raging over evolution.
That isn't to say we shouldn't be careful of new technologies
and put good safeguards in place, however I for one am tired of
overly alarmist predictions of every new technology. It would
be nice to see some beautiful predictions of how the future
might be better with the technology.
Maybe with Genetic Engineering we'll be able to eliminate the
stupid gene. (That statement may set off a
firestorm.)
This looks a lot like Woodstock for computer geeks.
:-)
The Tech Group (TG) has a page explaining the differences
between a "LAN Party" and a "Computer Party", here is an
excerpt:
"But LAN party and computer party is the same thing!"
No. LAN party and computer party is NOT the same thing. At a
LAN party everything is centered around the network. Everybody
just sits there, staring at their screens whilst copying porn,
warez and playing games. A computer party is much more. There
are competitions, both in computer games and computer
art. People meet, people talk, and there is plenty to see and
experience even when away from you computer. (I didn't even
bring my computer to TG01, and I had a great time!). Sometimes
there are shows on the stage (LAN parties don't even have a
stage), and even speeches you can go to to learn more computer
stuff. How about learning something new and fun to impress your
friends when you get back home?
If you want to read the full page go here:
http://tg.nlc.no/notalan.html
We need to get one of these going in the US.
It's good to see a study that debunks the myths being propagated in
the media. Those of us who play online games know that the vast
majority of the player base are not teenagers, rather they tend to be
older, in their mid-twenties and up. I've known a few teen-age kids
that played, however they usually weren't very successful and didn't
stick with it long. Although not all teen-agers are this way, many
of the ones that I've seen play were very impatient, they just wanted
to level really fast and get all the "uber" weapons so they would
have an "uber" character.
Most of the MMORG's that I've played require a significant amount of
patience, diligence and some amount of strategy in order to develop a
highly successful character. The few teenagers I saw playing these
games didn't seem to excercise those traits in abundance.
I'd like to see them extend this study to "computer" games in
general, and maybe compare those results to the demographics of
people who play console based games. I suspect that console based
games have a significatly higher population of teenagers than
computer or desktop based games.
While I symphathize with the blind, there has to be a better way to make e-mail addresses available without publicly disclosing the information in text format. If we are forced to always disclose e-mail addresses in this way, there is simply no way to stop spammers.
Typically when you are posting it for some type of a government contract or any type of business page, the actual membership consists of a fairly closed set of individuals. If you have that set, you could easily make the e-mail address display in text for blind users, and display as an image for everyone else. Although you would have to implement a strict policy before allowing someone to register as a blind user.
I know it imposes hardships on some people, but the current system imposes hardships on everyone, including blind people.
It's interesting to see those results. While I knew that spammers
harvested e-mail addresses from Web Sites, I didn't realize the
magnitude of it.
of the 10,000 spam messages they received over the six month period,
8,609 of them were from simply posting it publicly to a web site. I
always opt out of the subscription services where I can, and most of
the time I avoid posting any of my e-mail addresses publicly, now I
will redouble that effort.
They had some really useful suggestions also, my favorite was using
multiple "disposable" e-mail addresses and forwarding them to a main
e-mail address that you keep private. When you sign up for a site,
create a new disposable e-mail address and use that. If you start
getting spam from it, just shut off that disposable e-mail. That is
incredibly good advice.
I like the idea of disguising or masking your e-mail address,
although I think using HTML characters or a "Human readable"
equivalent is something that spammers will easily be able to
circumvent if the practice becomes widespread. They don't bother now
because not many people do it.
What I would like to see is a standard practice of generating your
posted e-mail address into an image. This would make it
*significantly* more difficult to harvest e-mail addresses in mass,
while remaining easy for a single use of sending someone an e-mail message.
Being a programmer I spend a lot of time staring at the screen. As a
result I spend a lot of time making sure I have the proper setup.
The monitor is typically the most expensive single component on any
computer setup I get. However it also has the most longevity, so
it's very imporant to get it right.
My favorite monitors are the View Sonic series. It's possible there
are better monitors out there, but I am incredibly hesitant to switch
from a brand that I know very well and trust implicitly. I now own
my seventh ViewSonic (multiple computers) and I've had a good
experience every time except once. On the most recent setup I have
two computers on a monitor switch, on one of the computers the
letters were slightly blurry. It was very apparent because the
letters were crisp on the other computer. Getting a new video card
fixed the problem.
In short here is my advice:
- Buy a brand well known for quality
- Buy from a store with a good reputation
- Go for good resolution and high refresh rate
- Pick a video card that is compatible with your monitor
- Talk extensively with people who have experience with the brand
you are considering.
If we start with the notion that thought is something special that can't arise from mechanical processes, we've answered our question by fiat.
I didn't specify that thinking was something special that couldn't arise in a mechanical process. Specifically I'm not saying that computer's can't think, nor did I say computers don't think necessarily.
Specifically to accept that there is a concept that exists which we call "thinking", then Human beings think. In other words the only place we can truly observe "Intelligent" behavior of the type we are discussing is in human beings. So if you accept the concept that thinking exists, you must accept that human beings think - since the term thinking arose from describing the mental processes of human beings.
The question is this: Is the thinking in human beings qualitatively different than the decision process of computers or is it only quantitatively different. Do we "think" the same way computers do, just at a more advanced level? Or do we "think" in an entirely different way than computers? If our thought processes are qualitatively different then no amount of extra hardware and no elaborate program could attain it simply by advancing the current state of AI. If our "thought" processes are qualitatively different, then it will take a qualitative shift in AI to make truly intelligent systems. Rather than just systems that behave "as if" they were intelligent.
As a follow up I want to clarify something, because I think we are combining to topics into one discussion.
I think there are two issues at hand here:
1) Can machines actually "think" or possess intelligence.
2) Can we build intelligent systems.
I think the first topic is a highly philosophical discussion that involves a lot of information that we don't currently have. It's questionable if this discussion would change anything about building intelligent systems.
You make some good points. Here are the problems I have with them though:
I think the axiomatic assumption that people think is part of the problem. If we cannot say why the claim is that people think, it's easy to just debunk any AI claims by outright statement. "People think, while computers are just machines." You can't really make any progress in the face of that.
When you are building any formal system you have to start with a set of Axioms. If you throw out the Axiom "people think" what do you have to go on? In essence by throwing out the axiom, you are setting up a situation where anything could be considered thinking, because there is no foundation to compare it with. I agree that "why" humans think, or "how" humans think needs further definition. If you can't say as a fundamental truth that Human beings "think" you can't even define what to think means.
I'm not arguing the mechanism of our thought, not only isn't it clear to me, I don't think it's clear to anyone yet. What I'm arguing is simply the fact that we do think is the first step in building a formal system.
The article itself gives pretty good coverage of Turings point
of view. It gives better coverage of the Turing test than I've
read in many AI books.
I tend to agree more with Searle though, whom he cites at the
end of the article "John Searle argues against the claim that
appropriately programmed computers literally have cognitive
states". Being a programmer myself, I don't feel that
programming something so that it can perform extremely well in a
specific test is necessarily indicative of Artificial
Intelligence or Intelligence in general. I agree with Turing
that the question of "do computers think" is vague enough to be
almost meaningless in a precise sense, but I think we understand
the statement taken as a whole.
I don't particularly agree with this statement in response
to the consciousness argument: "Turing makes
the effective reply that he would be satisfied if he could
secure agreement on the claim that we might each have just as
much reason to suppose that machines think as we have reason to
suppose that other people think" The question isn't whether or
not other people think, people thinking is an axiomatic
assumption when investigating Intelligence, unless you are
investigating existence from a philosophical point of view as
Descarte did. I guess I view AI from a more practical point of
view, I am by no means an expert in AI, but I tend to think the
goal of AI research is to produce systems that can learn and
react appropriately in different situations that they were never
programmed to handle or necessarily anticipate. If that isn't
the goal of AI research, what separates it from writing programs
on a large scale?
As a whole I found the article to be a good presentation of
Turing's position, although I have a few philosophical
differences with that position.