Yeah, Hollywood is notorious for shady accounting practices. But these involve sticking investors for one movie with expenses from another, or keeping payables on a separate schedule from receivables. That's not what's going on here: the movie didn't last long in theaters (the show I went to was practically empty) and there's no question that grosses were "disappointing". Conceivably the production costs are inflated, but I doubt it — this kind of movie is not cheap to make.
(By way of comparison, Little Miss Sunshine grossed about $100 million, a 1/4 of the gross for Salvation. But LMS only cost $8 million to make.)
They'll make some money from disc sales and merchandise tie-ins. But the big payday for this kind of movie is long lines at the theater, and it just didn't happen in this case. Oh yeah, and Halcyon was notorious for litigation even before they sued their partners in this movie, so expect the lawyers to take a big chunk.
We don't agree at all. I'm saying that Asimov's assumptions were wrong — they've been invalidated by subsequent AI research. And not knowing exactly what future science looks like doesn't mean you can't make logical inferences about was it does not look like.
Asimov's stories are full of hand-waving. I mean, brains made out of "positrons"? It's purest speculation. It's a reasonable storytelling technique, but don't confuse it with actual science.
Another issue with MindTouch: it's a little hypocritical of them to boast about their role in the OS community. You won't find their source code repository without resorting to Google.
Mind you, it's perfectly legitimate to monetize an OS product by building a commercial product around it. But there's more to being Open Source than honoring the letter of your OS-friendly license. It's about engaging with a community of OS developers. Without that, you're just a proprietary vendor that happens to publish some of your source code.
There's a very good chance that when the technology does arrive, it'll be strikingly similar to what he wrote about.
Please. Nobody knows what a truly artificial intelligence would be like. They probably wouldn't resemble SF robots, which are just human caricatures, with a few machine-like behaviors so you'll think of them as mechanical. If you assume there are cognitive models that are profoundly different from the ones humans use (and any animal behaviorist will tell you that there are) a machine intelligence built from scratch would probably be something completely new. The classic work on that theme is William Gibson's Neuromancer.
I already read the stupid thing more times than I like to think about. And yes, there's stuff there about the human condition. But there's an awful lot of tech there too. It's not like you can't have both.
They're dated in the sense that the science in them is dated. Lots of people enjoy reading old SF with old science (I know I do), but we don't need more of it. Especially about computing and AI — popular cultural already has too much misinformation on the subject.
"Hard" SF is not about the "hard" sciences. It's SF that studiously avoids being fantasy. The author deliberately keeps invented science to an absolute minimum. It's a story where the science is often as important (or even more important) than traditional elements like plot, prose style, and character development.
Asimov did like to speculate about societies and psychologies of the future. But that doesn't make the science in his fiction social science. The guy had no training in 20th century social sciences (he was a chemist, and his education focused very narrowly on the physical sciences). And judging from his (massive) non-fiction writing, he had no interest in it either.
You're right about the conspiracy theories. But defeatism? The right wingnuts are absolutely convinced that the Obama administration is on the brink of collapse, that the House will go Republican in 2010, and that Sarah Palin will be elected Pres. in 2012.
Did you miss the part where I said it wasn't Asimov's fault that he didn't know about stuff that didn't exist yet? I didn't say his stories were bad, I said they were dated.
It's true that there's more to these stories than "AI". (Notice the similarity between the social role of robots in some stories and the humiliations inflicted at that time on African-Americans.) But the AI part is important. Asimov was a "hard" SF writer — he didn't pull the science out of his ass, not even the imaginary science.
Here are some examples: there's "Runaround," where a robot behaves strangely because of a conflict between the second and third law. Then there's "Little Lost Robot" where the robot behaves strangely because of a modified first law. Then there's "Reason" where a robot behaves strangely after inventing its own cosmology. Then there's "Liar!" where a psychic robot behaves strangly because of a conflict between normal honesty and the first law.
Do you see a common thread here? Oh yes, and Susan Calvin, the most important character in these stories, is an expert on robot behavior.
Defining "artificial intelligence" isn't hard: it's about intelligence (and thus behavior) in artificial systems — such as robots. It is true that AI has made very little progress towards understanding how intelligence works and actually creating an artificial equivalent of natural intelligence. But that's precisely why Asimov's stories are dated. Because we now know that creating a machine that can hold a conversation with humans, make moral judgments, and act rationally in complicated situations is a lot harder than he assumed it was.
Asimov's robot stories were pretty groundbreaking when they were written, but are now thoroughly dated. The dude didn't know jack about AI. He's hardly to blame, since the discipline was in its infancy. But why do we need more stories full of hand-waving about "positronic brains" and "laws" that are so vague as to be meaningless?
I just tried to read the recent additions to Larry Niven's Known Space canon, and I wish I hadn't. Niven and his collaborator (a guy named Lerner, who I suspect did most of the actual writing) try to deal with some of the logic holes in the original stories, but mainly manage to create new ones.
Possibly I've gotten smarter and wiser, but so has the techie community in general. You no longer have so many people babbling about sovereign squatters and the end of proprietary software. In general the wingnut element in western society is on the decline, as last year's elections pretty thoroughly testified.
Thing is, the wingnut element doesn't recognize this trend, and still likes to tell itself that it's in charge. In general, I support this delusion, since it hastens their social and political irrelevance. But they still have the ability to gang up and shout down anybody who disagrees with them.
If I had any management skills, I'd go and start my version of Slashdot. I'll bet there are lots of disaffected people who'd like to have a forum where they can have actual conversations instead of shouting matches.
Your comment is painfully accurate. Thing is, Slashdotters were a lot smarter when I signed up 8 years ago. There have always been Linux obsessives, conspiracy wingnuts, and kneejerk libertarians, but even they had something worth contributing now and then. There was a lot of stupid noise, but every once in a while you could have a really interesting and informative conversation with some random stranger. Now it's all just flames, rants, and temper tantrums.
I blame changes in the moderation system. Originally, the people who participated in Slashdot the most got the most chances to moderate. Then they changed the system to have moderators chosen solely from the middle of the usage curve, so that heavy users don't get to moderate at all. This means that moderators are sporadic users with no real investment in maintaining a real conversational community.
More recent changes in metamoderation are even worse. It's not really metamoderation at all, you just say you approve of the article or don't. Useless.
I've had a few email exchanges with Rob on the subject. He won't even listen to suggestions for minor tweaks, like making it harder to abuse the "overrated" and "underrated" mods. (You're only supposed to use these to counteract simultaneous mods, but you often see these as the only mods on a post; people use them to avoid being metamoderated.) He won't budge from his position that everything's fine.
I guess from a certain point of view, it is. Slashdot's traffic levels are bigger than ever, and it's probably the biggest profit center Sourceforge Inc. still has. (Sourceforge used to be OSDN, and before that they were VA Linux; the name changes represent a huge number of failed enterprises.) So Rob's first post-college job has brought him fame and fortune. What's not to like? But the original Slashdot community is dead, and I guess it's not coming back.
Every few months, it seems, there is a new 'iPhone killer.'
Well, duh. Every new product generates hype, and to trend-conscious techies, the most obvious hype is that it's the "killer" of whatever product is already trendy. And, as you may have noticed, most new products these days are cell phones.
But have you ever heard of the latest blivet killer actually killing off the blivet? You have not. Market shifts don't happen that way. This "killer" meme is content-free marketing noise.
Because they'll stop working if they can't. And yes, there are printers that need to access the network. Home printers tend to pretty simple-minded (though many now have their own network addresses) but office printers often double as fax machines and scanners -- which means they have to look up the name of a mail server to forward those. And the mail server might well be named .
(Oops, Slashdot still barfs on non-Latin characters. Here's the cute Chinese name I came up with: http://tiny.cc/MUhUL )
Elevators too. Some of these are pretty smart and probably have the ability to report malfunctions, usage patterns, etc.
I have the same lockup problem, only much too often. And it happens most often when I'm converting ink to text, which makes that feature almost useless.
There are too many bad features to list. The one that really gets my goat is that a lot of the formatting feature, such as tables and bullet lists, are just not usable if you don't have a keyboard!
Oh please. By that logic you should never need to use a computer for anything, because there's always another way to do it that technically simpler. Just because a pencil doesn't require technical support doesn't mean it's the simplest solution to every problem.
I've been using OneNote for a couple of years, and I'm pretty disgusted with it. Too complicated, too limited. too unreliable, too many "what were they thinking" gotchas.
Right now, I'm giving Evernote a try. Not as many snazzy features of OneNote, but the features it does have work well and are easy to access. And it's free, if you don't mind a few non-obnoxious ads. If it continues to bear the strain, I'm transferring all my data from OneNote and deleting the sucker.
I understand slashdot loves to use fancy technology to solve simple problems, but sometimes simpler is better.
And sometimes taking notes on a computer is simpler than recording them in a dead-tree notebook.
I'm not a student, but I do take a lot of notes as a technical writer. When you have as many notes as I do, having them in online form can be a lifesaver. Not only are they easily searchable, but the disorganization that creeps in when you're taking them (you're more concerned about getting all the facts down than about keeping your notebook in order) can be easily remedied.
You can, of course, take notes on paper and transfer them to computer later. (That's an obvious solution if you're recording math or diagrams, and don't have a tablet computer.) But that takes extra time, and if you're busy you may well forget to do it. And then some crucial piece of information exists only on a piece of paper you can't find.
The question here is not "is this technological overkill?" The question you need to ask is, "what works for me?" If you're good at keeping (and using) pencil-and-paper notes, fine, do that. But not all of us are. For us, the high-tech solution makes sense.
Well, to be fair, your main sin is not reading TFA. Which is a sin I myself am often guilty of, and might not have bothered in this case if the summary hadn't pushed my "huh?" button.
Do bear in mind when you read breathless articles about bad behavior in high places (Michelle Obama's excessive spending on sneakers, the famous drunken goldfish) is that a certain kind of right-wing pundit makes his living by stirring up outrage in the citizenry, and not worrying too much about how much of a scandal he's really seeing.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, Hollywood is notorious for shady accounting practices. But these involve sticking investors for one movie with expenses from another, or keeping payables on a separate schedule from receivables. That's not what's going on here: the movie didn't last long in theaters (the show I went to was practically empty) and there's no question that grosses were "disappointing". Conceivably the production costs are inflated, but I doubt it — this kind of movie is not cheap to make.
(By way of comparison, Little Miss Sunshine grossed about $100 million, a 1/4 of the gross for Salvation. But LMS only cost $8 million to make.)
They'll make some money from disc sales and merchandise tie-ins. But the big payday for this kind of movie is long lines at the theater, and it just didn't happen in this case. Oh yeah, and Halcyon was notorious for litigation even before they sued their partners in this movie, so expect the lawyers to take a big chunk.
The purchaser used the rights to make Terminator: Salvation, which grossed $380 million worldwide. Not so bad.
Not for a movie that cost $200 million to make. By the time you factor in marketing, distribution, etc., the thing barely broke even.
Thanks for the correction.
We don't agree at all. I'm saying that Asimov's assumptions were wrong — they've been invalidated by subsequent AI research. And not knowing exactly what future science looks like doesn't mean you can't make logical inferences about was it does not look like.
Asimov's stories are full of hand-waving. I mean, brains made out of "positrons"? It's purest speculation. It's a reasonable storytelling technique, but don't confuse it with actual science.
Another issue with MindTouch: it's a little hypocritical of them to boast about their role in the OS community. You won't find their source code repository without resorting to Google.
Mind you, it's perfectly legitimate to monetize an OS product by building a commercial product around it. But there's more to being Open Source than honoring the letter of your OS-friendly license. It's about engaging with a community of OS developers. Without that, you're just a proprietary vendor that happens to publish some of your source code.
There's a very good chance that when the technology does arrive, it'll be strikingly similar to what he wrote about.
Please. Nobody knows what a truly artificial intelligence would be like. They probably wouldn't resemble SF robots, which are just human caricatures, with a few machine-like behaviors so you'll think of them as mechanical. If you assume there are cognitive models that are profoundly different from the ones humans use (and any animal behaviorist will tell you that there are) a machine intelligence built from scratch would probably be something completely new. The classic work on that theme is William Gibson's Neuromancer.
I already read the stupid thing more times than I like to think about. And yes, there's stuff there about the human condition. But there's an awful lot of tech there too. It's not like you can't have both.
Yours is like the 4th response to my post that poses a false dichotomy. I'm reminded of a particularly lame Star Trek episode.
They're dated in the sense that the science in them is dated. Lots of people enjoy reading old SF with old science (I know I do), but we don't need more of it. Especially about computing and AI — popular cultural already has too much misinformation on the subject.
"Hard" SF is not about the "hard" sciences. It's SF that studiously avoids being fantasy. The author deliberately keeps invented science to an absolute minimum. It's a story where the science is often as important (or even more important) than traditional elements like plot, prose style, and character development.
Asimov did like to speculate about societies and psychologies of the future. But that doesn't make the science in his fiction social science. The guy had no training in 20th century social sciences (he was a chemist, and his education focused very narrowly on the physical sciences). And judging from his (massive) non-fiction writing, he had no interest in it either.
You're right about the conspiracy theories. But defeatism? The right wingnuts are absolutely convinced that the Obama administration is on the brink of collapse, that the House will go Republican in 2010, and that Sarah Palin will be elected Pres. in 2012.
Hard to believe, but true.
Oh grow up. If you can't disagree with somebody without being an asshole, don't expect anybody to care about your opinions.
And believe it or not, there's an attitude towards Asimov that's somewhere between hero worship and total contempt.
Did you miss the part where I said it wasn't Asimov's fault that he didn't know about stuff that didn't exist yet? I didn't say his stories were bad, I said they were dated.
It's precisely because AI has progressed less than Asimov assumed it would that his stories are dated. See my previous post.
It's true that there's more to these stories than "AI". (Notice the similarity between the social role of robots in some stories and the humiliations inflicted at that time on African-Americans.) But the AI part is important. Asimov was a "hard" SF writer — he didn't pull the science out of his ass, not even the imaginary science.
Here are some examples: there's "Runaround," where a robot behaves strangely because of a conflict between the second and third law. Then there's "Little Lost Robot" where the robot behaves strangely because of a modified first law. Then there's "Reason" where a robot behaves strangely after inventing its own cosmology. Then there's "Liar!" where a psychic robot behaves strangly because of a conflict between normal honesty and the first law.
Do you see a common thread here? Oh yes, and Susan Calvin, the most important character in these stories, is an expert on robot behavior.
Defining "artificial intelligence" isn't hard: it's about intelligence (and thus behavior) in artificial systems — such as robots. It is true that AI has made very little progress towards understanding how intelligence works and actually creating an artificial equivalent of natural intelligence. But that's precisely why Asimov's stories are dated. Because we now know that creating a machine that can hold a conversation with humans, make moral judgments, and act rationally in complicated situations is a lot harder than he assumed it was.
Asimov's robot stories were pretty groundbreaking when they were written, but are now thoroughly dated. The dude didn't know jack about AI. He's hardly to blame, since the discipline was in its infancy. But why do we need more stories full of hand-waving about "positronic brains" and "laws" that are so vague as to be meaningless?
I just tried to read the recent additions to Larry Niven's Known Space canon, and I wish I hadn't. Niven and his collaborator (a guy named Lerner, who I suspect did most of the actual writing) try to deal with some of the logic holes in the original stories, but mainly manage to create new ones.
Meanwhile Fred Astaire is dancing with a vacuum cleaner.
Hey, I know money makes the world go round. But can we at least spin it with a little dignity?
Possibly I've gotten smarter and wiser, but so has the techie community in general. You no longer have so many people babbling about sovereign squatters and the end of proprietary software. In general the wingnut element in western society is on the decline, as last year's elections pretty thoroughly testified.
Thing is, the wingnut element doesn't recognize this trend, and still likes to tell itself that it's in charge. In general, I support this delusion, since it hastens their social and political irrelevance. But they still have the ability to gang up and shout down anybody who disagrees with them.
If I had any management skills, I'd go and start my version of Slashdot. I'll bet there are lots of disaffected people who'd like to have a forum where they can have actual conversations instead of shouting matches.
Your comment is painfully accurate. Thing is, Slashdotters were a lot smarter when I signed up 8 years ago. There have always been Linux obsessives, conspiracy wingnuts, and kneejerk libertarians, but even they had something worth contributing now and then. There was a lot of stupid noise, but every once in a while you could have a really interesting and informative conversation with some random stranger. Now it's all just flames, rants, and temper tantrums.
I blame changes in the moderation system. Originally, the people who participated in Slashdot the most got the most chances to moderate. Then they changed the system to have moderators chosen solely from the middle of the usage curve, so that heavy users don't get to moderate at all. This means that moderators are sporadic users with no real investment in maintaining a real conversational community.
More recent changes in metamoderation are even worse. It's not really metamoderation at all, you just say you approve of the article or don't. Useless.
I've had a few email exchanges with Rob on the subject. He won't even listen to suggestions for minor tweaks, like making it harder to abuse the "overrated" and "underrated" mods. (You're only supposed to use these to counteract simultaneous mods, but you often see these as the only mods on a post; people use them to avoid being metamoderated.) He won't budge from his position that everything's fine.
I guess from a certain point of view, it is. Slashdot's traffic levels are bigger than ever, and it's probably the biggest profit center Sourceforge Inc. still has. (Sourceforge used to be OSDN, and before that they were VA Linux; the name changes represent a huge number of failed enterprises.) So Rob's first post-college job has brought him fame and fortune. What's not to like? But the original Slashdot community is dead, and I guess it's not coming back.
Every few months, it seems, there is a new 'iPhone killer.'
Well, duh. Every new product generates hype, and to trend-conscious techies, the most obvious hype is that it's the "killer" of whatever product is already trendy. And, as you may have noticed, most new products these days are cell phones.
But have you ever heard of the latest blivet killer actually killing off the blivet? You have not. Market shifts don't happen that way. This "killer" meme is content-free marketing noise.
Because they'll stop working if they can't. And yes, there are printers that need to access the network. Home printers tend to pretty simple-minded (though many now have their own network addresses) but office printers often double as fax machines and scanners -- which means they have to look up the name of a mail server to forward those. And the mail server might well be named .
(Oops, Slashdot still barfs on non-Latin characters. Here's the cute Chinese name I came up with: http://tiny.cc/MUhUL )
Elevators too. Some of these are pretty smart and probably have the ability to report malfunctions, usage patterns, etc.
You know, using your brain once in a while won't hurt either.
If you really don't want somebody to read past the first sentence of your post, that's pretty much the best way to open.
I have the same lockup problem, only much too often. And it happens most often when I'm converting ink to text, which makes that feature almost useless.
There are too many bad features to list. The one that really gets my goat is that a lot of the formatting feature, such as tables and bullet lists, are just not usable if you don't have a keyboard!
Oh please. By that logic you should never need to use a computer for anything, because there's always another way to do it that technically simpler. Just because a pencil doesn't require technical support doesn't mean it's the simplest solution to every problem.
I've been using OneNote for a couple of years, and I'm pretty disgusted with it. Too complicated, too limited. too unreliable, too many "what were they thinking" gotchas.
Right now, I'm giving Evernote a try. Not as many snazzy features of OneNote, but the features it does have work well and are easy to access. And it's free, if you don't mind a few non-obnoxious ads. If it continues to bear the strain, I'm transferring all my data from OneNote and deleting the sucker.
I understand slashdot loves to use fancy technology to solve simple problems, but sometimes simpler is better.
And sometimes taking notes on a computer is simpler than recording them in a dead-tree notebook.
I'm not a student, but I do take a lot of notes as a technical writer. When you have as many notes as I do, having them in online form can be a lifesaver. Not only are they easily searchable, but the disorganization that creeps in when you're taking them (you're more concerned about getting all the facts down than about keeping your notebook in order) can be easily remedied.
You can, of course, take notes on paper and transfer them to computer later. (That's an obvious solution if you're recording math or diagrams, and don't have a tablet computer.) But that takes extra time, and if you're busy you may well forget to do it. And then some crucial piece of information exists only on a piece of paper you can't find.
The question here is not "is this technological overkill?" The question you need to ask is, "what works for me?" If you're good at keeping (and using) pencil-and-paper notes, fine, do that. But not all of us are. For us, the high-tech solution makes sense.
Well, to be fair, your main sin is not reading TFA. Which is a sin I myself am often guilty of, and might not have bothered in this case if the summary hadn't pushed my "huh?" button.
Do bear in mind when you read breathless articles about bad behavior in high places (Michelle Obama's excessive spending on sneakers, the famous drunken goldfish) is that a certain kind of right-wing pundit makes his living by stirring up outrage in the citizenry, and not worrying too much about how much of a scandal he's really seeing.