It is reasonable to set the date of the "collapse" as the day the light can be expected to reach Earth minus today; that's accurate enough and reasonably well defined.
You are, of course, technically correct. "The best kind of correct", as 1.0 would say.
Actually, it is an unreasonable definition, because it basically says (for some circumstances), "everything you do is morally wrong."
Yup, that's where the definition leads. Definitions do things like that.
Remember, definitions don't actually have any power. As long as they are reasonably consistent and everybody agrees with them, you can communicate with them. You can still discuss what is least wrong with such a definition.
I think there are two reasonable definitions of morally wrong: One is "any action other than the best moral action for some moral system", the other is specific to the moral system, but I'll take utilitarianism as an easy example: "Any action that has a negative net value to society is morally wrong."
I can accept that war is always morally wrong by the latter standard, and it's not an unreasonably definition. Clearly, war can rise to the former standard, although it is more complicated than most people really appreciate, due to the interaction of time and value depreciation.
(It is true that you should basically be "forced" into war, but it is not automatically true that you have to wait until the last possible moment; even without history showing that delay can make the problem very much worse, it's easy to see that you shouldn't wait to start your war preparations until the first bomber wave actually starts dropping bombs, when you had a week to see your enemy's carrier groups heading at you with full steam, for example. The question of when to start is a complicated one; "the last reasonable moment" is a tricky concept, and gets trickier the more damage your enemy can do to you in a short period of time.)
As we grow our unique blend of factional religious wars, fossil-fueled planetary suicide, coca-colonial capitalism, short sighted foreign policy, anti-social youth, teenage pregnancy, drug trafficking, blood diamonds and illegal arms transfers we're looking for partners in our long run success.
Also, affluence-induced pessimism. Don't forget the affluence-induced pessimism. The better things get, the more time we have to monomaniacally focus on everything that isn't perfect yet.
Yes, but it is information that you received at the speed of light from the original transmission. You didn't communicate something from one target to another at faster-than-light speeds, because you have no control over what you receive.
This means that you can receive a signal from the original transmitter at the speed of light, but that's no big deal.
I'd like to point out to both you and everybody else sputtering "but... but... but...!" that entanglement may be an exotic mathematical phenomenon, but it is very easy to create entangled photons in a laboratory. Very easy. And true FTL communication will be pretty much a guaranteed Nobel prize, so it's not a lack of motivation. If there was some easy way to exploit entanglement for FTL communication, it'd have been done. Most like fifty years ago.
I submit that if your understanding leads you to believe that there must be a way, or at least doesn't prove that there isn't one, it's your understanding that is wrong, not the universe and not people who really know physics.
If you're thinking that you can create a virtual drive to mount an image of an HD-DVD or BluRay disc which will have this crazy bug whereby it forgets to activate the DRM, no dice.
All drivers involved with media playing is going to have to be signed (maybe all of them have to be signed, I don't recall at the moment and I'm confident about the first part of this sentence), and you'll never be able to get your virtual drive signed.
Virtual drive software has no future on Vista; it is merely one feature that's gotta go for this magical protection to work.
So, if you compare the ideal case for commercial software against the worst case for open source software, commercial software wins.
Big surprise there.
Neither your caricature of commercial software, nor your caricature of open source software, has much to do with reality. Bad open source basically doesn't exist for a commercial company, because they most likely won't even encounter it, and it certainly won't last long in their selection system unless it's completely broken. And I've been involved in buying many closed-source libraries, and your happy-happy portrayal of closed-source software doesn't really remind me of any of those experiences. By far I have more trouble with the closed-source stuff just being unsupported, and sometimes it's the big vendors (as in Microsoft, Oracle, etc.) who are the worst!
I could babble on about this at length... in fact I'm planning on it on my website later this year... but there are two points worth making.
Fred Brooks in his masterpiece The Mythical Man Month draws a distinction between an essential thing and an accidental thing. Something is essential if it can not be removed; accidental is the antonym.
Most people, when answering the question of why software development sucks, answer with a long list of accidental points. Most of them are true, and most of them are worth thinking about. But it's worth considering the essential reasons why software development is hard, too. I think the two biggest essential problems are:
Our expectations rise more quickly than our capabilities. In many important ways software development is getting easier, but we always want more. Towards the end of last year, over a couple of months with no more than two full-time man-weeks devoted to the task, I squeezed out a weblog server platform. It has all the features you'd expect from a weblog platform in 2001, a healthy dollop of later features, and the beginnings of some unique features that are why I wanted a new platform in the first place. I did enough programming in 1997 to know what it would have taken to match the capabilities of this new weblog platform. Rather than two man-weeks, I'm probably looking at twenty man-years, what with the caching and SQL and other fun stuff I get nearly for free. It's easier for me because I got to build on one of the current trendy web frameworks, which itself builds on a lot of software that wasn't around ten years ago.
But no matter how our software advances, our expectations advance faster, so it seems like we aren't moving forward or are even moving backwards. We aren't. We aren't moving forward as quickly as I'd like and I think life for programmers is about to get very, very "interesting" in the Chinese-curse sense (multi-core is going to rock our world, and I think a lot of people may never really make the transition...), but we are making progress.
Nobody wants to pay for good software. Given the choice of "Fast, cheap, correct", a choice that isn't going anywhere in the near future, people consistently choose fast and cheap. By "people", I mean everybody: Developers, customers, the accountants in charge, users, you name the group, that's their decision. I'm not prepared to say that's even the wrong choice, because of the magic of compound interest "fast and cheap" can be the most rational choice. But nevertheless, this makes it effectively impossible to have "correct" software, which is what people are really bemoaning when they complain about the state of software engineering.
Many people say that all we have to do is apply the practices of other engineering disciplines to computer programming. This Slashdot discussion is no exception. But what these people fail to address is who is going to pay for these techniques, which uniformly involving doing "more" of something, usually a lot more, with more expensive people with more training and "more" of a lot of other things (training, personnel, time, testing, etc.).
This isn't by any means the whole story; we've still got a lot of accidental things in the way. But these essential problems guarantee that many of the complainers aren't going to get any happier anytime soon, because even if we completely fix all the accidental problems, these essential problems will still be enough to trigger further complaints.
Can you explain to me why exactly it's an advantage for commercial software?
Open Source software can be reused, but requires attention to licensing constraints which may be problematic. Some of it may not be usable in a commercial product, in which case it isn't a problem; it effectively doesn't exist for you.
Closed Source software either simply can't be reused, but even if it can, requires paying somebody to receive the code that will contain licensing constraints that may be problematic, and may furthermore require a lengthy negotiation process for things that aren't being sold as off-the-shelf projects, and in that case there is no guarantee you can come to an agreement at all.
The only time commercial software "wins" is a cheap off-the-shelf library that has relatively free licensing constraints and comes with source that you are allowed to modify and recompile, with the only open source competition being something you can't use for licensing reasons. You end up with most of the advantages of open source without the disadvantages of open source. This isn't the normal use case by any means, though; it's pretty specific and doesn't cover very many cases, and some of the use cases I can think of are open-source projects that you are allowed to pay for a full commercial license if you choose, such as MySQL and QT. (Cases that does cover are commercial graphic libraries like PDF or graph generators and many very specialized libraries.)
Yeah, sorry... I sort of stopped reading right there.
Computers aren't cars, webpages aren't newspapers, and the Internet is not a highway.
The closest real-world analogy to a botnet would be an engineered real-world virus, and even that isn't a good enough analogy to come to any conclusions with. (For one thing, nobody is a "manufacturer" of human bodies, so the blame situation would be entirely different.)
Friends don't let friends make car analogies. Do your part to put a stop to this hideous menace to clear thought on Slashdot.
I would like to acknowledge both your and EMeta's point. There is still some good stuff out there and in some sense I do have an obligation to say that after that post:)
That is part of why I don't believe the "blogs sweep away the old media" scenario, but rather in a melding. The best will survive and get better. Other media outlets will almost certainly further evolve into outlets that give people what they want, without regard for truth, for advertising purposes. We can already see the beginnings of that too, in the more partisan blogs. (Never read a blog where the owner never admits to being wrong and never concedes that his/her opposition actually has a good point at least once in a while. For that matter, hold conventional media to that standard too.)
You are assuming that there exists no way to filter the signal out of the noise. The evidence is not on your side. You're posting on one of the "ways to filter the signal from the noise", and it's not even one of the better filters right now. (Slashdot survives now as community, not as filter.)
Plus the system tends to self organize. How many crappy blog posts have you read in the past week? There may be millions of crap blogs, but you already never see them. By and large you only see what rises to the top. The current behavior of the system is not that of a system with no filtering. It's just the filtering doesn't look like what you are used to.
I see every reason to believe that we may pay for skilled people to pull even higher-quality signals out of the noise. I also see every reason to believe that is not going to take the form of an anointed (by journalism degree) priesthood that fully controls massive print infrastructures and dictates what stories are and are not valid, and what slants on the stories are and are not valid. Centralizing the filtering functions is as stupid as trying to centralize the economy.
The fact that journalism-as-we-know is a really, really, unspeakably, incredibly bad filter is only going to accelerate this process. Journalism talks a pretty talk about verifying sources and getting multiple angles and being "fair" but I see absolutely no reason beyond the pretty rhetoric to believe it is doing any of those things. Rather, it is a money-making enterprise that specializes in producing advertising space. If you can explain to me where the journalistic principles actually fit into that, with actual evidence, I'm all ears. Or explain to me how it isn't primarily a money-making enterprise.
(Note I don't really have a problem with it being a money-making enterprise. I have a problem when it presents itself as anything else.)
But even if we pay for filtering, we're only going to be paying for the filtering; the actual "signal" will be a commodity, because there will still be so damn much of it. Getting back to the original question: Is there a future in providing signal? Almost (but not quite) certainly not.
The endgame is that "blogging" and "the current media" will eventually merge until you can't tell the two apart anymore. We're already starting to see that, really. It's only a matter of time before CNN simply runs a "blog post" with light editing; already there have been stories that amount to little more than covering a blog post or set of blog posts, with the only difference being that CNN is about a week late to the party, they tend to "forget" to link to the primary sources, and they get all angsty about the bloggers.
Econ 101. Supply and demand. Supply of pundits is rising dramatically. Despite all the kids who think they are cool posting on Slashdot about how bad blogs are, enough of them are good that the supply of good pundits is also rising dramatically.
I honestly don't see how the economic value of punditry is going to end up at anywhere other than $0 in the very near future; supply is skyrocketing, demand is constrained by the amount of time people have to consume things (punditry is ultimately competing for entertainment time). Paid columnists are the only exception, and I daresay the demand for that is sinking much faster than the supply is also sinking.
Even if there are a few superstars who get paid something (maybe not even a lot), in the future the way those superstars will be discovered is after they spend time working for nothing to prove they have the goods. Imagine something like the way sports works; you do a lot of unpaid work before you get one of the precious few multi-million dollar slots. It'll be like that, except without the multi-million dollar contracts.
If you love writing... write! But don't expect to make any money as a columnist, and expect to lose your job sooner rather than later. Maybe you should just write as a hobby and find another way to make money; being a good writer can get your foot in a lot of doors and make you stand out in a world of people who write like idiots.
If you go forward with this, I think you need to go in with an awareness that you are basically playing the lottery; even if you're very, very good, it's still going to take a healthy dollop of luck to "make it".
A human had to tell the computer that marriage is a factor to consider in the first place.
Not in the way that you are most likely thinking of. It's difficult to express what I mean without much math, but basically, that 97% confidence/correlation would come from a statistical profile that would be 97% accurate at guessing, and at no point does that profile ever contain the actual knowledge of the marriage state... yet, an external viewer can only find a 3% variance between this statistical process and simple direct knowledge.
Consider the stereotypical Slashdot geek, who is so very single that they are 25 and haven't had a date yet. If I establish that you are an anime geek, who knows 10 programming languages, plays video games, and so on down the list of stereotypical behaviors, and in addition, that you don't like sports, have a pimply complexion, etc. etc. I may be able to build a model that correctly guesses that you are single 97% of the time.
(I'd like to emphasize that this says nothing about how that is done. There's a lot more to it than this. You'll have to take my word for it that this process is more sophisticated that a set of "if then" clauses, and it's not as doomed to failure as a naive conception would lead you to believe.)
Basically, what is boils down to is: Which is more important? Acting in a way that we currently obtain by forbidding employers to know marital status, or simply not knowing? The actions, or the state of knowledge in human heads? The law basically assumes the two are the same, but they don't have to be.
That's a much muddier discussion because even if you, a human being, greatly enjoyed me ripping your arms off, you can still argue that real harm has been committed; under current standards it has, and I'm not going to be in a hurry to change that while I still reside in a human body. That doesn't have to apply to a robot.
To make your curriculum more palatable to schools and more likely to be taught, some simple changes make it even more useful and applicable:
We need to teach the kids that not everyone is your friend, period. Not everyone is who they say they are, period. Never give out personal information, period, unless you are absolutely positive that the person you are giving it to is in fact who they say they are, and there is a legitimate reason for it. This means no SSN, phone number, credit card/bank numbers, address, etc.
(I was going to bold my differences but I ended up just removing "on the internet", and Slashdot doesn't allow <strike>.)
Tack on "how to be critical of advertising" and a few other things and you've got yourself a bona-fide vital 21st class. "Don't believe everything you see" and "Nobody is really going to give you anything for free" are valuable lessons both on and off the internet.
(I'll leave it for somebody else to detail how difficult it will be to get the modern school culture to deal with teaching those things.)
Oh, and for extra double-bonus points, "How will a lawyer representing someone who was turned down for a Google position react to these hypothetical questions?" and "How will a judge and/or jury react to the entire idea?"
Your post triggered an interesting thought process.
Google knows AI and machine learning; even if they don't use it they'll have people who know about it.
Suppose by asking certain questions, and doing some initial research and calibration, I can determine your age within two years with 97% certainty. Or marital status, or race, or any of the other protected categories. Have I broken the law? What if I don't actually do the computation? What if my computers do the computation but no human ever sees it? What if I do the computation and no human ever directly sees the result but the computer has enough power to say "No" to a hire in practice, thus still incorporating this potentially "forbidden knowledge" into the hiring decision?
(After all, asking someone about their marital status may actually be less reliable in the end; I can easily imagine 1 out of 40 people lying about something like that, or their true age/race/etc. if asked.)
This is extremely likely to be possible, and probably downright easy for Google, so this isn't just a hypothetical. And the problems this raises extends beyond this exact instance into any domain where for legal reasons, we have to cultivate ignorance; exactly what constitutes "ignorance" if you get right down to it?
You're short by several factors of magnitude, and you're failing to see the increased opportunity cost that arises as technology improves and we can make better use of resources.
You can already see this happening. Compare the mass of a lamp from 1950 to a lamp you pick up at Walmart. What made one lamp in 1950 may make 4 or 5 lamps today. Now, extend this trend up several orders of magnitude; the resources to make that lamp in 1950 may fully and totally literally simulate 100 years of lifetime for you in a virtual (but real enough) world.
Your SUV family isn't paying the opportunity cost of "entire third-world families", because tech levels are wildly different across the planet. This is a temporary blip. If that family could choose between that trip, or entire-families worth of lifetime, which do you think they would choose?
As I've said, the UFO is not technically impossible, but it requires a very, very, very precise and peculiar combination of rationality and irrationality for it to actually occur. And most people are debating in terms of an effectively 1950s understanding of the limits of science and engineering, like you just did. Unless there's a way around the speed of light, which only gets more and more constraining the better your technology gets, it would take a very odd intelligence to prefer to build spaceships to taunt monkeys in other star systems rather than experience umpteen thousands of years of human-level life. (The speed of light is important because unless there is a way around it, even crossing to the other side of Planet Earth, let alone the solar system, is going to become quite a trek again, what with you being out of the loop for entire seconds at a time... and smart money is not on lightspeed being broken right now.)
Slashdot Mirror
It is reasonable to set the date of the "collapse" as the day the light can be expected to reach Earth minus today; that's accurate enough and reasonably well defined.
You are, of course, technically correct. "The best kind of correct", as 1.0 would say.
There is no such thing as "instantaneously".
Remember, definitions don't actually have any power. As long as they are reasonably consistent and everybody agrees with them, you can communicate with them. You can still discuss what is least wrong with such a definition.
Likewise. Read that .txt file about Vista content protection that has been making the rounds.
I think there are two reasonable definitions of morally wrong: One is "any action other than the best moral action for some moral system", the other is specific to the moral system, but I'll take utilitarianism as an easy example: "Any action that has a negative net value to society is morally wrong."
I can accept that war is always morally wrong by the latter standard, and it's not an unreasonably definition. Clearly, war can rise to the former standard, although it is more complicated than most people really appreciate, due to the interaction of time and value depreciation.
(It is true that you should basically be "forced" into war, but it is not automatically true that you have to wait until the last possible moment; even without history showing that delay can make the problem very much worse, it's easy to see that you shouldn't wait to start your war preparations until the first bomber wave actually starts dropping bombs, when you had a week to see your enemy's carrier groups heading at you with full steam, for example. The question of when to start is a complicated one; "the last reasonable moment" is a tricky concept, and gets trickier the more damage your enemy can do to you in a short period of time.)
Remember, if you succeed at bypassing the protection, all involved drivers (and by extension, hardware) gets revoked!
Yes, but it is information that you received at the speed of light from the original transmission. You didn't communicate something from one target to another at faster-than-light speeds, because you have no control over what you receive.
This means that you can receive a signal from the original transmitter at the speed of light, but that's no big deal.
I'd like to point out to both you and everybody else sputtering "but... but... but...!" that entanglement may be an exotic mathematical phenomenon, but it is very easy to create entangled photons in a laboratory. Very easy. And true FTL communication will be pretty much a guaranteed Nobel prize, so it's not a lack of motivation. If there was some easy way to exploit entanglement for FTL communication, it'd have been done. Most like fifty years ago.
I submit that if your understanding leads you to believe that there must be a way, or at least doesn't prove that there isn't one, it's your understanding that is wrong, not the universe and not people who really know physics.
If you're thinking that you can create a virtual drive to mount an image of an HD-DVD or BluRay disc which will have this crazy bug whereby it forgets to activate the DRM, no dice.
All drivers involved with media playing is going to have to be signed (maybe all of them have to be signed, I don't recall at the moment and I'm confident about the first part of this sentence), and you'll never be able to get your virtual drive signed.
Virtual drive software has no future on Vista; it is merely one feature that's gotta go for this magical protection to work.
Your brain's license to Microsoft 1984 has expired and you are no longer permitted to use Microsoft 1984 in any way.
Error 0x8000002e: Imagination query failed (BRM exception)
To purchase the continued right to use Microsoft 1984 will cost you $19.84 for this year. Please indicate your acceptance of this charge by:
- Hating Microsoft
- Moaning
- Experiencing braindeath
Microsoft - What Do You Want To Think Today?So, if you compare the ideal case for commercial software against the worst case for open source software, commercial software wins.
Big surprise there.
Neither your caricature of commercial software, nor your caricature of open source software, has much to do with reality. Bad open source basically doesn't exist for a commercial company, because they most likely won't even encounter it, and it certainly won't last long in their selection system unless it's completely broken. And I've been involved in buying many closed-source libraries, and your happy-happy portrayal of closed-source software doesn't really remind me of any of those experiences. By far I have more trouble with the closed-source stuff just being unsupported, and sometimes it's the big vendors (as in Microsoft, Oracle, etc.) who are the worst!
Fred Brooks in his masterpiece The Mythical Man Month draws a distinction between an essential thing and an accidental thing. Something is essential if it can not be removed; accidental is the antonym.
Most people, when answering the question of why software development sucks, answer with a long list of accidental points. Most of them are true, and most of them are worth thinking about. But it's worth considering the essential reasons why software development is hard, too. I think the two biggest essential problems are:
- Our expectations rise more quickly than our capabilities. In many important ways software development is getting easier, but we always want more. Towards the end of last year, over a couple of months with no more than two full-time man-weeks devoted to the task, I squeezed out a weblog server platform. It has all the features you'd expect from a weblog platform in 2001, a healthy dollop of later features, and the beginnings of some unique features that are why I wanted a new platform in the first place. I did enough programming in 1997 to know what it would have taken to match the capabilities of this new weblog platform. Rather than two man-weeks, I'm probably looking at twenty man-years, what with the caching and SQL and other fun stuff I get nearly for free. It's easier for me because I got to build on one of the current trendy web frameworks, which itself builds on a lot of software that wasn't around ten years ago.
- Nobody wants to pay for good software. Given the choice of "Fast, cheap, correct", a choice that isn't going anywhere in the near future, people consistently choose fast and cheap. By "people", I mean everybody: Developers, customers, the accountants in charge, users, you name the group, that's their decision. I'm not prepared to say that's even the wrong choice, because of the magic of compound interest "fast and cheap" can be the most rational choice. But nevertheless, this makes it effectively impossible to have "correct" software, which is what people are really bemoaning when they complain about the state of software engineering.
This isn't by any means the whole story; we've still got a lot of accidental things in the way. But these essential problems guarantee that many of the complainers aren't going to get any happier anytime soon, because even if we completely fix all the accidental problems, these essential problems will still be enough to trigger further complaints.But no matter how our software advances, our expectations advance faster, so it seems like we aren't moving forward or are even moving backwards. We aren't. We aren't moving forward as quickly as I'd like and I think life for programmers is about to get very, very "interesting" in the Chinese-curse sense (multi-core is going to rock our world, and I think a lot of people may never really make the transition...), but we are making progress.
Many people say that all we have to do is apply the practices of other engineering disciplines to computer programming. This Slashdot discussion is no exception. But what these people fail to address is who is going to pay for these techniques, which uniformly involving doing "more" of something, usually a lot more, with more expensive people with more training and "more" of a lot of other things (training, personnel, time, testing, etc.).
Bloody hell, according to the VG charts the Wii is already halfway to the XBox360 penetration.
Nexgenwars has a higher number on the XBox360, and I wouldn't be suprised that's more accurate. But still.
Somebody in this discussion posted about the Wii passing the XBox 360 sometime near the middle of this year. Maybe it actually will. Wow.
I think that if the Wii takes #1, it's not likely to let go.
Can you explain to me why exactly it's an advantage for commercial software?
Open Source software can be reused, but requires attention to licensing constraints which may be problematic. Some of it may not be usable in a commercial product, in which case it isn't a problem; it effectively doesn't exist for you.
Closed Source software either simply can't be reused, but even if it can, requires paying somebody to receive the code that will contain licensing constraints that may be problematic, and may furthermore require a lengthy negotiation process for things that aren't being sold as off-the-shelf projects, and in that case there is no guarantee you can come to an agreement at all.
The only time commercial software "wins" is a cheap off-the-shelf library that has relatively free licensing constraints and comes with source that you are allowed to modify and recompile, with the only open source competition being something you can't use for licensing reasons. You end up with most of the advantages of open source without the disadvantages of open source. This isn't the normal use case by any means, though; it's pretty specific and doesn't cover very many cases, and some of the use cases I can think of are open-source projects that you are allowed to pay for a full commercial license if you choose, such as MySQL and QT. (Cases that does cover are commercial graphic libraries like PDF or graph generators and many very specialized libraries.)
Computers aren't cars, webpages aren't newspapers, and the Internet is not a highway.
The closest real-world analogy to a botnet would be an engineered real-world virus, and even that isn't a good enough analogy to come to any conclusions with. (For one thing, nobody is a "manufacturer" of human bodies, so the blame situation would be entirely different.)
Friends don't let friends make car analogies. Do your part to put a stop to this hideous menace to clear thought on Slashdot.
Ah, the Internet. The cause of, and the solution to, all of our productivity problems.
I would like to acknowledge both your and EMeta's point. There is still some good stuff out there and in some sense I do have an obligation to say that after that post :)
That is part of why I don't believe the "blogs sweep away the old media" scenario, but rather in a melding. The best will survive and get better. Other media outlets will almost certainly further evolve into outlets that give people what they want, without regard for truth, for advertising purposes. We can already see the beginnings of that too, in the more partisan blogs. (Never read a blog where the owner never admits to being wrong and never concedes that his/her opposition actually has a good point at least once in a while. For that matter, hold conventional media to that standard too.)
You are assuming that there exists no way to filter the signal out of the noise. The evidence is not on your side. You're posting on one of the "ways to filter the signal from the noise", and it's not even one of the better filters right now. (Slashdot survives now as community, not as filter.)
Plus the system tends to self organize. How many crappy blog posts have you read in the past week? There may be millions of crap blogs, but you already never see them. By and large you only see what rises to the top. The current behavior of the system is not that of a system with no filtering. It's just the filtering doesn't look like what you are used to.
I see every reason to believe that we may pay for skilled people to pull even higher-quality signals out of the noise. I also see every reason to believe that is not going to take the form of an anointed (by journalism degree) priesthood that fully controls massive print infrastructures and dictates what stories are and are not valid, and what slants on the stories are and are not valid. Centralizing the filtering functions is as stupid as trying to centralize the economy.
The fact that journalism-as-we-know is a really, really, unspeakably, incredibly bad filter is only going to accelerate this process. Journalism talks a pretty talk about verifying sources and getting multiple angles and being "fair" but I see absolutely no reason beyond the pretty rhetoric to believe it is doing any of those things. Rather, it is a money-making enterprise that specializes in producing advertising space. If you can explain to me where the journalistic principles actually fit into that, with actual evidence, I'm all ears. Or explain to me how it isn't primarily a money-making enterprise.
(Note I don't really have a problem with it being a money-making enterprise. I have a problem when it presents itself as anything else.)
But even if we pay for filtering, we're only going to be paying for the filtering; the actual "signal" will be a commodity, because there will still be so damn much of it. Getting back to the original question: Is there a future in providing signal? Almost (but not quite) certainly not.
The endgame is that "blogging" and "the current media" will eventually merge until you can't tell the two apart anymore. We're already starting to see that, really. It's only a matter of time before CNN simply runs a "blog post" with light editing; already there have been stories that amount to little more than covering a blog post or set of blog posts, with the only difference being that CNN is about a week late to the party, they tend to "forget" to link to the primary sources, and they get all angsty about the bloggers.
Econ 101. Supply and demand. Supply of pundits is rising dramatically. Despite all the kids who think they are cool posting on Slashdot about how bad blogs are, enough of them are good that the supply of good pundits is also rising dramatically.
I honestly don't see how the economic value of punditry is going to end up at anywhere other than $0 in the very near future; supply is skyrocketing, demand is constrained by the amount of time people have to consume things (punditry is ultimately competing for entertainment time). Paid columnists are the only exception, and I daresay the demand for that is sinking much faster than the supply is also sinking.
Even if there are a few superstars who get paid something (maybe not even a lot), in the future the way those superstars will be discovered is after they spend time working for nothing to prove they have the goods. Imagine something like the way sports works; you do a lot of unpaid work before you get one of the precious few multi-million dollar slots. It'll be like that, except without the multi-million dollar contracts.
If you love writing... write! But don't expect to make any money as a columnist, and expect to lose your job sooner rather than later. Maybe you should just write as a hobby and find another way to make money; being a good writer can get your foot in a lot of doors and make you stand out in a world of people who write like idiots.
If you go forward with this, I think you need to go in with an awareness that you are basically playing the lottery; even if you're very, very good, it's still going to take a healthy dollop of luck to "make it".
Consider the stereotypical Slashdot geek, who is so very single that they are 25 and haven't had a date yet. If I establish that you are an anime geek, who knows 10 programming languages, plays video games, and so on down the list of stereotypical behaviors, and in addition, that you don't like sports, have a pimply complexion, etc. etc. I may be able to build a model that correctly guesses that you are single 97% of the time.
(I'd like to emphasize that this says nothing about how that is done. There's a lot more to it than this. You'll have to take my word for it that this process is more sophisticated that a set of "if then" clauses, and it's not as doomed to failure as a naive conception would lead you to believe.)
Basically, what is boils down to is: Which is more important? Acting in a way that we currently obtain by forbidding employers to know marital status, or simply not knowing? The actions, or the state of knowledge in human heads? The law basically assumes the two are the same, but they don't have to be.
That's a much muddier discussion because even if you, a human being, greatly enjoyed me ripping your arms off, you can still argue that real harm has been committed; under current standards it has, and I'm not going to be in a hurry to change that while I still reside in a human body. That doesn't have to apply to a robot.
Tack on "how to be critical of advertising" and a few other things and you've got yourself a bona-fide vital 21st class. "Don't believe everything you see" and "Nobody is really going to give you anything for free" are valuable lessons both on and off the internet.
(I'll leave it for somebody else to detail how difficult it will be to get the modern school culture to deal with teaching those things.)
Oh, and for extra double-bonus points, "How will a lawyer representing someone who was turned down for a Google position react to these hypothetical questions?" and "How will a judge and/or jury react to the entire idea?"
Your post triggered an interesting thought process.
Google knows AI and machine learning; even if they don't use it they'll have people who know about it.
Suppose by asking certain questions, and doing some initial research and calibration, I can determine your age within two years with 97% certainty. Or marital status, or race, or any of the other protected categories. Have I broken the law? What if I don't actually do the computation? What if my computers do the computation but no human ever sees it? What if I do the computation and no human ever directly sees the result but the computer has enough power to say "No" to a hire in practice, thus still incorporating this potentially "forbidden knowledge" into the hiring decision?
(After all, asking someone about their marital status may actually be less reliable in the end; I can easily imagine 1 out of 40 people lying about something like that, or their true age/race/etc. if asked.)
This is extremely likely to be possible, and probably downright easy for Google, so this isn't just a hypothetical. And the problems this raises extends beyond this exact instance into any domain where for legal reasons, we have to cultivate ignorance; exactly what constitutes "ignorance" if you get right down to it?
You're short by several factors of magnitude, and you're failing to see the increased opportunity cost that arises as technology improves and we can make better use of resources.
You can already see this happening. Compare the mass of a lamp from 1950 to a lamp you pick up at Walmart. What made one lamp in 1950 may make 4 or 5 lamps today. Now, extend this trend up several orders of magnitude; the resources to make that lamp in 1950 may fully and totally literally simulate 100 years of lifetime for you in a virtual (but real enough) world.
Your SUV family isn't paying the opportunity cost of "entire third-world families", because tech levels are wildly different across the planet. This is a temporary blip. If that family could choose between that trip, or entire-families worth of lifetime, which do you think they would choose?
As I've said, the UFO is not technically impossible, but it requires a very, very, very precise and peculiar combination of rationality and irrationality for it to actually occur. And most people are debating in terms of an effectively 1950s understanding of the limits of science and engineering, like you just did. Unless there's a way around the speed of light, which only gets more and more constraining the better your technology gets, it would take a very odd intelligence to prefer to build spaceships to taunt monkeys in other star systems rather than experience umpteen thousands of years of human-level life. (The speed of light is important because unless there is a way around it, even crossing to the other side of Planet Earth, let alone the solar system, is going to become quite a trek again, what with you being out of the loop for entire seconds at a time... and smart money is not on lightspeed being broken right now.)