The notion that Echelon hasn't been proved to exist is both uninformed and naive.
Cryptome.org has a definitive collection of documents concerning Echelon in an archive. Those desiring to test directly for themselves the existence of Echelon might consider sending some email using phrases from the Echelon trigger words list. This list, by the way, was circulated last year on newspaper wire services and isn't exactly top secret.
OK, let's say you are Queen Isabella of Spain. Christopher Columbus comes to you with some high-budget whacko proposal to send a small flotilla to the "other side of the world" when no one even knows if there is another side of the world.
How do you prioritize the following? 1. Keep funding the war with the English. 2. Keep funding your own court and all of the sycophants whose political support keeps you in power. 3. Keep paying the Vatican tribute so that you can get your sorry ass into Heaven through papal dispensation. 4. Keep throwing bones (in the form of subsidized wine and cut-rate fish prices) to the starving peasants who constitute the single largest economic class in your fading country. 5. Keep slipping dough to support the pirates who make the Dutch mercantilists' lives hard and prevent you from totally ceding international trade to a bunch of guys wearing wooden shoes.
The more times change the more they stay the same.
Prolly break more bones than records...
on
Ballooning into Space
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· Score: 3, Informative
Yeah, it's an Aussie who claims with a straight face that it's a scientific experiment, not a stunt. (Of course, he's already sold the rights to a television producer..."Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, Dorothy.")
It's a preferred rate, but anyone off the street can have it for about ten bucks more. I am in central Michigan. I provided my own antenna, which adds about two hundred dollars up front, to get the preferred rate.
Broadband is a concept; DSL and cable are the current mass-market technologies for delivering the concept as a service. Just because the technology sucks, that doesn't mean the concept is bad.
Most posts here (as well as Cringely) have overlooked wireless. While the infrastructure for cable and DSL (miles of cables and vast banks of centralized switches) are ~ twenty and fifty years old, respectively, wireless relies on fresh technology with very low cost of installed infrastructure. Further, as the technology changes, you change the transmitters and receivers and software, which are cheap compared to laying and maintaining cables and switches, and independent of any fixed wire technology.
Who doesn't have a cell-phone now? I pay 2 cents a minute to call anywhere in the US. Yet no one foresaw this as little as half a dozen years ago. I don't even bother locking my car when my cellphone's on the front seat...it's more hassle for someone to steal one now than to buy one.
Broadband is already far along in the process of co-opting the excellent technologies developed for digital cellular. I traded in my T1 line last year for a 10MBit wireless connect beamed to me direct from my ISP. It costs me 35 bucks a month.The ISP can give this service to anyone within ten miles (they put up a little antenna on a building downtown). I routinely get 750KBytes up and down in real-world use.
Broadband is not endangered, only the retro technologies used to deliver it. Within the next few years, small entrepreneurs like my ISP will rapidly move in to fill the vacuum (pun intended) left by the likes of @Home. Broadband is not capital intensive, it is imagination intensive, so it plays to the strengths of smaller companies. The typical wireless entrepreneur will not have to protect or monetize existing assets like phone wires or television cables. Wireless can be installed simply and cheaply, and it works right away.
I think we'll see a replay of the situation in the mid 90s, when limber ISPs pioneered services based on (cheap) modem banks, then were amalgamated into the larger telcos and cable companies. Fast-moving technologies always favor the fast-moving players.
Most of the astonishment comes from the Lego-bot's ability to physically manipulate the cube. However (sniff), the thinking is done on a PC. Can you imagine how Charles Babbage would have approached the problem? (Babbage's 19th Century Analytical Engine was a fully mechanical computer based on brass, not silicon.) He probably would figure out how to encode the lookup table and operators in plastic, not silicon.
OK, I'm just jealous 'cuz my Lego mass spectrum analyzer isn't working yet.:-)
"Knuth is clearly very smart...but very old-fashioned." His work is "really [not] relevant to most people anymore."
Applying this line of argument further, one should also toss aside other old-fashioned dinosaurs like Darwin, Newton, von Neumann (and his silly single-cpu virtual machines), Pasteur, Des Cartes...the list is long, far longer than janpod66's memory or appreciation of the history of science.
Knuth does not offer "nuggets." Like other great scientists, he offers bedrock, a firmament upon which to build. As Newton himself said, "If I have seen farther than other men, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." Knuth is a giant who helps people see farther.
If you sling code for a living, you are a technologist. That is high praise in my book, but it is not the same thing as a scientist, who is not as concerned with application as he/she is with understanding. Most technologists don't need any bedrock, just a toehold in their niche. That's perfectly OK. The world needs both good technologists and good scientists.
Knuth is not for people looking for algorithm cookbooks and subroutine libraries, but for those who want scientific understanding of computer programming. Newton's Principia is not particularly useful to an engineer caculating a modulus of tension for a bridge girder, but whatever textbook the engineer was taught from rests firmly on pilings driven into the Principia.
Look around. Everything has a new version number, more megahertz, new distro, fresh sound, hot new cuisine, just-invented slang, on and on and on. Well, almost everything. There are still a few things that are eternal, classic, don't need to change with time because they are indeed timeless. Donald Knuth will never sell as many copies as Java for Dummies, or even Niklaus Wirth's Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, but his books will still be read when the others have disappeared in the hole of time.
The preservative properties of moss and peat mentioned above aren't so surprising if you think about the bog mummies of Scandinavia and Britain. Many of these bodies are 2000 years old, yet are better preserved than any other human remains surviving from ancient times. (Yes, that even includes the freeze-dried remains of the Ice Man of the Tyrolean alps.) The bog water and peat arrest the organisms responsible for decomposition and over time, bog acids naturally "tan" the bodies into nearly indestructible leather.
The preservation is so good that when the occasional bog body is found, it is usually the police who get the first call, because the discoverers think they've found a recent murder victim.
Typical saber-rattling maneuver used by RIAA. There is an inversely proportional relationship between the shrillness of a given RIAA threat and the firmness of the legal foundation upon which it rests.
The real problem with US copyright law is that it is directed toward "tangible expressions" of a created work. (For example, if you tell someone your unwritten screenplay idea, and he writes it down, he (NOT you) has copyright to it. Your speech is "nontangible" but his printout IS tangible.)
Because cyberspace has distinctly non-tangible dimensions, enforcers of copyright law are finding it to be a hard retrofit. Many of the higher court and Supreme Court justices do not even know how to use a computer (that kind of scutwork is reserved for their clerks), so they are struggling when cases like this come before them.
The thylacine reference reminds me of a story told by the great biologist Edward O. Wilson concerning the last Imperial Woodpecker. After two weeks of tracking following a sighting in northern Mexico, the trail led to a Mexican truck driver, who had shot it and cooked it for dinner. The significance of his meal seemed lost on him, because when told the woodpecker was extinct, he looked sad and said, "Too bad...it was good and meaty, and I was looking forward to shooting another one."
I'm not an ecofreak, but it takes profound ignorance (or denial) to not see that decreased biodiversity will create a lot of problems. We are currently in the midst of the sixth great extinction that has occurred during the history of life. If current trends continue, within a century this event will become both the fastest and the most sweeping extinction ever, beating even the great Permian extinction of about 275 million years ago, and absolutely dwarfing the K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) dinosaur extinction caused by a giant meteorite 60 million years ago. Every day more than a hundred species disappear. One or two have probably evaporated while you are reading this post.
Ha ha, another tropical tree is extinct. Or beetle. Or slouch rat. Or passion flower. The mall is still open, the sky is still blue, and besides, we've got films of all that stuff we can watch on the Discovery Channel. So what?
Messing with biodiversity is no laughing matter. After the Permian extinction, fungi were temporarily the dominant life form on Earth. Sure, in a few tens of millions of years, whatever's left after we're finished will begin speciating again, and eventually restore biodiversity. In the meantime, however, remember that we evolved not as a stand-alone species, but as nodes in a great web, a network of interdependent creatures, feedback loops, and survival dependencies. Air, water, and soil all depend on this network. Our food, our health, our very breath depend on it. (For the cost/benefit analysis crowd -- our economy depends on it.) Like a well-designed computer net, the web of life is fault-tolerant and self-healing...up to a point. After that point, the network crashes and burns.
Wilson suggests imagining sitting in the window seat of a jetliner as it taxis to the runway. As you look out on the wing you can see the rows of rivets holding the wings together. Each makes an undetermined contribution to the ability of the plane to fly. Now, as you watch, a few of the rivets start popping out. The process continues...at what point do you start to wonder about the integrity of the wing? More succinctly, at what point do you start to feel afraid?
Biodiversity is like this. No one can say when the crucial rivet has popped. But even if the crucial rivet is still (temporarily) in place, risk begins accumulating at an ever-increasing rate. We are right to be afraid of losing diversity. Already, we've undertaken enormous risk. Is there anyone out there who really thinks we need to keep converting the biomass of other species into ever more biomass of our own? (For starters, I can think of better things to do with Imperial Woodpecker meat than turn it into Mexican Truckdriver meat.) Nothing will get better with billions more people, and a lot of things will get worse.
If you want to check out some well-written and interesting books on the subject, Wilson's book Biodiversity is a good read, as well as Roger Lewin's and Richard Leakey's book The Sixth Extinction.
A fail-proof method for creating intelligence has already been developed...by Nature. Intelligence is now thought to be an emergent property - it arises naturally in certain kinds of self-organizing systems (like life) in which the ability to acquire and process information increases survival, and natural selection sorts out the best ways of doing it. That you are reading this and understanding it is proof that this mechanism can deliver the goods.
About ten years ago, Rodney Brooks (also of MIT) flipped AI on its head with his "insect bots," which took a bottom-up (instead of Minskyesque top-down) approach. Brooks put a cheap microprocessor and servo motor on each of six "legs" of a lowly bot, and programmed each leg unit to do extremely simple things like check whether the leg was bumping against something, and if so, to lift it. Repertoires of behavior learned from the environment were then stored and re-used when similar stimuli presented themselves again. What happened after a short time was that far more complex behaviors than were programmed "emerged" from the collection of puny processors and actuators. With just a few lines of code, the damned things could navigate complex environments (like a back yard) that completely foiled Minsky-style bots run by minicomputers and millions of lines of instructions. (Brooks coined the phrase "fast, cheap, and out of control" to describe not only his bots, but the behaviors they "invented" by walking around.)
George Dyson (Freeman's son) wrote a book a couple of years ago called Darwin among the Machines that is as good an explanation of machine-evolved intelligence as I've seen. It's packed with illustrative stories from both within and without the discipline. Look here for Dyson's own commentary and some good links. Hans Moravec, director of Carnegie-Mellon's Field Robotics Lab, also writes very convincingly, if speculatively, about the evolution of machine intelligence, in his recent book Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. It's a fascinating read.
After what's been learned in the past decade about how machines can become intelligent, Minsky seems to me a bit like Lord Kelvin. Kelvin made tremendous contributions to science, especially in the fields of heat theory and thermodynamics, but in his later years, became mired in defending some pet theories that were way past their prime. He railed bitterly against Darwin, claimed the Earth was only a few million years old, and refused to accept radioactivity. One of his biographers observed that for the first half of his career, he could no wrong, and for the second half, he seemingly could do no right. Minsky, alas, has in some ways shared this fate.
Oooh CNET, hurry up and tell me what I think...
on
OSX/Win2K Deathmatch
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· Score: 1
This is like those dumb car mag articles: "We test the Boxster against the Z3 and crown a new king of the road!" or those dumb stereo mag articles "Sony's Direct-Coupled MOSFET Amp goes toe to toe with Luxman's All-Tube PowerCube."
Can't wait for CNET's new article: "Catholicism, Protestantism, and Zoroastrianism: a clear winner emerges among the pretenders!"
Get a life, quit worrying what everyone else chooses, and use/drive/buy/worship what works FOR YOU! Thanks to Bill, Linus, Steve, and the rest. As long as they've got each other to worry about, hallelujah - we've got choices.
In this article, if you substitute the words "Japan Inc." for Microsoft, you'll be instantly transported back to about 1989, when the Japanese were buying Pebble Beach, Rockefeller Center, and anything else they wanted with their Honda/Sony/NEC/Toyota/Toshiba megabucks. The warnings then were just as dire; the sky was falling in even larger chunks; the arrogance of the Japanese was even more galling than the arrogance of Microsoft.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall. If history teaches anything, it's that megacorps, meganations, and mega-anything rot themselves out from the inside once avarice and power-lust replaces hunger and passion. I don't know how the Microsoft juggernaut will eventually founder, but I do know that it will. No matter how much cash is thrown at them, the best and the brightest can not thrive, or even survive, among relentlessly expanding cadres of focus-group marketroids, lawyers, MBAs, and suited Napoleans still trying to compensate for pimply highschool careers. In the long run, history teaches that innovation, success and ascension are sustained by hearts and minds, not dollars and marketshare. Hearts and minds are what currently drive open source development...$$ drives Microsoft. Place your bets.
BTW, Christopher Woods wrote a superb analysis of the Japanese brush with dominance called The Bubble Economy (recent dot com stockholders can also benefit from it). Here's a reference to a summary.
Obviously Katz has not yet figured out the way the Hollywood reviewer spoils system works. He could be sticking his snout in the trough like the rest of them if he'd just get with the program and say something 1. nice 2. terse 3. followed by an exclamation mark.
Examples: Fresh! Outrageous! Scintillating! Achingly Funny! This Summer's [fill in movie name]!
If you still pick your movies based on what reviewers say (or worse yet, excerpted quotations), then check out this story.
So this is why Ballmer's got 50 Large in the bank? Even though I don't have an MBA (or even a subscription to Forbes), I would know better than to give the opposing team a newspaper clipping to tape to the locker-room wall. However, it is true that in an unintended way, Ballmer and his fellow droogs ARE driving software innovation. Ballmer's condescending comments are exactly what keep blood and caffeine coursing through the veins of programmers at two in the morning for the glory of the cause.
Why does TV advertising work better than web advertising? A lot of people get hung up on the "customizability" of banner ads. Harumph. I don't go to the web for ads - no matter how customized - I go for content, just like with TV. Television does not carry its ads inside its content; it alternates content with ads. In contrast, banner ads are embedded inside content. They annoy because they break concentration on the content - destroy, so to speak, the gestalt of the content. I don't know about you, but my undercaffeinated, sleep-deprived, likely hung-over, and not-all-that-Leonardolike-to-begin-with brain needs fewer distractions, not more. I WANT to focus on one thing at a time. On tube, the ads represent a couple of minutes to relax, maybe grab the pretzels or take a leak, before re-connecting with the content. On the web, they're just one more snotty kid yelling at me, waving its tumescent little hand, and preventing me from focusing on what I went to the web for in the first place. Fix that, and you fix the banner ad problem.
Various of Britney's body parts have already been engineered and fabricated in vitro...to say nothing of the homogenous corporate music product marketed as her "art." She looks and sounds like McDonald's fries smell and taste. (Both are designed to play your hot buttons like the Mighty Wurlitzer and thereby extract your cash.) Nonetheless, something tells me all the horrified ethicists will take a personal exemption when they get old and realize these bio-assembly line techniques will also be used to grow them new parts to replace their worn-out ones. What a bunch of blather.
Christo had wrapped the mesa in four miles of shade-contoured mylar fabric for the 1976 photo, but had long since removed the installation so he could wrap the Reichstag in the 90s. Duh.
In 1843 Patent Office Commissioner Henry Ellsworth reported to Congress that "the advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." Hmmph. However, before you judge Ellsworth too harshly, remember that the internet of 1843 used two steel rails and a locomotive to transfer packets.
In 1966 Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry patented Time Warping as a specific transportation method for large spaceships, but did not mention implementations involving MPEG compression.
TiVo's brilliant patent application not only puts the lie to those who say everything that can be invented has been invented, but also shows that there's still some juice to be squeezed from the rinds of more recent patents. Who would have thought that an ingenious method for moving starships at transluminal speeds could also be used to allow recording one television show while watching another?
Of course, before you judge this failure to foresee the future too harshly, remember that the internet of 2001 uses copper wires and computers with mechanical CPU coolers to transfer packets.
Watch this space for my own upcoming patent: a method of watching Star Trek while one-clicking the remote in real time to see what else is on in the PIP window.
Slashdot Mirror
The notion that Echelon hasn't been proved to exist is both uninformed and naive.
Cryptome.org has a definitive collection of documents concerning Echelon in an archive. Those desiring to test directly for themselves the existence of Echelon might consider sending some email using phrases from the Echelon trigger words list. This list, by the way, was circulated last year on newspaper wire services and isn't exactly top secret.
OK, let's say you are Queen Isabella of Spain. Christopher Columbus comes to you with some high-budget whacko proposal to send a small flotilla to the "other side of the world" when no one even knows if there is another side of the world.
How do you prioritize the following?
1. Keep funding the war with the English.
2. Keep funding your own court and all of the sycophants whose political support keeps you in power.
3. Keep paying the Vatican tribute so that you can get your sorry ass into Heaven through papal dispensation.
4. Keep throwing bones (in the form of subsidized wine and cut-rate fish prices) to the starving peasants who constitute the single largest economic class in your fading country.
5. Keep slipping dough to support the pirates who make the Dutch mercantilists' lives hard and prevent you from totally ceding international trade to a bunch of guys wearing wooden shoes.
The more times change the more they stay the same.
Yeah, it's an Aussie who claims with a straight face that it's a scientific experiment, not a stunt. (Of course, he's already sold the rights to a television producer..."Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, Dorothy.")
Anyway, here is the story.
Sounds like a lot of hot air to me.
It's a preferred rate, but anyone off the street can have it for about ten bucks more. I am in central Michigan. I provided my own antenna, which adds about two hundred dollars up front, to get the preferred rate.
Most posts here (as well as Cringely) have overlooked wireless. While the infrastructure for cable and DSL (miles of cables and vast banks of centralized switches) are ~ twenty and fifty years old, respectively, wireless relies on fresh technology with very low cost of installed infrastructure. Further, as the technology changes, you change the transmitters and receivers and software, which are cheap compared to laying and maintaining cables and switches, and independent of any fixed wire technology.
Who doesn't have a cell-phone now? I pay 2 cents a minute to call anywhere in the US. Yet no one foresaw this as little as half a dozen years ago. I don't even bother locking my car when my cellphone's on the front seat...it's more hassle for someone to steal one now than to buy one.
Broadband is already far along in the process of co-opting the excellent technologies developed for digital cellular. I traded in my T1 line last year for a 10MBit wireless connect beamed to me direct from my ISP. It costs me 35 bucks a month.The ISP can give this service to anyone within ten miles (they put up a little antenna on a building downtown). I routinely get 750KBytes up and down in real-world use.
Broadband is not endangered, only the retro technologies used to deliver it. Within the next few years, small entrepreneurs like my ISP will rapidly move in to fill the vacuum (pun intended) left by the likes of @Home. Broadband is not capital intensive, it is imagination intensive, so it plays to the strengths of smaller companies. The typical wireless entrepreneur will not have to protect or monetize existing assets like phone wires or television cables. Wireless can be installed simply and cheaply, and it works right away.
I think we'll see a replay of the situation in the mid 90s, when limber ISPs pioneered services based on (cheap) modem banks, then were amalgamated into the larger telcos and cable companies. Fast-moving technologies always favor the fast-moving players.
OK, I'm just jealous 'cuz my Lego mass spectrum analyzer isn't working yet.
Applying this line of argument further, one should also toss aside other old-fashioned dinosaurs like Darwin, Newton, von Neumann (and his silly single-cpu virtual machines), Pasteur, Des Cartes...the list is long, far longer than janpod66's memory or appreciation of the history of science.
Knuth does not offer "nuggets." Like other great scientists, he offers bedrock, a firmament upon which to build. As Newton himself said, "If I have seen farther than other men, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." Knuth is a giant who helps people see farther.
If you sling code for a living, you are a technologist. That is high praise in my book, but it is not the same thing as a scientist, who is not as concerned with application as he/she is with understanding. Most technologists don't need any bedrock, just a toehold in their niche. That's perfectly OK. The world needs both good technologists and good scientists.
Knuth is not for people looking for algorithm cookbooks and subroutine libraries, but for those who want scientific understanding of computer programming. Newton's Principia is not particularly useful to an engineer caculating a modulus of tension for a bridge girder, but whatever textbook the engineer was taught from rests firmly on pilings driven into the Principia.
Look around. Everything has a new version number, more megahertz, new distro, fresh sound, hot new cuisine, just-invented slang, on and on and on. Well, almost everything. There are still a few things that are eternal, classic, don't need to change with time because they are indeed timeless. Donald Knuth will never sell as many copies as Java for Dummies, or even Niklaus Wirth's Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, but his books will still be read when the others have disappeared in the hole of time.
The preservation is so good that when the occasional bog body is found, it is usually the police who get the first call, because the discoverers think they've found a recent murder victim.
Typical saber-rattling maneuver used by RIAA. There is an inversely proportional relationship between the shrillness of a given RIAA threat and the firmness of the legal foundation upon which it rests.
Because cyberspace has distinctly non-tangible dimensions, enforcers of copyright law are finding it to be a hard retrofit. Many of the higher court and Supreme Court justices do not even know how to use a computer (that kind of scutwork is reserved for their clerks), so they are struggling when cases like this come before them.
I'm not an ecofreak, but it takes profound ignorance (or denial) to not see that decreased biodiversity will create a lot of problems. We are currently in the midst of the sixth great extinction that has occurred during the history of life. If current trends continue, within a century this event will become both the fastest and the most sweeping extinction ever, beating even the great Permian extinction of about 275 million years ago, and absolutely dwarfing the K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) dinosaur extinction caused by a giant meteorite 60 million years ago. Every day more than a hundred species disappear. One or two have probably evaporated while you are reading this post.
Ha ha, another tropical tree is extinct. Or beetle. Or slouch rat. Or passion flower. The mall is still open, the sky is still blue, and besides, we've got films of all that stuff we can watch on the Discovery Channel. So what?
Messing with biodiversity is no laughing matter. After the Permian extinction, fungi were temporarily the dominant life form on Earth. Sure, in a few tens of millions of years, whatever's left after we're finished will begin speciating again, and eventually restore biodiversity. In the meantime, however, remember that we evolved not as a stand-alone species, but as nodes in a great web, a network of interdependent creatures, feedback loops, and survival dependencies. Air, water, and soil all depend on this network. Our food, our health, our very breath depend on it. (For the cost/benefit analysis crowd -- our economy depends on it.) Like a well-designed computer net, the web of life is fault-tolerant and self-healing...up to a point. After that point, the network crashes and burns.
Wilson suggests imagining sitting in the window seat of a jetliner as it taxis to the runway. As you look out on the wing you can see the rows of rivets holding the wings together. Each makes an undetermined contribution to the ability of the plane to fly. Now, as you watch, a few of the rivets start popping out. The process continues...at what point do you start to wonder about the integrity of the wing? More succinctly, at what point do you start to feel afraid?
Biodiversity is like this. No one can say when the crucial rivet has popped. But even if the crucial rivet is still (temporarily) in place, risk begins accumulating at an ever-increasing rate. We are right to be afraid of losing diversity. Already, we've undertaken enormous risk. Is there anyone out there who really thinks we need to keep converting the biomass of other species into ever more biomass of our own? (For starters, I can think of better things to do with Imperial Woodpecker meat than turn it into Mexican Truckdriver meat.) Nothing will get better with billions more people, and a lot of things will get worse.
If you want to check out some well-written and interesting books on the subject, Wilson's book Biodiversity is a good read, as well as Roger Lewin's and Richard Leakey's book The Sixth Extinction.
About ten years ago, Rodney Brooks (also of MIT) flipped AI on its head with his "insect bots," which took a bottom-up (instead of Minskyesque top-down) approach. Brooks put a cheap microprocessor and servo motor on each of six "legs" of a lowly bot, and programmed each leg unit to do extremely simple things like check whether the leg was bumping against something, and if so, to lift it. Repertoires of behavior learned from the environment were then stored and re-used when similar stimuli presented themselves again. What happened after a short time was that far more complex behaviors than were programmed "emerged" from the collection of puny processors and actuators. With just a few lines of code, the damned things could navigate complex environments (like a back yard) that completely foiled Minsky-style bots run by minicomputers and millions of lines of instructions. (Brooks coined the phrase "fast, cheap, and out of control" to describe not only his bots, but the behaviors they "invented" by walking around.)
George Dyson (Freeman's son) wrote a book a couple of years ago called Darwin among the Machines that is as good an explanation of machine-evolved intelligence as I've seen. It's packed with illustrative stories from both within and without the discipline. Look here for Dyson's own commentary and some good links. Hans Moravec, director of Carnegie-Mellon's Field Robotics Lab, also writes very convincingly, if speculatively, about the evolution of machine intelligence, in his recent book Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind . It's a fascinating read.
After what's been learned in the past decade about how machines can become intelligent, Minsky seems to me a bit like Lord Kelvin. Kelvin made tremendous contributions to science, especially in the fields of heat theory and thermodynamics, but in his later years, became mired in defending some pet theories that were way past their prime. He railed bitterly against Darwin, claimed the Earth was only a few million years old, and refused to accept radioactivity. One of his biographers observed that for the first half of his career, he could no wrong, and for the second half, he seemingly could do no right. Minsky, alas, has in some ways shared this fate.
Can't wait for CNET's new article: "Catholicism, Protestantism, and Zoroastrianism: a clear winner emerges among the pretenders!"
Get a life, quit worrying what everyone else chooses, and use/drive/buy/worship what works FOR YOU! Thanks to Bill, Linus, Steve, and the rest. As long as they've got each other to worry about, hallelujah - we've got choices.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall. If history teaches anything, it's that megacorps, meganations, and mega-anything rot themselves out from the inside once avarice and power-lust replaces hunger and passion. I don't know how the Microsoft juggernaut will eventually founder, but I do know that it will. No matter how much cash is thrown at them, the best and the brightest can not thrive, or even survive, among relentlessly expanding cadres of focus-group marketroids, lawyers, MBAs, and suited Napoleans still trying to compensate for pimply highschool careers. In the long run, history teaches that innovation, success and ascension are sustained by hearts and minds, not dollars and marketshare. Hearts and minds are what currently drive open source development...$$ drives Microsoft. Place your bets.
BTW, Christopher Woods wrote a superb analysis of the Japanese brush with dominance called The Bubble Economy (recent dot com stockholders can also benefit from it). Here's a reference to a summary.
Examples: Fresh! Outrageous! Scintillating! Achingly Funny! This Summer's [fill in movie name]!
If you still pick your movies based on what reviewers say (or worse yet, excerpted quotations), then check out this story.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/581770.asp
So this is why Ballmer's got 50 Large in the bank? Even though I don't have an MBA (or even a subscription to Forbes), I would know better than to give the opposing team a newspaper clipping to tape to the locker-room wall. However, it is true that in an unintended way, Ballmer and his fellow droogs ARE driving software innovation. Ballmer's condescending comments are exactly what keep blood and caffeine coursing through the veins of programmers at two in the morning for the glory of the cause.
Note to Rogue States: Disguise warheads of ICBMS to look like 6-10 ft rocks. Cf. HBO featurette "Making of Armageddon" for further details.
Why does TV advertising work better than web advertising? A lot of people get hung up on the "customizability" of banner ads. Harumph. I don't go to the web for ads - no matter how customized - I go for content, just like with TV. Television does not carry its ads inside its content; it alternates content with ads. In contrast, banner ads are embedded inside content. They annoy because they break concentration on the content - destroy, so to speak, the gestalt of the content. I don't know about you, but my undercaffeinated, sleep-deprived, likely hung-over, and not-all-that-Leonardolike-to-begin-with brain needs fewer distractions, not more. I WANT to focus on one thing at a time. On tube, the ads represent a couple of minutes to relax, maybe grab the pretzels or take a leak, before re-connecting with the content. On the web, they're just one more snotty kid yelling at me, waving its tumescent little hand, and preventing me from focusing on what I went to the web for in the first place. Fix that, and you fix the banner ad problem.
Various of Britney's body parts have already been engineered and fabricated in vitro...to say nothing of the homogenous corporate music product marketed as her "art." She looks and sounds like McDonald's fries smell and taste. (Both are designed to play your hot buttons like the Mighty Wurlitzer and thereby extract your cash.) Nonetheless, something tells me all the horrified ethicists will take a personal exemption when they get old and realize these bio-assembly line techniques will also be used to grow them new parts to replace their worn-out ones. What a bunch of blather.
Christo had wrapped the mesa in four miles of shade-contoured mylar fabric for the 1976 photo, but had long since removed the installation so he could wrap the Reichstag in the 90s. Duh.
In 1843 Patent Office Commissioner Henry Ellsworth reported to Congress that "the advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end." Hmmph. However, before you judge Ellsworth too harshly, remember that the internet of 1843 used two steel rails and a locomotive to transfer packets. In 1966 Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry patented Time Warping as a specific transportation method for large spaceships, but did not mention implementations involving MPEG compression. TiVo's brilliant patent application not only puts the lie to those who say everything that can be invented has been invented, but also shows that there's still some juice to be squeezed from the rinds of more recent patents. Who would have thought that an ingenious method for moving starships at transluminal speeds could also be used to allow recording one television show while watching another? Of course, before you judge this failure to foresee the future too harshly, remember that the internet of 2001 uses copper wires and computers with mechanical CPU coolers to transfer packets. Watch this space for my own upcoming patent: a method of watching Star Trek while one-clicking the remote in real time to see what else is on in the PIP window.