DB2 rocks on GNU/Linux, by the way, and it's free as in beer. You should check it out.
Have they implemented autoincrement columns or sequences yet? That's by FAR the most detestable thing about DB/2, and in fact, is one reason I generally recommend against it.
You know, I hear that during the 1940s, the German police made a few bad decisions, civil-rights-wise. Therefore, the german police of today must have concentration camps, but we just can't find them.
Thus illustrating the danger of anecdotal evidence. I wasn't there, I don't know all the details. However, when I say "miniscule possibility", I am saying that statistically this just doesn't happen that often. Does it happen? Of course. Does that mean we should ban law enforcement? No. Does it mean we should continue to watch them very carefully? Yes.
And does it mean we should "handcuff" law enforcement because of the *possibility* of abuse? Absolutely not.
Now, what lessons should we all learn from this?
That police are human, not perfect, and will possibly err on the side of caution when their life is in real danger. Sorry, but I can't say that I wouldn't have done exactly the same thing, particularly if it occurred in a dangerous neighborhood (which presumably it was if you have drive-by shootings). Personally, I would rather live and apologize, than die knowing I didn't frighten a possible innocent.
What part of "subject to court order" don't you understand?
Sometimes I think there are people who seriously think we should completely ban law enforcement because there might be some miniscule possibility of abuse.
Admittedly, there are no documented cases of any of these infections, but they're all theoretically possible,
Sorry, I don't live in theory, I live in the real world. I simply will not catch HIV, period. Incidently, transfusion-related infections haven't happened in over 10 years because of the blood screening process.
Look, I don't wish ill-will on anyone, and I'm glad drugs are being developed to help them. My point is that some diseases are more innocent than others, and AIDS is one of the least innocent. If I was donating my money to a particular cause, I would give $100 to curing pediatric cancer to every $1 of HIV.
Whether you want to believe it or not, HIV is almost 100% preventable.
I don't think I'm in position to judge anyone for their choices in life, and can't see the background they came for, what happened to them during their lifetimes.
Unfortunately, you have identified a problem in modern society: this "who am I to judge" nonsense.
I judge everything and everyone in the world. And I invite everyone in the world to judge me. Sometimes I live up to it, and sometimes not. And I don't always accept everyone's judgements, and not everyone accepts my judgements.
But it would be far better world if everyone judged everyone else, and everyone held each other up to the highest standards.
what happened to them during their lifetimes.
What is in someone's past is completely irrelevent. All that matters is their current actions. Letting people throw out excuses for their behavior is a recipe for letting people screw other people without any consequences. "Hey, I had a rough childhood, so I should be allowed to screw a few people." No, I say!
Making any kind of difference would be a form of discrimination.
You seem to be under the impression that all discrimination is bad. It is not. Discrimination for arbitrary reasons is bad. Discrimination for real reasons is not. For example, I don't have friends that are heroin users. Am I being discriminatory? Of course. Am I justified? Absolutely.
A healthy society must be prepared to have the guts to make moral judgements, one individual at a time.
The reason someone gets a disease is HUGELY important. I feel way more sympathy towards someone who gets a disease that anyone can get versus someone who has AIDS, those of whom pretty much choose to get it (except in extremely rare circumstances).
Do you feel the same sympathy for a child with cancer that you do a heavy, lifetime chain smoker with cancer? Or a lifetime alcoholic with liver disease?
I'm not saying that all AIDS patients deserve what they get, and that I have no sympathy at all, but we should never forget that it's a behaviorially spread disease.
I don't think anyone believes that these experiments are the last word on how life began. What I think they do show is that a relatively small number of materials in a high-energy environment can form the building blocks of life. Is that how it actually happened? Probably not, but given that life did form/thrive, I think it's probably not going to get far to argue that the early earth made life impossible.:)
Of course, it's all guesswork for anyone, but here's my thinking.
For AI, we don't even have the beginnings of a good theory of intelligence/conciousness, even after 50 years of computers, not to mention 2000 years of the greatest thinkers and philosophers thinking about it. We have made small amounts of progress, but mostly we've learned is how hugely complex the brain is. Given that major techological revolutions seem to occur in 25 year cycles, it looks to me like the progress arc is 4 cycles away from "real" AI.
Keep in mind that it took 25/30 years for the Internet to go from the lab into real use.
As for nanotech, it may not even be practical. The engineering challenges are insane: power, communication, reliability, movement, manipulation, and probably hardest of all, organization. It's definitely not just a matter for making "small parts".
Since the odds of this happening in the known time period on Earth are under considerable dispute, the "native origin" theory of life could turn out to require more bizarre coincidences than the "space seed" theory.
I'm actually on the side that self-concious life is hugely, insanely unlikely. But it actually doesn't matter how unlikely it is, because before we came along, we don't sense the passage of time. Life could have failed on a billion billion other worlds, until the Earth just happened to give rise to us. In fact, if you believe in the cyclic universe theory, we could have gone through a billion billion universe cycles before we just happened to spring up. We simply don't know.
I think it's also pretty likely that we are totally alone in the galaxy. If you do the math, once a space-fairing species develops, it only takes a few million years to fill up the whole galaxy, even at sub-light speeds. The why I think that self-concious life is hugely unlikely, simply because the planet hasn't been filled up in 10 billion years of history.
Well put. The other thing is that a lot of l33t haxxhor types think $3000 is a lot of money. That's peanuts for a guarantee of security.
To put it in perspective, on a site that I'm involved with that runs credit reports, we were required to pay $20,000 to a company to "review" our architecture (joke) and do periodic port scans. I'm sure sometimes the port scans find vulnerabilities, but it's still pretty pricy.
On the hand, it's a good barrier to entry for the business.:)
But this is even more absurd and easy to refute. If we were seeded by a super-intelligent species, then how did the super-intelligence species evolve? Super-seeding? At some point, there must have been a "progenitor" species (to use Brin's term).
Given that, wouldn't it be simpler to believe that we are simply a progenitor species?
Just out of curiosity, are there any movements out there to clone OS/X's interface? I've sworn never to give money to Apple, but I might be interested in playing around with a clone someday.:)
He also believed that life didn't start on Earth, but that we were "seeded" from outer space.
I've never read his theory, and I'm sure he had his reasons for believing this, but I've never understood this reasoning. Does he think that Earth doesn't have the raw material necessary to create complex proteins? I seem to remember "lightning bottle" experiments that proved that you could create simple proteins from primordial earth "stuff".
Just using "the simplest explanation is usually the right one" logic, one would tend to believe that we don't need extraterrestial explanations to theorize how life began.
However, with nanotechnology around the corner (5-10 years),
To be honest with you, I think we're at least 100 years away from nanotechnology as well (at least as described in the sci-fi books). The engineering challenges are insane: power, communication, reliability, movement, manipulation, and probably hardest of all, organization. It may not even end up being practical.
5-10 years?? Come on. I would prepare yourself to not see it happen in your lifetime. Unless medical science manages to extend our lifetimes (I'm going to be pissed if I don't manage to live a few hundred years).
Do the math. 3,000 centers. Let's say 10 computers per center (high?). Let's say $100 per copy of Windows, plus $150 (?) for the home version of Office. That's only $7.5 million.
Sorry to be the one to douse the "hardy har har" Microsoft bashing.
But don't worry... you can still be cynical by believing they are faceless automotons only doing it as a PR stunt, and they couldn't care less about the actual children.
The scientists (yes, they are real scientists) doing research in this area are not just pulling things out of thin air.
I don't mean to impune the intelligence of these researchers. There are clearly brilliant people doing research in these areas. However, Aristotle and Einstein were both brilliant people for their time, they both made huge contributions to their fields, but there are immense differences in knowledge.
The reason I put "scientist" in quotes (and I probably shouldn't have) is that it's really not reached the level of a science, in my opinion. To be a science, you have to have theories that are verified through experiments. I'll grant that we have some interesting evidence, and some toy models, but no real grand theories to sink our teeth into.
Even your mysteries that have been "solved" I don't totally buy into*. They are certainly important and interesting clues, but I'm not necessarily convinced they "prove" anything. For example, optical illusions give us powerful clues into how vision works in the brain. But that doesn't mean we are close to understanding vision and cognition.
* Incidently, I hadn't been aware of those experiments. Do you have some good references on those? It would be interesting to follow up.
There is no doubt in my mind that ISPs need to take better action. I should be able to report probing and infection to the ISP, and they should investigate the other party. If it's a rogue hacker, they report them to the authorities. If it's a virus, the other party should be notified and their connection pulled until the system is disinfected.
Having had my Linux box infected/hacked via the WU-FTPd bug, I know that this is not limited to Windows machines.
In fact, I might even be open to public financing of ISP's investigation departments under a law-enforcement arm. This is a public nuisance issue. Just as you don't want a fire at your neighbor's house setting fire to your house*, we should have "fire fighters" putting out viruses as well.
*Incidently, to all the Libertarian wackos who think that fire departments should be privately hired by each homeowner, this is why it needs to be under the "promote the general welfare" part of the constitution.
...but I'm guessing that they know a lot more about the subject than you do.
I'm certain he does. On the other hand, many AI "scientists" have made a lot of claims over the years with their superior knowledge of the various details.
I, on the other hand, have enough knowledge and experience to see that the entire field doesn't have the slightest clue how full-blown adult-level cognitive and language abilities work. You don't have to be an expert in architecture to see that a mud hut is not going to scale to the Empire State Building.
What about the entire field of linguistics? There is no shortage of theories on how language works. Cognitive scientists are also starting to develop an understanding of how children pick it up.
To paraphrase another poster, which I liked: Just because you have a theory that gluing feathers on your arms and flapping is the basis of flight doesn't mean you have a theory of aerodynamics.
Like I said, I don't disagree with his point (that often command lines can do things faster), but that his example is bad. He creates this image of Joe User slowly moving one file at a time, which is absurd. Using the standard Windows file manager, I could move those mythical 500 files in about 30-60 seconds, probably less time than it would take most people to figure out how to create the shell command.
"...you assume they have a considerable amount of nonlinguistic cognitive machinery in place before they start" [...] Additionally, the idea that children learn laguage because of rewards or praise is, apparently, inconsistent with studies of human language acquisition.
Hmm, interesting. To tell you the truth, I have a tottler about 20 months old myself, and it's been fascinating watching him developing cognitive skills. I think there is room for both views. On the one hand, there is no question that there is a considerable amount of hard-wired machinery at work. This is immediately apparent when compared to raising a puppy (which I've also done).
When my child was born, I was interested to see how long it would take for me to see there was something "different" over the puppy. To my amazement, once an infant starts noticing the world (they are pretty much oblivious for the first three months), the differences are noticeable right away. It's subtle, but you can see them looking at the world and you can see "the little gears turning". I don't know how to define it exactly, but there is no doubt that there is a qualitative difference in how each brain works.
On the other hand, I don't think you necessarily need to look to straight parental or world positive/negative reinforcement to find feedback at work. There is a tremendous amount of self-motivated feedback at work in a child. In my boy, at least, his biggest motivations are 1) look at everything and analyze how it interacts in his world, and more importantly, 2) to be a "big boy" by mimicking the adults around him. If there's something that he thinks he can do, he gets pissed if you don't let him try it himself. Much of his positive/negative feedback is coming directly from comparing his actions and results to those around him.
I think that hard-wired self-motivated feedback based on mimickry is going to be shown to be an important factor in child development. Which makes it all the harder to make a machine do it, because you have to give it something to mimic in a relatively real world environment.
Slashdot Mirror
When's the last time you heard a major vendor acknowledge a severe hole was actually severe.
Um, how about Microsoft and Code Red, which incidently was patched months before the Code Red outbreak.
DB2 rocks on GNU/Linux, by the way, and it's free as in beer. You should check it out.
Have they implemented autoincrement columns or sequences yet? That's by FAR the most detestable thing about DB/2, and in fact, is one reason I generally recommend against it.
You know, I hear that during the 1940s, the German police made a few bad decisions, civil-rights-wise. Therefore, the german police of today must have concentration camps, but we just can't find them.
Once upon a time, [... blah story]
Thus illustrating the danger of anecdotal evidence. I wasn't there, I don't know all the details. However, when I say "miniscule possibility", I am saying that statistically this just doesn't happen that often. Does it happen? Of course. Does that mean we should ban law enforcement? No. Does it mean we should continue to watch them very carefully? Yes.
And does it mean we should "handcuff" law enforcement because of the *possibility* of abuse? Absolutely not.
Now, what lessons should we all learn from this?
That police are human, not perfect, and will possibly err on the side of caution when their life is in real danger. Sorry, but I can't say that I wouldn't have done exactly the same thing, particularly if it occurred in a dangerous neighborhood (which presumably it was if you have drive-by shootings). Personally, I would rather live and apologize, than die knowing I didn't frighten a possible innocent.
What part of "subject to court order" don't you understand?
Sometimes I think there are people who seriously think we should completely ban law enforcement because there might be some miniscule possibility of abuse.
Admittedly, there are no documented cases of any of these infections, but they're all theoretically possible,
Sorry, I don't live in theory, I live in the real world. I simply will not catch HIV, period. Incidently, transfusion-related infections haven't happened in over 10 years because of the blood screening process.
Look, I don't wish ill-will on anyone, and I'm glad drugs are being developed to help them. My point is that some diseases are more innocent than others, and AIDS is one of the least innocent. If I was donating my money to a particular cause, I would give $100 to curing pediatric cancer to every $1 of HIV.
Whether you want to believe it or not, HIV is almost 100% preventable.
I don't think I'm in position to judge anyone for their choices in life, and can't see the background they came for, what happened to them during their lifetimes.
Unfortunately, you have identified a problem in modern society: this "who am I to judge" nonsense.
I judge everything and everyone in the world. And I invite everyone in the world to judge me. Sometimes I live up to it, and sometimes not. And I don't always accept everyone's judgements, and not everyone accepts my judgements.
But it would be far better world if everyone judged everyone else, and everyone held each other up to the highest standards.
what happened to them during their lifetimes.
What is in someone's past is completely irrelevent. All that matters is their current actions. Letting people throw out excuses for their behavior is a recipe for letting people screw other people without any consequences. "Hey, I had a rough childhood, so I should be allowed to screw a few people." No, I say!
Making any kind of difference would be a form of discrimination.
You seem to be under the impression that all discrimination is bad. It is not. Discrimination for arbitrary reasons is bad. Discrimination for real reasons is not. For example, I don't have friends that are heroin users. Am I being discriminatory? Of course. Am I justified? Absolutely.
A healthy society must be prepared to have the guts to make moral judgements, one individual at a time.
The reason why they infected is not importnt,
What the hell? You are definitely on acid.
The reason someone gets a disease is HUGELY important. I feel way more sympathy towards someone who gets a disease that anyone can get versus someone who has AIDS, those of whom pretty much choose to get it (except in extremely rare circumstances).
Do you feel the same sympathy for a child with cancer that you do a heavy, lifetime chain smoker with cancer? Or a lifetime alcoholic with liver disease?
I'm not saying that all AIDS patients deserve what they get, and that I have no sympathy at all, but we should never forget that it's a behaviorially spread disease.
You're right. It says in the main body of the article "exhaustive search", and I missed that somehow.
The article pretty much says that keystroke timing can help increase the efficiency of dictionary searches.
Big deal. If your paswords are vulnerable to dictionary searches, then you have bigger problems than keystroke timing vulnerability.
This sounds like a non-issue to me.
This explanation is seriously questioned today,
I don't think anyone believes that these experiments are the last word on how life began. What I think they do show is that a relatively small number of materials in a high-energy environment can form the building blocks of life. Is that how it actually happened? Probably not, but given that life did form/thrive, I think it's probably not going to get far to argue that the early earth made life impossible. :)
Of course, it's all guesswork for anyone, but here's my thinking.
For AI, we don't even have the beginnings of a good theory of intelligence/conciousness, even after 50 years of computers, not to mention 2000 years of the greatest thinkers and philosophers thinking about it. We have made small amounts of progress, but mostly we've learned is how hugely complex the brain is. Given that major techological revolutions seem to occur in 25 year cycles, it looks to me like the progress arc is 4 cycles away from "real" AI.
Keep in mind that it took 25/30 years for the Internet to go from the lab into real use.
As for nanotech, it may not even be practical. The engineering challenges are insane: power, communication, reliability, movement, manipulation, and probably hardest of all, organization. It's definitely not just a matter for making "small parts".
Since the odds of this happening in the known time period on Earth are under considerable dispute, the "native origin" theory of life could turn out to require more bizarre coincidences than the "space seed" theory.
I'm actually on the side that self-concious life is hugely, insanely unlikely. But it actually doesn't matter how unlikely it is, because before we came along, we don't sense the passage of time. Life could have failed on a billion billion other worlds, until the Earth just happened to give rise to us. In fact, if you believe in the cyclic universe theory, we could have gone through a billion billion universe cycles before we just happened to spring up. We simply don't know.
I think it's also pretty likely that we are totally alone in the galaxy. If you do the math, once a space-fairing species develops, it only takes a few million years to fill up the whole galaxy, even at sub-light speeds. The why I think that self-concious life is hugely unlikely, simply because the planet hasn't been filled up in 10 billion years of history.
Well put. The other thing is that a lot of l33t haxxhor types think $3000 is a lot of money. That's peanuts for a guarantee of security.
To put it in perspective, on a site that I'm involved with that runs credit reports, we were required to pay $20,000 to a company to "review" our architecture (joke) and do periodic port scans. I'm sure sometimes the port scans find vulnerabilities, but it's still pretty pricy.
On the hand, it's a good barrier to entry for the business. :)
Oops. I guess I should have RTFA. :)
But this is even more absurd and easy to refute. If we were seeded by a super-intelligent species, then how did the super-intelligence species evolve? Super-seeding? At some point, there must have been a "progenitor" species (to use Brin's term).
Given that, wouldn't it be simpler to believe that we are simply a progenitor species?
Just out of curiosity, are there any movements out there to clone OS/X's interface? I've sworn never to give money to Apple, but I might be interested in playing around with a clone someday. :)
I hear their mailing lists require registration as well. Those bastards!
He also believed that life didn't start on Earth, but that we were "seeded" from outer space.
I've never read his theory, and I'm sure he had his reasons for believing this, but I've never understood this reasoning. Does he think that Earth doesn't have the raw material necessary to create complex proteins? I seem to remember "lightning bottle" experiments that proved that you could create simple proteins from primordial earth "stuff".
Just using "the simplest explanation is usually the right one" logic, one would tend to believe that we don't need extraterrestial explanations to theorize how life began.
However, with nanotechnology around the corner (5-10 years),
To be honest with you, I think we're at least 100 years away from nanotechnology as well (at least as described in the sci-fi books). The engineering challenges are insane: power, communication, reliability, movement, manipulation, and probably hardest of all, organization. It may not even end up being practical.
5-10 years?? Come on. I would prepare yourself to not see it happen in your lifetime. Unless medical science manages to extend our lifetimes (I'm going to be pissed if I don't manage to live a few hundred years).
Do the math. 3,000 centers. Let's say 10 computers per center (high?). Let's say $100 per copy of Windows, plus $150 (?) for the home version of Office. That's only $7.5 million.
Sorry to be the one to douse the "hardy har har" Microsoft bashing.
But don't worry ... you can still be cynical by believing they are faceless automotons only doing it as a PR stunt, and they couldn't care less about the actual children.
The scientists (yes, they are real scientists) doing research in this area are not just pulling things out of thin air.
I don't mean to impune the intelligence of these researchers. There are clearly brilliant people doing research in these areas. However, Aristotle and Einstein were both brilliant people for their time, they both made huge contributions to their fields, but there are immense differences in knowledge.
The reason I put "scientist" in quotes (and I probably shouldn't have) is that it's really not reached the level of a science, in my opinion. To be a science, you have to have theories that are verified through experiments. I'll grant that we have some interesting evidence, and some toy models, but no real grand theories to sink our teeth into.
Even your mysteries that have been "solved" I don't totally buy into*. They are certainly important and interesting clues, but I'm not necessarily convinced they "prove" anything. For example, optical illusions give us powerful clues into how vision works in the brain. But that doesn't mean we are close to understanding vision and cognition.
* Incidently, I hadn't been aware of those experiments. Do you have some good references on those? It would be interesting to follow up.
Apparently they read my post on this subject. :)
There is no doubt in my mind that ISPs need to take better action. I should be able to report probing and infection to the ISP, and they should investigate the other party. If it's a rogue hacker, they report them to the authorities. If it's a virus, the other party should be notified and their connection pulled until the system is disinfected.
Having had my Linux box infected/hacked via the WU-FTPd bug, I know that this is not limited to Windows machines.
In fact, I might even be open to public financing of ISP's investigation departments under a law-enforcement arm. This is a public nuisance issue. Just as you don't want a fire at your neighbor's house setting fire to your house*, we should have "fire fighters" putting out viruses as well.
*Incidently, to all the Libertarian wackos who think that fire departments should be privately hired by each homeowner, this is why it needs to be under the "promote the general welfare" part of the constitution.
I'm certain he does. On the other hand, many AI "scientists" have made a lot of claims over the years with their superior knowledge of the various details.
I, on the other hand, have enough knowledge and experience to see that the entire field doesn't have the slightest clue how full-blown adult-level cognitive and language abilities work. You don't have to be an expert in architecture to see that a mud hut is not going to scale to the Empire State Building.
What about the entire field of linguistics? There is no shortage of theories on how language works. Cognitive scientists are also starting to develop an understanding of how children pick it up.
To paraphrase another poster, which I liked: Just because you have a theory that gluing feathers on your arms and flapping is the basis of flight doesn't mean you have a theory of aerodynamics.
Like I said, I don't disagree with his point (that often command lines can do things faster), but that his example is bad. He creates this image of Joe User slowly moving one file at a time, which is absurd. Using the standard Windows file manager, I could move those mythical 500 files in about 30-60 seconds, probably less time than it would take most people to figure out how to create the shell command.
"...you assume they have a considerable amount of nonlinguistic cognitive machinery in place before they start" [...] Additionally, the idea that children learn laguage because of rewards or praise is, apparently, inconsistent with studies of human language acquisition.
Hmm, interesting. To tell you the truth, I have a tottler about 20 months old myself, and it's been fascinating watching him developing cognitive skills. I think there is room for both views. On the one hand, there is no question that there is a considerable amount of hard-wired machinery at work. This is immediately apparent when compared to raising a puppy (which I've also done).
When my child was born, I was interested to see how long it would take for me to see there was something "different" over the puppy. To my amazement, once an infant starts noticing the world (they are pretty much oblivious for the first three months), the differences are noticeable right away. It's subtle, but you can see them looking at the world and you can see "the little gears turning". I don't know how to define it exactly, but there is no doubt that there is a qualitative difference in how each brain works.
On the other hand, I don't think you necessarily need to look to straight parental or world positive/negative reinforcement to find feedback at work. There is a tremendous amount of self-motivated feedback at work in a child. In my boy, at least, his biggest motivations are 1) look at everything and analyze how it interacts in his world, and more importantly, 2) to be a "big boy" by mimicking the adults around him. If there's something that he thinks he can do, he gets pissed if you don't let him try it himself. Much of his positive/negative feedback is coming directly from comparing his actions and results to those around him.
I think that hard-wired self-motivated feedback based on mimickry is going to be shown to be an important factor in child development. Which makes it all the harder to make a machine do it, because you have to give it something to mimic in a relatively real world environment.