If you read the article, you will see that the problem is not generating enough electricity -- it'd be mad if they couldn't manage that, what were they, comatose? -- but distributing that electricity. Essentially, they have too much at low times and too little at peak times, too much in some areas and too little in others (Silicon Valley in particular). There's an interesting parallel here with world hunger: the problem is storage and distribution, not production. It's about time the 1st world got a bite from the bug that's been hounding the 3rd world all these years...
Obviously you're saying that sponsors should not expect any kind of exclusivity as a result of their donations. This is self-evident -- to the person receiving the donations. To a corporation, geared towards a culture of short-term gain, the long-term goal of better educated workers is overridden by a short-term desire for good publicity for the corporation.
I would rather corporations making donations to educational institutions expected no short-term return at all: no publicity, no co-branded buildings or labs. But little-picture corporate leadership could never let that happen, sadly. If a university sells out, it should expect to face the consequences.
I wish there was another source of funding for universities and organizations that didn't involve selling out... but there isn't.
Well, apart from some kind of comment involving smelling hot grits as they pour over NaTaLiE PoRtMaN...:-)
You could use an accurate e-nose to sniff pheromones and no withing seconds whether the person next to you is the right girl/guy for you. How much time/wasted money/emotional trauma would that save?
You might also use the same e-nose to recognize a human-being's characteristic odour as a form of identity verification... but then somebody could just steal your clothes and impersonate you. But it might help as an addition to biometrics... one day we'll just have a Hitchhiker's-guide style platic card containing all our biometric information:->
But the systems seems to take care of both of those problems (as I understand them): it takes the signal and simultaneously works out where it needs to go and how it gets there. Like all neural computing, the fact that it does this is non-obvious, but it certainly seems to handle both eventualities.
Despite the truly staggering quantity of flamebait on this article so far, I think this is really a huge leap forward: eventually, as the limitations of procedural computing and programming become more and more obvious (as if Windows 2000 wasn't enough evidence:-) neural computing will be programming, in the same way that computing used to "be" vacuum tubes and is now silicon.
Programming will become working out the solution to a problem in a general sense, and then training a neural network to behave in that way. No more if-else statements, very little hard-coding at all (at least, nothing that will get turned into a real "program" as we understand it now. Computing is just getting to big and too fast for an unaided human brain to satisfactorily handle all eventual possibilities and / or inputs, and neural networks excel at this.
I'm just waiting for the first Artificial Neural Networking Operating System: I figure it'll come around as soon as somebody comes up with a less embarrassing acronym than ANNOS:-)
If I wasn't already posting to this thread, I would rate that as "informative":-) Thanks for that info, now I have one more thing to self-righteously complain about:->
I'm genuinely curious here: what is the technical/financial/legal difference between different long-distance phone companies both providing service to the same area and two cable companies doing the same thing? Why is it so impossible to work out a way to share the costs and split the service? Packet-switching makes this easy, surely?
How long will it be until the FTC realises the mistake they've made here?
It's all very depressing. Corporations are just getting bigger and more powerful by the day, and the government in cooperating because corporations, unlike ordinary people, can afford to bribe politicians and officials. But what can we do to stop this? It makes business sense to merge -- usually -- so we can't claim they have ulterior motives. We can't make profit illegal. So what can we do? Suggestions, please!
See the Slashdot post I made on this topic earlier this afternoon. Quoted for simplicity:
It's been said before, but I'm really terrified of the path we are increasingly following. When I read Titan by Stephen Baxter, I thought his future vision of a regulated and partitioned Internet, heavily under the thrall of government censorship, was insane. A free and open Internet is impossible to prevent, I thought. But it's not. All the government has to do is go to some buildings somewhere in the country and take over, and they can cut links to the outside world -- not easily, but they can. They can shut down all but government-sanctioned communication. And if current trends of regulation, censorship and litigation continue, this is what will happen. We will trade a completely free medium for the petty dollars being lost by a few big companies, we will trade the ability to express ourselves for the dubious security of thought police.
Are we insane? Why are we letting this happen? Every libel case, every time a site is shut down, every time another mouth is hushed we get closer to giving up our freedoms. And we're not doing anything about it. We need to stop these idiocies, we need to convince the lawmakers and the public at large that nothing is worth the abolition of free and unfettered speech. And above all, we need to do it now.
Otherwise, we'll just keep complaining about our lack of freedom until finally, one day, somebody tells us that we can't.
Hmm. I guess I'm kinda misinformed then. But heck, I post to slashdot, you expect me to know about the stuff I'm ranting about?:-)
Okay, yeah, so if you say it in a crowded room it's slander and you can get sued for that too. I should have clarified that I meant it as an opinion... I didn't because generally when somebody says "X is an asshole" it's taken for granted that this is an opinion. That's just the way (informal) speech is -- it's mainly opinion. When I said "a crowded room" obviously lots of people thought of a man with a mike in front of a podium, which isn't what I meant.
This is, in fact, the same confusion that's going on with this kid's site: he's saying stuff that is patently just his opinion / venting, but people are using laws which apply to an entirely different class of action to kick his ass, just because they're pissed off.
My main point -- that they shouldn't be able to kick his butt just because he doesn't like them and says so -- still stands. It's rampant censorship. And I think I've clarified what I meant on the other points: on the net, things should be taken as opinion, not facts or attempt to be factual.
Thanks for illustrating my point, people! No wonder I love/.:-)
The difference is how you view the medium: when something is on the web, are you "publishing" it or just "saying" it?
If I'm in a crowded room and I yell offensive things about somebody -- even if they're untrue -- I can't get in trouble. If I do the exact same things in print -- like a magazine or a newspaper -- then I can. Because the source is claiming legitimacy, it is implying that what I say is true.
On the 'net, that's a boneheaded idea. Nothing on a website is likely to be true. Even CNN.Com publishes fraudulent virus warnings before realising they're untrue (famously, the story of an invention that lets you "fire a pulse of energy down a phone line and fry the modem" of somebody who's pissing you off). So libel should not be possible on the web.
The real issue here is that the people in charge and the people with more money are crushing an opposing view, for no good reason except that it opposes/offends them. They need to realise they do not have the right to do that! I can curse you to your face if I want to, and if I'm a beggar on the street and you're Bill Clinton you still can't touch me, once I don't threaten you.
But I'm really terrified of the path we are increasingly following. When I read Titan by Stephen Baxter, I thought his future vision of a regulated and partitioned Internet, heavily under the thrall of government censorship, was insane. A free and open Internet is impossible to prevent, I thought. But it's not. All the government has to do is go to some buildings somewhere in the country and take over, and they can cut links to the outside world -- not easily, but they can. They can shut down all but government-sanctioned communication. And if current trends of regulation, censorship and litigation continue, this is what will happen. We will trade a completely free medium for the petty dollars being lost by a few big companies, we will trade the ability to express ourselves for the dubious security of thought police.
Are we insane? Why are we letting this happen? Every libel case, every time a site is shut down, every time another mouth is hushed we get closer to giving up our freedoms. And we're not doing anything about it. We need to stop these idiocies, we need to convince the lawmakers and the public at large that nothing is worth the abolition of free and unfettered speech. And above all, we need to do it now.
Otherwise, we'll just keep complaining about our lack of freedom until finally, one day, somebody tells us that we can't.
Lots of scientists in the article appear to downplay the idea that you could use a system like this to send data faster than light. But I'm not sure.
The way it works is: the very first part of a signal arriving at one end of the apparatus somehow allows the entire pulse to be reconstructed and delivered out the other end even before the last part of the pulse has finished entering. No matter what you put things, you've pushed a coherent pattern of something faster than c.
Admittedly, the time taken to process the information would preclude getting feedback fast enough to affect the original process -- it would be scary if that wasn't the case -- but in an optical computing setup, you would still get information the information faster than if it had been sent at c. Whether you can sustain that speed for a continuous stream of data is another question.
With the restrictions of the antitrust trial including the opening or at least the "timely" publication of the Windows API specs, and a stable Wine both not too far away, I think Bill may be feeling just a little bit close to the fire: after all, the difference between Windows and Linux used to be ease of installation and variety of apps available. The latest installs are no-brainers, and Wine means that Linux will have more applications than Windows (all the Windows apps + all the pre-existing Linux apps).
The death of Microsoft is no longer something we wish would happen. It's now a practical possibility, and may even be inevitable.
Why can't we have a picture of a smiling Einstein as the icon? He looks like he's just spent five hours installing NT and it's just flashed up a bluescreen.
Did I say an Internet cafe? No, I said an IT-based business. Obviously, creating the business involves a lot of education. It's not the same as educating the masses, but that's the point. We need money before we can educate the masses, and the way to do that is by educating some people and starting businesses in motion.
Okay, sure we should educate everybody, but you don't grasp how poor these countries are: why do you think the education system sucks in these countries (screw "these countries"; I mean "my country" and I'll say so)? Because it's never occurred to us that "HEY! Sending people to school is a good idea!"? It's because we can't afford schools, we don't have the resources to build them or the money to continue staffing them. Because we're POOR.
Saying "educate first, then build your economy" is the ultimate hypocrisy of the developed nations, and especially the US. These nations did not become rich by thinking about the poor and uneducated, they got where they are by ruthlessly exploiting them -- picture slaves in the cotton fields, and illiterates working in the steel mills and automobile factories. The US, one of the world's richest nations, also has one of the worst education systems, and that fact has been proven time and time again. How can you remember that fact and still say "education is key"? Smart people are fostered by strong economies, not the other way around.
Obviously you need some basic infrastructure in place before starting an IT business -- computers need electricity. But it doesn't need to be and cannot be universal before you can go to the next stage. The cities are always more developed than the hamlets, even in the US. Start giving people in the villages vaccinations, but start giving people in the towns the 386s. There's room for both.
First off, get your terminology straight: originally, the "second world" referred to Africa and India (they were sailed to and discovered by the Spanish/Portuguese before the Americas were discovered. The third world referred to the "New World": this, obviously, includes what is now the United States. Obviously, these terms have changed.
"Third world" is now a synonym for a "developing nation" -- anything that isn't a developed nation is, I guess, part of the third world. The term "second world" is no longer used. But this is not the point.
People who say "we should solve all our/their basic problems before we tackle new development" are missing the point: we need development in order to solve the basic problems. If people had listened to this kind of thinking back in prehistory, we'd still be a load of cavemen desperately trying to hunt enough animals to keep everyone fed before we started work on this new-fangled "fire" thing.
If the Geekcorps can create a successful IT business in a country that creates 20 new jobs, then 100 people will have a source of income and can feed themselves. That is preventing starvation.
First off all, I'd like to say that I come from Trinidad in the Caribbean, which is a developing third-world nation, albeit more on the "developed" side of developing. And this kind of program is exactly what the developing world needs.
The third world needs to catch up with the developed world. This can not be achieved by following in the footsteps of the developed nations: as fast as we develop, the developed nations will maintain their lead and we will always be second-class world citizens.
Information technology has the ability to allow us to leapfrog several steps in the development process by creating economies based on the 21st-century business model from the ground up rather than recreating offline economies and going through the same painful and expensive restructuring process that the developed nations are currently undergoing. And, yes, it would be a good idea to get all our citizens clothed and fed, but to do that we need money and lots of it, and the only way to get that is to get our economies competing effectively with the rest of the world.
But the age-old need-money-to-get-money problem comes into effect: we are too busy preventing complete collapse of our economies to think about beefing them up. We don't have the resources, both physical but especially mental -- third-world countries suffer heavily from "brain-drain" as all our best and brightest get their bloody H1-B visas and ship off to the states as fast as they can.
The developed nations have made all their money exploiting the developing nations for raw materials, cheap labour and relaxed laws of every kind for centuries now: it's high time they started giving back.
I am rooting for them to lose because they are in effect *competing* with eBay for advertising dollars by *using* eBay's content.
You mean the way Slashdot -- a technology news site / community / portal -- deep-links to articles on other news sources all over web for its own content? Admittedly/. links to the sites, but if the content didn't exist neither would the bulk of/.
Wired and C|net in particular would have/. for breakfast if this set the kind of precedent that seems to be happening.
I'm surprised nobody thought of this before! You can support your favourite charity just by dialling in... pretty cool.
What would be best is a "free" (dial-up charges only) ISP which donates any and all profits to the campaign for unmetered calls! What the heck is up with per-minute charges for local calls in this country??? As if the weather wasn't enough reason to be depressed!:-)
They will be able to better aid downloads in the next version if they know more about what people are downloading. Or so they will claim if they are asked.
Even as you say "so they will claim" you are admitting that you too see that that is obviously not what it's really for; it's self-evident that this is a marketing device. And I would love to see them show how knowing what we download most often will help speed downloads: the program doesn't mirror software or speed downloads in any way, it just allows you to resume interrupted downloads, or schedule them. Knowing what the file is is totally irrelevant to that task.
It should remain legal, just like it currently is. We already have too many laws. It is sheep like you, wanting the government to fix your dislikes that is helping to ruin this country (the other major problem is big companies buying government, but that's another rant). If you don't like that program, don't buy it. And please, try and convince your friends not to buy it.
Which country, precisely? Please let's not go around assuming I'm an American or anything.
The issue is not that I'm being forced to get the program: I'm not! I don't use this software. The issue is that the software advertises itself as being a tool for one task when its real purpose is something else entirely. And the reason I said it should be illegal, but I don't know how, is because any kind of law that would deal with it successfully would be too open to abuse. I wasn't seriously proposing legislation, more making a public wish that things were not as they are -- I'm sorry you misunderstood, I'm equally opposed to stupid legislation.
Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates, that's who. That's an inventors' hall of fame, Bill. You can't get in there, 'cause you're an "innovator" remember? :-)
If you read the article, you will see that the problem is not generating enough electricity -- it'd be mad if they couldn't manage that, what were they, comatose? -- but distributing that electricity. Essentially, they have too much at low times and too little at peak times, too much in some areas and too little in others (Silicon Valley in particular). There's an interesting parallel here with world hunger: the problem is storage and distribution, not production. It's about time the 1st world got a bite from the bug that's been hounding the 3rd world all these years...
I would rather corporations making donations to educational institutions expected no short-term return at all: no publicity, no co-branded buildings or labs. But little-picture corporate leadership could never let that happen, sadly. If a university sells out, it should expect to face the consequences.
I wish there was another source of funding for universities and organizations that didn't involve selling out... but there isn't.
You could use an accurate e-nose to sniff pheromones and no withing seconds whether the person next to you is the right girl/guy for you. How much time/wasted money/emotional trauma would that save?
You might also use the same e-nose to recognize a human-being's characteristic odour as a form of identity verification... but then somebody could just steal your clothes and impersonate you. But it might help as an addition to biometrics... one day we'll just have a Hitchhiker's-guide style platic card containing all our biometric information :->
Dammit, I swear that bold stuff didn't happen in the preview...
If I'm wrong, somebody please enlighten me...
Programming will become working out the solution to a problem in a general sense, and then training a neural network to behave in that way. No more if-else statements, very little hard-coding at all (at least, nothing that will get turned into a real "program" as we understand it now. Computing is just getting to big and too fast for an unaided human brain to satisfactorily handle all eventual possibilities and / or inputs, and neural networks excel at this.
I'm just waiting for the first Artificial Neural Networking Operating System: I figure it'll come around as soon as somebody comes up with a less embarrassing acronym than ANNOS :-)
If I wasn't already posting to this thread, I would rate that as "informative" :-) Thanks for that info, now I have one more thing to self-righteously complain about :->
I Am Not Knowledgeable :-)
It's all very depressing. Corporations are just getting bigger and more powerful by the day, and the government in cooperating because corporations, unlike ordinary people, can afford to bribe politicians and officials. But what can we do to stop this? It makes business sense to merge -- usually -- so we can't claim they have ulterior motives. We can't make profit illegal. So what can we do? Suggestions, please!
It's been said before, but I'm really terrified of the path we are increasingly following. When I read Titan by Stephen Baxter, I thought his future vision of a regulated and partitioned Internet, heavily under the thrall of government censorship, was insane. A free and open Internet is impossible to prevent, I thought. But it's not. All the government has to do is go to some buildings somewhere in the country and take over, and they can cut links to the outside world -- not easily, but they can. They can shut down all but government-sanctioned communication. And if current trends of regulation, censorship and litigation continue, this is what will happen. We will trade a completely free medium for the petty dollars being lost by a few big companies, we will trade the ability to express ourselves for the dubious security of thought police.
Are we insane? Why are we letting this happen? Every libel case, every time a site is shut down, every time another mouth is hushed we get closer to giving up our freedoms. And we're not doing anything about it. We need to stop these idiocies, we need to convince the lawmakers and the public at large that nothing is worth the abolition of free and unfettered speech. And above all, we need to do it now.
Otherwise, we'll just keep complaining about our lack of freedom until finally, one day, somebody tells us that we can't.
Okay, yeah, so if you say it in a crowded room it's slander and you can get sued for that too. I should have clarified that I meant it as an opinion... I didn't because generally when somebody says "X is an asshole" it's taken for granted that this is an opinion. That's just the way (informal) speech is -- it's mainly opinion. When I said "a crowded room" obviously lots of people thought of a man with a mike in front of a podium, which isn't what I meant.
This is, in fact, the same confusion that's going on with this kid's site: he's saying stuff that is patently just his opinion / venting, but people are using laws which apply to an entirely different class of action to kick his ass, just because they're pissed off.
My main point -- that they shouldn't be able to kick his butt just because he doesn't like them and says so -- still stands. It's rampant censorship. And I think I've clarified what I meant on the other points: on the net, things should be taken as opinion, not facts or attempt to be factual.
Thanks for illustrating my point, people! No wonder I love /. :-)
If I'm in a crowded room and I yell offensive things about somebody -- even if they're untrue -- I can't get in trouble. If I do the exact same things in print -- like a magazine or a newspaper -- then I can. Because the source is claiming legitimacy, it is implying that what I say is true.
On the 'net, that's a boneheaded idea. Nothing on a website is likely to be true. Even CNN.Com publishes fraudulent virus warnings before realising they're untrue (famously, the story of an invention that lets you "fire a pulse of energy down a phone line and fry the modem" of somebody who's pissing you off). So libel should not be possible on the web.
The real issue here is that the people in charge and the people with more money are crushing an opposing view, for no good reason except that it opposes/offends them. They need to realise they do not have the right to do that! I can curse you to your face if I want to, and if I'm a beggar on the street and you're Bill Clinton you still can't touch me, once I don't threaten you.
Are we insane? Why are we letting this happen? Every libel case, every time a site is shut down, every time another mouth is hushed we get closer to giving up our freedoms. And we're not doing anything about it. We need to stop these idiocies, we need to convince the lawmakers and the public at large that nothing is worth the abolition of free and unfettered speech. And above all, we need to do it now.
Otherwise, we'll just keep complaining about our lack of freedom until finally, one day, somebody tells us that we can't.
The way it works is: the very first part of a signal arriving at one end of the apparatus somehow allows the entire pulse to be reconstructed and delivered out the other end even before the last part of the pulse has finished entering. No matter what you put things, you've pushed a coherent pattern of something faster than c.
Admittedly, the time taken to process the information would preclude getting feedback fast enough to affect the original process -- it would be scary if that wasn't the case -- but in an optical computing setup, you would still get information the information faster than if it had been sent at c. Whether you can sustain that speed for a continuous stream of data is another question.
The death of Microsoft is no longer something we wish would happen. It's now a practical possibility, and may even be inevitable.
Why can't we have a picture of a smiling Einstein as the icon? He looks like he's just spent five hours installing NT and it's just flashed up a bluescreen.
But you're geeks! Is that even allowed?
(runs off to check rulebook)
Did I say an Internet cafe? No, I said an IT-based business. Obviously, creating the business involves a lot of education. It's not the same as educating the masses, but that's the point. We need money before we can educate the masses, and the way to do that is by educating some people and starting businesses in motion.
Okay, sure we should educate everybody, but you don't grasp how poor these countries are: why do you think the education system sucks in these countries (screw "these countries"; I mean "my country" and I'll say so)? Because it's never occurred to us that "HEY! Sending people to school is a good idea!"? It's because we can't afford schools, we don't have the resources to build them or the money to continue staffing them. Because we're POOR.
Saying "educate first, then build your economy" is the ultimate hypocrisy of the developed nations, and especially the US. These nations did not become rich by thinking about the poor and uneducated, they got where they are by ruthlessly exploiting them -- picture slaves in the cotton fields, and illiterates working in the steel mills and automobile factories. The US, one of the world's richest nations, also has one of the worst education systems, and that fact has been proven time and time again. How can you remember that fact and still say "education is key"? Smart people are fostered by strong economies, not the other way around.
Obviously you need some basic infrastructure in place before starting an IT business -- computers need electricity. But it doesn't need to be and cannot be universal before you can go to the next stage. The cities are always more developed than the hamlets, even in the US. Start giving people in the villages vaccinations, but start giving people in the towns the 386s. There's room for both.
First off, get your terminology straight: originally, the "second world" referred to Africa and India (they were sailed to and discovered by the Spanish/Portuguese before the Americas were discovered. The third world referred to the "New World": this, obviously, includes what is now the United States. Obviously, these terms have changed.
"Third world" is now a synonym for a "developing nation" -- anything that isn't a developed nation is, I guess, part of the third world. The term "second world" is no longer used. But this is not the point.
People who say "we should solve all our/their basic problems before we tackle new development" are missing the point: we need development in order to solve the basic problems. If people had listened to this kind of thinking back in prehistory, we'd still be a load of cavemen desperately trying to hunt enough animals to keep everyone fed before we started work on this new-fangled "fire" thing.
If the Geekcorps can create a successful IT business in a country that creates 20 new jobs, then 100 people will have a source of income and can feed themselves. That is preventing starvation.
First off all, I'd like to say that I come from Trinidad in the Caribbean, which is a developing third-world nation, albeit more on the "developed" side of developing. And this kind of program is exactly what the developing world needs.
The third world needs to catch up with the developed world. This can not be achieved by following in the footsteps of the developed nations: as fast as we develop, the developed nations will maintain their lead and we will always be second-class world citizens.
Information technology has the ability to allow us to leapfrog several steps in the development process by creating economies based on the 21st-century business model from the ground up rather than recreating offline economies and going through the same painful and expensive restructuring process that the developed nations are currently undergoing. And, yes, it would be a good idea to get all our citizens clothed and fed, but to do that we need money and lots of it, and the only way to get that is to get our economies competing effectively with the rest of the world.
But the age-old need-money-to-get-money problem comes into effect: we are too busy preventing complete collapse of our economies to think about beefing them up. We don't have the resources, both physical but especially mental -- third-world countries suffer heavily from "brain-drain" as all our best and brightest get their bloody H1-B visas and ship off to the states as fast as they can.
The developed nations have made all their money exploiting the developing nations for raw materials, cheap labour and relaxed laws of every kind for centuries now: it's high time they started giving back.
I am rooting for them to lose because they are in effect *competing* with eBay for advertising dollars by *using* eBay's content.
You mean the way Slashdot -- a technology news site / community / portal -- deep-links to articles on other news sources all over web for its own content? Admittedly /. links to the sites, but if the content didn't exist neither would the bulk of /.
Wired and C|net in particular would have /. for breakfast if this set the kind of precedent that seems to be happening.
Ugh. They'll never catch on.
What would be best is a "free" (dial-up charges only) ISP which donates any and all profits to the campaign for unmetered calls! What the heck is up with per-minute charges for local calls in this country??? As if the weather wasn't enough reason to be depressed! :-)
They will be able to better aid downloads in the next version if they know more about what people are downloading. Or so they will claim if they are asked.
Even as you say "so they will claim" you are admitting that you too see that that is obviously not what it's really for; it's self-evident that this is a marketing device. And I would love to see them show how knowing what we download most often will help speed downloads: the program doesn't mirror software or speed downloads in any way, it just allows you to resume interrupted downloads, or schedule them. Knowing what the file is is totally irrelevant to that task.
It should remain legal, just like it currently is. We already have too many laws. It is sheep like you, wanting the government to fix your dislikes that is helping to ruin this country (the other major problem is big companies buying government, but that's another rant). If you don't like that program, don't buy it. And please, try and convince your friends not to buy it.