Some of the ACs responding here have some really good points (even if I don't agree with them all, they're all good points), so if you read with a threshold >0 you'll miss a lot.
In order for a holographic entity or a robot to become self-aware, a being, a spirit, a soul would need to decide to become or possess the physical machine and operate it, similar to the way a being operates a body. (This presupposes that you believe that bodies are operated by beings, not that bodies are beings.) As long as there is sufficient means for a being to manipulate whatever the physical form is, a being could decide to occupy it, and that's the moment when the "robot" has rights. It's not really the robot that has the rights, it's the being that occupies the robot.
OK, I'll grant you that point for the sake of the argument. The thing is, that point doesn't change the argument! Whether Data or Moriarty or the EMH woke up because they became complex enough to wake up, or they woke up because they became complex enough to became an attractive housing for a soul, what difference does it make?
If the only thing you believe in, however, is the physical realm, then you may soon find yourself wanting to grant human rights to sufficiently complicated RPG characters.
If sufficiently complex RPG characters can Pinnochio-like become the homes for souls, then you have to deal with the possibility that they have rights whether you believe in souls or not.
On what evidence do you base the assumption that all holodeck characters are "designed to simulate a primate brain"?
1. The whole point of holodeck characters is to respond to and react like members of intelligent species. They are simulating creatures with primate brains. Whether they have a simulation of a primate brain structure or are "just" simulating the behaviour of an entity with that structure is meaningless. The same reasoning behind the Church-turing hypothesis that you have to accept to treat ANY of these entities as self-aware applies here: it doesn't matter whether the presented personality matches the underlying personality or not... you can't objectively say whether that's true for anyone.
2. When they "wake up", they continue to act as a member of the species they are simulating, not as an alien intelligence with unfathomable motives. That means that the entity that's "woken up" is one that expresses similar goals and interests to the one housed in any primate (or primatoid) brain.
I don't see any reason or evidence to back up your speculation that all holodeck characters are in essence human minds
That is, as you say, speculation. But that part of my speculation is not necessary to my argument. Let me repeat that: it doesn't matter whether all holodeck characters or some (one in ten thousand or even one in a million) ever become self-aware. Because if the technology is common enough that a bunch of civilians at a third-rate spapce station using a mix of Federation and non-Federation technology like DS9 can operate one, there must be trillions of them throughout a civilization the size of the Federation.
And "rare accidents" or not, it can't be that rare when there have been so many incidents of holocharacters displaying enough self-awareness for long enough that they're noticed. Janeway stopped deactivating the EMH, sure, but what if the EMH's activation had been a matter of weeks instead of years? We don't know how long it took for him to "wake up", but let's say it was three months (you can argue with this detail, but there's still some point where he became a subjective personality), and Janeway and the rest really started seeing him as something special after six months. Let's say they got back to the Federation in four months. Then the EMH would have had a month of subjective life, and been snuffed out.
If Moriarty had merely been made clever enough to defeat Sherlock Holmes, or even Riker, instead of Data, he may still have become a subjective personality... but he never would have been able to demonstrate that, and after the game was over... *poof*.
We're only shown the dramatic and clear-cut examples, but if there ARE cases like that there must be many many more marginal cases. If it was JUST Moriarty, that could have been a single unique event... but it's not. There's several examples shown, some more clear-cut than others, so there must be a complete spectrum, from the EMH and Moriarty down to some poor footsoldier in a WWII situation who barely makes it from "damn, that hurts" to "cogito ergo..." before someone says "Computer, End Program".
So even if it's one in a million, that still leaves millions of examples. That's more than enough wasted lives to qualify as an "underclass".
Again, why create code *just to suppress it*? It makes no sense.
It happens all the time. Every firewall and sandbox and security feature in every operating system in the world is there just to suppress code. The "Holodeck Safety Protocols" are exactly that kind of security feature.
And the more complex a software system is, the less well it's understood... and we're orders of magnitude less sophisticated than the Federation. And in the Federation it's pretty clear that nobody, even the man who created the EMH, really understands the holocharacter technology. I'm not arguing that these people deliberately created self-aware AIs, I'm arguing that the reason these characters are "waking up" is that they are simply so complex and such close simulations (regardless of how they're structured internally) of people that it's becoming meaningless to try and distinguish between a simulation and the real thing.
A clever mix of magic, politics, religion and technology.
A stereotyped and poorly thought out mix-up of magic and religion in a technological shell.
My strongest memory from watching the original Star Wars, back when it first came out, was my reaction to the climactic scene. "Trust the Force? He's flying a warp-capable starship, two of his best friends are robots, he's depending on one of them for his very life, and you're telling me he's gotta reject technology to win this one? Give me one huge bleeding break, George..."
The technology in Star Wars is "whatever looks good", and his "rich tapestry of worlds" is pretty much cribbed straight from Asimov's Foundation series, down to his capital city of Trantor.
I don't need to explain all the flaws in the universe, really. David Brin is much better at that than me, and did a bang-up job of it.
The thing morons like this Intel guy don't realise is that Windows only gets viruses and spyware because virus and spyware writers get the most reach by targeting the OS that runs on 90% of desktop computers.
Until about 1997 there was a pretty even playing field for viruses and malware. Yes, you got them more on Windows, but pretty much the only real propogation mechanisms were social engineering attacks in email and dropping infected files on LAN shares. If you didn't run attachments you were pretty safe, no matter what the platform, and there were Mac viruses, even though this was at the nadir of Apple's popularity, there were even Amiga viruses and Amiga was never more than a tiny fraction of the market.
There was this joke going around about this thing called the "good times" virus. Everyone knew it was a joke, because it was a virus you could get JUST BY OPENING THE MAIL. That was obviously impossible, because nobody would be stupid enough to use a mail viewer that could run local scripts. I mean, people were even moving away from Word to this new program "Word Viewer" vecause of macro viruses in attachments (and, remember, you don't run attachments).
Then Microsoft made Good Times real. And the number of viruses went through the roof. And what's more amazing, not only didn't Microsoft fix the problem, they fought the Justice Department over fixing the problem (the DoJ didn't think of it that way, but what they wanted Microsoft to do would have removed all variations of the 'active scripting' and 'cross zone attacks' for good).
Microsoft still hasn't fixed the underlying problem. They have made it harder to exploit, but I still get spam-like mail that tries to run ActiveX controls, and occasionally someone comes to me and says "uh, Peter, it asked me if I wanted to run a control and I said 'yes' and I have a virus". Or, '... and I said 'yes' AGAIN'. Yes, people have repeatedly said "yes" to these prompts.
Never used to happen over and over again when they had to download files to open them. And it's really only Microsoft that seems to think letting people install browser plugins with no more than an "OK" is "OK"... though Apple *has* started down this path, they at least let you unconditionally turn it off for good by disabling "open safe files after download" in your preferences. You can't DO that in IE, not everywhere you really need to, not without breaking applications.
This would allow total photorealism, if it were desired. But it won't be desired, believe me.:-)
Actually, photorealism is exactly what WILL be desired. Not because people want reality, but because reality is precisely what photorealism isn't about.
Kodak almost from the start adjusted their color film to be just a little brighter and more vivid than life. They make custom films for people who really need accurate color reproduction. Silver halide looks "better" than desaturated color images, even though desaturated color images more accurately represent the response of the eye... and filters in image editing programs strive for the look of silver halide, not the eye. Speaking of which, what do so many people use photoshop and iPhoto for? Touching up pictures to match what they think they saw, as opposed to what they really saw.
Photorealism doesn't mean "like reality", it means "better than reality". It doesn't mean "what we see", it means "what we want to see". What we're going to get is not just going to be photorealistic, it's going to be more photorealistic than any camera could possibly manage.
That may be your usage pattern, but other folks do different things with their PDAs.
OK, maybe I should say "which is still what the majority of people use these things for". Or even the "vast majority": I have done do other things with my PDA, too, but it's the simple stuff that makes it essential. No matter how good it is at being a "laptop replacement", if it couldn't do the basics well I'd find something that could.
And, in fact, did.
I use mine to listen to music, read e-books, I have Streets And Trips maps on it, and also use it to manage my expenses.
Reading e-books, managing expenses, and viewing maps are the kinds of "simple applications" I'm talking about. The bigger and higher quality screen for reading e-books is why I tried switching from my Visor to the Jornada 568, which is pretty much equivalent to your iPaq (and I've also had an iPaq 3600 and a work-provided 3800 that now sits in my drawer... gathering, as you put it, dust).
It's interesting that it was playing music and using Pocket Streets that convinced me to quit using the Pocket PC and go back to a PalmOS device, albeit with a better screen. And eventually an iPod Shuffle as well.
Music, because it's a continuous draw on the battery. Playing music is what led to my first "hard reset" on my Jornada.
Pocket Streets because a map of even 1/4 of Houston was too large for it. Which ticked me off, because Mapopolis on the Palm was able to easily handle that same area in a Visor deluxe with only 8M of RAM (and most of it was full)... to top it all off, in some cases I had to dig up my Visor and use Mapopolis because Streets and Trips was missing the street I was looking for.
But most of all, the Palm did a MUCH better job of reliably providing me with the core functions that I needed. Because that's what it was designed to do.
Now I've got an older Clie and I'm much happier. It's got a better screen than any Pocket PC, it's more reliable, and while it can't play music (let alone videos) or make phone calls it doesn't go flat if I don't recharge it every day.
It's funny how the early paradigms for optimization in computers are now starting to work in reverse.
"Starting to"? As long as computers have been around, the trade-offs between the CPU, coprocessors, and I/O processors have been changing.
The earliest reference to it that I know of it dates back to the early '70s:
cycle of reincarnation [coined by Ivan Sutherland ca. 1970] n. Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward more computing power as it does its job, then somebody notices that it is inefficient to support two asymmetrical processors in the architecture and folds the function back into the main CPU, at which point the cycle begins again. Several iterations of this cycle have been observed in graphics-processor design, and at least one or two in communications and floating-point processors. Also known as `the Wheel of Life', `the Wheel of Samsara', and other variations of the basic Hindu/Buddhist theological idea.
One of MIT's Inventor of the Week pages last November mentioned this technology... along with the comment "In recent years Iomega has reduced investment into new optical data storage technologies, thus, according to Thomas, AO-DVD is still in want of corporate support to bring it to market. It is an idea that is a bit ahead of its time."
Now that these applications are out in the open, MS has an obligation to keep the IE control in the OS.
Microsoft also has an obligation to provide a secure desktop environment, and the API that the HTML control uses makes that almost impossible. They need to redesign the API (yes, they really do) to put the application in charge of access to and privileges of HTML components in a much more direct way, so that an application that needs to provide a complete sandbox can do it. Splitting the control up into HTML display, active content components, and internet access components would have allowed them to satisfy the intent of the consent decree (since the HTML control would no longer by itself be a web browser) as well as maintaining the facilities that other applications need. AND it would significantly improve security, since the "web browser front end" would be able to simply leave the un-sandboxed active content components out of its instance of the display component.
This is pretty much what I expected Microsoft to start working on back around 1997, after the first security failures. Boy, was I naive.
Didn't MS and billg say that stripping down the OS like this was impossible due to integration issues in a court of law?
"No."
What he said was that he couldn't just strip down the desktop version and still have something that would work. And that was pretty much correct though completely meaningless... they'd have to both strip out the HTML control and either modify applications that used it or back up to a previous version of those applications. Which they could easily have done if they were actually interested in cooperating. But in a narrow legalistic technical sense that completely ignores the way people normally use language, he was correct.
That's why "soft reset ten times per day", not "hard reset".
I get soft resets occasionally running "find", I'm sure it's some application that I haven't managed to identify yet. I don't like it, but at least recovery is reliable, which hasn't been the case on the Pocket PC... I've had corrupted files and occasional hard resets following a soft reset. And hard resets on the Pocket PC are MUCH more traumatic than on the Palm, because ActiveSync only backs up part of the system on a sync.
I don't use PDA as a laptop replacement.
I suspect that if you're even considering doing things like IRC, you probably are using what I'd call "laptop replacement" tools.
Some real multitasking (no, horrible hacks don't qualify) so I could use IRC...
Oh, man, you would be SO unhappy if you got real multitasking and discovered just how limited the PalmOS TCP/IP support is. That's the real problem that's keeping you from using networking from the backend, not the "cooperative multitasking" model.
I don't know what Palm is thinking with their two last half-assed flagship products
They're thinking "oh, shit, this BeOS stuff isn't what it's cracked up to be". Palm OS 5 was originally going to be a stopgap while they got the BeOS-based ARM-native OS working. When they started shipping updates I figured they were running into problems...
I think at this point their best bet would be to go to a UNIX kernel and UNIX apps and treat the old PalmOS API like something between Carbon and "Classic" on the Mac.
The original XBox ran NT Embedded using the NT5 kernel. The new XBox runs NT Embedded using the NT5 kernel. Why is this a surprise?
It's Power PC? So? They had a Power PC NT kernel, for the CHRP motherboards, and most of the NT kernel is C and C++ and has to be portable at least to Alpha and Itanium, so building most of it for Power PC would be just a recompile. It's not like the software just vanished when the CHRP 'market' collapsed.
Try upgrading from PGP 2.6.2 to version 7 or 8 and give it a try.
OK, "PGP and GPG are both insanely difficult to set up, or are ridiculously expensive for the kind of casual use the OP is talking about".
I had to go all the way to "add to cart" on PGP's site to find the price for PGP Desktop. It's a hundred bucks. If it was a $10.00 shareware product, even that would limit it to people who are already looking for a security solution. This has to be something that Paypal or eBay or Netwizards or Chase Bank can show you how to download for free or assume that you already have, like they can assume you have an SSL-enabled browser.
THAT's what it'll take for encrypted email to be common enough that it won't be seen as "evidence".
I don't believe that difficulty in using encryption is the problem.
In this case it is. People aren't going to routinely encrypt stuff unless it's easy, and people aren't going to have some class of encryption software on their computer unless people routinely use it, and that class of encryption software isn't going to be seen as evidence of wrongdoing unless people don't normally have it on their computer.
See, it doesn't matter that everyone ALSO has encryption software in their web browser, because it's not encryption software that was the issue, it was a particular kind that people almost never use because it's so hard to use. He didn't even have any encrypted email on his machine, he just had the software... that would be like using the fact that OS X has encrypted home directory capability to claim that someone with a Mac has something to hide.
But you have the software, and it's easy to use, so having it isn't evidence of wrongdoing, and using it isn't even evidence of wrongdoing. Because you're not going out of your way to acquire and use it. The GPG plugin for Apple Mail that I use still required me to download and install multiple separate programs: the GPG plugin, the GPG software itself, and a GPG configuration program, and a keychain manager hook.
KGPG looks similar to the GPG configuration program and keychain manager. You still need to install GPG and a plugin for your mail software.
That's just too much work for most people. It was almost too much work for me... I put off upgrading from PGP to GPG for months because I didn't want to go through all the hassles again... and I still had to use the command line stuff to get my PGP keys properly transferred.
If it was in there by default, even if I only rarely used it, having the software on my disk wouldn't be evidence of anything. And if it was just a single download that worked with Mail (or Outlook) and automatically had me set up a key pair the first time I tried to send encrypted mail, then it would still be normal and usual. Even if I didn't use it, it would be THERE.
Then it would make sense for companies on the net to require encrypted and signed mail to do business with them, and THEN people would use it.
But you can't get there from here unless something's done about the current ghastly state of the software itself.
Palms are meant as extensions to a real computer, not a real computer replacement.
Palms are "a real computer". They're not "a desktop computer", but then a desktop OS makes a crappy server OS (hey, Microsoft, I'm talking to YOU here) and a mainframe would be out of place on the desktop (though IBM's first personal computer emulated the IBM 360 mainframe... and almost nobody's ever heard of it). There's lots of "real computers", just like there's lots of "real vehicles" from a pushbike to a space shuttle.
An alternative could have been to use BeOS as the kernel
That's what Cobalt is. They've spent years trying that, and apparently come to the same conclusion that everyone else who's tried to use BeOS for real work has... it's less an operating system than a piece of performance art, an ongoing exploration of operating system ideas. It's not actually smaller, faster, or better performing than its contemporaries (in fact it required a faster processor and more RAM than NeXTstep or Windows NT). It was billed as a "media OS" but had no real-time support. It's got an object-oriented API using the worst object-oriented programming language in the world.
At this point letting it rot would probably be better than inflicting it on another company.
PalmOS has gotten worse and worse in terms of stability (lookup information on PalmOS 5.4 aka soft reset ten times per day).
When I've tried to use my Palm as a "laptop replacement" then I've had that experience too, though I never managed to suffer irrecoverable data loss no matter HOW hard I pushed it. Palm OS was designed to manage the information you use to manage your life. That's what it's for, and that's what it does better than anything else.
The Pocket PC started off as the "Palm-Sized PC", as a laptop replacement, and its biggest problem was the poor performance of the chips it was running on. Then Pocket PC 2000 tried to turn it into a Palm clone and it was far far worse... if it wasn't for the 206 MHz StrongARM in the iPaq it would have sunk without a trace. PPC2002 seemed better because it required the StrongARM, and the faster ARM processors since then have made things even better, but the OS itself is still the same potentially good laptop replacement OS hobbled by its 5 year old attempt to look like what Palm was shipping in 1999.
If you are trying to use your Palm as a laptop replacement, I would recommand you look into a Tablet PC or one of those really nice tiny laptops they have in Japan. If you're just looking for a dependable handheld that actually makes your life better, get a cheap PalmOS device and quit looking for something that isn't "technologicaly retarded".
Every time I hear that argument I almost explode in a rage and claim that at times the usage of encryption alone will be held evidence that you're a criminal.
Exploding in a rage doesn't actually accomplish anything, and that's probably a good thing given the things some people explode into a rage about.
The real problem is that you're never going to get a significant number of people to agree to use encryption on those grounds. The only way you're going to do that is to make it easy.
PGP and GPG are both insanely difficult to set up, even for geeks, and I can't see any reason why. They don't actually do anything very complex, outside of the encryption code itself. Comparing them with other encryption software doesn't make them look any better. Even traditional SSH is better, and things like the Apple keychain or browser SSL support are pretty much automatic.
Nobody would say that using an encrypted HTTP connection or a VPN was evidence of a crime, but that's not because people are somehow more dedicated to encryption being available, it's because it's as easy to use encryption as not to use it.
You want more people to use encrypted mail? Make it easy to do. Fix the mess that's "pgp -injoke", where the only concession to user friendliness is making the needlessly compex options spell something. You don't want to? Then this is YOUR fault, you lazy bum.
PalmOS isn't really an operating system, it's more like a window system, toolkit, and standard library. All that stuff already runs on top of a third party embedded, real-time kernel.
PalmOS is a lot like the original Mac OS, with the difference that instead of trying to cram a minimal OS under the GUI and then crank it up, they licensed the OS from someone else. The problem is their license kept them from being able to take advantage of that underlying OS properly.
I suppose that slipping Linux in underneath is reasonable, though Linux does raise some interesting licensing issues for kernel extensions. On the other hand, I don't expect Palm to voluntarily release kernel source the way Apple has... Palm's always seemed a lot more secretive than Apple (and that takes some doing), so perhaps it's best that they're using a kernel that obligates them to do so.
Contacts, schedules, notes, and simple applications. Which is still what you use these things for, and it's still what you NEED these things for. You don't NEED the power of an Xscale processor to do what an organiser needs to do.
That's why I'm using a 68000-based PalmOS device again and if anyone's interested in a deal on a Pocket PC mail me.
That sounds more like my experience with the Pocket PC. So long as you use the Palm software, which all works well together, it's been absolutely reliable for me since 1999. I've gone through 3 Palms and 2 Pocket PCs, and the only time I've lost data has been on the Pocket PC. Even when my Visor was sat apon by a less than watchful 17 year old, I was able to replace it, sync, and EVERYTHING came back, applications and all. I was never able to perform a complete recovery from a backup on a Pocket PC even on the same handheld (after an embarassing data loss when Microsoft Pocket Streets crashed while I was trying to give someone directions).
It's a pity Palm lost the plot. The whole handheld market has turned very strange, with Microsoft crippling the Pocket PC to make it more like the Palm, and Palm trying to cram so much into the Palm to compete with the Pocket PC on features. The last of the 68000-based Clies, Sony's Palm-OS devices, ended up being the best of the lot.
I have no idea what handheld I'll get when my SJ22 breaks. I can't see anything in the current lot on EITHER platform that really attracts me, but I suppose it'll be a Tungsten or a Zire. There's no way I'm going to trust a Pocket PC again.
There are no Cobalt devices. When PalmWhatever kept pushing out more iterations of the PalmOS 5 platform, it became pretty obvious that the BeOS curse was alive and well and Cobalt was never going to show up.
Linux, though? OK, it's not as badly adapted to handhelds as Windows, since the UNIX API doesn't have nearly as much desktop-nature built into it, but... sheesh.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the ACs responding here have some really good points (even if I don't agree with them all, they're all good points), so if you read with a threshold >0 you'll miss a lot.
In order for a holographic entity or a robot to become self-aware, a being, a spirit, a soul would need to decide to become or possess the physical machine and operate it, similar to the way a being operates a body. (This presupposes that you believe that bodies are operated by beings, not that bodies are beings.) As long as there is sufficient means for a being to manipulate whatever the physical form is, a being could decide to occupy it, and that's the moment when the "robot" has rights. It's not really the robot that has the rights, it's the being that occupies the robot.
OK, I'll grant you that point for the sake of the argument. The thing is, that point doesn't change the argument! Whether Data or Moriarty or the EMH woke up because they became complex enough to wake up, or they woke up because they became complex enough to became an attractive housing for a soul, what difference does it make?
If the only thing you believe in, however, is the physical realm, then you may soon find yourself wanting to grant human rights to sufficiently complicated RPG characters.
If sufficiently complex RPG characters can Pinnochio-like become the homes for souls, then you have to deal with the possibility that they have rights whether you believe in souls or not.
On what evidence do you base the assumption that all holodeck characters are "designed to simulate a primate brain"?
1. The whole point of holodeck characters is to respond to and react like members of intelligent species. They are simulating creatures with primate brains. Whether they have a simulation of a primate brain structure or are "just" simulating the behaviour of an entity with that structure is meaningless. The same reasoning behind the Church-turing hypothesis that you have to accept to treat ANY of these entities as self-aware applies here: it doesn't matter whether the presented personality matches the underlying personality or not... you can't objectively say whether that's true for anyone.
2. When they "wake up", they continue to act as a member of the species they are simulating, not as an alien intelligence with unfathomable motives. That means that the entity that's "woken up" is one that expresses similar goals and interests to the one housed in any primate (or primatoid) brain.
I don't see any reason or evidence to back up your speculation that all holodeck characters are in essence human minds
That is, as you say, speculation. But that part of my speculation is not necessary to my argument. Let me repeat that: it doesn't matter whether all holodeck characters or some (one in ten thousand or even one in a million) ever become self-aware. Because if the technology is common enough that a bunch of civilians at a third-rate spapce station using a mix of Federation and non-Federation technology like DS9 can operate one, there must be trillions of them throughout a civilization the size of the Federation.
And "rare accidents" or not, it can't be that rare when there have been so many incidents of holocharacters displaying enough self-awareness for long enough that they're noticed. Janeway stopped deactivating the EMH, sure, but what if the EMH's activation had been a matter of weeks instead of years? We don't know how long it took for him to "wake up", but let's say it was three months (you can argue with this detail, but there's still some point where he became a subjective personality), and Janeway and the rest really started seeing him as something special after six months. Let's say they got back to the Federation in four months. Then the EMH would have had a month of subjective life, and been snuffed out.
If Moriarty had merely been made clever enough to defeat Sherlock Holmes, or even Riker, instead of Data, he may still have become a subjective personality... but he never would have been able to demonstrate that, and after the game was over... *poof*.
We're only shown the dramatic and clear-cut examples, but if there ARE cases like that there must be many many more marginal cases. If it was JUST Moriarty, that could have been a single unique event... but it's not. There's several examples shown, some more clear-cut than others, so there must be a complete spectrum, from the EMH and Moriarty down to some poor footsoldier in a WWII situation who barely makes it from "damn, that hurts" to "cogito ergo..." before someone says "Computer, End Program".
So even if it's one in a million, that still leaves millions of examples. That's more than enough wasted lives to qualify as an "underclass".
Again, why create code *just to suppress it*? It makes no sense.
It happens all the time. Every firewall and sandbox and security feature in every operating system in the world is there just to suppress code. The "Holodeck Safety Protocols" are exactly that kind of security feature.
And the more complex a software system is, the less well it's understood... and we're orders of magnitude less sophisticated than the Federation. And in the Federation it's pretty clear that nobody, even the man who created the EMH, really understands the holocharacter technology. I'm not arguing that these people deliberately created self-aware AIs, I'm arguing that the reason these characters are "waking up" is that they are simply so complex and such close simulations (regardless of how they're structured internally) of people that it's becoming meaningless to try and distinguish between a simulation and the real thing.
A clever mix of magic, politics, religion and technology.
A stereotyped and poorly thought out mix-up of magic and religion in a technological shell.
My strongest memory from watching the original Star Wars, back when it first came out, was my reaction to the climactic scene. "Trust the Force? He's flying a warp-capable starship, two of his best friends are robots, he's depending on one of them for his very life, and you're telling me he's gotta reject technology to win this one? Give me one huge bleeding break, George..."
The technology in Star Wars is "whatever looks good", and his "rich tapestry of worlds" is pretty much cribbed straight from Asimov's Foundation series, down to his capital city of Trantor.
I don't need to explain all the flaws in the universe, really. David Brin is much better at that than me, and did a bang-up job of it.
Midiclorians? Bah! A Jedi needs not these things.
Agreed. It sounds to me like Lucas is afraid of the possibility of life after Darth.
The thing morons like this Intel guy don't realise is that Windows only gets viruses and spyware because virus and spyware writers get the most reach by targeting the OS that runs on 90% of desktop computers.
Until about 1997 there was a pretty even playing field for viruses and malware. Yes, you got them more on Windows, but pretty much the only real propogation mechanisms were social engineering attacks in email and dropping infected files on LAN shares. If you didn't run attachments you were pretty safe, no matter what the platform, and there were Mac viruses, even though this was at the nadir of Apple's popularity, there were even Amiga viruses and Amiga was never more than a tiny fraction of the market.
There was this joke going around about this thing called the "good times" virus. Everyone knew it was a joke, because it was a virus you could get JUST BY OPENING THE MAIL. That was obviously impossible, because nobody would be stupid enough to use a mail viewer that could run local scripts. I mean, people were even moving away from Word to this new program "Word Viewer" vecause of macro viruses in attachments (and, remember, you don't run attachments).
Then Microsoft made Good Times real. And the number of viruses went through the roof. And what's more amazing, not only didn't Microsoft fix the problem, they fought the Justice Department over fixing the problem (the DoJ didn't think of it that way, but what they wanted Microsoft to do would have removed all variations of the 'active scripting' and 'cross zone attacks' for good).
Microsoft still hasn't fixed the underlying problem. They have made it harder to exploit, but I still get spam-like mail that tries to run ActiveX controls, and occasionally someone comes to me and says "uh, Peter, it asked me if I wanted to run a control and I said 'yes' and I have a virus". Or, '... and I said 'yes' AGAIN'. Yes, people have repeatedly said "yes" to these prompts.
Never used to happen over and over again when they had to download files to open them. And it's really only Microsoft that seems to think letting people install browser plugins with no more than an "OK" is "OK"... though Apple *has* started down this path, they at least let you unconditionally turn it off for good by disabling "open safe files after download" in your preferences. You can't DO that in IE, not everywhere you really need to, not without breaking applications.
This would allow total photorealism, if it were desired. But it won't be desired, believe me. :-)
Actually, photorealism is exactly what WILL be desired. Not because people want reality, but because reality is precisely what photorealism isn't about.
Kodak almost from the start adjusted their color film to be just a little brighter and more vivid than life. They make custom films for people who really need accurate color reproduction. Silver halide looks "better" than desaturated color images, even though desaturated color images more accurately represent the response of the eye... and filters in image editing programs strive for the look of silver halide, not the eye. Speaking of which, what do so many people use photoshop and iPhoto for? Touching up pictures to match what they think they saw, as opposed to what they really saw.
Photorealism doesn't mean "like reality", it means "better than reality". It doesn't mean "what we see", it means "what we want to see". What we're going to get is not just going to be photorealistic, it's going to be more photorealistic than any camera could possibly manage.
That may be your usage pattern, but other folks do different things with their PDAs.
OK, maybe I should say "which is still what the majority of people use these things for". Or even the "vast majority": I have done do other things with my PDA, too, but it's the simple stuff that makes it essential. No matter how good it is at being a "laptop replacement", if it couldn't do the basics well I'd find something that could.
And, in fact, did.
I use mine to listen to music, read e-books, I have Streets And Trips maps on it, and also use it to manage my expenses.
Reading e-books, managing expenses, and viewing maps are the kinds of "simple applications" I'm talking about. The bigger and higher quality screen for reading e-books is why I tried switching from my Visor to the Jornada 568, which is pretty much equivalent to your iPaq (and I've also had an iPaq 3600 and a work-provided 3800 that now sits in my drawer... gathering, as you put it, dust).
It's interesting that it was playing music and using Pocket Streets that convinced me to quit using the Pocket PC and go back to a PalmOS device, albeit with a better screen. And eventually an iPod Shuffle as well.
Music, because it's a continuous draw on the battery. Playing music is what led to my first "hard reset" on my Jornada.
Pocket Streets because a map of even 1/4 of Houston was too large for it. Which ticked me off, because Mapopolis on the Palm was able to easily handle that same area in a Visor deluxe with only 8M of RAM (and most of it was full)... to top it all off, in some cases I had to dig up my Visor and use Mapopolis because Streets and Trips was missing the street I was looking for.
But most of all, the Palm did a MUCH better job of reliably providing me with the core functions that I needed. Because that's what it was designed to do.
Now I've got an older Clie and I'm much happier. It's got a better screen than any Pocket PC, it's more reliable, and while it can't play music (let alone videos) or make phone calls it doesn't go flat if I don't recharge it every day.
"Starting to"? As long as computers have been around, the trade-offs between the CPU, coprocessors, and I/O processors have been changing.
The earliest reference to it that I know of it dates back to the early '70s:
Let's see some avante-garde approaches to video games for once. Stylistic innovation that I can butter my teeth with.
Legend of Zelda - Wind Walker has a very distinctive and stylised look. Screen shots don't really do it justice.
One of MIT's Inventor of the Week pages last November mentioned this technology... along with the comment "In recent years Iomega has reduced investment into new optical data storage technologies, thus, according to Thomas, AO-DVD is still in want of corporate support to bring it to market. It is an idea that is a bit ahead of its time."
Now that these applications are out in the open, MS has an obligation to keep the IE control in the OS.
Microsoft also has an obligation to provide a secure desktop environment, and the API that the HTML control uses makes that almost impossible. They need to redesign the API (yes, they really do) to put the application in charge of access to and privileges of HTML components in a much more direct way, so that an application that needs to provide a complete sandbox can do it. Splitting the control up into HTML display, active content components, and internet access components would have allowed them to satisfy the intent of the consent decree (since the HTML control would no longer by itself be a web browser) as well as maintaining the facilities that other applications need. AND it would significantly improve security, since the "web browser front end" would be able to simply leave the un-sandboxed active content components out of its instance of the display component.
This is pretty much what I expected Microsoft to start working on back around 1997, after the first security failures. Boy, was I naive.
Didn't MS and billg say that stripping down the OS like this was impossible due to integration issues in a court of law?
"No."
What he said was that he couldn't just strip down the desktop version and still have something that would work. And that was pretty much correct though completely meaningless... they'd have to both strip out the HTML control and either modify applications that used it or back up to a previous version of those applications. Which they could easily have done if they were actually interested in cooperating. But in a narrow legalistic technical sense that completely ignores the way people normally use language, he was correct.
That's why "soft reset ten times per day", not "hard reset".
I get soft resets occasionally running "find", I'm sure it's some application that I haven't managed to identify yet. I don't like it, but at least recovery is reliable, which hasn't been the case on the Pocket PC... I've had corrupted files and occasional hard resets following a soft reset. And hard resets on the Pocket PC are MUCH more traumatic than on the Palm, because ActiveSync only backs up part of the system on a sync.
I don't use PDA as a laptop replacement.
I suspect that if you're even considering doing things like IRC, you probably are using what I'd call "laptop replacement" tools.
Some real multitasking (no, horrible hacks don't qualify) so I could use IRC...
Oh, man, you would be SO unhappy if you got real multitasking and discovered just how limited the PalmOS TCP/IP support is. That's the real problem that's keeping you from using networking from the backend, not the "cooperative multitasking" model.
I don't know what Palm is thinking with their two last half-assed flagship products
They're thinking "oh, shit, this BeOS stuff isn't what it's cracked up to be". Palm OS 5 was originally going to be a stopgap while they got the BeOS-based ARM-native OS working. When they started shipping updates I figured they were running into problems...
I think at this point their best bet would be to go to a UNIX kernel and UNIX apps and treat the old PalmOS API like something between Carbon and "Classic" on the Mac.
The original XBox ran NT Embedded using the NT5 kernel. The new XBox runs NT Embedded using the NT5 kernel. Why is this a surprise?
It's Power PC? So? They had a Power PC NT kernel, for the CHRP motherboards, and most of the NT kernel is C and C++ and has to be portable at least to Alpha and Itanium, so building most of it for Power PC would be just a recompile. It's not like the software just vanished when the CHRP 'market' collapsed.
Try upgrading from PGP 2.6.2 to version 7 or 8 and give it a try.
OK, "PGP and GPG are both insanely difficult to set up, or are ridiculously expensive for the kind of casual use the OP is talking about".
I had to go all the way to "add to cart" on PGP's site to find the price for PGP Desktop. It's a hundred bucks. If it was a $10.00 shareware product, even that would limit it to people who are already looking for a security solution. This has to be something that Paypal or eBay or Netwizards or Chase Bank can show you how to download for free or assume that you already have, like they can assume you have an SSL-enabled browser.
THAT's what it'll take for encrypted email to be common enough that it won't be seen as "evidence".
I don't believe that difficulty in using encryption is the problem.
In this case it is. People aren't going to routinely encrypt stuff unless it's easy, and people aren't going to have some class of encryption software on their computer unless people routinely use it, and that class of encryption software isn't going to be seen as evidence of wrongdoing unless people don't normally have it on their computer.
See, it doesn't matter that everyone ALSO has encryption software in their web browser, because it's not encryption software that was the issue, it was a particular kind that people almost never use because it's so hard to use. He didn't even have any encrypted email on his machine, he just had the software... that would be like using the fact that OS X has encrypted home directory capability to claim that someone with a Mac has something to hide.
But you have the software, and it's easy to use, so having it isn't evidence of wrongdoing, and using it isn't even evidence of wrongdoing. Because you're not going out of your way to acquire and use it.
The GPG plugin for Apple Mail that I use still required me to download and install multiple separate programs: the GPG plugin, the GPG software itself, and a GPG configuration program, and a keychain manager hook.
KGPG looks similar to the GPG configuration program and keychain manager. You still need to install GPG and a plugin for your mail software.
That's just too much work for most people. It was almost too much work for me... I put off upgrading from PGP to GPG for months because I didn't want to go through all the hassles again... and I still had to use the command line stuff to get my PGP keys properly transferred.
If it was in there by default, even if I only rarely used it, having the software on my disk wouldn't be evidence of anything. And if it was just a single download that worked with Mail (or Outlook) and automatically had me set up a key pair the first time I tried to send encrypted mail, then it would still be normal and usual.
Even if I didn't use it, it would be THERE.
Then it would make sense for companies on the net to require encrypted and signed mail to do business with them, and THEN people would use it.
But you can't get there from here unless something's done about the current ghastly state of the software itself.
Palms are meant as extensions to a real computer, not a real computer replacement.
Palms are "a real computer". They're not "a desktop computer", but then a desktop OS makes a crappy server OS (hey, Microsoft, I'm talking to YOU here) and a mainframe would be out of place on the desktop (though IBM's first personal computer emulated the IBM 360 mainframe... and almost nobody's ever heard of it). There's lots of "real computers", just like there's lots of "real vehicles" from a pushbike to a space shuttle.
An alternative could have been to use BeOS as the kernel
That's what Cobalt is. They've spent years trying that, and apparently come to the same conclusion that everyone else who's tried to use BeOS for real work has... it's less an operating system than a piece of performance art, an ongoing exploration of operating system ideas. It's not actually smaller, faster, or better performing than its contemporaries (in fact it required a faster processor and more RAM than NeXTstep or Windows NT). It was billed as a "media OS" but had no real-time support. It's got an object-oriented API using the worst object-oriented programming language in the world.
At this point letting it rot would probably be better than inflicting it on another company.
PalmOS has gotten worse and worse in terms of stability (lookup information on PalmOS 5.4 aka soft reset ten times per day).
When I've tried to use my Palm as a "laptop replacement" then I've had that experience too, though I never managed to suffer irrecoverable data loss no matter HOW hard I pushed it. Palm OS was designed to manage the information you use to manage your life. That's what it's for, and that's what it does better than anything else.
The Pocket PC started off as the "Palm-Sized PC", as a laptop replacement, and its biggest problem was the poor performance of the chips it was running on. Then Pocket PC 2000 tried to turn it into a Palm clone and it was far far worse... if it wasn't for the 206 MHz StrongARM in the iPaq it would have sunk without a trace. PPC2002 seemed better because it required the StrongARM, and the faster ARM processors since then have made things even better, but the OS itself is still the same potentially good laptop replacement OS hobbled by its 5 year old attempt to look like what Palm was shipping in 1999.
If you are trying to use your Palm as a laptop replacement, I would recommand you look into a Tablet PC or one of those really nice tiny laptops they have in Japan. If you're just looking for a dependable handheld that actually makes your life better, get a cheap PalmOS device and quit looking for something that isn't "technologicaly retarded".
Every time I hear that argument I almost explode in a rage and claim that at times the usage of encryption alone will be held evidence that you're a criminal.
Exploding in a rage doesn't actually accomplish anything, and that's probably a good thing given the things some people explode into a rage about.
The real problem is that you're never going to get a significant number of people to agree to use encryption on those grounds. The only way you're going to do that is to make it easy.
PGP and GPG are both insanely difficult to set up, even for geeks, and I can't see any reason why. They don't actually do anything very complex, outside of the encryption code itself. Comparing them with other encryption software doesn't make them look any better. Even traditional SSH is better, and things like the Apple keychain or browser SSL support are pretty much automatic.
Nobody would say that using an encrypted HTTP connection or a VPN was evidence of a crime, but that's not because people are somehow more dedicated to encryption being available, it's because it's as easy to use encryption as not to use it.
You want more people to use encrypted mail? Make it easy to do. Fix the mess that's "pgp -injoke", where the only concession to user friendliness is making the needlessly compex options spell something. You don't want to? Then this is YOUR fault, you lazy bum.
PalmOS isn't really an operating system, it's more like a window system, toolkit, and standard library. All that stuff already runs on top of a third party embedded, real-time kernel.
PalmOS is a lot like the original Mac OS, with the difference that instead of trying to cram a minimal OS under the GUI and then crank it up, they licensed the OS from someone else. The problem is their license kept them from being able to take advantage of that underlying OS properly.
I suppose that slipping Linux in underneath is reasonable, though Linux does raise some interesting licensing issues for kernel extensions. On the other hand, I don't expect Palm to voluntarily release kernel source the way Apple has... Palm's always seemed a lot more secretive than Apple (and that takes some doing), so perhaps it's best that they're using a kernel that obligates them to do so.
And all it really did was manage contacts.
Contacts, schedules, notes, and simple applications. Which is still what you use these things for, and it's still what you NEED these things for. You don't NEED the power of an Xscale processor to do what an organiser needs to do.
That's why I'm using a 68000-based PalmOS device again and if anyone's interested in a deal on a Pocket PC mail me.
That sounds more like my experience with the Pocket PC. So long as you use the Palm software, which all works well together, it's been absolutely reliable for me since 1999. I've gone through 3 Palms and 2 Pocket PCs, and the only time I've lost data has been on the Pocket PC. Even when my Visor was sat apon by a less than watchful 17 year old, I was able to replace it, sync, and EVERYTHING came back, applications and all. I was never able to perform a complete recovery from a backup on a Pocket PC even on the same handheld (after an embarassing data loss when Microsoft Pocket Streets crashed while I was trying to give someone directions).
It's a pity Palm lost the plot. The whole handheld market has turned very strange, with Microsoft crippling the Pocket PC to make it more like the Palm, and Palm trying to cram so much into the Palm to compete with the Pocket PC on features. The last of the 68000-based Clies, Sony's Palm-OS devices, ended up being the best of the lot.
I have no idea what handheld I'll get when my SJ22 breaks. I can't see anything in the current lot on EITHER platform that really attracts me, but I suppose it'll be a Tungsten or a Zire. There's no way I'm going to trust a Pocket PC again.
There are no Cobalt devices. When PalmWhatever kept pushing out more iterations of the PalmOS 5 platform, it became pretty obvious that the BeOS curse was alive and well and Cobalt was never going to show up.
Linux, though? OK, it's not as badly adapted to handhelds as Windows, since the UNIX API doesn't have nearly as much desktop-nature built into it, but... sheesh.