Churchill wasn't a linguist either, and I seriously doubt he spoke a word of Japanese. His French was mediocre, and so was his German. As an educated man of his class, no doubt he had some training in other languages, but it's doubtful any came from outside of Europe.
I, however, am a linguist, although I am not fluent in Japanese, and I find the argument extremely doubtful. I've never heard of any effective way of measuring ambiguity in a whole language. Language as a tool of communication generally adapts to serve the users' needs. If it needs precision, precise codes are adopted by the speakers. If the Japanese navy had problems communicating clear orders, I'd look to their training and communications practices, not the language itself.
If the Japanese language was too ambiguous to give clear orders, how on earth could Japan in the space of 40 years develop a very productive, highly advanced industrial system?
Take great care in evaluating arguments that claim one language's superiority over another on some internal basis. I've heard a lot of them and I've never seen one that could stand up to any scientific test.
If you speak English and only English and don't want to learn another language, your options are somewhat limited. The UK is incredibly expensive and for the most part ugly. Telecommunications aren't nearly as subsidised or state-supported generally, which means that nowadays you pay the same rates in the UK as elsewhere, but you can't take advantage of new infrastructure. Ireland is coming around with the growth of high tech there, but you still have to live in one of Europe's most deeply conservative countries.
Australia is okay if you can command a tech's income. Otherwise, recent dismantling of the school system and social services makes it awful. Public transit isn't very good there either. It is in many ways the worst of America combined with he worst of Britain.
New Zealand has been a mess for years. Stay clear.
English Canada is okay, but either you pay a fortune to live in Toronto or Vancouver or you live in dull, cold secondary centres with little to offer the tech or anyone else.
Montreal is cheap, very tech oriented, and has cheap DSL and cable modems as well as a first rate telecom infrastructure, but good knowledge of French improves the experience dramatically. Ottawa is a bit of a compromise between Toronto and Montreal, cheap and dull, fairly high tech, and somewhat French.
It is possible to live in Brussels with only English. It won't be as much fun, but it is possible. Brussels and the university towns of Leuven and Louvain-la-neuve are fully wired for cable modems and as I understand it DSL is now available. Rates are good. Rent is high, but not as much as in Silicon Valley.
Paris is still an excellent place to live, if you can afford the rent which is at roughly Silicon Valley levels. The French telecommunications system has come back from being one of Europe's worst 20 years ago to one of Europe's best and most modern. If Paris costs too much, Lyon, Toulouse, Strasbourg and the new high tech centres at Sophia Antipolis and Grenoble have a lot to recommend themnselves, including topless beaches or good skiing.
I'm told Barcelona in Spain and Coimbra in Portugal are pretty good - at least for relatively cheap and poor European countries - but you can't live there with English alone.
I haven't lived in Germany in years, but it doesn't strike me as a haven of high-tech. Leipzig and Chemnitz used to be the communist Silicon Valley before reunification, but I doubt they're much now. Perhaps the newly rebuilt Berlin is good for tech, but I want to remember the cool, artsy, punk West Berlin that was. Without it, I don't think I'd want to live there.
Stay away from the major west German cities. They are all post-war ugly construction. And, German taxes are out of control. France or Belgium are much better on that count.
I'm told Stockholm and Göteborg are good to techs these days, as well as the area around Uppsala, but I can't verify this. Finland is reputed to be the most wired nation in Europe, with more than three-quarters of the population online. In Sweden, you can survive on English alone. In Finland, it's a bit harder. Plus any idiot can learn Swedish - it's pretty easy to do - but Finnish is extremely hard.
I've never lived in Italy or the Netherlands. Switzerland is home to a lot of high tech now, and things are getting better there, but you have to put up with a lot of boredom to live in Switzerland.
Outside Europe and the Americas, Bangalore is the place to be in India. They speak English and have most of India's high tech sector. Compared to the US and Europe, it's reputed to be dirt cheap. In China, Hong Kong is the most wired city, but also the most expensive. Guangdong, Shanghai and Beijing are supposed to be pretty modern and have good computer infrastructure. Taiwan is also a well wired country, but it is pretty expensive. Of course, learning Chinese may pose some barriers to integration. Singapore is wired and anglophone, but expensive and deeply conservative. Malaysia is cheaper, and quite high tech now, but still very conservative. Japan is just expensive, and no longer quite the paragon of technology it used to be.
In some cases, the standards become, in effect, a government regulation. Standards describing air bags and seat belts for automobiles may start out as voluntary ISO (or in the old days ANSI) standards and end up enacted into legislation or into a regulation.
In some cases, large purchasers, like governments, require complaince to some standard in order to bid for government contracts. POSIX, for example, is a US government purchasing requirement in some cases. Companies obey the standard because it's cheaper than having one product line for governments and other big contractors and another for everybody else.
In other cases, like TCP/IP, the standard is self-enforcing. There's no law to stop somebody from writing their own TCP/IP variant, but if it isn't compliant with the standard, it probably won't work on the 'Net.
This is the kind of thing companies love. Early on, they can try to twist the standard by putting out their own, incompatible variant and then locking their customers into it. Microsoft is famous for this manoevre, and HTML is good example of a standard that ought to be just as self-enforcing as TCP/IP but isn't because of vendor intransigeance.
What makes standards work is that they tend to be safe choices, not enforced ones. There are a number of standards for the manufacture of, for example, luggage. No law prevents luggage manufacturers from making luggage with dimensions and properties that don't comply with the standard, but then they'll find that their luggage doesn't fit into aircraft luggage bins (which are also described in a standard designed to be compatible with the standards for luggage) and don't fit into standard sized cardboard boxes (which makes them more expensive to ship.) So, the luggage company sticks to the standard, because it's safe.
Now, standards like ISO 9000 and ISO 14000 aren't manditory in law, but many people require, or at least consider, ISO compliance in purchasing. For those standards, there are national certification bodies that let companies say they are ISO 9000 or 14000 compliant if they can verify that they meet certain conditions. But most standards don't work that way and don't come with certification.
Appaerently, the people responsible for Babylon5 decided early on that anything short of taping the episodes and selling them on the net would be tolerated. They haven't lost anything for it. Yes, perhaps legally the corporate producers have the right to their copyright, but as with the X-Files, Star Trek and all the others before them, what do they expect to lose?
Do fans sites detract from their income? No. If anything, it brings in revenue by encouraging new fans to watch the show after seeing the response from the 'Net.
Do they loose any legal claim to their property because some fan puts a few fuzzy screen captures on the web? No. Only trademark claims are lost if other uses are tolerated.
The legal issues here may be clear, but the behaviour is stupid. The example of Babylon 5 should serve as a guide to content producers to be a little more tolerant.
Besides, I have difficulty following Iron Chef without subtitles, and I can't get the Food Network in my area. Those fan sites make my viewing possible.
Anything by Rumiko Takahashi
on
Essential Anime
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· Score: 3
Urusei Yatsura, Ranma 1/2, Maison Ikkoku - it's all really good stuff.
Ozamu Tezuka was the best at manga/anime. He's dead now, but he was responsible for a wide variety of classics.
I also like Key, the Metal Idol. In fact, I'd recommend that as my single favourite anime programme.
As a Canadian whose lived about half and half on both sides of the border, I welcome you to move here and find out how little of what you think America is like is true. Compare an HMO to Canadian health care. In Canada, you can always get a second opinion and you get the services your doctor demands. In an HMO, you get what the HMO is willing to approve.
You'll have private health care, but will end up paying a big chuck of your bills anyway, and you'll still shell out a big chunk of your taxes to support medical care, only all that money will go to other people, you won't get anything out of it.
Now, all that assumes you can get a decent job and keep it. No unions and no guarantees means in Silicon Valley, if you don't code, you're poor, and even if you do code, the start-up you work for may not pay you squat, except in promissary notes due if and when the company IPO's.
Sales taxes in Santa Clara county, California are 8.5%, and prices over all are much higher than Canada, taxes included, because high rents and high wages have to be factored into every price. Add to that state income tax, and in some places county or city income tax, and the tax situation isn't so much better in the high brackets, and is far worse in the lower ones.
You'll pay twice what it costs to eat in a restaurant in Canada, and any contact you have with the service industry will be nothing but frustration. Anybody smart enough to run a cash register or wait tables can find a better job. Those homeless heroin addicts you don't want to see will be serving your food, and they'll still be there in the emergency room nearest your home. Hospitals in the US are required by law to treat everyone, even if they can't pay.
If you feel that US tax dollars are better spent in the USA, you are a fool. I invite you to take a look at the quality of the schools in California, or try to get your green card renewed at the INS building in San Jose. Whatever greater measure of government services you think you'll see in the US is an illusion. Services are being cut all over, and have been for years.
Canada's duties are small compared with the massive chicanery of importing to the US from Mexico or Chile, or even the far east. Canadian tariffs are lower on most kinds of goods than US ones, and prices for imports are usually lower in Canada. And Canadian customs is a breeze compared to bringing stuff into the US from Mexico.
Oh yeah, and that "American spirit" is mostly a myth invented by Ronald Reagan. Americans don't try to get rich through hard work, the upper middle class has etrade.com and the lower class has the lottery. About the same number of people get rich off of each. Entrepreneurship has nothing to do with the IPO culture.
So please, come to America. I'm going back to Canada and on behalf of my compatriots, we'd be happy to be rid of you. One less lazy bum who expects the government to protect his life and property but expects the government to shaft everyone else so his taxes will be lower - we can do with that.
Like many of the others, I started out in BASIC on an ancient 8-bit machine. But what really got me started in serious programming was scripting languages and VB.
I realise VB is an incoherent mess, and perhaps Delphi is better (I've never used it) but the biggest advantage of VB is that you can quickly and easily produce visual applications. You can see results, right there on your PC, even with simple projects. Learning something more structured like C involves having to deal with too many complicated issues of programming theory and structure, and unless you're willing to sit through complicated stuff like X or Windows GUI coding, all you'll get is some boring text program.
There may be better ways to do this than VB. Tcl/Tk for example, or tkperl, or even javascript/HTML. But I think the place to start with children is something that produces highly visual GUI output in short order.
Unless one of your parents was educated in French (not immersion - real French school) in Canada, you cannot enroll in a French school in any province except Quebec. In Quebec, the same rule applies to English.
Taking a look at the responses here and in those for the article on Canadian government databases gives me a really chilling picture of how many Americans see the rest of the world. Every time issues surrounding some foreign government's legal system comes up, someone always says something along the lines of "well, their a lot more socialist than we are" as if that explains anything.
I've lived in three countries in my life, the US, Canada and France, and if Americans think Canada or France are very socialist, it's only because their conception of what socialism is is piss poor. Japan, Australia, even Chile have social policies and government controls over the economy as great or greater than either France or Canada, yet few people here seem to see them as socialist.
A better folk political theory would be that the US is has the abnormal political system, with its worship of markets and disregard for good public policy.
Canada is not the home of big brother, nor are the French lazy. France has had higher productivity, greater increases in productivity and has traditionally been wealthier than Germany or the UK, yet I don't hear much grousing about lazy Germans and Brits on this board.
Furthermore, there is the noise about those countries not valuing free speech and/or privacy. True, both Canada and France have laws forbidding certain kinds of speech in some media, which are poorly enforced and whose legal status remains hopelessly unclear. That doesn't justify those laws, but it does make them largely meaningless. The US, on the other hand, is home to the Texas Food Libel law, making it illegal to say demeaning things about vegetables. It is a place where you can use legal pressure to close websites that translate copyrighted pages into "Swedish chef" jargon. In the US, free speech is reserved for those who can afford the legal fees (note that Babelfish does basically the same thing as the "Dialectizer" yet hasn't been hassled by BofA), while in both Canada and France such harassment is rare and often very costly to the harasser.
If you want to see a country with real free speech problems, look at the UK's libel laws. Look at the "LM vs ITN" lawsuit at http://www.informinc.co.uk/ITN-vs-LM/. Yet,/.'ers seem to take a wholly different view of the UK than they do of non-anglophone countries.
As for language laws, is there anyone on/. who has the faintest idea what kinds of language laws there are in Canada or France? In Canada, there are laws that require students to attend school in the majority language of their province unless they are willing to pay for a private education. In the US, the real situation isn't any different. Quebec has a law requiring outdoor signs to be have readable French content, as do several communities in the US for English. France and Canada require that some legally manditory documents be in French. The US does the same thing implicitly and explicitly, as do most countries.
As a non-American on/., it genuinely pisses me off to see a bunch of yahoos who've never lived abroad and who get their news from CNN tell me that country X is full of lazy bumpkins and country Y is in economic ruin when they don't know the first thing about those places. Try getting your views of the world from somewhere outside of bars for once.
That's why I think we'll end up with hybrid systems when we start to see real AI agents on the web.
With XML we can provide some semantic clues. We can find websites that claim "Drew Barrymore" as a major topic, or celebrity interviews with Drew Barrymore listed as an interviewee. We can check the website content to find sections with some bearing on Drew, and we can even use fairly simple language models to make good guesses at the kind of content that website has. Then we can pass the data to some more connectionist kind of program (this is where the magic happens:^) that can try to figure out if these pages come anywhere near answering the question.
I think that's a viable, useful approach to these kinds of problems. We can't provide full semantic markup with XML, but we can get part way there. Hopefully, it can be close enough that CPU intensive processes like neural networks can go the rest of the way.
I don't think we disagree that much either, although I'm not convinced that Cyc has been terribly successful at anything. Structuring environmental knowledge in that way doesn't strike me as a very likely approach to understanding human intelligence, and alternative avenues are available. What Cyc may accomplish is casting some light on what kinds of knowledge humans need to function in the world, although I'm not especially optimistic about that either.
I see two issues here. The first, I think, is whether a connectionist system can be viewed as a symbol processing system, and I would answer yes, with some caveats. Fodor and others support a very strong form of the symbolic systems hypothesis that I don't think is viable any more. There isn't a single internal logic engine, or any sort of unified "language of thought" in the sense that theorem provers implement predicate calculus. Connected networks do many tasks once thought to require symbolic systems of that type, but don't have any prefabricated symbolic machinery.
However, it is possible to view the state of a neural network as a kind of logic engine, but one that isn't per se compatible with the logic engines of other problem solving networks. An analysis of neural networks for OCR is quite revealing in how individual hidden layer neurons can search for particular features. Some aspects of this can be summarised using more traditional kinds of symbol systems, but the networks generally prove to be more robust frameworks for application.
The search for some unified symbol system able to account for different kinds of human behaviours is no longer a very viable research project. Such a project may have value in AI because we can't build massively connected networks that mimic the topology of the brain, and a symbol processing system may well be the best we can do for some kinds of problems at present.
The second problem is what constitutes artificial intelligence. One of my old profs put it well: once you've solved a problem in AI, it doesn't seem that intelligent anymore.
There is some research in AI intended to solve problems that humans solve without making any particular reference to how humans do it, nor do they try to shed light on the nature of human intelligence. I'm not very interested in that kind of research, prefering research that sheds light on human intelligence. I have no ideological qualms about doing those kinds of projects. If you can write a program that works, more power to you, but I have to question what we mean by intelligence when we say such a program is intelligent.
In principle, I suppose a symbol system can be as intelligent as a human, but only if you define intelligence in a way that makes it difficult say if it is equivalent to what humans do. My Ultra 10 is a hell of a lot better than I am at a wide variety of problems, and it certainly is a symbol processing system, rather than a connectionist one. One could define intelligence in a way that makes my Ultra 10 more intelligent than I am, but I don't think much would be accomplished in that way. We will no doubt expand the number of things computers can do well that right now only humans can do, but I'm not sure we will ever build a machine that we can conceed is equal to humans, because we keep defining intelligence in ways that exclude anything that isn't human.
I've been reading a lot of Piaget and Vygotsky recently, and I think there is a lot of merit to their theories of human intelligence arising through interaction with the environment rather than being something necessarily inherent to brain algorithms. Of course, I reserve the right to change my mind, but I've read a lot of the strong symbolic systems literature, and I don't see anything to make me change my mind so far. If this idea about intelligence is true, it makes it almost impossible to build a computer that we would judge as human equivalent, even if it could do the kind of massive parallel processing brains do, unless we put the computer inside a baby and raised it as a person in our constrained three-dimensional world.
I do consider GOFAI a kludge, and perhaps not even the best kludge available anymore. The trend is towards biologically motivated models that consider human intelligence to be embedded in the functioning of bodies and their interaction with the environment. They have had some major successes and I think they will continue to for a while.
The problems of the web that can have AI-type solutions are generally semiotic in nature. We could have intelligent agents, able to pay our bills and do our shopping for us, if we had a system of symbols that mapped clearly and unambiguously to meanings, or, a non-symbol processing system able to decode the web the way a human does. Most likely, we'll get something midway between them.
The GOFAI idea that human cognition is a matter of disembodied symbol processing is dead, and good riddance. However, our computers remain most useful as symbol processing engines, not as the more complex kinds of massively parralel connection engines that most people think brains are. We can get computers to emulate that kind of brain functionality, but only on a very limited scale compared to the human mind. Human-equal parralel machines are not just around the corner, so we have to augment the connectionist systems we have with symbol processing facilities.
The kind of project that interests me is a system that uses XML formats to provide clear semantics on the web, and connectionist methods to make judgements about how to act in response to those symbols. A system, for instance, that can scan an XML resource for information about rock concerts or movie listings, and having learned in more connectionist ways the preferences of the user (both in terms of costs, scheduling and personal taste) can inform them of events they might like to see, perhaps even going so far as to make tentative reservations when it's very confident.
The same kind of system could be used to solve library research problems. An XML document structures data semantically enough that a connectionist system can make quick, fairly superficial judgements about the contents and how they relate to the research needs of its users. It can then do more indepth readings of the highest confidence documents, leading to better sources and new documents. In the end, it can provide the documents to users and assist them when there are gaps in their knowledge by pointing them to the document that fills the gap.
The killer ap for AI would be automatic translation. Since that's my field, I don't think it's somewhere you ought to go without a strong knowledge of linguistics, and of the past failures in the field. I have some ideas, but that's what my PhD is going to be about.:^P
Corporations do essential, absolutely necessary things. They collect taxes, enforce standards, make the enforcement of decent labour standards possible, and most importantly integrate complex chains of production in a relatively economically efficient way.
Every industrialised economy, even the command economies of the former eastern bloc, had some kind of institution that functioned like a modern firm. They have had a variety of names, and a variety of legal definitions and statuses, but the basic machinery of management, division of labour, and intertwined responsibility have always been there.
The persistent failure of alternative formulations suggests that the modern firm is an institution unlikely to go away, and that it is undesireable to replace it.
The real problems revolve around who owns the firms, who operates them, and who regulates them, and in the end, what purposes they are designed and allowed to serve.
I agree that the corporation's ideology is "profitability is society's dominant goal," and that that is a poor ideology, recognised as such by nearly everyone. As B. F. Skinner pointed out, we do good because good is rewarded, and we do bad because bad is rewarded. I'm not so sure this is true in such a simple way for individuals, but Skinner's dictum recapitulates the essense of natural selection. If long life and growth are the rewards of profits, organisations will be structured to seek profits at the expense of all else. They have to, because if they don't other organisations will displace them in the ecology of human affairs.
Individualism at all costs isn't the answer. Without organising structures, every man and woman must depend on themselves for all their needs. It may be a sort of freedom, but it is the freedom of the caveman: the freedom to die alone when the machinery of society grins to a halt.
There are alternatives. Rethinking the nature of ownership and the rights of labour has been the project of various liberal philosophies for two centuries or more. And much progress has been made. It is no longer possible to own another human in most places. Societies generally recognise that the structure of firms creates uneven dependencies and pass laws to ensure greater balance. Until recently, social insurance was a value of such great importance that even the demand for economic efficiency was considered secondary to it. These programmes were, and are, successful. The level of public wealth available in the industrialised world would never have materialised without it.
An objection to the commodification of public culture is the single strongest thread of dissent in recent years. In days past, it was the commodification of labour that provoked rebellion, but today it's mostly culture. Both are undoubtedly bad things, but both can be amended.
Karl Marx prescribed the only solution to the commodification of labour by demanding that the means of production belong to the workers. Although his specific programme is quite dated and less applicable to the modern world, the basic tenet remains strong.
Take a look at Silicon Valley. One of the major factors in the success of the high-tech employment model is the liberal distribution of stock to employees and the relatively flat managerial hierarchies that insure local decision-making. Workers control those firms to an extent rarely seen in the "old" economy. Notions like total quality management and job rotation also serve to bring the workers more and more into the management, and indirectly into the ownership of companies. Surveys suggest that partially and wholly worker-owned companies out-perform fully private competitors on the average.
This suggests that the basic Marxist prescription remains the most effective way to undermine these old injustices. When a corporation must be held responsible to the immediate interests of a crosssection of the public, it acts quite differently. The evil done by self-perpetualting boardroom oligarchies becomes less and less likely when many of its own owners stand to be damaged.
The more contentious issue is the commodification of culture. No unified theory exists to deal with this problem, however, I note that it's scope diminishes when diverse and independent media are actively supported. The biggest music successes often start with underground recording, distributed independently, like the early Metallica, or grunge music. In some countries, publicly owned television stations with little or no advertising are able to set standards for content and culture that others must strive to equal in order to make a profit. Outside the US, most media markets support more than one newspaper.
Developing networks that insure the funding and representation of independent media, limitations on advertising and perhaps even moving away from advertising as a model of financing for media might serve that purpose.
But attacking corporations for doing exactly the things we reward them for is senseless. We need the corporations in order to support industrialised society and we can't change that. We can change what we reward them for doing.
I approve and appreciate the sentiment behind this proposal, although in the end it's a bit like approving of Mom, the flag and apple pie.
The devil is in the details, and this Oxfam document is sparse on those. Some of them are simply parts of existing activist programmes: a hostility towards WIPO and WTO that is partially, but not wholly, merited, encouraging Open Sourse ideas and use, a demand for patent reform particularly with regard to biotechnology. Citing this new French legal proposal to require governments to favour open source and computing standards in contracting is novel, and a good thing.
However, intellectual property reform is a very painful issue. It is one thing to say that the existing system is dysfunctional, it's quite another to propose alternatives. The initial intent of patents was to insure that inventions would eventually enter the public domain by offering that the inventor a monopoly on its use for a fixed time. For all the grousing, I've seen few real plans for a new IP scheme. The only thing I've seen that seems realistic to me is to reduce the length of patent and copyright protections, and possibly to give different kinds of patents different lengths and abolishing some kinds of patents and ownership rights with regard to biology and software. Before lending my support the cause of patent reform, I need to see a real programme.
Copyright globally corresponds to the life of the author, plus a few more years, or 70-90 years for works-for-hire. Shortening those protections very much is a lost battle, those norms have been in place in most of the world for a very long time. Acting to make sure they aren't extended any further is a better platform. (Disney basically bought an extra 20 years of ownership of Mickey Mouse by paying off Congressmen in the '98 elections.) The expansion of fair-use and enshrining some sort of educational and library exemption is another viable goal. Beyond that, I'm not sure how much can genuinely be done about copyrights.
Open disclosure of WIPO and WTO processes is probably a good thing, within limits. Part of what the WTO exists to protect is the ability of members to come to an agreement before taking trade issues to arbitration. That can be useful and important.
Before lighting in too hard on the WTO, take a look at the treaty itself. It enshrines quite a few exemptions for the third world. A winable fight might be to get some of those exemptions expanded rather than trying to undermine the organisation completely.
The importance of industrial standards is a good cause to rally around, even if it isn't a very romantic one. Their function is to ensure that open, easily obtainable standards apply to products and services, favouring third world industries in the same way that open Internet and computing standards favour small, non-Microsoft vendors. One of the functions of the WTO is to ensure that standards enacted by governments are open and available, so that countries can't create barriers to entry of exactly the kind Microsoft makes.
A good look at the global standards process would be a good education for a activist with this kind of agenda.
Reforms of this type will take place in an international arena in the future. Abolishing the WIPO and WTO just moves the problem to some new international organisation. Hijacking the existing institutions has often proved more effective for revolutionaires.
The Left has always had cosmopolitanism on its side, and it bothers me to see new nationalisms and isolationisms become causes with activist support. Global entitiies have played an important role in the liberal causes of the past, and they can again in the future.
...and maybe the only worthwhile thing to take from this debate:
'One reason an acknowledgement of both past and present regulation is needed is so we can move public debate away from the false "should there be public policy" question to the real question of "which public policy" should be promoted?' (Newman at http://www.prospect.org/controversy/open_source/ne wman-n-1.html )
Intellectual experiments in anarchy work about as well as they always have: they don't. The 'Net is now a matter of public interest and public policy, and people need to stop pretending no one in government or law enforcement knows it exists. Telecommunications have been regulated in every country since the turn of the century, an it is hard to see how universal access, limited tolls and extensive innovation and research would ever have happened without it.
There will be laws that specifically regulate internet access and standards and computer design and construction, just as there are for telephones, TV's, radios, cars and the postal system. This is inevitable and in the past turned out to mostly be a good thing. We can have stupid internet policies, but we can't pretend there will be no policies.
Remember, France has very low inflation, as low as the US if not lower over the last few years. The money supply isn't increasing much, besides which, changes in money supply have relatively little direct effect on market valuations. During the high inflation 70's in the US, corporate incomes mostly rose with inflation, but market values didn't start rising significantly until Volker slowed inflation down in the 80's.
Corporate incomes have been generally up in France, but it will take a while for me to find statistics.
Lessee here... according to the CIA World Factbook (a less than ideal source for info, but it's what I have on hand) France has per capita around US$23,000 and grew 3% in 1998 and 1999. It has a somewhat better income distribution, so even the lower GDP per capita translates into comparable incomes to the US for most of the middle class. The French stock market has grown faster than the S&P for the last couple of years. France is currently the biggest producer of high-tech exports in the EU, and is second only to the UK in the amount of foreign direct investment it has received in the last seven years. France has a lower external debt per capita than the US, a trade surplus (America has a trade deficit), low inflation, a smaller percentage of the population in poverty than the US, a higher literacy rate, more people with full health insurance...
If France is a country with severe economic problems, I only wish the rest of the world was so badly off.
...try saying it's interesting, but not necessarily a big deal.
I'm a nanosceptic. As interesting as this sort of technology is, I don't think it is quite the miracle cure for everything or a source of world-ending destruction. Too many things have billed themselves that way in the past and haven't lived up to their promises.
First of all, read Bill Joy's article on Wired, and some of the follow up articles, like the ones at Salon.com. I heard him speak at a symposium at Stanford a couple weeks ago. If a transcript is on the web read it too. You look a lot better on these essays if you at least read the public press on the subject.
Right now, the public press is all there is. Very little research in nanotechnology as such makes it into the journals. The field is awfully young.
Now, doomsayers and optimists alike see nanotech as way of handling large problems by using self-replicating machines to, for example, convert chemicals into more useful or less toxic ones, or to cure diseases like cancer by simply attacking the cancer directly and non-invasively. The doomsayers also warn of nano-infections killing millions and turning ecosystems into sludge.
However, nature hes been throwing the worst it has to offer in self-replicating nanotechnology at living organisms for billions of years, and most of the time we live through it. I am sceptical that humans will build machines as resilient as those nature provides anytime soon.
This doesn't eliminate medical potential - we might flood a body with short-lived machines designed to hunt down a cancer to do some other specific work, and let them run until the immune system kills them. I just don't think we'll see artificial diseases killing people off - human immune systems are much too good for that and the real world is a very caustic, destructive place for tiny machines. I suspect the average toxic waste dump is also going to be a poor place to deploy nanotech.
Biotech is much more useful and dangerous in that respect, since nature has already done most of the work of constructing self-replicating machines that can survive in nature.
I'm not convinced that any of the recent advances in nanotech lead to self-replication at all. Remember, we can't even build reliably self-replicating machines at any scale. Why miniaturisation should make this easier is something I don't understand.
Nanotech has a lot of potential for manufacturing, no doubt about that, but household replicators strike me as a bit far-fetched, although perhaps not impossible. The most immediate benefit I expect to see is the construction of largely unspecialised factories that are able to retool to a new product or new specifications in a matter of days or even hours. This is a trend already underway, but I think nanotech could make it a lot easier.
The result might be a manufactuing process not unlike the software design process. Someone makes a design, tests it in a computer, weeds out the bugs, and distant factories are able to assemble the product from nothing but the plans. Perhaps it's time to discuss open source industrial design? GNU four-slice toaster v6.2? Weirder things have happened.
Another major area for realistic progress is brain research. At present, a lot of neurological research depends on a small number of patients with a form of epilepsy that can only be cured by opening the skull and operating directly on the brain while the patient is awake. With nanotechnology, we could do even more direct and small scale research on the brain without ever having to open the skull at all.
But, I'm sceptical of claims of doom and claims that nanotech can solve all our problems. There are no ultimate solutions.
I'm still pretty sceptical of such high populations in the British Isles. No, exact sizes can't be deduced from physical artifacts or bodily remains directly, but the country ought to be fairly litered with neolithic human corpses if it were true. The level of agricultural efficiency required would be incredible for a neolithic society. Even very advanced civilisations with labour intensive agriculture, like those of 15th century China, were unable to support such large populations. I can't believe that Stone Age tribes could do it. I believe that was your central point.
As Bill Nye the Science Guy says, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The evidence of larger areas under cultivation in earlier times is not sufficient evidence of larger populations when technology is taken into account.
Be careful in trying to use the legends of ancient peoples as evidence in favour of specific events. Velikovsky got into trouble for exactly that, and now he's remembered as a complete quack.
There is no secure evidence about the prevalence of Rh- types in Europe before the Romans arrived. We do know roughly the sixth century a.D. distribution of Basques, and can make some good guesses about how blood types were distributed in Roman times from that data. Cavalli-Sforza makes a good case for the recession of the pre-Celt European population in the face of invasion by Rh+ types, but connecting this with Celtic and Germanic myth is a tricky and unreliable business.
I'm having trouble following your argument about hidden recessives. The reason hybrid infertility happens in horse breeding is that the new hybrid population is aggressively inbred by the horse breeder. That's part of the standard procedure for improving a breed. Among humans, this doesn't generally occur. The likelihood of hidden recessives appearing in the post contact population is somewhat lower than in the pre-contact population, because of its now greater genetic diversity.
I'm very familiar with genetics, and with both Dawkins and Cavalli-Sforza, but I am unaware of an analysis of any real world population, other than the Basques with their special circumstances, that produced the kind of overall reduction in fertility you describe. The reduction in sickle-cell anemia, for example, among North American blacks compared to Africans is strong evidence of the reduced power of unreinforced recessives in mixed populations. Furthermore, this analysis neglects the positive effects of outside genes, for example the increase in lactose tolerance among Mexicans after the Spanish conquest. Useful traits in the new population are likely to be greater stimulus to fertility than the new fatal recessives are.
The African American population is not known to have suffered dramatically reduced fertility in any period of its history, and birth rates for that population are well documented by owners trying to keep accounts of their property. Mexicans had a sharp population reduction in the period surrounding the arrival of the conquistadors, but the blame falls clearly on smallpox, not hybrid infertility.
The author of the website you link to makes the claim that he has evidence of exactly that sort of reduction in fertility in populations in contact, but never cites anything. I'm sceptical that it exists, but I'm willing to consider it if you have a reference.
Interbreeding does not generally reduce infertility - all the evidence I know of shows the opposite in general, if any difference at all.
Mitochondrial DNA studies of the British public reflect that Britan's many invaders mostly came without their women. Roman soldiers came, got local girlfriends and spread their sperm throughout the island. Viking men came in the long ships, raped and pillaged, and either stayed or left, but never brought their women. Getting invaded usually means the invaders are soldiers almost never accompanied by their women.
A larger study would have shown that Scandianvia, and especially Iceland, are full of mitochonrial DNA from Ireland, because the Vikings came, took women slaves, and dragged them off to wherever they lived. This didn't lower their birthrate one bit. France is full of invader's genes - the country's very name comes from the name of a Germanic tribe that took over in the sixth century (or was it the seventh? I forget.) Before the Germans, Celtic Gaul was invaded by Romans, and one out of every three modern Frenchmen counts a foreigner among his or her great-grandparents. Yet French fertility didn't fall off until after WWII.
America is quite racially mixed. Few contemporary Americans count a single European ethnic group among their ancestors, and a surprising number count non-Europeans among them. The black and hispanic populations in the US are well known to have higher fertility than whites on the average, yet they are the both much more likely to have mixed ancestors.
The only example I know of where interbreeding reduced fertility in general is the Basque country, and there is a simple and straighforward reason why: Basques tended traditionally to be Rh negative. Rh syndrome does reduce fertility.
As for carrying capacity in neolithic times, it may be higher than was thought, but it still wasn't very high. Agricultural practices didn't change much for thousands of years until the rise of mechanisation. The amount of food produced, and the island's carrying capacity can't be deduced by comparing the amount of land under cultivation then with the amount now. Modern agriculture is far more intese than anything possible in the neolithic era.
There is no chance at all that the British Isles supported a hundred million people at any time in its history.
We have more leisure that people did in 1900. I'm not claiming nothing has changed. I am claiming that the luxury each generation imagines will follow on the heels of "the next big thing" always turns out to be a mirage.
We have slightly more income equality than they did. At least 3/4 of the people in the bottom quitile of American income remain there for at least 20 years. No one has done longer range studies than that for lack of data. The study you are refering to discussed the bottom 20% of income tax payers, and even it seriously massaged the data to get that result. Class mobility is less than it was in 1950. It wasn't a BLS study, it was a conservative think tank - I can't remember which - that paid for it.
Today's poor own cars, and in 1900 the poor owned hundreds of acres of farmland. They had razors and ovens, which they didn't have in 1800. They were still poor, and so are today's poor. Poverty is measured in avoidable misery, not misery against an absolute standard.
There hasn't been any significant increase in public health in the US since 1980. There has been since 1900, but since the vaccination era, we have also failed to kill off polio (which we could have done), started to see a resurgence of TB, discovered whole new classes of bugs never known to exist and for which we have no treatment. A utopia of health is still in the future. As late as 1960, many people imagined that by 2000, we would be winning against the bugs.
No, misery ain't what it used to be, but the optimists of 1900 were way off the mark. We still live in a world of avoidable misery. That is the failure of the technological utopianism of 1900, and it shows every sign of becoming the failure of technological utopianists today.
Imagine a science-fiction writer in 1900 looking forward to the level of productivity and automation of 2000. What would he write? Probably nothing very different from what Sterling wrote.
History isn't over, neither is economics. In 1900, many intellectuals forsaw a future of peace and leisure, where everyone would be rich. It didn't happen for them, and it won't happen for us. Conflict is plentiful; markets still fail; governments still fail; there's no real movement towards better medicine for most, much less all, of the people; economists are still better at telling you what went wrong than at predicting what will go wrong next; and wealth still accumulates at the top (even more than it used to).
Recent history is full of the failed attempts of those who believed that markets would act rationally. The LTCM collapse is just the latest in a long line of failed "systems" for beating the averages. People know that won't work at the race track or the blackjack table, and Sterling should know better than to believe it's any different for markets.
Each era's political and economic certainies are the next's discredited superstitions. Don't be so sure it's any different for capitalism various stripes and schools than it was for Marxism's. Sterling's prediction of the end of the Third World at the hands of the 'Net is as premature as the same prediction was at the end of imperialism.
Sterling's discomfort with the commodification of everything is today's problem. I'm already burned out on the Digital Revolution - so are most people. Sterling's anti-historicism - scepticism that progress is leading somewhere - is also today's issue. It was also the issue in 1900, and 1800, and 1600, and 1000 for all I know. We struggle on, finding meaning in history only when it's over.
The real issue is the lack of willingness to work for progress. We don't have convincing goals, or even real expectations that the world can and will improve if we work for it. That is where our malaise comes from - the belief that as much as the world sucks we can't do any better.
I fear Sterling isn't doing much to fight that notion, and the only good excuse for it is that no one else is either.
Archiving is important. I'm actually surprised at the number of/.'ers who just want to let the data die. I remember taking a tour of the Magninot Line in France. Having proven useless as a military outpost, the entire chain of caverns was converted to document storage decades ago. In a thousand years, archeologists will be able to substantially reconstruct live in twentieth century France. Information about births, deaths and marriages need never be lost. Detailed census reports can be preserved so historians can make new theories about the social behaviour of man. I think this is a fairly important task. Imagine how much easier it would be to reconstruct human history if past civilisation hadn't kept shoddy records.
I suspect the problem of file formats is less serious than people make it out to be. A well-documented format should be reconstructable indefinitely. Few software companies don't document their file formats. Even without documentation, it ought to be easier than reconstructing dead languages. We learned to read Egyptian hieroglyphs primarily from one attested translation and a lot of careful deduction. Given a thousand Word 6 documents, I think a good computer archeologist ought to be able to construct a program to open and edit them.
Museums of old hardware, and perhaps some sort of custom computer factor to make ancient hardware strikes me as a good idea. It could be like blacksmiths at SCA festivals, "Ye Olde ASIC Mill.":^) I doubt it would ever be profitable, but museums, even working ones, rarely are. Although who knows? A Commodore 64 could be an objet d'art in a hundred years, just as ugly African masks are now.
The real problem strikes as the one most heavily emphasised in the article: decaying media. I suspect the best solution with presently forseeable technology would be to preserve data in crystalised DNA. Even in nature, DNA takes centuries to decay, and if it were crystalised and kept somewhere cool and dry, it would likely last for millenia. Encoding a document onto a billion strands of DNA weighs basically nothing and it would be a very highly redundant storage system.
It isn't easy to do right now, but I suspect that technology is right around the corner and probably only requires a little bit of research money to become practical.
Slashdot Mirror
Churchill wasn't a linguist either, and I seriously doubt he spoke a word of Japanese. His French was mediocre, and so was his German. As an educated man of his class, no doubt he had some training in other languages, but it's doubtful any came from outside of Europe.
I, however, am a linguist, although I am not fluent in Japanese, and I find the argument extremely doubtful. I've never heard of any effective way of measuring ambiguity in a whole language. Language as a tool of communication generally adapts to serve the users' needs. If it needs precision, precise codes are adopted by the speakers. If the Japanese navy had problems communicating clear orders, I'd look to their training and communications practices, not the language itself.
If the Japanese language was too ambiguous to give clear orders, how on earth could Japan in the space of 40 years develop a very productive, highly advanced industrial system?
Take great care in evaluating arguments that claim one language's superiority over another on some internal basis. I've heard a lot of them and I've never seen one that could stand up to any scientific test.
If you speak English and only English and don't want to learn another language, your options are somewhat limited. The UK is incredibly expensive and for the most part ugly. Telecommunications aren't nearly as subsidised or state-supported generally, which means that nowadays you pay the same rates in the UK as elsewhere, but you can't take advantage of new infrastructure. Ireland is coming around with the growth of high tech there, but you still have to live in one of Europe's most deeply conservative countries.
Australia is okay if you can command a tech's income. Otherwise, recent dismantling of the school system and social services makes it awful. Public transit isn't very good there either. It is in many ways the worst of America combined with he worst of Britain.
New Zealand has been a mess for years. Stay clear.
English Canada is okay, but either you pay a fortune to live in Toronto or Vancouver or you live in dull, cold secondary centres with little to offer the tech or anyone else.
Montreal is cheap, very tech oriented, and has cheap DSL and cable modems as well as a first rate telecom infrastructure, but good knowledge of French improves the experience dramatically. Ottawa is a bit of a compromise between Toronto and Montreal, cheap and dull, fairly high tech, and somewhat French.
It is possible to live in Brussels with only English. It won't be as much fun, but it is possible. Brussels and the university towns of Leuven and Louvain-la-neuve are fully wired for cable modems and as I understand it DSL is now available. Rates are good. Rent is high, but not as much as in Silicon Valley.
Paris is still an excellent place to live, if you can afford the rent which is at roughly Silicon Valley levels. The French telecommunications system has come back from being one of Europe's worst 20 years ago to one of Europe's best and most modern. If Paris costs too much, Lyon, Toulouse, Strasbourg and the new high tech centres at Sophia Antipolis and Grenoble have a lot to recommend themnselves, including topless beaches or good skiing.
I'm told Barcelona in Spain and Coimbra in Portugal are pretty good - at least for relatively cheap and poor European countries - but you can't live there with English alone.
I haven't lived in Germany in years, but it doesn't strike me as a haven of high-tech. Leipzig and Chemnitz used to be the communist Silicon Valley before reunification, but I doubt they're much now. Perhaps the newly rebuilt Berlin is good for tech, but I want to remember the cool, artsy, punk West Berlin that was. Without it, I don't think I'd want to live there.
Stay away from the major west German cities. They are all post-war ugly construction. And, German taxes are out of control. France or Belgium are much better on that count.
I'm told Stockholm and Göteborg are good to techs these days, as well as the area around Uppsala, but I can't verify this. Finland is reputed to be the most wired nation in Europe, with more than three-quarters of the population online. In Sweden, you can survive on English alone. In Finland, it's a bit harder. Plus any idiot can learn Swedish - it's pretty easy to do - but Finnish is extremely hard.
I've never lived in Italy or the Netherlands. Switzerland is home to a lot of high tech now, and things are getting better there, but you have to put up with a lot of boredom to live in Switzerland.
Outside Europe and the Americas, Bangalore is the place to be in India. They speak English and have most of India's high tech sector. Compared to the US and Europe, it's reputed to be dirt cheap. In China, Hong Kong is the most wired city, but also the most expensive. Guangdong, Shanghai and Beijing are supposed to be pretty modern and have good computer infrastructure. Taiwan is also a well wired country, but it is pretty expensive. Of course, learning Chinese may pose some barriers to integration. Singapore is wired and anglophone, but expensive and deeply conservative. Malaysia is cheaper, and quite high tech now, but still very conservative. Japan is just expensive, and no longer quite the paragon of technology it used to be.
As far as I know, that covers your options.
In some cases, the standards become, in effect, a government regulation. Standards describing air bags and seat belts for automobiles may start out as voluntary ISO (or in the old days ANSI) standards and end up enacted into legislation or into a regulation.
In some cases, large purchasers, like governments, require complaince to some standard in order to bid for government contracts. POSIX, for example, is a US government purchasing requirement in some cases. Companies obey the standard because it's cheaper than having one product line for governments and other big contractors and another for everybody else.
In other cases, like TCP/IP, the standard is self-enforcing. There's no law to stop somebody from writing their own TCP/IP variant, but if it isn't compliant with the standard, it probably won't work on the 'Net.
This is the kind of thing companies love. Early on, they can try to twist the standard by putting out their own, incompatible variant and then locking their customers into it. Microsoft is famous for this manoevre, and HTML is good example of a standard that ought to be just as self-enforcing as TCP/IP but isn't because of vendor intransigeance.
What makes standards work is that they tend to be safe choices, not enforced ones. There are a number of standards for the manufacture of, for example, luggage. No law prevents luggage manufacturers from making luggage with dimensions and properties that don't comply with the standard, but then they'll find that their luggage doesn't fit into aircraft luggage bins (which are also described in a standard designed to be compatible with the standards for luggage) and don't fit into standard sized cardboard boxes (which makes them more expensive to ship.) So, the luggage company sticks to the standard, because it's safe.
Now, standards like ISO 9000 and ISO 14000 aren't manditory in law, but many people require, or at least consider, ISO compliance in purchasing. For those standards, there are national certification bodies that let companies say they are ISO 9000 or 14000 compliant if they can verify that they meet certain conditions. But most standards don't work that way and don't come with certification.
Appaerently, the people responsible for Babylon5 decided early on that anything short of taping the episodes and selling them on the net would be tolerated. They haven't lost anything for it. Yes, perhaps legally the corporate producers have the right to their copyright, but as with the X-Files, Star Trek and all the others before them, what do they expect to lose?
Do fans sites detract from their income? No. If anything, it brings in revenue by encouraging new fans to watch the show after seeing the response from the 'Net.
Do they loose any legal claim to their property because some fan puts a few fuzzy screen captures on the web? No. Only trademark claims are lost if other uses are tolerated.
The legal issues here may be clear, but the behaviour is stupid. The example of Babylon 5 should serve as a guide to content producers to be a little more tolerant.
Besides, I have difficulty following Iron Chef without subtitles, and I can't get the Food Network in my area. Those fan sites make my viewing possible.
Urusei Yatsura, Ranma 1/2, Maison Ikkoku - it's all really good stuff.
Ozamu Tezuka was the best at manga/anime. He's dead now, but he was responsible for a wide variety of classics.
I also like Key, the Metal Idol. In fact, I'd recommend that as my single favourite anime programme.
As a Canadian whose lived about half and half on both sides of the border, I welcome you to move here and find out how little of what you think America is like is true. Compare an HMO to Canadian health care. In Canada, you can always get a second opinion and you get the services your doctor demands. In an HMO, you get what the HMO is willing to approve.
You'll have private health care, but will end up paying a big chuck of your bills anyway, and you'll still shell out a big chunk of your taxes to support medical care, only all that money will go to other people, you won't get anything out of it.
Now, all that assumes you can get a decent job and keep it. No unions and no guarantees means in Silicon Valley, if you don't code, you're poor, and even if you do code, the start-up you work for may not pay you squat, except in promissary notes due if and when the company IPO's.
Sales taxes in Santa Clara county, California are 8.5%, and prices over all are much higher than Canada, taxes included, because high rents and high wages have to be factored into every price. Add to that state income tax, and in some places county or city income tax, and the tax situation isn't so much better in the high brackets, and is far worse in the lower ones.
You'll pay twice what it costs to eat in a restaurant in Canada, and any contact you have with the service industry will be nothing but frustration. Anybody smart enough to run a cash register or wait tables can find a better job. Those homeless heroin addicts you don't want to see will be serving your food, and they'll still be there in the emergency room nearest your home. Hospitals in the US are required by law to treat everyone, even if they can't pay.
If you feel that US tax dollars are better spent in the USA, you are a fool. I invite you to take a look at the quality of the schools in California, or try to get your green card renewed at the INS building in San Jose. Whatever greater measure of government services you think you'll see in the US is an illusion. Services are being cut all over, and have been for years.
Canada's duties are small compared with the massive chicanery of importing to the US from Mexico or Chile, or even the far east. Canadian tariffs are lower on most kinds of goods than US ones, and prices for imports are usually lower in Canada. And Canadian customs is a breeze compared to bringing stuff into the US from Mexico.
Oh yeah, and that "American spirit" is mostly a myth invented by Ronald Reagan. Americans don't try to get rich through hard work, the upper middle class has etrade.com and the lower class has the lottery. About the same number of people get rich off of each. Entrepreneurship has nothing to do with the IPO culture.
So please, come to America. I'm going back to Canada and on behalf of my compatriots, we'd be happy to be rid of you. One less lazy bum who expects the government to protect his life and property but expects the government to shaft everyone else so his taxes will be lower - we can do with that.
Like many of the others, I started out in BASIC on an ancient 8-bit machine. But what really got me started in serious programming was scripting languages and VB.
I realise VB is an incoherent mess, and perhaps Delphi is better (I've never used it) but the biggest advantage of VB is that you can quickly and easily produce visual applications. You can see results, right there on your PC, even with simple projects. Learning something more structured like C involves having to deal with too many complicated issues of programming theory and structure, and unless you're willing to sit through complicated stuff like X or Windows GUI coding, all you'll get is some boring text program.
There may be better ways to do this than VB. Tcl/Tk for example, or tkperl, or even javascript/HTML. But I think the place to start with children is something that produces highly visual GUI output in short order.
Unless one of your parents was educated in French (not immersion - real French school) in Canada, you cannot enroll in a French school in any province except Quebec. In Quebec, the same rule applies to English.
Try it.
Taking a look at the responses here and in those for the article on Canadian government databases gives me a really chilling picture of how many Americans see the rest of the world. Every time issues surrounding some foreign government's legal system comes up, someone always says something along the lines of "well, their a lot more socialist than we are" as if that explains anything.
/.'ers seem to take a wholly different view of the UK than they do of non-anglophone countries.
/. who has the faintest idea what kinds of language laws there are in Canada or France? In Canada, there are laws that require students to attend school in the majority language of their province unless they are willing to pay for a private education. In the US, the real situation isn't any different. Quebec has a law requiring outdoor signs to be have readable French content, as do several communities in the US for English. France and Canada require that some legally manditory documents be in French. The US does the same thing implicitly and explicitly, as do most countries.
/., it genuinely pisses me off to see a bunch of yahoos who've never lived abroad and who get their news from CNN tell me that country X is full of lazy bumpkins and country Y is in economic ruin when they don't know the first thing about those places. Try getting your views of the world from somewhere outside of bars for once.
I've lived in three countries in my life, the US, Canada and France, and if Americans think Canada or France are very socialist, it's only because their conception of what socialism is is piss poor. Japan, Australia, even Chile have social policies and government controls over the economy as great or greater than either France or Canada, yet few people here seem to see them as socialist.
A better folk political theory would be that the US is has the abnormal political system, with its worship of markets and disregard for good public policy.
Canada is not the home of big brother, nor are the French lazy. France has had higher productivity, greater increases in productivity and has traditionally been wealthier than Germany or the UK, yet I don't hear much grousing about lazy Germans and Brits on this board.
Furthermore, there is the noise about those countries not valuing free speech and/or privacy. True, both Canada and France have laws forbidding certain kinds of speech in some media, which are poorly enforced and whose legal status remains hopelessly unclear. That doesn't justify those laws, but it does make them largely meaningless. The US, on the other hand, is home to the Texas Food Libel law, making it illegal to say demeaning things about vegetables. It is a place where you can use legal pressure to close websites that translate copyrighted pages into "Swedish chef" jargon. In the US, free speech is reserved for those who can afford the legal fees (note that Babelfish does basically the same thing as the "Dialectizer" yet hasn't been hassled by BofA), while in both Canada and France such harassment is rare and often very costly to the harasser.
If you want to see a country with real free speech problems, look at the UK's libel laws. Look at the "LM vs ITN" lawsuit at http://www.informinc.co.uk/ITN-vs-LM/. Yet,
As for language laws, is there anyone on
As a non-American on
Je suis américain, mais j'espère que la bonne nation de la France réussira à convaincre les Américains d'abandonner leur politique à ce sujet.
(Sorry, I used to be a French teacher. The instinct to correct lives on.)
That's why I think we'll end up with hybrid systems when we start to see real AI agents on the web.
:^) that can try to figure out if these pages come anywhere near answering the question.
With XML we can provide some semantic clues. We can find websites that claim "Drew Barrymore" as a major topic, or celebrity interviews with Drew Barrymore listed as an interviewee. We can check the website content to find sections with some bearing on Drew, and we can even use fairly simple language models to make good guesses at the kind of content that website has. Then we can pass the data to some more connectionist kind of program (this is where the magic happens
I think that's a viable, useful approach to these kinds of problems. We can't provide full semantic markup with XML, but we can get part way there. Hopefully, it can be close enough that CPU intensive processes like neural networks can go the rest of the way.
I don't think we disagree that much either, although I'm not convinced that Cyc has been terribly successful at anything. Structuring environmental knowledge in that way doesn't strike me as a very likely approach to understanding human intelligence, and alternative avenues are available. What Cyc may accomplish is casting some light on what kinds of knowledge humans need to function in the world, although I'm not especially optimistic about that either.
I see two issues here. The first, I think, is whether a connectionist system can be viewed as a symbol processing system, and I would answer yes, with some caveats. Fodor and others support a very strong form of the symbolic systems hypothesis that I don't think is viable any more. There isn't a single internal logic engine, or any sort of unified "language of thought" in the sense that theorem provers implement predicate calculus. Connected networks do many tasks once thought to require symbolic systems of that type, but don't have any prefabricated symbolic machinery.
However, it is possible to view the state of a neural network as a kind of logic engine, but one that isn't per se compatible with the logic engines of other problem solving networks. An analysis of neural networks for OCR is quite revealing in how individual hidden layer neurons can search for particular features. Some aspects of this can be summarised using more traditional kinds of symbol systems, but the networks generally prove to be more robust frameworks for application.
The search for some unified symbol system able to account for different kinds of human behaviours is no longer a very viable research project. Such a project may have value in AI because we can't build massively connected networks that mimic the topology of the brain, and a symbol processing system may well be the best we can do for some kinds of problems at present.
The second problem is what constitutes artificial intelligence. One of my old profs put it well: once you've solved a problem in AI, it doesn't seem that intelligent anymore.
There is some research in AI intended to solve problems that humans solve without making any particular reference to how humans do it, nor do they try to shed light on the nature of human intelligence. I'm not very interested in that kind of research, prefering research that sheds light on human intelligence. I have no ideological qualms about doing those kinds of projects. If you can write a program that works, more power to you, but I have to question what we mean by intelligence when we say such a program is intelligent.
In principle, I suppose a symbol system can be as intelligent as a human, but only if you define intelligence in a way that makes it difficult say if it is equivalent to what humans do. My Ultra 10 is a hell of a lot better than I am at a wide variety of problems, and it certainly is a symbol processing system, rather than a connectionist one. One could define intelligence in a way that makes my Ultra 10 more intelligent than I am, but I don't think much would be accomplished in that way. We will no doubt expand the number of things computers can do well that right now only humans can do, but I'm not sure we will ever build a machine that we can conceed is equal to humans, because we keep defining intelligence in ways that exclude anything that isn't human.
I've been reading a lot of Piaget and Vygotsky recently, and I think there is a lot of merit to their theories of human intelligence arising through interaction with the environment rather than being something necessarily inherent to brain algorithms. Of course, I reserve the right to change my mind, but I've read a lot of the strong symbolic systems literature, and I don't see anything to make me change my mind so far. If this idea about intelligence is true, it makes it almost impossible to build a computer that we would judge as human equivalent, even if it could do the kind of massive parallel processing brains do, unless we put the computer inside a baby and raised it as a person in our constrained three-dimensional world.
I do consider GOFAI a kludge, and perhaps not even the best kludge available anymore. The trend is towards biologically motivated models that consider human intelligence to be embedded in the functioning of bodies and their interaction with the environment. They have had some major successes and I think they will continue to for a while.
The problems of the web that can have AI-type solutions are generally semiotic in nature. We could have intelligent agents, able to pay our bills and do our shopping for us, if we had a system of symbols that mapped clearly and unambiguously to meanings, or, a non-symbol processing system able to decode the web the way a human does. Most likely, we'll get something midway between them.
:^P
The GOFAI idea that human cognition is a matter of disembodied symbol processing is dead, and good riddance. However, our computers remain most useful as symbol processing engines, not as the more complex kinds of massively parralel connection engines that most people think brains are. We can get computers to emulate that kind of brain functionality, but only on a very limited scale compared to the human mind. Human-equal parralel machines are not just around the corner, so we have to augment the connectionist systems we have with symbol processing facilities.
The kind of project that interests me is a system that uses XML formats to provide clear semantics on the web, and connectionist methods to make judgements about how to act in response to those symbols. A system, for instance, that can scan an XML resource for information about rock concerts or movie listings, and having learned in more connectionist ways the preferences of the user (both in terms of costs, scheduling and personal taste) can inform them of events they might like to see, perhaps even going so far as to make tentative reservations when it's very confident.
The same kind of system could be used to solve library research problems. An XML document structures data semantically enough that a connectionist system can make quick, fairly superficial judgements about the contents and how they relate to the research needs of its users. It can then do more indepth readings of the highest confidence documents, leading to better sources and new documents. In the end, it can provide the documents to users and assist them when there are gaps in their knowledge by pointing them to the document that fills the gap.
The killer ap for AI would be automatic translation. Since that's my field, I don't think it's somewhere you ought to go without a strong knowledge of linguistics, and of the past failures in the field. I have some ideas, but that's what my PhD is going to be about.
Corporations do essential, absolutely necessary things. They collect taxes, enforce standards, make the enforcement of decent labour standards possible, and most importantly integrate complex chains of production in a relatively economically efficient way.
Every industrialised economy, even the command economies of the former eastern bloc, had some kind of institution that functioned like a modern firm. They have had a variety of names, and a variety of legal definitions and statuses, but the basic machinery of management, division of labour, and intertwined responsibility have always been there.
The persistent failure of alternative formulations suggests that the modern firm is an institution unlikely to go away, and that it is undesireable to replace it.
The real problems revolve around who owns the firms, who operates them, and who regulates them, and in the end, what purposes they are designed and allowed to serve.
I agree that the corporation's ideology is "profitability is society's dominant goal," and that that is a poor ideology, recognised as such by nearly everyone. As B. F. Skinner pointed out, we do good because good is rewarded, and we do bad because bad is rewarded. I'm not so sure this is true in such a simple way for individuals, but Skinner's dictum recapitulates the essense of natural selection. If long life and growth are the rewards of profits, organisations will be structured to seek profits at the expense of all else. They have to, because if they don't other organisations will displace them in the ecology of human affairs.
Individualism at all costs isn't the answer. Without organising structures, every man and woman must depend on themselves for all their needs. It may be a sort of freedom, but it is the freedom of the caveman: the freedom to die alone when the machinery of society grins to a halt.
There are alternatives. Rethinking the nature of ownership and the rights of labour has been the project of various liberal philosophies for two centuries or more. And much progress has been made. It is no longer possible to own another human in most places. Societies generally recognise that the structure of firms creates uneven dependencies and pass laws to ensure greater balance. Until recently, social insurance was a value of such great importance that even the demand for economic efficiency was considered secondary to it. These programmes were, and are, successful. The level of public wealth available in the industrialised world would never have materialised without it.
An objection to the commodification of public culture is the single strongest thread of dissent in recent years. In days past, it was the commodification of labour that provoked rebellion, but today it's mostly culture. Both are undoubtedly bad things, but both can be amended.
Karl Marx prescribed the only solution to the commodification of labour by demanding that the means of production belong to the workers. Although his specific programme is quite dated and less applicable to the modern world, the basic tenet remains strong.
Take a look at Silicon Valley. One of the major factors in the success of the high-tech employment model is the liberal distribution of stock to employees and the relatively flat managerial hierarchies that insure local decision-making. Workers control those firms to an extent rarely seen in the "old" economy. Notions like total quality management and job rotation also serve to bring the workers more and more into the management, and indirectly into the ownership of companies. Surveys suggest that partially and wholly worker-owned companies out-perform fully private competitors on the average.
This suggests that the basic Marxist prescription remains the most effective way to undermine these old injustices. When a corporation must be held responsible to the immediate interests of a crosssection of the public, it acts quite differently. The evil done by self-perpetualting boardroom oligarchies becomes less and less likely when many of its own owners stand to be damaged.
The more contentious issue is the commodification of culture. No unified theory exists to deal with this problem, however, I note that it's scope diminishes when diverse and independent media are actively supported. The biggest music successes often start with underground recording, distributed independently, like the early Metallica, or grunge music. In some countries, publicly owned television stations with little or no advertising are able to set standards for content and culture that others must strive to equal in order to make a profit. Outside the US, most media markets support more than one newspaper.
Developing networks that insure the funding and representation of independent media, limitations on advertising and perhaps even moving away from advertising as a model of financing for media might serve that purpose.
But attacking corporations for doing exactly the things we reward them for is senseless. We need the corporations in order to support industrialised society and we can't change that. We can change what we reward them for doing.
I approve and appreciate the sentiment behind this proposal, although in the end it's a bit like approving of Mom, the flag and apple pie.
The devil is in the details, and this Oxfam document is sparse on those. Some of them are simply parts of existing activist programmes: a hostility towards WIPO and WTO that is partially, but not wholly, merited, encouraging Open Sourse ideas and use, a demand for patent reform particularly with regard to biotechnology. Citing this new French legal proposal to require governments to favour open source and computing standards in contracting is novel, and a good thing.
However, intellectual property reform is a very painful issue. It is one thing to say that the existing system is dysfunctional, it's quite another to propose alternatives. The initial intent of patents was to insure that inventions would eventually enter the public domain by offering that the inventor a monopoly on its use for a fixed time. For all the grousing, I've seen few real plans for a new IP scheme. The only thing I've seen that seems realistic to me is to reduce the length of patent and copyright protections, and possibly to give different kinds of patents different lengths and abolishing some kinds of patents and ownership rights with regard to biology and software. Before lending my support the cause of patent reform, I need to see a real programme.
Copyright globally corresponds to the life of the author, plus a few more years, or 70-90 years for works-for-hire. Shortening those protections very much is a lost battle, those norms have been in place in most of the world for a very long time. Acting to make sure they aren't extended any further is a better platform. (Disney basically bought an extra 20 years of ownership of Mickey Mouse by paying off Congressmen in the '98 elections.) The expansion of fair-use and enshrining some sort of educational and library exemption is another viable goal. Beyond that, I'm not sure how much can genuinely be done about copyrights.
Open disclosure of WIPO and WTO processes is probably a good thing, within limits. Part of what the WTO exists to protect is the ability of members to come to an agreement before taking trade issues to arbitration. That can be useful and important.
Before lighting in too hard on the WTO, take a look at the treaty itself. It enshrines quite a few exemptions for the third world. A winable fight might be to get some of those exemptions expanded rather than trying to undermine the organisation completely.
The importance of industrial standards is a good cause to rally around, even if it isn't a very romantic one. Their function is to ensure that open, easily obtainable standards apply to products and services, favouring third world industries in the same way that open Internet and computing standards favour small, non-Microsoft vendors. One of the functions of the WTO is to ensure that standards enacted by governments are open and available, so that countries can't create barriers to entry of exactly the kind Microsoft makes.
A good look at the global standards process would be a good education for a activist with this kind of agenda.
Reforms of this type will take place in an international arena in the future. Abolishing the WIPO and WTO just moves the problem to some new international organisation. Hijacking the existing institutions has often proved more effective for revolutionaires.
The Left has always had cosmopolitanism on its side, and it bothers me to see new nationalisms and isolationisms become causes with activist support. Global entitiies have played an important role in the liberal causes of the past, and they can again in the future.
...and maybe the only worthwhile thing to take from this debate:
e wman-n-1.html )
'One reason an acknowledgement of both past and present regulation is needed is so we can move public debate away from the false "should there be public policy" question to the real question of "which public policy" should be promoted?' (Newman at http://www.prospect.org/controversy/open_source/n
Intellectual experiments in anarchy work about as well as they always have: they don't. The 'Net is now a matter of public interest and public policy, and people need to stop pretending no one in government or law enforcement knows it exists. Telecommunications have been regulated in every country since the turn of the century, an it is hard to see how universal access, limited tolls and extensive innovation and research would ever have happened without it.
There will be laws that specifically regulate internet access and standards and computer design and construction, just as there are for telephones, TV's, radios, cars and the postal system. This is inevitable and in the past turned out to mostly be a good thing. We can have stupid internet policies, but we can't pretend there will be no policies.
Remember, France has very low inflation, as low as the US if not lower over the last few years. The money supply isn't increasing much, besides which, changes in money supply have relatively little direct effect on market valuations. During the high inflation 70's in the US, corporate incomes mostly rose with inflation, but market values didn't start rising significantly until Volker slowed inflation down in the 80's.
Corporate incomes have been generally up in France, but it will take a while for me to find statistics.
Lessee here... according to the CIA World Factbook (a less than ideal source for info, but it's what I have on hand) France has per capita around US$23,000 and grew 3% in 1998 and 1999. It has a somewhat better income distribution, so even the lower GDP per capita translates into comparable incomes to the US for most of the middle class. The French stock market has grown faster than the S&P for the last couple of years. France is currently the biggest producer of high-tech exports in the EU, and is second only to the UK in the amount of foreign direct investment it has received in the last seven years. France has a lower external debt per capita than the US, a trade surplus (America has a trade deficit), low inflation, a smaller percentage of the population in poverty than the US, a higher literacy rate, more people with full health insurance...
If France is a country with severe economic problems, I only wish the rest of the world was so badly off.
...try saying it's interesting, but not necessarily a big deal.
I'm a nanosceptic. As interesting as this sort of technology is, I don't think it is quite the miracle cure for everything or a source of world-ending destruction. Too many things have billed themselves that way in the past and haven't lived up to their promises.
First of all, read Bill Joy's article on Wired, and some of the follow up articles, like the ones at Salon.com. I heard him speak at a symposium at Stanford a couple weeks ago. If a transcript is on the web read it too. You look a lot better on these essays if you at least read the public press on the subject.
Right now, the public press is all there is. Very little research in nanotechnology as such makes it into the journals. The field is awfully young.
Now, doomsayers and optimists alike see nanotech as way of handling large problems by using self-replicating machines to, for example, convert chemicals into more useful or less toxic ones, or to cure diseases like cancer by simply attacking the cancer directly and non-invasively. The doomsayers also warn of nano-infections killing millions and turning ecosystems into sludge.
However, nature hes been throwing the worst it has to offer in self-replicating nanotechnology at living organisms for billions of years, and most of the time we live through it. I am sceptical that humans will build machines as resilient as those nature provides anytime soon.
This doesn't eliminate medical potential - we might flood a body with short-lived machines designed to hunt down a cancer to do some other specific work, and let them run until the immune system kills them. I just don't think we'll see artificial diseases killing people off - human immune systems are much too good for that and the real world is a very caustic, destructive place for tiny machines. I suspect the average toxic waste dump is also going to be a poor place to deploy nanotech.
Biotech is much more useful and dangerous in that respect, since nature has already done most of the work of constructing self-replicating machines that can survive in nature.
I'm not convinced that any of the recent advances in nanotech lead to self-replication at all. Remember, we can't even build reliably self-replicating machines at any scale. Why miniaturisation should make this easier is something I don't understand.
Nanotech has a lot of potential for manufacturing, no doubt about that, but household replicators strike me as a bit far-fetched, although perhaps not impossible. The most immediate benefit I expect to see is the construction of largely unspecialised factories that are able to retool to a new product or new specifications in a matter of days or even hours. This is a trend already underway, but I think nanotech could make it a lot easier.
The result might be a manufactuing process not unlike the software design process. Someone makes a design, tests it in a computer, weeds out the bugs, and distant factories are able to assemble the product from nothing but the plans. Perhaps it's time to discuss open source industrial design? GNU four-slice toaster v6.2? Weirder things have happened.
Another major area for realistic progress is brain research. At present, a lot of neurological research depends on a small number of patients with a form of epilepsy that can only be cured by opening the skull and operating directly on the brain while the patient is awake. With nanotechnology, we could do even more direct and small scale research on the brain without ever having to open the skull at all.
But, I'm sceptical of claims of doom and claims that nanotech can solve all our problems. There are no ultimate solutions.
I'm still pretty sceptical of such high populations in the British Isles. No, exact sizes can't be deduced from physical artifacts or bodily remains directly, but the country ought to be fairly litered with neolithic human corpses if it were true. The level of agricultural efficiency required would be incredible for a neolithic society. Even very advanced civilisations with labour intensive agriculture, like those of 15th century China, were unable to support such large populations. I can't believe that Stone Age tribes could do it. I believe that was your central point.
As Bill Nye the Science Guy says, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The evidence of larger areas under cultivation in earlier times is not sufficient evidence of larger populations when technology is taken into account.
Be careful in trying to use the legends of ancient peoples as evidence in favour of specific events. Velikovsky got into trouble for exactly that, and now he's remembered as a complete quack.
There is no secure evidence about the prevalence of Rh- types in Europe before the Romans arrived. We do know roughly the sixth century a.D. distribution of Basques, and can make some good guesses about how blood types were distributed in Roman times from that data. Cavalli-Sforza makes a good case for the recession of the pre-Celt European population in the face of invasion by Rh+ types, but connecting this with Celtic and Germanic myth is a tricky and unreliable business.
I'm having trouble following your argument about hidden recessives. The reason hybrid infertility happens in horse breeding is that the new hybrid population is aggressively inbred by the horse breeder. That's part of the standard procedure for improving a breed. Among humans, this doesn't generally occur. The likelihood of hidden recessives appearing in the post contact population is somewhat lower than in the pre-contact population, because of its now greater genetic diversity.
I'm very familiar with genetics, and with both Dawkins and Cavalli-Sforza, but I am unaware of an analysis of any real world population, other than the Basques with their special circumstances, that produced the kind of overall reduction in fertility you describe. The reduction in sickle-cell anemia, for example, among North American blacks compared to Africans is strong evidence of the reduced power of unreinforced recessives in mixed populations. Furthermore, this analysis neglects the positive effects of outside genes, for example the increase in lactose tolerance among Mexicans after the Spanish conquest. Useful traits in the new population are likely to be greater stimulus to fertility than the new fatal recessives are.
The African American population is not known to have suffered dramatically reduced fertility in any period of its history, and birth rates for that population are well documented by owners trying to keep accounts of their property. Mexicans had a sharp population reduction in the period surrounding the arrival of the conquistadors, but the blame falls clearly on smallpox, not hybrid infertility.
The author of the website you link to makes the claim that he has evidence of exactly that sort of reduction in fertility in populations in contact, but never cites anything. I'm sceptical that it exists, but I'm willing to consider it if you have a reference.
Interbreeding does not generally reduce infertility - all the evidence I know of shows the opposite in general, if any difference at all.
Mitochondrial DNA studies of the British public reflect that Britan's many invaders mostly came without their women. Roman soldiers came, got local girlfriends and spread their sperm throughout the island. Viking men came in the long ships, raped and pillaged, and either stayed or left, but never brought their women. Getting invaded usually means the invaders are soldiers almost never accompanied by their women.
A larger study would have shown that Scandianvia, and especially Iceland, are full of mitochonrial DNA from Ireland, because the Vikings came, took women slaves, and dragged them off to wherever they lived. This didn't lower their birthrate one bit. France is full of invader's genes - the country's very name comes from the name of a Germanic tribe that took over in the sixth century (or was it the seventh? I forget.) Before the Germans, Celtic Gaul was invaded by Romans, and one out of every three modern Frenchmen counts a foreigner among his or her great-grandparents. Yet French fertility didn't fall off until after WWII.
America is quite racially mixed. Few contemporary Americans count a single European ethnic group among their ancestors, and a surprising number count non-Europeans among them. The black and hispanic populations in the US are well known to have higher fertility than whites on the average, yet they are the both much more likely to have mixed ancestors.
The only example I know of where interbreeding reduced fertility in general is the Basque country, and there is a simple and straighforward reason why: Basques tended traditionally to be Rh negative. Rh syndrome does reduce fertility.
As for carrying capacity in neolithic times, it may be higher than was thought, but it still wasn't very high. Agricultural practices didn't change much for thousands of years until the rise of mechanisation. The amount of food produced, and the island's carrying capacity can't be deduced by comparing the amount of land under cultivation then with the amount now. Modern agriculture is far more intese than anything possible in the neolithic era.
There is no chance at all that the British Isles supported a hundred million people at any time in its history.
I, for one, would pay to hear that duet sing "Blame Canada."
We have more leisure that people did in 1900. I'm not claiming nothing has changed. I am claiming that the luxury each generation imagines will follow on the heels of "the next big thing" always turns out to be a mirage.
We have slightly more income equality than they did. At least 3/4 of the people in the bottom quitile of American income remain there for at least 20 years. No one has done longer range studies than that for lack of data. The study you are refering to discussed the bottom 20% of income tax payers, and even it seriously massaged the data to get that result. Class mobility is less than it was in 1950. It wasn't a BLS study, it was a conservative think tank - I can't remember which - that paid for it.
Today's poor own cars, and in 1900 the poor owned hundreds of acres of farmland. They had razors and ovens, which they didn't have in 1800. They were still poor, and so are today's poor. Poverty is measured in avoidable misery, not misery against an absolute standard.
There hasn't been any significant increase in public health in the US since 1980. There has been since 1900, but since the vaccination era, we have also failed to kill off polio (which we could have done), started to see a resurgence of TB, discovered whole new classes of bugs never known to exist and for which we have no treatment. A utopia of health is still in the future. As late as 1960, many people imagined that by 2000, we would be winning against the bugs.
No, misery ain't what it used to be, but the optimists of 1900 were way off the mark. We still live in a world of avoidable misery. That is the failure of the technological utopianism of 1900, and it shows every sign of becoming the failure of technological utopianists today.
Imagine a science-fiction writer in 1900 looking forward to the level of productivity and automation of 2000. What would he write? Probably nothing very different from what Sterling wrote.
History isn't over, neither is economics. In 1900, many intellectuals forsaw a future of peace and leisure, where everyone would be rich. It didn't happen for them, and it won't happen for us. Conflict is plentiful; markets still fail; governments still fail; there's no real movement towards better medicine for most, much less all, of the people; economists are still better at telling you what went wrong than at predicting what will go wrong next; and wealth still accumulates at the top (even more than it used to).
Recent history is full of the failed attempts of those who believed that markets would act rationally. The LTCM collapse is just the latest in a long line of failed "systems" for beating the averages. People know that won't work at the race track or the blackjack table, and Sterling should know better than to believe it's any different for markets.
Each era's political and economic certainies are the next's discredited superstitions. Don't be so sure it's any different for capitalism various stripes and schools than it was for Marxism's. Sterling's prediction of the end of the Third World at the hands of the 'Net is as premature as the same prediction was at the end of imperialism.
Sterling's discomfort with the commodification of everything is today's problem. I'm already burned out on the Digital Revolution - so are most people. Sterling's anti-historicism - scepticism that progress is leading somewhere - is also today's issue. It was also the issue in 1900, and 1800, and 1600, and 1000 for all I know. We struggle on, finding meaning in history only when it's over.
The real issue is the lack of willingness to work for progress. We don't have convincing goals, or even real expectations that the world can and will improve if we work for it. That is where our malaise comes from - the belief that as much as the world sucks we can't do any better.
I fear Sterling isn't doing much to fight that notion, and the only good excuse for it is that no one else is either.
Archiving is important. I'm actually surprised at the number of /.'ers who just want to let the data die. I remember taking a tour of the Magninot Line in France. Having proven useless as a military outpost, the entire chain of caverns was converted to document storage decades ago. In a thousand years, archeologists will be able to substantially reconstruct live in twentieth century France. Information about births, deaths and marriages need never be lost. Detailed census reports can be preserved so historians can make new theories about the social behaviour of man. I think this is a fairly important task. Imagine how much easier it would be to reconstruct human history if past civilisation hadn't kept shoddy records.
:^) I doubt it would ever be profitable, but museums, even working ones, rarely are. Although who knows? A Commodore 64 could be an objet d'art in a hundred years, just as ugly African masks are now.
I suspect the problem of file formats is less serious than people make it out to be. A well-documented format should be reconstructable indefinitely. Few software companies don't document their file formats. Even without documentation, it ought to be easier than reconstructing dead languages. We learned to read Egyptian hieroglyphs primarily from one attested translation and a lot of careful deduction. Given a thousand Word 6 documents, I think a good computer archeologist ought to be able to construct a program to open and edit them.
Museums of old hardware, and perhaps some sort of custom computer factor to make ancient hardware strikes me as a good idea. It could be like blacksmiths at SCA festivals, "Ye Olde ASIC Mill."
The real problem strikes as the one most heavily emphasised in the article: decaying media. I suspect the best solution with presently forseeable technology would be to preserve data in crystalised DNA. Even in nature, DNA takes centuries to decay, and if it were crystalised and kept somewhere cool and dry, it would likely last for millenia. Encoding a document onto a billion strands of DNA weighs basically nothing and it would be a very highly redundant storage system.
It isn't easy to do right now, but I suspect that technology is right around the corner and probably only requires a little bit of research money to become practical.