Stanley Kaplan has a pretty good reputation for increasing SAT results. It is not free. Is it better than the prep course offered at your school? I don't know. But it does have a curriculum and teachers aimed straight at the SAT.
Ad hominem. Heck, I'm an anti-testing radical produced by a system in which I tested very well. I was 1550 on the combined SAT (pre-inflation) and scored perfect on the GRE (I can't remember if they went to 800 or 900 any more--it was 15 years ago). I even got a 600 on the Spanish ACT, though I can't read a Spanish newspaper much less carry on a conversation.
What I learned from doing very well on tests was that they didn't test anything that meant anything. I never studied or prepped. I'm just a naturally good test taker. It's a skill. But not a very useful one. You're right in that it certainly does correlate with college academic success; of course, I did better in courses which based the grades on tests than I did in courses which required essays or lab work.
Have you ever heard of the Chitlin's Test? It was an intelligence test designed for black culture, using questions and scenarios which were more likely to be familiar to them. On that test, blacks tended to outscore whites.
Was that test racist? Or are the usual tests, written by members of the majority culture, racist? Is it even possible to write an intelligence test which does not favor some parts of society over others?
Anybody who is interested in this subject should read Stephen Jay Gould's Mismeasure of Man.
We don't like the SAT test, since its results disagree with our vision of a fair and perfect world. Therefore, the test is defective and must be eliminated.
I don't know who you mean by "we," but that's not why I don't like it. I don't like it because the connection between what the SAT actually tests and anything that actually matters, such as intelligence, is low. The SAT is not even a particularly good predictor of good grades in college, and good grades in college is a pretty bad predictor of success in life.
If we had a good test for intelligence, I'd be all for it. But intelligence is not a single quantity, and I'm not sure such a test is even possible.
Anybody interested in this subject should read Stephen Jay Gould's Mismeasure of Man.
An excellent predictor of success on the SAT is taking an SAT prep course. Those are only available to students with enough money and time available to take them. In other words, the SAT is already biased against the poorest regions. Eliminating the SAT is not going to solve that. But keeping the SAT is not going to solve that either.
The people who study and work hard to perform better on the SATs will tend to get better scores on the SATs than those who slacked off. Guess which two skills are extremely important in relation to getting good grades in college? Studying and working hard. In general (always exceptions) people who study and work hard in college make better grades than those who slack off.
In other words, any old test will do, provided people have to study and work hard to pass it. So why pretend that you are testing something else? We should scrap the Scholastic Aptitude Tests and replace them with the Useless Knowledge Memorization Test.
Anybody interested in this issue should read Stephen Jay Gould's Mismeasure of Man.
I already have my own web site, so if I want to get the information out I can publish my book online for free.
I suppose I could dream about other people buying my book. However, I am the co-author of one technical book, and my father is the author of ten or so, and I've learned a simple truth: most people don't make noticeable amounts of money writing technical books. The few really successful ones are not merely well written, they are well edited, they have good technical review, they are promoted by the publishers, and they are available in bookstores where browsers (the human kind) can encounter them. You aren't talking about any of those services.
(For the record, I received $800 for my role as co-author of GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool. I will get more money if the book sells over 10,000 copies, shortly after pigs start to fly. Considering how much time I put into writing the book, the monetary return was, let us say, noticeably less than my hourly rate for programming. It was worth it just to have a book I can hand to friends and family. But it wouldn't be worth doing it again. And I doubt I would get that feeling of pride if the book were published at a vanity press.)
Now, printing online books on demand is a believable business, since not everybody like to read a computer screen. But you have to work the payments the other way around: you pay the author for the right to print their work on paper, you don't expect the author to pay for the privilege.
Cisco would presumably owe income tax on the money they paid out. Smart employees would buy their options and hold on to them for a year before selling, thus paying long term capital gains tax. The capital gains tax rate is lower than the income tax rate. I don't see how the government will get more money.
Yes, the GPL does permit companies to develop customer applications for internal use without releasing the source to the general public.
In fact, the GPL never requires releasing the source to the general public. It only requires releasing the source to anybody to whom you give a binary. Of course, that person is free to distribute the code further if they choose. But they are not required to do so.
A group of people, or companies, could exchange modified GPL programs without ever releasing the source code to the general public.
This is not a bug. Free software permits source distribution, but it does not require it. Privacy is the other side of the coin of freedom.
I don't know what you mean by proprietary development. I doubt any version of the GPL will prohibit keeping private changes private. I quote from the FSF web site:
You should also have the freedom to make modifications and use them privately in your own work or play, without even mentioning that they exist. If you do publish your changes, you should not be required to notify anyone in particular, or in any particular way.
ESR's presumptousness annoys me so much that when he says that ``we'' support A, then, even if I previously supported A, I'm inclined to switch to supporting not A, just to oppose ESR.
Money is just paper and small pieces of metal. Whatever value it has comes only from that groundwork of society which the original poster was talking about.
Why can't I just print my own money? The technology is not that difficult, and it's probably a lot simpler than working for somebody else. The only thing stopping me is that groundwork of society.
Actually, I lied. These days, money is just a number in a computer at a bank. How does that number get special treatment? What keeps other numbers in other computers from having the same properties? The groundwork of society.
There have been plenty of societies in the past with simpler notions of money, in which there was no paper money and coins were valued at their quantity of precious metal. Those systems don't support particularly robust economies, though, at least not by modern standards. A solid economy requires a universally accepted monetary standard. Where does that come from?
For some reason Slashdot tossed my HTML tags, and I didn't notice. Let's try that again.
I have a hard time believing that serious commitment to a long-term OSS project has that much to do with altruism. If altruism was the case, people would send in kernel patches via anonymous remailers, and someone would have invented a way to have authenticated anonymous CVS.
Huh? Why does altruism require anonymity?
Haven't you ever seen the long lists of donors to a museum or an opera house? Those people are getting a little prestige, but, considering the price they are paying, altruism is still their main motivation. After all, when they give all that money, listing their name seems like the least the recipient can do.
I have a hard time believing that serious commitment to a long-term OSS project has that much to do with altruism. If altruism was the case, people would send in kernel patches via anonymous remailers, and someone would have invented a way to have authenticated anonymous CVS. Huh? Why does altruism require anonymity? Haven't you ever seen the long lists of donors to a museum or an opera house? Those people are getting a little prestige, but, considering the price they are paying, altruism is still their main motivation. After all, when they give all that money, listing their name seems like the least the recipient can do.
The reporting in the NYT makes the original paper seem rather simple-minded. People do not act only from obvious aspects of self-interest such as money and prestige. To characterize the free software movement as an ``economic puzzle'' is to badly misunderstand it.
There are many reasons for people to engage in free software, and others here have pointed some of them out. I won't try to cover them here. I'll just point out one that doesn't get mentioned much.
Many people volunteer at soup kitchens. Nobody tries to figure out the economic motive for this. The reasons are more or less obvious, and generally have nothing to do with money or prestige.
If I volunteer at a soup kitchen, I help maybe 100 people in a small but significant way.
If I write and distribute a piece of free software, I help maybe 100,000 people, maybe many more. The way that I help them is even smaller and less significant, but there are a lot more of them.
Also, the people I help are more my peers, and programming is just plain more fun than doling out soup.
Also, my soup kitchen charity helps people once. My free software charity helps people for years.
Is it really a puzzle that I work on free software?
The Cluetrain Manifesto takes something interesting--the way the Internet makes it easy for people to talk to people they would otherwise never meet--and turns it into something boring--a new way to sell stuff.
That's like saying that the most exciting thing about television was that people making products could now finally show what they looked like in action without having to knock on your door.
Look at their very first thesis: ``Markets are conversations.'' First of all, I doubt it. There are probably ten different organizations who bring tomatoes from Mexico to the local supermarket where I buy them, and I sure don't spend much time talking, or even listening, to any of them.
But even if markets are conversations, guess what? Conversations are not markets.
There are a lot of interesting things to be said about conversations on the Internet, and about the benefits and drawbacks of virtual communities. Compared to what could be said, the Cluetrain Manifesto is pretty dull.
That's not a key point, that's a key flaw. MIST was specifically designedt o replace the subjective judgement of individual judges with the statistical judgement of a very large number of people (1 million or more).
But that isn't what it does. The Turing test relies on an intelligent examiner to judge intelligence. You have replaced the intelligent examiner with a simple series of questions. The intelligent examiner will consider the answers to previous questions when asking new questions. You've lost that.
If I steal your entire database and build it into my program, I can write a program which does very well on your test, but which nobody would call either intelligent or conscious.
What about issues which people don't agree on, like abortion, the death penalty, or whether computers can ever be conscious? How are you going to implement those as MindPixels? (I'm not trying to trip you up here--you must have thought about these issues, and I am curious what your answer is.)
Who cares about those. They vary from person to person and life to life. The goal here is to model an average person. Not a specific person. MIST only considers consensus knowledge, that which is the same across all people. The rest is fluff.
It may be fluff to you, but I don't think I could consider a program which didn't have any specific beliefs to have any claim to consciousness.
I don't see any significant advance over the CYC project. It's a worthy goal, but I don't see any path to consciousness here.
Presenting MindPixels to a system is a Binary Turing Test (see my article: K. C. McKinstry, The Minimum Intelliget Signal Test, An Alternative Turing Test, Canadian Artificial Intelligence, Issue 41), that is much more objective than a traditional TT.
I unfortunately don't have a copy of Canadian Artifical Intelligence lying around. But I do know that a key point of the Turing test is that it is not objective. Consciousness, whatever else it may be, is inherently subjective. Someday we will understand consciousness sufficiently to be able to make an objective test, or to know why such a test is impossible. Until that day, the only meaningful way to test for consciousness is to use subjective tests.
Your goal should be to try to convince a bunch of intelligent people that your system is conscious. You shouldn't try to pass an objective test, particularly not one you wrote yourself.
Thus, if I get a number back that is statistically indistinguishable from human, I must logically assume the system is human. That is feels, lives a life and is conscious.
That's a pretty big leap. A conscious human run as a simple computer program would probably go nuts due to lack of sensory input. Is your program going to emulate that?
A giant corpus of MindPixels collected and validated from a large number of people is a digitial model of self and environment.
What about issues which people don't agree on, like abortion, the death penalty, or whether computers can ever be conscious? How are you going to implement those as MindPixels? (I'm not trying to trip you up here--you must have thought about these issues, and I am curious what your answer is.)
Mutually Assured Destruction only works if all parties involved are rational.
It more or less worked for nuclear warfare for a few decades because only large governments could build a nuclear bomb, and governments are composed of a sufficiently large number of people that they are at least not completely irrational. (But what if Nazi Germany had had the atomic bomb? They would have used it at the end. Interestingly, some say Heisenberg lied to prevent them from getting it, which I suppose supports my argument about large numbers of people.)
Once nanotechnology works, individuals will be able to use it. Was the Unabomber rational when he decided to send out letter bombs? What if he had been able to send out deadly nanites instead?
You don't describe an algorithm for consciousness, you describe an algorithm for an intelligent encyclopedia.
If you want to develop artificial consciousness, you need to have some kind of plausible theory as to what consciousness is, or why it doesn't really exist (i.e., is merely an illusion of some sort). I don't know what consciousness is, but I don't think it is merely a vast and detailed knowledge of facts, nor is it an ability to discuss them.
Disclaimer: I know some Microsoft employees, although I don't know the precise details of their financial arrangements.
I appreciate what you are saying, but I think you are tending to exaggerate the downside and minimize the upside.
First, a general point: Microsoft does a lot of hiring straight out of college. (That's part of the reason why they periodically announce that they've invented something which the rest of us have known about for a long time: they have a lot of people who don't have any work experience outside of Microsoft.) Also, Microsoft is in Seattle, not Silicon Valley, so they don't have to pay outrageous Silicon Valley salaries.
When I said that Microsoft was getting their employees to buy stock, I meant it. Microsoft is offering stock options in lieu of salary, and employees are accepting them. They accept it because they think the stock will go up. Nobody has to work at Microsoft.
I suspect that ``tiny fraction of the stock price'' is because the stock has gone up so much in the past couple of years, and most employees are still getting their stock options at the older price. I don't know for sure, though.
If a lot of Microsoft employees are living on siginificant margin loans, then they are fools, and so are the people lending them money. Of course, it might be happening. I don't really know. But a sensible person wouldn't put up more than about 30% of their stock on a loan, so that they could handle a severe drop.
If people lose faith in Microsoft stock, then it will fall. If the stock price drops for a while--that has happened already, after all--people will sit tight as long as they believe it will go up again. Of course the stock might go into freefall--but why would it? It's more likely to just slow down and plateau. Employees will slowly sell out, the stock might drop slowly over time, but I don't see any reason it would tip over into a free fall.
They are being paid "mediocre at best" (from the article); the millionaires are people who got in a long time ago, under more favorable conditions, and also have *many* years of cumulative stock options.
The most certain way to become a millionaire in the last decade in the U.S. has been to work at Microsoft. Microsoft grows steadily in revenue, but not in number of employees. Those people who got in a long time ago are more than half the company.
it's generally agreed that MS is an unpleasant plkace to work.
I don't concede that, actually. Microsoft is no worse than any Silicon Valley company. In fact, in some ways, it is better.
it's even more unpleasant to be bought by - see Cringeley- and that was where they got most of their new product. it'll be a lot harder to keep up with mediocre new programmers, far fewere willing sellers (the purchase targets aren't IPO'd; there are no stockholder pressures) from which to buy new technologies/features!
They bought their core products a long time ago. In my opinion, they already work with mediocre new programmers. It's been a while since they made a successful acquisition. In short, I don't think this is dependent on the stock price, nor do I think it is new.
Your statement that "investors like it" is *equivalent* to "the stock is rising" and will no longer be valid if it falls for more than a short period.
No, the two statements are not equivalent, except perhaps for people who rely solely on technical analysis. Most investors try to look at company fundamentals. Since I don't see a runaway spiral of destruction if the stock drops, I don't think Microsoft's fundamentals are that closely tied to their stock price.
Consider this: Microsoft does buy back some of their stock, to avoid excessive dilution. If the stock price falls, it will be cheaper for them to buy it back.
Basically, Microsoft is getting their employees to pay them to buy stock. There's no Ponzi scheme here, though.
Microsoft's employees won't all go broke when Microsoft stock starts to fall. They're still getting cash salaries. They just won't become millionaires as they do today.
When Microsoft's stock starts to fall, they may find it harder to hire good people. But that will take a long time to affect the company--we're not talking about any sort of crash.
Sensible investors understand how Microsoft manages their stock options. They then look at Microsoft's monopoly and conclude that the company is likely to do pretty well in any case.
Of course investors like to see patents. It tells them that what you have invented is unique and potentially valuable. Most investors don't have the technical ability to evaluate an invention on its own merits; a patent shows that somebody else--the Patent and Trademark Office--thinks that the invention is worthwhile. You and I know that the Patent and Trademark Office hands out software patents to any idiot, but people outside the software industry don't know that, and in my experience most don't believe it without plenty of evidence.
Patents also look good as a marketing mechanism: slapping a patent number on your box is a good marketing move, because, again, your customers don't realize how easy it is to get a software patent.
My point is simple: don't condemn Google, or anybody else who holds a software patent, until they do something worth condemning.
Slashdot Mirror
Stanley Kaplan has a pretty good reputation for increasing SAT results. It is not free. Is it better than the prep course offered at your school? I don't know. But it does have a curriculum and teachers aimed straight at the SAT.
Ad hominem. Heck, I'm an anti-testing radical produced by a system in which I tested very well. I was 1550 on the combined SAT (pre-inflation) and scored perfect on the GRE (I can't remember if they went to 800 or 900 any more--it was 15 years ago). I even got a 600 on the Spanish ACT, though I can't read a Spanish newspaper much less carry on a conversation.
What I learned from doing very well on tests was that they didn't test anything that meant anything. I never studied or prepped. I'm just a naturally good test taker. It's a skill. But not a very useful one. You're right in that it certainly does correlate with college academic success; of course, I did better in courses which based the grades on tests than I did in courses which required essays or lab work.
Have you ever heard of the Chitlin's Test? It was an intelligence test designed for black culture, using questions and scenarios which were more likely to be familiar to them. On that test, blacks tended to outscore whites.
Was that test racist? Or are the usual tests, written by members of the majority culture, racist? Is it even possible to write an intelligence test which does not favor some parts of society over others?
Anybody who is interested in this subject should read Stephen Jay Gould's Mismeasure of Man.
We don't like the SAT test, since its results disagree with our vision of a fair and perfect world. Therefore, the test is defective and must be eliminated.
I don't know who you mean by "we," but that's not why I don't like it. I don't like it because the connection between what the SAT actually tests and anything that actually matters, such as intelligence, is low. The SAT is not even a particularly good predictor of good grades in college, and good grades in college is a pretty bad predictor of success in life.
If we had a good test for intelligence, I'd be all for it. But intelligence is not a single quantity, and I'm not sure such a test is even possible.
Anybody interested in this subject should read Stephen Jay Gould's Mismeasure of Man.
An excellent predictor of success on the SAT is taking an SAT prep course. Those are only available to students with enough money and time available to take them. In other words, the SAT is already biased against the poorest regions. Eliminating the SAT is not going to solve that. But keeping the SAT is not going to solve that either.
The people who study and work hard to perform better on the SATs will tend to get better scores on the SATs than those who slacked off. Guess which two skills are extremely important in relation to getting good grades in college? Studying and working hard. In general (always exceptions) people who study and work hard in college make better grades than those who slack off.
In other words, any old test will do, provided people have to study and work hard to pass it. So why pretend that you are testing something else? We should scrap the Scholastic Aptitude Tests and replace them with the Useless Knowledge Memorization Test.
Anybody interested in this issue should read Stephen Jay Gould's Mismeasure of Man.
Why would I pay to have my own book printed?
I already have my own web site, so if I want to get the information out I can publish my book online for free.
I suppose I could dream about other people buying my book. However, I am the co-author of one technical book, and my father is the author of ten or so, and I've learned a simple truth: most people don't make noticeable amounts of money writing technical books. The few really successful ones are not merely well written, they are well edited, they have good technical review, they are promoted by the publishers, and they are available in bookstores where browsers (the human kind) can encounter them. You aren't talking about any of those services.
(For the record, I received $800 for my role as co-author of GNU Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool. I will get more money if the book sells over 10,000 copies, shortly after pigs start to fly. Considering how much time I put into writing the book, the monetary return was, let us say, noticeably less than my hourly rate for programming. It was worth it just to have a book I can hand to friends and family. But it wouldn't be worth doing it again. And I doubt I would get that feeling of pride if the book were published at a vanity press.)
Now, printing online books on demand is a believable business, since not everybody like to read a computer screen. But you have to work the payments the other way around: you pay the author for the right to print their work on paper, you don't expect the author to pay for the privilege.
And nothing says backwards-compatible-lovin like working on a file with a creation date over a decade ago.
There are plenty of files in gcc which have creation dates of 1987. I didn't check emacs, but there might be some even older files there.
Cisco would presumably owe income tax on the money they paid out. Smart employees would buy their options and hold on to them for a year before selling, thus paying long term capital gains tax. The capital gains tax rate is lower than the income tax rate. I don't see how the government will get more money.
Yes, the GPL does permit companies to develop customer applications for internal use without releasing the source to the general public.
In fact, the GPL never requires releasing the source to the general public. It only requires releasing the source to anybody to whom you give a binary. Of course, that person is free to distribute the code further if they choose. But they are not required to do so.
A group of people, or companies, could exchange modified GPL programs without ever releasing the source code to the general public.
This is not a bug. Free software permits source distribution, but it does not require it. Privacy is the other side of the coin of freedom.
What the heck is the FSF's PR engine? RMS?
I don't know what you mean by proprietary development. I doubt any version of the GPL will prohibit keeping private changes private. I quote from the FSF web site:
ESR's presumptousness annoys me so much that when he says that ``we'' support A, then, even if I previously supported A, I'm inclined to switch to supporting not A, just to oppose ESR.
Money is just paper and small pieces of metal. Whatever value it has comes only from that groundwork of society which the original poster was talking about.
Why can't I just print my own money? The technology is not that difficult, and it's probably a lot simpler than working for somebody else. The only thing stopping me is that groundwork of society.
Actually, I lied. These days, money is just a number in a computer at a bank. How does that number get special treatment? What keeps other numbers in other computers from having the same properties? The groundwork of society.
There have been plenty of societies in the past with simpler notions of money, in which there was no paper money and coins were valued at their quantity of precious metal. Those systems don't support particularly robust economies, though, at least not by modern standards. A solid economy requires a universally accepted monetary standard. Where does that come from?
For some reason Slashdot tossed my HTML tags, and I didn't notice. Let's try that again.
I have a hard time believing that serious commitment to a long-term OSS project has that much to do with altruism. If altruism was the case, people would send in kernel patches via anonymous remailers, and someone would have invented a way to have authenticated anonymous CVS.
Huh? Why does altruism require anonymity?
Haven't you ever seen the long lists of donors to a museum or an opera house? Those people are getting a little prestige, but, considering the price they are paying, altruism is still their main motivation. After all, when they give all that money, listing their name seems like the least the recipient can do.
I have a hard time believing that serious commitment to a long-term OSS project has that much to do with altruism. If altruism was the case, people would send in kernel patches via anonymous remailers, and someone would have invented a way to have authenticated anonymous CVS. Huh? Why does altruism require anonymity? Haven't you ever seen the long lists of donors to a museum or an opera house? Those people are getting a little prestige, but, considering the price they are paying, altruism is still their main motivation. After all, when they give all that money, listing their name seems like the least the recipient can do.
I haven't read the original paper.
The reporting in the NYT makes the original paper seem rather simple-minded. People do not act only from obvious aspects of self-interest such as money and prestige. To characterize the free software movement as an ``economic puzzle'' is to badly misunderstand it.
There are many reasons for people to engage in free software, and others here have pointed some of them out. I won't try to cover them here. I'll just point out one that doesn't get mentioned much.
Many people volunteer at soup kitchens. Nobody tries to figure out the economic motive for this. The reasons are more or less obvious, and generally have nothing to do with money or prestige.
If I volunteer at a soup kitchen, I help maybe 100 people in a small but significant way.
If I write and distribute a piece of free software, I help maybe 100,000 people, maybe many more. The way that I help them is even smaller and less significant, but there are a lot more of them.
Also, the people I help are more my peers, and programming is just plain more fun than doling out soup.
Also, my soup kitchen charity helps people once. My free software charity helps people for years.
Is it really a puzzle that I work on free software?
The Cluetrain Manifesto takes something interesting--the way the Internet makes it easy for people to talk to people they would otherwise never meet--and turns it into something boring--a new way to sell stuff.
That's like saying that the most exciting thing about television was that people making products could now finally show what they looked like in action without having to knock on your door.
Look at their very first thesis: ``Markets are conversations.'' First of all, I doubt it. There are probably ten different organizations who bring tomatoes from Mexico to the local supermarket where I buy them, and I sure don't spend much time talking, or even listening, to any of them.
But even if markets are conversations, guess what? Conversations are not markets.
There are a lot of interesting things to be said about conversations on the Internet, and about the benefits and drawbacks of virtual communities. Compared to what could be said, the Cluetrain Manifesto is pretty dull.
Thanks for the pointer to your paper.
That's not a key point, that's a key flaw. MIST was specifically designedt o replace the subjective judgement of individual judges with the statistical judgement of a very large number of people (1 million or more).
But that isn't what it does. The Turing test relies on an intelligent examiner to judge intelligence. You have replaced the intelligent examiner with a simple series of questions. The intelligent examiner will consider the answers to previous questions when asking new questions. You've lost that.
If I steal your entire database and build it into my program, I can write a program which does very well on your test, but which nobody would call either intelligent or conscious.
Who cares about those. They vary from person to person and life to life. The goal here is to model an average person. Not a specific person. MIST only considers consensus knowledge, that which is the same across all people. The rest is fluff.
It may be fluff to you, but I don't think I could consider a program which didn't have any specific beliefs to have any claim to consciousness.
I don't see any significant advance over the CYC project. It's a worthy goal, but I don't see any path to consciousness here.
Presenting MindPixels to a system is a Binary Turing Test (see my article: K. C. McKinstry, The Minimum Intelliget Signal Test, An Alternative Turing Test, Canadian Artificial Intelligence, Issue 41), that is much more objective than a traditional TT.
I unfortunately don't have a copy of Canadian Artifical Intelligence lying around. But I do know that a key point of the Turing test is that it is not objective. Consciousness, whatever else it may be, is inherently subjective. Someday we will understand consciousness sufficiently to be able to make an objective test, or to know why such a test is impossible. Until that day, the only meaningful way to test for consciousness is to use subjective tests.
Your goal should be to try to convince a bunch of intelligent people that your system is conscious. You shouldn't try to pass an objective test, particularly not one you wrote yourself.
Thus, if I get a number back that is statistically indistinguishable from human, I must logically assume the system is human. That is feels, lives a life and is conscious.
That's a pretty big leap. A conscious human run as a simple computer program would probably go nuts due to lack of sensory input. Is your program going to emulate that?
A giant corpus of MindPixels collected and validated from a large number of people is a digitial model of self and environment.
What about issues which people don't agree on, like abortion, the death penalty, or whether computers can ever be conscious? How are you going to implement those as MindPixels? (I'm not trying to trip you up here--you must have thought about these issues, and I am curious what your answer is.)
Mutually Assured Destruction only works if all parties involved are rational.
It more or less worked for nuclear warfare for a few decades because only large governments could build a nuclear bomb, and governments are composed of a sufficiently large number of people that they are at least not completely irrational. (But what if Nazi Germany had had the atomic bomb? They would have used it at the end. Interestingly, some say Heisenberg lied to prevent them from getting it, which I suppose supports my argument about large numbers of people.)
Once nanotechnology works, individuals will be able to use it. Was the Unabomber rational when he decided to send out letter bombs? What if he had been able to send out deadly nanites instead?
Your suggested defense is no defense at all.
You don't describe an algorithm for consciousness, you describe an algorithm for an intelligent encyclopedia.
If you want to develop artificial consciousness, you need to have some kind of plausible theory as to what consciousness is, or why it doesn't really exist (i.e., is merely an illusion of some sort). I don't know what consciousness is, but I don't think it is merely a vast and detailed knowledge of facts, nor is it an ability to discuss them.
Disclaimer: I know some Microsoft employees, although I don't know the precise details of their financial arrangements.
I appreciate what you are saying, but I think you are tending to exaggerate the downside and minimize the upside.
First, a general point: Microsoft does a lot of hiring straight out of college. (That's part of the reason why they periodically announce that they've invented something which the rest of us have known about for a long time: they have a lot of people who don't have any work experience outside of Microsoft.) Also, Microsoft is in Seattle, not Silicon Valley, so they don't have to pay outrageous Silicon Valley salaries.
When I said that Microsoft was getting their employees to buy stock, I meant it. Microsoft is offering stock options in lieu of salary, and employees are accepting them. They accept it because they think the stock will go up. Nobody has to work at Microsoft.
I suspect that ``tiny fraction of the stock price'' is because the stock has gone up so much in the past couple of years, and most employees are still getting their stock options at the older price. I don't know for sure, though.
If a lot of Microsoft employees are living on siginificant margin loans, then they are fools, and so are the people lending them money. Of course, it might be happening. I don't really know. But a sensible person wouldn't put up more than about 30% of their stock on a loan, so that they could handle a severe drop.
If people lose faith in Microsoft stock, then it will fall. If the stock price drops for a while--that has happened already, after all--people will sit tight as long as they believe it will go up again. Of course the stock might go into freefall--but why would it? It's more likely to just slow down and plateau. Employees will slowly sell out, the stock might drop slowly over time, but I don't see any reason it would tip over into a free fall.
They are being paid "mediocre at best" (from the article); the millionaires are people who got in a long time ago, under more favorable conditions, and also have *many* years of cumulative stock options.
The most certain way to become a millionaire in the last decade in the U.S. has been to work at Microsoft. Microsoft grows steadily in revenue, but not in number of employees. Those people who got in a long time ago are more than half the company.
it's generally agreed that MS is an unpleasant plkace to work.
I don't concede that, actually. Microsoft is no worse than any Silicon Valley company. In fact, in some ways, it is better.
it's even more unpleasant to be bought by - see Cringeley- and that was where they got most of their new product. it'll be a lot harder to keep up with mediocre new programmers, far fewere willing sellers (the purchase targets aren't IPO'd; there are no stockholder pressures) from which to buy new technologies/features!
They bought their core products a long time ago. In my opinion, they already work with mediocre new programmers. It's been a while since they made a successful acquisition. In short, I don't think this is dependent on the stock price, nor do I think it is new.
Your statement that "investors like it" is *equivalent* to "the stock is rising" and will no longer be valid if it falls for more than a short period.
No, the two statements are not equivalent, except perhaps for people who rely solely on technical analysis. Most investors try to look at company fundamentals. Since I don't see a runaway spiral of destruction if the stock drops, I don't think Microsoft's fundamentals are that closely tied to their stock price.
Consider this: Microsoft does buy back some of their stock, to avoid excessive dilution. If the stock price falls, it will be cheaper for them to buy it back.
Basically, Microsoft is getting their employees to pay them to buy stock. There's no Ponzi scheme here, though.
Microsoft's employees won't all go broke when Microsoft stock starts to fall. They're still getting cash salaries. They just won't become millionaires as they do today.
When Microsoft's stock starts to fall, they may find it harder to hire good people. But that will take a long time to affect the company--we're not talking about any sort of crash.
Sensible investors understand how Microsoft manages their stock options. They then look at Microsoft's monopoly and conclude that the company is likely to do pretty well in any case.
Patents are good to make your company look good.
Of course investors like to see patents. It tells them that what you have invented is unique and potentially valuable. Most investors don't have the technical ability to evaluate an invention on its own merits; a patent shows that somebody else--the Patent and Trademark Office--thinks that the invention is worthwhile. You and I know that the Patent and Trademark Office hands out software patents to any idiot, but people outside the software industry don't know that, and in my experience most don't believe it without plenty of evidence.
Patents also look good as a marketing mechanism: slapping a patent number on your box is a good marketing move, because, again, your customers don't realize how easy it is to get a software patent.
My point is simple: don't condemn Google, or anybody else who holds a software patent, until they do something worth condemning.
There's nothing wrong with taking out a software patent, in today's crazy world. It's a good way to make yourself look good to investors, for example.
The problem is suing other people based on that patent.