Sure, if you add all the money Microsoft has spent on the XBox (development, production, administrative costs, marketing, advertising, logistics, retail incentives) and divide it by the number of XBoxes sold, you may get a figure that's higher than the price of an XBox in the shops. But that doesn't mean Microsoft loses money on each XBox sold.
Look at it this way: the average retail shop or restaurant takes 2 to 3 years to become profitable. Still that doesn't mean that the restaurant is losing money when you eat there.
We can toss around numbers all day, but these numbers are only meaningful in so far as they persuade the people who actually build supercomputers to copy the Big Mac design. I don't see anybody doing that, so it appears to me that the Big Mac, on the whole, is not very significant.
This is sure to draw a lot of personal responsibility nuts out of the woodwork. Political and ideological dogma compels them to ridicule even the most reasonable doubts or concerns about the glorification of excessive violence in entertainment. Because to them, principle is everything, regardless of where it leads.
Even if we are disgusted with, or just plain tired of, games that idealize wanton violence and nihilistic solipsism, at the end of the day we should just put those feelings aside and join the crowd to cheer on the society that keeps churning them out by the dozens. Because such is freedom, baby.
No, it's a trojan. The difference between a virus and a trojan being that a virus spreads itself as a side effect of normal user behavior (inserting a floppy into the disk drive, running an infected executable,...), whereas a trojan spreads itself by seducing the user into running it.
Obviously you are overly pessimistic about the development possiblities within 50 years.
Yes, I am highly pessimistic. The only areas where AI is making significant progress is where it derives from classical process control and signal processing. And this in itself is more a result of ever increasing processing power and improved component quality than any breakthroughs that originated in the field of AI.
The assumption seems to be that if we just keep improving sensor resolution, filtering algorithms, and actuator accuracy, the difference in degree will somehow become a difference in kind, but there is really no theory which explains how this will happen or why. It's just blind faith, really. People who question the prevailing dogma are ridiculed as suckers who cannot escape their antropomorphic bias, or tree-hugging idealists who refuse to accept materialism.
Meanwhile the knowledge management and reasoning people have been stuck since the eighties solving closed-world Towers of Hanoi type problems, and the A-Life/emergent behavior types continue to present their painfully stupid carpet-cleaners as revolutionary breakthroughs.
I expect that we will become pretty good at mimicking certain human behaviors in the near future (10 to 30 years). The question is whether at that point we will have created intelligence or something more akin to a cargo cult.
Build the robot out of solid steel, make it 15 feet tall, and equip it with a V12 engine as a power source. Make sure to inform the press when you want to body check it, it may be the last anybody ever sees of you.
Seriously though, resilience against the kind of force you are describing is mostly a matter of mass. Certainly the robot shown in the video clips achieves its balance by constantly accounting for the discrepancy in where it expects to be versus where its sensors tell it it actually is: it's too complex to rely on "static algorithms", whatever that means. But it will never withstand a body check because it is too small and powerless. It's simple physics.
First, the practical problems involved in creating a robot that can autonomously participate in human society is far from being solved. People have been saying for over 40 years that the solution was 30 to 50 years in the future. I wouldn't expect it to arrive in a 1000 years, if ever. And yes, I study AI.
Second, as Sartre observed, "Hell is other people". A single super robot on the loose is no match for our puny weapons. To be effective, he'd have to enlist a following. But since he's alone, those followers would have to be recruited amongst humans. But how on Earth is that ever going to happen?
Third, you make it all sound like a video game. "Secure land, natural resources, labour...". You took a page straight out of Civilization, there.
Fourth, there are a lot more pressing issues to worry about than what happens when a breed of superintelligent robots wants to dominate the planet.
Christ, this looks like something that might make a good Simpsons gag. First the robot lamely slides off of a ramp (presumably to gain some speed?), then for no apparent reason it grinds to a halt. It stands motionless for a good 10 seconds before it starts moving again. The arms spread as if it's about to take off, the legs move a little, and it segues into something that looks like water ballet for geriatrics. Ugh. I don't know what to think of this.
But then, give them a few years of income from people willing to pay $200K for "Oh! I got in space for 3 minutes!" and they'll be working on the next level, which is that hotel in LEO you've probably already heard about. And then they (or someone else) will start thinking about hotels on the moon, and you'll get another level of development.
I don't know. This is the kind of reasoning that predicted the videophone and the flying car. Who would have predicted that in 2004 we don't even have supersonic passenger flight?
Anybody who prefers ssh to a web browser should not be commenting on the popular impact of technology.
Audio cassette tapes were popular. Cars are popular. Television is popular.
Gmail isn't popular. It's the latest in a long line of fads designed to appeal to the discerning tastes of a technologically sophisticated vanguard.
This is pretty obvious from its feature set. The gig of storage, the threading, the lean user interface, these are things that appeal to professionals in media and technology. The average Joe, the people that make up the "popular" masses that have you as their self-proclaimed spokesman, they hardly know how much a gigabyte is or why they would need it.
I'm happy gmail works for you and your wife. I'm impressed by gmail's functionality. But the hype surrounding gmail (and I think your assessment of gmail's "popular impact" is just that), owes at least as much to Google's marketing savvy as to its technical prowess.
Yes, these are all advantages of gmail over Yahoo mail or Hotmail. But not over locally running email clients. Why use gmail if there are apps which are completely ad-free, work with any number of great spam filters, are faster than gmail, and work without a network connection?
Re:I've used GMail for a while now...
on
Gmail Adds Features
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Threading of messages has been around for decades. Searching is easy and fast on modern hardware. Storage is perhaps not quite a dime per GB yet but that day is not far off. Spam detection technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the past few years. The only benefit of gmail is that it's accessible anywhere you can access the WWW. That's cool, but personally I much prefer to SSH into my home machine.
I'm not trying to downplay the significance of gmail. It's a very nice application. Even if it wasn't, new sources of throw-away email accounts are always welcome. And it keeps Hotmail in check. But grandiose proclamations like "I believe GMail is the logical next step in how we all do e-mail", well, that's just liturgical bullshit.
When confronted with messy real world problems, the typical nerd's reaction is to withdraw into a closed system fantasy and project that onto the real world.
"If only all email was digitally signed, we would no longer have spam!"
"If only all websites followed W3C specs, we would no longer need Internet Explorer!"
"If only all cars and roads and laws are changed, we would no longer have traffic jams!"
The totalitarian impulse does not manifest itself in a desire for increased government meddling, as you seem to think and certainly suggest, but in the desire to eradicate whatever system is currently in use, and replace it with something totally new, utopian, and "perfect".
Other problem is, that to have a true system like this, non-AI controlled cars cannot be on the road, as they will add randomness to the central control.
It's not that simple. To fully support CSS, for example, Gecko (the page rendering engine that's used by Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird) has to be able to change the way buttons and other elements are drawn. And it has to be able to control z-ordering, i.e. it has to be in control of what happens when you draw two buttons on top of eachother. The same goes for things like charset support, printing, accessibility, etc.
To provide full support for the W3C standards, you need widgets that provide very specific capabilities. Toolkits like wxWidgets have the opposite goal: they work by hiding specifics from the application programmer. There is a fundamental mismatch between the two.
If you want to fully support all the standards that make up the web across different operating systems, you end up with something like Firefox. It's not primarily some geek pride thing (although that always plays a role); it is primarily a consequence of the complexity and scope of the standards involved.
The point of advocating alternative browsers isn't to make a "better browser" its to empower standards and to create a diverse application ecology so no one app dominates.
This would be a laudable cause if the standards weren't so complex and broadly scoped that they prevent exactly this from happening.
While the W3C and its cohorts pay lip-service to diversity and flexibility, the complexity and semantic subtleties of the specifications they have created do little to facilitate either.
Imagine some big ass security hole in gecko after the google/firefox revolution.
I beg to differ. Why did he have to kill the crewmates that were in stasis? They wouldn't have told anybody, would they? Why did he have to kill anybody, really? He could have just not told them, right?
No, the alternative explanation, that HAL was simply a megalomanical psychotic killer, is much more probable. Doesn't HAL hint in the short interview with Earth that the crew is really not necessary, since he is fully capable of doing the mission by himself? What about his repeated assertions that he is infallible? That's the behavior of a psychotic with delusions of grandiosity.
As I see it, HAL is a symbol of human hubris turned against himself. But whatever. I didn't even like the movie very much.
I guess my point is that your question is legitimate, but that at this point it isn't possible to answer.
Space is the huge unknown. We don't know what we're going to find. I think that's part of the attraction. We can fill the vacuum of space with our imagination.
There is still a tremendous amount we don't know. But so far, what little we have learned has mostly served only to shatter our most compelling fantasies. The sheer distances seem impossible to overcome. The timescales are unfathomable. No space babes.
And alchemy, for all its occult silliness, was the necessary precursor to modern chemistry.
Nonsense. You might as well say that witchhunts were necessary precursors to modern law.
...warm climates...hunting and gathering...
These are remarkably poor examples. Both fire and farming brought huge immediate benefits to the populations that pioneered them. They don't need to be justified as "adventures" or "new experiences" -- the benefits are readily apparent.
The truth is that expanding our horizons and testing our limits always pays off in big ways down the road.
Yes, if you put it like that, of course. The question is whether we are actually expanding our horizons and testing our limits, or whether space travel is the equivalent of jumping into a volcano. Apart from doing research or getting a kick out of it, what's the point?
Slashdot Mirror
Namely, malloc returns null.
Wish that were true. More likely, the OOM killer will run amok and start killing all your important daemons.
Somebody kill this stupid myth.
Sure, if you add all the money Microsoft has spent on the XBox (development, production, administrative costs, marketing, advertising, logistics, retail incentives) and divide it by the number of XBoxes sold, you may get a figure that's higher than the price of an XBox in the shops. But that doesn't mean Microsoft loses money on each XBox sold.
Look at it this way: the average retail shop or restaurant takes 2 to 3 years to become profitable. Still that doesn't mean that the restaurant is losing money when you eat there.
It'd have to be computationally equivalent to a Turing machine.
We can toss around numbers all day, but these numbers are only meaningful in so far as they persuade the people who actually build supercomputers to copy the Big Mac design. I don't see anybody doing that, so it appears to me that the Big Mac, on the whole, is not very significant.
They make 100s of times more honey than they need
This is hard to take at face value. Can you provide references which will support this claim?
This is sure to draw a lot of personal responsibility nuts out of the woodwork. Political and ideological dogma compels them to ridicule even the most reasonable doubts or concerns about the glorification of excessive violence in entertainment. Because to them, principle is everything, regardless of where it leads.
Even if we are disgusted with, or just plain tired of, games that idealize wanton violence and nihilistic solipsism, at the end of the day we should just put those feelings aside and join the crowd to cheer on the society that keeps churning them out by the dozens. Because such is freedom, baby.
That's not a property of Linux, it's a property of GNU.
You're going to worry about saving 50% HD space (FLAC vs 320kb MP3) when 200GB drives are $100 or less?
If 50% disk space savings are inconsequential, then why use FLAC at all? 50% compression is about the best it can do.
No, it's a trojan. The difference between a virus and a trojan being that a virus spreads itself as a side effect of normal user behavior (inserting a floppy into the disk drive, running an infected executable, ...), whereas a trojan spreads itself by seducing the user into running it.
Obviously you are overly pessimistic about the development possiblities within 50 years.
Yes, I am highly pessimistic. The only areas where AI is making significant progress is where it derives from classical process control and signal processing. And this in itself is more a result of ever increasing processing power and improved component quality than any breakthroughs that originated in the field of AI.
The assumption seems to be that if we just keep improving sensor resolution, filtering algorithms, and actuator accuracy, the difference in degree will somehow become a difference in kind, but there is really no theory which explains how this will happen or why. It's just blind faith, really. People who question the prevailing dogma are ridiculed as suckers who cannot escape their antropomorphic bias, or tree-hugging idealists who refuse to accept materialism.
Meanwhile the knowledge management and reasoning people have been stuck since the eighties solving closed-world Towers of Hanoi type problems, and the A-Life/emergent behavior types continue to present their painfully stupid carpet-cleaners as revolutionary breakthroughs.
I expect that we will become pretty good at mimicking certain human behaviors in the near future (10 to 30 years). The question is whether at that point we will have created intelligence or something more akin to a cargo cult.
Build the robot out of solid steel, make it 15 feet tall, and equip it with a V12 engine as a power source. Make sure to inform the press when you want to body check it, it may be the last anybody ever sees of you.
Seriously though, resilience against the kind of force you are describing is mostly a matter of mass. Certainly the robot shown in the video clips achieves its balance by constantly accounting for the discrepancy in where it expects to be versus where its sensors tell it it actually is: it's too complex to rely on "static algorithms", whatever that means. But it will never withstand a body check because it is too small and powerless. It's simple physics.
This is wrong on so many levels.
First, the practical problems involved in creating a robot that can autonomously participate in human society is far from being solved. People have been saying for over 40 years that the solution was 30 to 50 years in the future. I wouldn't expect it to arrive in a 1000 years, if ever. And yes, I study AI.
Second, as Sartre observed, "Hell is other people". A single super robot on the loose is no match for our puny weapons. To be effective, he'd have to enlist a following. But since he's alone, those followers would have to be recruited amongst humans. But how on Earth is that ever going to happen?
Third, you make it all sound like a video game. "Secure land, natural resources, labour...". You took a page straight out of Civilization, there.
Fourth, there are a lot more pressing issues to worry about than what happens when a breed of superintelligent robots wants to dominate the planet.
Christ, this looks like something that might make a good Simpsons gag. First the robot lamely slides off of a ramp (presumably to gain some speed?), then for no apparent reason it grinds to a halt. It stands motionless for a good 10 seconds before it starts moving again. The arms spread as if it's about to take off, the legs move a little, and it segues into something that looks like water ballet for geriatrics. Ugh. I don't know what to think of this.
But then, give them a few years of income from people willing to pay $200K for "Oh! I got in space for 3 minutes!" and they'll be working on the next level, which is that hotel in LEO you've probably already heard about. And then they (or someone else) will start thinking about hotels on the moon, and you'll get another level of development.
I don't know. This is the kind of reasoning that predicted the videophone and the flying car. Who would have predicted that in 2004 we don't even have supersonic passenger flight?
Anybody who prefers ssh to a web browser should not be commenting on the popular impact of technology.
Audio cassette tapes were popular. Cars are popular. Television is popular.
Gmail isn't popular. It's the latest in a long line of fads designed to appeal to the discerning tastes of a technologically sophisticated vanguard.
This is pretty obvious from its feature set. The gig of storage, the threading, the lean user interface, these are things that appeal to professionals in media and technology. The average Joe, the people that make up the "popular" masses that have you as their self-proclaimed spokesman, they hardly know how much a gigabyte is or why they would need it.
I'm happy gmail works for you and your wife. I'm impressed by gmail's functionality. But the hype surrounding gmail (and I think your assessment of gmail's "popular impact" is just that), owes at least as much to Google's marketing savvy as to its technical prowess.
Yes, these are all advantages of gmail over Yahoo mail or Hotmail. But not over locally running email clients. Why use gmail if there are apps which are completely ad-free, work with any number of great spam filters, are faster than gmail, and work without a network connection?
Threading of messages has been around for decades. Searching is easy and fast on modern hardware. Storage is perhaps not quite a dime per GB yet but that day is not far off. Spam detection technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the past few years. The only benefit of gmail is that it's accessible anywhere you can access the WWW. That's cool, but personally I much prefer to SSH into my home machine.
I'm not trying to downplay the significance of gmail. It's a very nice application. Even if it wasn't, new sources of throw-away email accounts are always welcome. And it keeps Hotmail in check. But grandiose proclamations like "I believe GMail is the logical next step in how we all do e-mail", well, that's just liturgical bullshit.
When confronted with messy real world problems, the typical nerd's reaction is to withdraw into a closed system fantasy and project that onto the real world. The totalitarian impulse does not manifest itself in a desire for increased government meddling, as you seem to think and certainly suggest, but in the desire to eradicate whatever system is currently in use, and replace it with something totally new, utopian, and "perfect".
It's an expression of the technototalitarianism that makes it impossible to take nerds seriously.
Other problem is, that to have a true system like this, non-AI controlled cars cannot be on the road, as they will add randomness to the central control.
Aye, comrade.
Geez.
It's not that simple. To fully support CSS, for example, Gecko (the page rendering engine that's used by Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird) has to be able to change the way buttons and other elements are drawn. And it has to be able to control z-ordering, i.e. it has to be in control of what happens when you draw two buttons on top of eachother. The same goes for things like charset support, printing, accessibility, etc.
To provide full support for the W3C standards, you need widgets that provide very specific capabilities. Toolkits like wxWidgets have the opposite goal: they work by hiding specifics from the application programmer. There is a fundamental mismatch between the two.
If you want to fully support all the standards that make up the web across different operating systems, you end up with something like Firefox. It's not primarily some geek pride thing (although that always plays a role); it is primarily a consequence of the complexity and scope of the standards involved.
The point of advocating alternative browsers isn't to make a "better browser" its to empower standards and to create a diverse application ecology so no one app dominates.
This would be a laudable cause if the standards weren't so complex and broadly scoped that they prevent exactly this from happening.
While the W3C and its cohorts pay lip-service to diversity and flexibility, the complexity and semantic subtleties of the specifications they have created do little to facilitate either.
Imagine some big ass security hole in gecko after the google/firefox revolution.
It will get fixed and we will move on.
I beg to differ. Why did he have to kill the crewmates that were in stasis? They wouldn't have told anybody, would they? Why did he have to kill anybody, really? He could have just not told them, right?
No, the alternative explanation, that HAL was simply a megalomanical psychotic killer, is much more probable. Doesn't HAL hint in the short interview with Earth that the crew is really not necessary, since he is fully capable of doing the mission by himself? What about his repeated assertions that he is infallible? That's the behavior of a psychotic with delusions of grandiosity.
As I see it, HAL is a symbol of human hubris turned against himself. But whatever. I didn't even like the movie very much.
I guess my point is that your question is legitimate, but that at this point it isn't possible to answer.
Space is the huge unknown. We don't know what we're going to find. I think that's part of the attraction. We can fill the vacuum of space with our imagination.
There is still a tremendous amount we don't know. But so far, what little we have learned has mostly served only to shatter our most compelling fantasies. The sheer distances seem impossible to overcome. The timescales are unfathomable. No space babes.
There just have been so few pleasant surprises.
Nonsense. You might as well say that witchhunts were necessary precursors to modern law.
These are remarkably poor examples. Both fire and farming brought huge immediate benefits to the populations that pioneered them. They don't need to be justified as "adventures" or "new experiences" -- the benefits are readily apparent.
The truth is that expanding our horizons and testing our limits always pays off in big ways down the road.
Yes, if you put it like that, of course. The question is whether we are actually expanding our horizons and testing our limits, or whether space travel is the equivalent of jumping into a volcano. Apart from doing research or getting a kick out of it, what's the point?