Yes this is a small milestone. The rate-of-growth for this realm is on an exponential curve (see: https://www.forbes.com/sites/r... ). Perhaps the 10% that would impress you for Kansas will take some time, but globally generation is increasing quickly. The EIA projects the next 2 years to be steady at 10% (see: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/s... )
Percentage of load is a different stat entirely. There, it may be better to look at the conversion channels of energy (fuel vs electricity) via something like https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/ which show large opportunities for renewables. Load is increasing each year, so this skews all percentage claims.
The infrastructure for gen/load time gaps is indeed real. However, you may want to compare that infrastructure to oil, gas and nuclear infrastructure for storage and waste disposal / containment. When a municipality builds a battery bank, it is hooked to the general market. Thus, they can buy off -peak power and begin to normalize the competition.
This cascades into prices for renewable power going up, increasing the investment returns per field. Some companies will spend more for "exploration" in wind & solar areas than others, sure. But these compete much the same as oil, coal & gas contractors - with one exception: Once a field is developed, it's performance graphs are highly predictable, and processing costs are negligible (vs carbon refinement/transportation/waste)
I'd also like to mention that the per-unit service of these solar and wind fields is more like per-well or per-mine, skipping the per-generator intermediate. Essentially, we're removing a point of inefficiency in the distribution. This also allows new transmission paths - which is a huge sticking point across the market regardless. Each field has a tie-in to the grid, but also services localized areas. Essentially, we're benefiting from solar & wind fields being more distributed than wells/mines.
Lastly, servicing the nighttime battery banks is also highly distributed - from muni all the way to per-home. You'd possibly be surprised to find that one can easily heat a home overnight from a battery bank with a moderate investment. This is going to make the future of "outages" in neighborhoods more like what we have in data centers: a slower ramp-down and homeowner conservation strategies for getting thru outages: Skip the hot water but keep the fridge cool. This is already the case for phones, laptops, routers and most mobile light sources (headlamps).
Essentially the future looks like tiers of electrochemical power storage and consumption, with delivery times being unimportant. From this viewpoint, renewables are an obvious choice; nobody will want to deal with the mess of mines, wells, rods and all their trucks and waste. I say this completely apolitically - nobody really gives a hoot what party supports what. The system is vastly more efficient, even if not flawless: Battery tech will continue to march forward and transmission continues to be a headache.
If it reaches 100% to convince you of the efficacy, then you will be woefully behind the times.
Battery banks already live through most data centers, normalizing power prices and effectively making the internet more resilient. They are now being implemented for municipal power storage, alleviating the temporal shifts for generation/consumption.
Kansas, by the way, is not the only location that's moving forward. Instead of try to convince you of how useful this is - it's obviously already happening regardless of your opinion - you should look into getting employment in this sector. It is literally replacing everything in its path.
This has some scary downstream implications - bird migrations will immediately change, and the ecosystem will have geographic pockets of abundance and scarcity due to that.
Food pollination also comes to mind. Corporations do not react to emotional pressures [often] - so any link from pesticide/herbicide usage to lack of pollinators will require a round of market disruption. Even then, the answer may not be insects but something like humans or drones to artificially pollinate sustenance plants until unequivocal proof is found that insects were affect by these chemicals.
This isn't necessarily a problem. The problem arises from a cult-of-brand and groupthink that MS cannot do wrong. If Troy Hunt wrote honestly, he'd explore the customers that had turned off MS Update with some interviewing and surveys, then report the results, give a nod to their core cause, report MS's renewed efforts to address these *core* causes and then talk about why Updates should be left on.
Instead he delivers these sugar-free platitudes:
It's not fun, it costs money and it can still break other dependencies, but the alternative is quite possibly ending up like the NHS or even worse. Bottom line is that it's an essential part of running a desktop environment in a modern business.
He's a fly-around shill just trying to look good in the eyes of Sales. His "workshops" are an insanely expensive way of selling low-calorie information that's already discussed online in much finer detail. His Ghost-powered blog site doesn't offer a search feature, but I'd bet it wouldn't return any meaningful results for two-factor authentication, separation-of-concerns, what certifications exist for software security, or the track record of non-MS products. Quick example: There's no mention of Google's recent publishing of security flaws in open-source projects. Instead we get a pass-the-buck, blame-the-victim blog post that ignores the annoyances of MS Update and tells everyone to "just deal with it".
If an MS Update actually updated just the software you have (taking into account anything you've disabled or removed) - then this feature would be useful. As-is, it seems to Upgrade, Re-enable, Reset the OS to a state that is disruptive. This is not what such a feature should be doing. We've seen this before when updates required clicking (no scripting mode) and when updates required accepting EULA's that didn't allow a "No" - you were left with the half-way install.
Each time, MS had to learn that their platform would be far more secure if they kept it simple. When they fail doing this well, the feature is disabled. The platform silently becomes a haven for compromised equipment - and a continued poor reputation for service. Has nobody written down the requirements for this type of tool over there? Or more clearly: The requirements should include what NOT to do as well as what is required.
I'm very surprised, given that MS wants to be the go-to OS for corporate use. Every OS has flaws and attacks, but making patches into sales gimmicks is what pushes people away.
First, I sympathize with this your plight. I have insulin resistance and sugar sensitivity, worsening with age. However, I've scaled my life slowly, in fits and (re)starts, to drop most of my sedentary habits and instead convert that time to movement - any movement. So lunches are walking, before and after work is biking, weekends are more of the same.
I would offer that if your family knew you'll be dying earlier, after accumulating a massive medical portfolio and insurance rates, they'd make a lot more windows of time open for you to move. Even if you have to watch the kids, treadmills are perhaps a good way to stay moving and still in one place. Jump-rope, seriously, is so freaking exhausting I'm always surprised how little I can do.
Anyway, ease into it, and best of luck. I would never scold you for failures, but don't give up on your health. It's quite seriously the only thing keeping you alive.
Get into a "scene" of fitness, online and locally. Nothing helps motivation more than having a friend cheer you along.
-Population growth pressures agriculture, consumerism, and per-capita-labor rates to go UP.
-These systems strive to accommodate the market, and so they "grow" by buying more machinery, infrastructure & fuel.
-Governments skim this economic growth and (clumsily) apply the money to common needs: defense, roads, schools...all promoting more fuel usage.
Petroleum is an excellent fuel for transportation and distilling into various fuels, PLUS an excellent source of long-chain carbon for plastics.
-To solve the fuel issue, we currently need to move to a (less efficient) battery system and electricity-based fuel. Not easy: energy density, throughput and usage patterns will all be different.
-To solve the plastics consumption, we probably need to completely re-crack the waste (burning) and capture the stack again - still creating CO2 but at least we're not dumping the plastic into the bellies of fish and birds.
-To solve the atmospheric issue, we can plant more trees, but we'd need less people, which takes war or disease - an historic eventuality. So really, we have to wait about 1000 years - once we complete the other changes. We're making that change very slowly, so don't start counting down just yet.
To keep that scale in perspective: 1000 years ago we were in a dark age with comparatively ignorant civilizations. 1000 years from now, today will look similar.
Folks, before you mindlessly type your rant about the loss of a headphone jack: Things like
this adapter
are going to be everywhere - and include lots of market competition. Your 3.5mm jack will appear like a "dumb" phone in the blink of an eye.
Remember, we have 6.5mm to 3.5in adapters for some of us, USB adapters for others, adapters for onboard-mic headsets, etc. This is just another in a long line of slight refinements on an idea. The 3.5mm connector itself is a changed standard.
Think of video - we have countless adapters for generations of video, including proprietary nonsense from several companies, include Apple.
Most people aren't going to care.
Or relevant to how we use photos now.
If you need large-scale printed media or high-quality video, you already know to not use a phone camera. For everything else, we are not suffering for phone-camera capability - it's just toys from this point onward.
To me the crux comes down to the experiential history any consciousness has as a reference in a conversation. If you remove any one of our senses from a person, and then try to have a conversation in text, there are noticeable differences. For a chatbot, remove all senses but some strange "can see text in an otherwise silent dark experience" and a chatbot is at a severe handicap to participate. Contextual clues aren't just the decorative influence to meaningful dialog, they're the essence of it.
So until we get a "bot" that can use some form of vision, hearing and touch - and possibly smell/taste - to fills its "memory" with massive associations that we humans use - it'll never do much. We're left with a machine guessing at the layers of meanings involved and following massive piles of rules to mimic the text of real communication. It cannot easily make the jumps across semantic concepts of jokes like "How does a fish smell? With it's nose, dummy!" or phrases as simple as "See what I mean?" or "I heard you were taking a vacation" or "Check out this vid, it touches on the finer point about AI" or "Over here, the weather is great" - the list is endless, and subtly woven into all conversations.
Interestingly, a machine that could use input like our own senses wouldn't need to be limited to just those 5. It could have broader-bandwidth input for light, sound, and get into perceiving radio-waves, echolocation, etc. Of course, it would have to talk to us in "human context" so it understood time-related phrase like "a little while" was based on human perception, the locale, etc. Also, we may have to get used to a single bot that has multiple physical presences, such that it "lived" (had sensory input from) in several locations across the globe experiencing things, but knew to focus on our location when chatting with us.
What some have proposed is a precursor to such a machine, by using machine-aided design to build the bot. So for example if a computer could design the optimal "drivers" for stereoscopic vision (layers of them - for color, contrast, movement, etc) through iterative evolutionary means (where multiple designs for, say, contrast, competed with a fitness test) - we might get a machine accepting input from devices and storing/searching it more effectively. Right now, we throw a lot of guesses around and just employ massive processing power. Of course, this iterative design would need to be built into the bot permanently, so that it kept improving without so much tinkering.
Thanks for responding to at least my comment, given the flood. I'm unsure how you classify "drug users" but you're correct that freedom to filter/employ/associate with those you prefer is good, and even necessary. At the edge are legal bounds for prejudice but I accept you're not speaking of this. You describe a twice-annual full-company random drug test for Scheduled drugs - seems fine by me. Each shop has quite a few cultural hallmarks (many en in burnout, unfortunately). As an American male, I've worked with many H1B's and other non-native folks, and don't really concern myself with country of origin. I can understand the motivation to scare up a perceved shortage, as so companies can pay lower labor rates. The eventuality seems to be that pay rates may receive downward pressure, but other influences like cost-of-living, location, turnover, business-knowledge, etc push labor rates around as well. So its just obe of many influences.
I'm late to this discussion, but I feel compelled to add: This policy you hold is indeed a fine, legal and perhaps prudent choice. I think what you're noticing is exactly what the article states: The general population's perception of the risks of abuse [from cannabis] are too low to care about as in the past. Given the past failures for policy enforcement similar to how you run your shop, the comments' sentiment here is clear: There are simply too many addictions and abuses that are not covered by tests to worry so much about cannabis any more. The professions you mark actually suffer from exceptional abuse (machine operators, surgeons) - many times due to the stresses of retaining successful position itself. There also seems to renewed focus on empathy for those actually suffering from addiction, as it is arising up in the most personal of places.
I doubt anyone sways any opinions on the internet - so this discussion crystallizes best as the Q2 2016 marker of the various viewpoints still bickering about pot and the workplace. I commend your patience to explain your view even as I see the general tide ebbing towards legalization and eventually, removal from the banned substance list.
Better yet, if a semantic derivative of any web page is built by these powerful web crawlers, building a channel for pushing a link to it back the original web site would mean each crawler wouldn't need to start from scratch. Instead they could annotate and extend the semantic information, serve it from multiple locations, while the original site stayed larger out of the process, save for serving the link(s) or be amenable to a filtering proxy that decorates pages with the links.
Reduced down, there would be a machine-friendly semantic version of the web that browsers plugin could tap to annotate the existing human-web, and the crawlers were constantly polishing this semantic version behind the scenes (with curated fixups). The infrastructure of the current web wouldn't need to change, but the experience of the browsing user would be greatly enhanced, largely raising the signal-to-noise ratio on "related" links.
The issue of tracking entities that quote your resource is not really the size of a problem that demands this much answer. IIRC, the original design included a large number of other features that became nonsensical as modern conventions for information arrived: - We do not require licensing or micropayment for quoting text or speech. The www follows free-speech by default, and tools must be built on top to restrict things. (Among many reasons why not: There is no permanent trust-able entity for enforcement) - There is a vastly larger usage of linking than quote usage (links jump but also embed) - Commercial licensing of text, images and video is still required but the infrastructure to enforce it has to constantly differentiate by usage and intent (satire, education), not mere presence or absence. (YouTube's big review process...) - There is no permanent barrier to building a free side-channel for information that would otherwise be licensed. (P2P File Sharing, etc)
^This is exactly what give me pause to blindly swoon over Kurzweil's predictions: His achievements in other fields were at times good, other not-so-much, but really none of it carries over to his AI research predictions: It's a huge problem, much larger than the individual - a composite form of pattern acquisition, storage, search and association that deals with modeling all our senses, modeling our cognition, self-awareness, ethics, history, etc. I see his aim to "understand a sentence" (for his definition of 'understand') as a piece of string connected to a huge sweater: Pull just a little, and one finds it's connected to the entire thing.
When he compounds the (predicted) discoveries of nanotechnology and some form of artificial intelligence into all sorts of fantasy, I'm not able to suspend disbelief. If we replaced sections of your brain with machine replacements in tiny portions over time, so that you never fully realized the difference, there would be, in his words, "no death". I disagree: there would be several dozen post-operation mini-deaths where we didn't feel or act "the same anymore" to our peers or to ourselves. This is not extending life forever, this is converting ourselves into the v1.0 buggy technology equivalent, killing ourselves in the process. Is the "self" just the biology? No, but we're not going to have the first (or any) version of this concept work flawlessly. I envision Kurzweil's future not as sentient machines, networked together in a single giant consciousness - but rather a swarm of flawed algorithms flooding, corrupting the networks, flopping around with fatal bugs - like a post-op brain patient machine-zombie population. "There's Grandma - she got v2.4 of the Kurzweil artificial brain - yeah the one with the 'TakePillsAllDay' bug. We're waiting for a bugfix."
By that logic, we could use any of several dozen mythological creation stories that have no evidence. I find the Christian myth really unexciting, can we please instead examples of Scientology, Hindusim or DungeonsAndDragons ?
Slashdot Mirror
Read about fuzz testing. Its been around since the late 1950â(TM)s.
Are mushrooms alive?
Yes this is a small milestone. The rate-of-growth for this realm is on an exponential curve (see: https://www.forbes.com/sites/r... ). Perhaps the 10% that would impress you for Kansas will take some time, but globally generation is increasing quickly. The EIA projects the next 2 years to be steady at 10% (see: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/s... )
Percentage of load is a different stat entirely. There, it may be better to look at the conversion channels of energy (fuel vs electricity) via something like https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/ which show large opportunities for renewables. Load is increasing each year, so this skews all percentage claims.
The infrastructure for gen/load time gaps is indeed real. However, you may want to compare that infrastructure to oil, gas and nuclear infrastructure for storage and waste disposal / containment. When a municipality builds a battery bank, it is hooked to the general market. Thus, they can buy off -peak power and begin to normalize the competition.
This cascades into prices for renewable power going up, increasing the investment returns per field. Some companies will spend more for "exploration" in wind & solar areas than others, sure. But these compete much the same as oil, coal & gas contractors - with one exception: Once a field is developed, it's performance graphs are highly predictable, and processing costs are negligible (vs carbon refinement/transportation/waste)
I'd also like to mention that the per-unit service of these solar and wind fields is more like per-well or per-mine, skipping the per-generator intermediate. Essentially, we're removing a point of inefficiency in the distribution. This also allows new transmission paths - which is a huge sticking point across the market regardless. Each field has a tie-in to the grid, but also services localized areas. Essentially, we're benefiting from solar & wind fields being more distributed than wells/mines.
Lastly, servicing the nighttime battery banks is also highly distributed - from muni all the way to per-home. You'd possibly be surprised to find that one can easily heat a home overnight from a battery bank with a moderate investment. This is going to make the future of "outages" in neighborhoods more like what we have in data centers: a slower ramp-down and homeowner conservation strategies for getting thru outages: Skip the hot water but keep the fridge cool. This is already the case for phones, laptops, routers and most mobile light sources (headlamps).
Essentially the future looks like tiers of electrochemical power storage and consumption, with delivery times being unimportant. From this viewpoint, renewables are an obvious choice; nobody will want to deal with the mess of mines, wells, rods and all their trucks and waste. I say this completely apolitically - nobody really gives a hoot what party supports what. The system is vastly more efficient, even if not flawless: Battery tech will continue to march forward and transmission continues to be a headache.
If it reaches 100% to convince you of the efficacy, then you will be woefully behind the times. Battery banks already live through most data centers, normalizing power prices and effectively making the internet more resilient. They are now being implemented for municipal power storage, alleviating the temporal shifts for generation/consumption.
One of many articles describing these batteries: https://www.scientificamerican...
Generalizing this concept, here are a few alternatives to electro-chemical storage: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/n...
Kansas, by the way, is not the only location that's moving forward. Instead of try to convince you of how useful this is - it's obviously already happening regardless of your opinion - you should look into getting employment in this sector. It is literally replacing everything in its path.
This has some scary downstream implications - bird migrations will immediately change, and the ecosystem will have geographic pockets of abundance and scarcity due to that. Food pollination also comes to mind. Corporations do not react to emotional pressures [often] - so any link from pesticide/herbicide usage to lack of pollinators will require a round of market disruption. Even then, the answer may not be insects but something like humans or drones to artificially pollinate sustenance plants until unequivocal proof is found that insects were affect by these chemicals.
It's not fun, it costs money and it can still break other dependencies, but the alternative is quite possibly ending up like the NHS or even worse. Bottom line is that it's an essential part of running a desktop environment in a modern business.
He's a fly-around shill just trying to look good in the eyes of Sales. His "workshops" are an insanely expensive way of selling low-calorie information that's already discussed online in much finer detail. His Ghost-powered blog site doesn't offer a search feature, but I'd bet it wouldn't return any meaningful results for two-factor authentication, separation-of-concerns, what certifications exist for software security, or the track record of non-MS products. Quick example: There's no mention of Google's recent publishing of security flaws in open-source projects. Instead we get a pass-the-buck, blame-the-victim blog post that ignores the annoyances of MS Update and tells everyone to "just deal with it".
If an MS Update actually updated just the software you have (taking into account anything you've disabled or removed) - then this feature would be useful. As-is, it seems to Upgrade, Re-enable, Reset the OS to a state that is disruptive. This is not what such a feature should be doing. We've seen this before when updates required clicking (no scripting mode) and when updates required accepting EULA's that didn't allow a "No" - you were left with the half-way install. Each time, MS had to learn that their platform would be far more secure if they kept it simple. When they fail doing this well, the feature is disabled. The platform silently becomes a haven for compromised equipment - and a continued poor reputation for service. Has nobody written down the requirements for this type of tool over there? Or more clearly: The requirements should include what NOT to do as well as what is required. I'm very surprised, given that MS wants to be the go-to OS for corporate use. Every OS has flaws and attacks, but making patches into sales gimmicks is what pushes people away.
First, I sympathize with this your plight. I have insulin resistance and sugar sensitivity, worsening with age. However, I've scaled my life slowly, in fits and (re)starts, to drop most of my sedentary habits and instead convert that time to movement - any movement. So lunches are walking, before and after work is biking, weekends are more of the same. I would offer that if your family knew you'll be dying earlier, after accumulating a massive medical portfolio and insurance rates, they'd make a lot more windows of time open for you to move. Even if you have to watch the kids, treadmills are perhaps a good way to stay moving and still in one place. Jump-rope, seriously, is so freaking exhausting I'm always surprised how little I can do. Anyway, ease into it, and best of luck. I would never scold you for failures, but don't give up on your health. It's quite seriously the only thing keeping you alive. Get into a "scene" of fitness, online and locally. Nothing helps motivation more than having a friend cheer you along.
Petroleum is an excellent fuel for transportation and distilling into various fuels, PLUS an excellent source of long-chain carbon for plastics.
To keep that scale in perspective: 1000 years ago we were in a dark age with comparatively ignorant civilizations. 1000 years from now, today will look similar.
Sure, just like people shop around for an audio interface, camera, USB mouse, etc. I'm not too concerned about the type of component (active/passive)
Missed edit: "3.5.in" => "3.5mm" Please /., allow edits for up to an hour.
Folks, before you mindlessly type your rant about the loss of a headphone jack: Things like this adapter are going to be everywhere - and include lots of market competition. Your 3.5mm jack will appear like a "dumb" phone in the blink of an eye. Remember, we have 6.5mm to 3.5in adapters for some of us, USB adapters for others, adapters for onboard-mic headsets, etc. This is just another in a long line of slight refinements on an idea. The 3.5mm connector itself is a changed standard. Think of video - we have countless adapters for generations of video, including proprietary nonsense from several companies, include Apple. Most people aren't going to care.
Or relevant to how we use photos now. If you need large-scale printed media or high-quality video, you already know to not use a phone camera. For everything else, we are not suffering for phone-camera capability - it's just toys from this point onward.
Change is hard. For some, impossible.
To me the crux comes down to the experiential history any consciousness has as a reference in a conversation. If you remove any one of our senses from a person, and then try to have a conversation in text, there are noticeable differences. For a chatbot, remove all senses but some strange "can see text in an otherwise silent dark experience" and a chatbot is at a severe handicap to participate. Contextual clues aren't just the decorative influence to meaningful dialog, they're the essence of it.
So until we get a "bot" that can use some form of vision, hearing and touch - and possibly smell/taste - to fills its "memory" with massive associations that we humans use - it'll never do much. We're left with a machine guessing at the layers of meanings involved and following massive piles of rules to mimic the text of real communication. It cannot easily make the jumps across semantic concepts of jokes like "How does a fish smell? With it's nose, dummy!" or phrases as simple as "See what I mean?" or "I heard you were taking a vacation" or "Check out this vid, it touches on the finer point about AI" or "Over here, the weather is great" - the list is endless, and subtly woven into all conversations.
Interestingly, a machine that could use input like our own senses wouldn't need to be limited to just those 5. It could have broader-bandwidth input for light, sound, and get into perceiving radio-waves, echolocation, etc. Of course, it would have to talk to us in "human context" so it understood time-related phrase like "a little while" was based on human perception, the locale, etc. Also, we may have to get used to a single bot that has multiple physical presences, such that it "lived" (had sensory input from) in several locations across the globe experiencing things, but knew to focus on our location when chatting with us.
What some have proposed is a precursor to such a machine, by using machine-aided design to build the bot. So for example if a computer could design the optimal "drivers" for stereoscopic vision (layers of them - for color, contrast, movement, etc) through iterative evolutionary means (where multiple designs for, say, contrast, competed with a fitness test) - we might get a machine accepting input from devices and storing/searching it more effectively. Right now, we throw a lot of guesses around and just employ massive processing power. Of course, this iterative design would need to be built into the bot permanently, so that it kept improving without so much tinkering.
He couldn't get nearly this amount of press, and he's been customizing genes for a while now.
You had to go an bring dualism into the discussion. Aren't all of you rushing things?
Thanks for responding to at least my comment, given the flood. I'm unsure how you classify "drug users" but you're correct that freedom to filter/employ/associate with those you prefer is good, and even necessary. At the edge are legal bounds for prejudice but I accept you're not speaking of this. You describe a twice-annual full-company random drug test for Scheduled drugs - seems fine by me. Each shop has quite a few cultural hallmarks (many en in burnout, unfortunately). As an American male, I've worked with many H1B's and other non-native folks, and don't really concern myself with country of origin. I can understand the motivation to scare up a perceved shortage, as so companies can pay lower labor rates. The eventuality seems to be that pay rates may receive downward pressure, but other influences like cost-of-living, location, turnover, business-knowledge, etc push labor rates around as well. So its just obe of many influences.
I'm late to this discussion, but I feel compelled to add: This policy you hold is indeed a fine, legal and perhaps prudent choice. I think what you're noticing is exactly what the article states: The general population's perception of the risks of abuse [from cannabis] are too low to care about as in the past. Given the past failures for policy enforcement similar to how you run your shop, the comments' sentiment here is clear: There are simply too many addictions and abuses that are not covered by tests to worry so much about cannabis any more. The professions you mark actually suffer from exceptional abuse (machine operators, surgeons) - many times due to the stresses of retaining successful position itself. There also seems to renewed focus on empathy for those actually suffering from addiction, as it is arising up in the most personal of places.
I doubt anyone sways any opinions on the internet - so this discussion crystallizes best as the Q2 2016 marker of the various viewpoints still bickering about pot and the workplace. I commend your patience to explain your view even as I see the general tide ebbing towards legalization and eventually, removal from the banned substance list.
Better yet, if a semantic derivative of any web page is built by these powerful web crawlers, building a channel for pushing a link to it back the original web site would mean each crawler wouldn't need to start from scratch. Instead they could annotate and extend the semantic information, serve it from multiple locations, while the original site stayed larger out of the process, save for serving the link(s) or be amenable to a filtering proxy that decorates pages with the links.
Reduced down, there would be a machine-friendly semantic version of the web that browsers plugin could tap to annotate the existing human-web, and the crawlers were constantly polishing this semantic version behind the scenes (with curated fixups). The infrastructure of the current web wouldn't need to change, but the experience of the browsing user would be greatly enhanced, largely raising the signal-to-noise ratio on "related" links.
the only winner is another state.
The issue of tracking entities that quote your resource is not really the size of a problem that demands this much answer.
IIRC, the original design included a large number of other features that became nonsensical as modern conventions for information arrived:
- We do not require licensing or micropayment for quoting text or speech. The www follows free-speech by default, and tools must be built on top to restrict things. (Among many reasons why not: There is no permanent trust-able entity for enforcement)
- There is a vastly larger usage of linking than quote usage (links jump but also embed)
- Commercial licensing of text, images and video is still required but the infrastructure to enforce it has to constantly differentiate by usage and intent (satire, education), not mere presence or absence. (YouTube's big review process...)
- There is no permanent barrier to building a free side-channel for information that would otherwise be licensed. (P2P File Sharing, etc)
.
^This is exactly what give me pause to blindly swoon over Kurzweil's predictions: His achievements in other fields were at times good, other not-so-much, but really none of it carries over to his AI research predictions: It's a huge problem, much larger than the individual - a composite form of pattern acquisition, storage, search and association that deals with modeling all our senses, modeling our cognition, self-awareness, ethics, history, etc. I see his aim to "understand a sentence" (for his definition of 'understand') as a piece of string connected to a huge sweater: Pull just a little, and one finds it's connected to the entire thing.
When he compounds the (predicted) discoveries of nanotechnology and some form of artificial intelligence into all sorts of fantasy, I'm not able to suspend disbelief. If we replaced sections of your brain with machine replacements in tiny portions over time, so that you never fully realized the difference, there would be, in his words, "no death". I disagree: there would be several dozen post-operation mini-deaths where we didn't feel or act "the same anymore" to our peers or to ourselves. This is not extending life forever, this is converting ourselves into the v1.0 buggy technology equivalent, killing ourselves in the process. Is the "self" just the biology? No, but we're not going to have the first (or any) version of this concept work flawlessly. I envision Kurzweil's future not as sentient machines, networked together in a single giant consciousness - but rather a swarm of flawed algorithms flooding, corrupting the networks, flopping around with fatal bugs - like a post-op brain patient machine-zombie population. "There's Grandma - she got v2.4 of the Kurzweil artificial brain - yeah the one with the 'TakePillsAllDay' bug. We're waiting for a bugfix."
By that logic, we could use any of several dozen mythological creation stories that have no evidence. I find the Christian myth really unexciting, can we please instead examples of Scientology, Hindusim or DungeonsAndDragons ?