The problem with RSS 1.0 is that it is more complex than RSS 9.x (a designation which should include "2.0"), this is caused by two design decisions:
RSS 1.0 is infinitely extensible because it can be combined with other RDF schemas. In order to extend RSS 9.x, the standard must be extended. This allows its expansion to be controlled, which seems more managable, but as time goes on, features get duct-taped to it in ugly ways.
Because of RSS 1.0's extensibility, its syntax is less human-friendly. This was an issue when syndication was starting out because people needed to be able to roll their own aggregators and debug summaries. Now that all that work is done, only computers ever read feeds, so it really doesn't matter what the syntax is.
RSS 9.x was a textbook initial solution, and it contributed to getting syndication out of the gates, but the time has come to put away childish things.
I mean *applying* the semantics to those things. My point is that what pages need is a why to say "these things can be selected, but only one of them", and then leave the nature of the things and how selection is signified to the presentation layer.
And you only think managing a shopping cart with thumbnails would suck because you're a technophile. My grandmother would dig it.
There was a major change in the business model for games just as bandwidth was approaching the size required to make pirating them trivial. That same bandwidth that was about to destroy them allowed many of the most popular titles to be online multiplayer. Online servers make for very reliable DRM, and users support it because circumventing it would also allow cheaters.
This suggests a very reasonable business model for musicians if no other IP authors. Hmm...
If any of the blogophiles making this sort of thing had the attention span to grok the awesomeness that is the semantic web, they wouldn't be using RSS 2.0, would they?
Politicians don't draft bills, their staff does, and their staff is just an aggregator for lobbiests. So our representative democracies are really a distributed, collaborative, bill-authoring device. (ie: They could be replaced by a very small Wiki.)
As for Bill C-60, I figure it's better if some lawyers make some $ than the government infringing on my fair use rights, so I'll write my MP and tell them to support it, then wait till the Supreme Court sorts out the mess.
Ever-changing masks aren't exactly all that comfortable, either. I think it's hard to say off the top of my head which future would be more compatible with human nature, but it certainly seems like a good area for research. Hell, maybe the Internet is going to require us to genetically/psychologically engineer everyone just to keep from going crazy.
Part of the point in The Transparent Society is that if we reconfigure civil society and agree to give up our privacy together, we can go back to doing something more productive than making a better mask. Remember: arms races are bad for the economy (in the long run). Also, a transparent society includes a transparent government, which is good for democracy, and transparent corporations, which are good for capitalism.
The example the author uses is to replace the standard widgets with cutesy ones. This is probably a degenerate example.* What has really been implemented here is to add checkbox and radiobutton semantics to any element. Consider:
Managing a shopping cart with thumbnails of the actual items rather than names
Being able to control selection of paragraphs or words in an editing application (think Gmail spell checker?)
Manipulating rich HTML elements like IFRAMEs for who-knows-what-killer-app
What I really like about the approach is that from a developer perspective (eg: PHP form parser), I can pretend that it's just a regular web form, while my user may perceive it as much friendlier and more fun.
* If you're going to be a degenerate, maybe you should just use Flash like the rest of your kind.
I'm with Brin on this one: how are you going to prevent revealing your identity when every's palmtop is powerful enough to datamine the Net? I'll take a picture of you and do a Google Images+ search for "pictures that feature this object", and once enough people are pushing photographs of every second of their life onto Flikr...
Is there any theoretical evidence that a world run by friendly or unfriendly AIs would do less SETI activity than one run by humans? Besides, the encryption, of course, which is a cool idea.
The first book (Souls in the Great Machine) is almost entirely focused on the creation and operation of the calculor and should be very well received by programmer types. By the timeline of the other books, calculors are just another tool, and McMullen is off steampunking other inventions -- which is still entertaining, but has nothing to do with computers.
Let me get this straight: the reason we don't see any aliens is that their civilizations reached The Singularity and therefore they stopped doing things which would make us notice them? Okay, assuming that the enraptured humans are having enough fun they don't worry about the possibility of ET anymore, shouldn't the AIs still be sending out signals or whatever? Or if The Singularity involves non-friendly AIs, then why haven't they come to Earth to eat us yet?
What are Kurzweil's contributions to Friendliness Theory, anyway? Because personally, as someone with CompSci & Philosophy degrees (but without emphasis in AI or ethics), it strikes me as being a very hard problem.
As someone else commented on this story, The Singularity is a rather blatantly Rapture for science/geeks. This kind of futurism has become indistinguishable from religion. But what's really bad is that universal craving for The Good Word discourages dissen from The Singularity, marginalising all conservative futurists.
So, to mix metaphors, The Singularity meme has eaten all the other futurist memes and now we're left with stupid goo.
So you're saying he's making a major contribution to the "ascension and transcendence of humans" by saying it's inevitable? Is that some kind of second-order self-fulfilling prophecy?
I'm betting the faster my computer can read dead trees, the faster it will singularity my ass.
Futurists are just like science fiction writers, except instead of being entertaining by combining prognostication with insight into the human condition (cyberpunk) or appealing to our mythological archetypes (space opera), futurism is entertaining by making you laugh in either pity or amazement at their naivete. So they're all doing their part to make the world a better place...unlike priests.
If by "genius" you mean "twit", I'm right there with you. Inventions aside, Kurzweil seems very disconnected from reality, and most of his futurism seems so naive that I don't understand why it gets any attention whatsoever. The Age of Spiritual Machines is one of the most useless books I have ever read.
Ah thanks. It's a very interesting name: do they call it that because the inside lights up like a full moon during the night despite the fact that it's shaped nothing like a sun? Or is the name passed down by people who understood that it's mirroring-as-in-reflecting sunlight?
And of course in Eyes of the Calculor <rot13>gur Zveebefha ercebqhprf naq gur puvyq tbrf gb pbby qbja Irahf</rot13>.
The Mars Trilogy is a good example because it demonstrates the two uses of space rings: trapping energy and repelling energy. Halo is set on a Dyson Ring, the purpose of which is to trap as much of the sun's energy as a pre-Dyson-Sphere-capable civilization can get.
Sean McMullen's Greatwinter Trilogy also features a ring around Earth for the purposes of blocking sunlight (its name escapes me right now). And I recall some kind of sunblock measure in Clarke's 3001 to counteract vacuum energy.
Especially because Newton's is archaically named: it's about physics. Russell and Whitehead were actually setting out to lay down the principles of mathematics.
Sxip is a horrible example. They've become unsecret yet they still don't have a working product (I know what I'm talking about: if they did, my employer would probably buy it), so what did the secrecy get them? It certainly didn't protect them from competitors, because Microsoft has been trying to give away a product (Passport) in that market for years. As far as I can tell, Sxip's secrecy is mostly about making them cool, which surely does give them a financing and hiring advantage...if only that let them produce something.
Why would you write rules that get translated into an intermediate language when you could write what academics call a "compiler" for translating the rules directly into an executable or an "interpreter" for evaluating the rules on the fly? Generators are a sign of an inflexible, poorly designed language (I should know: I get paid to write C#!).
What is it with script programmers with delusions that their languages are panaceas? The languages are created for rapid prototyping and tiny applications, then they get crufted into larger and larger domains. Repeat after me:
OO is not the one true paradigm. Weak and Dynamic is not the one true typing. Interpreted is not the one true execution mode. My language is not the one language to rule them all.
This could be a mature application with business analysts and real money on the line, he doesn't care about your toy solution.
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The problem with RSS 1.0 is that it is more complex than RSS 9.x (a designation which should include "2.0"), this is caused by two design decisions:
RSS 1.0 is infinitely extensible because it can be combined with other RDF schemas. In order to extend RSS 9.x, the standard must be extended. This allows its expansion to be controlled, which seems more managable, but as time goes on, features get duct-taped to it in ugly ways.
Because of RSS 1.0's extensibility, its syntax is less human-friendly. This was an issue when syndication was starting out because people needed to be able to roll their own aggregators and debug summaries. Now that all that work is done, only computers ever read feeds, so it really doesn't matter what the syntax is.
RSS 9.x was a textbook initial solution, and it contributed to getting syndication out of the gates, but the time has come to put away childish things.
I mean *applying* the semantics to those things. My point is that what pages need is a why to say "these things can be selected, but only one of them", and then leave the nature of the things and how selection is signified to the presentation layer. And you only think managing a shopping cart with thumbnails would suck because you're a technophile. My grandmother would dig it.
There was a major change in the business model for games just as bandwidth was approaching the size required to make pirating them trivial. That same bandwidth that was about to destroy them allowed many of the most popular titles to be online multiplayer. Online servers make for very reliable DRM, and users support it because circumventing it would also allow cheaters.
This suggests a very reasonable business model for musicians if no other IP authors. Hmm...
If any of the blogophiles making this sort of thing had the attention span to grok the awesomeness that is the semantic web, they wouldn't be using RSS 2.0, would they?
Politicians don't draft bills, their staff does, and their staff is just an aggregator for lobbiests. So our representative democracies are really a distributed, collaborative, bill-authoring device. (ie: They could be replaced by a very small Wiki.)
As for Bill C-60, I figure it's better if some lawyers make some $ than the government infringing on my fair use rights, so I'll write my MP and tell them to support it, then wait till the Supreme Court sorts out the mess.
Ever-changing masks aren't exactly all that comfortable, either. I think it's hard to say off the top of my head which future would be more compatible with human nature, but it certainly seems like a good area for research. Hell, maybe the Internet is going to require us to genetically/psychologically engineer everyone just to keep from going crazy.
Part of the point in The Transparent Society is that if we reconfigure civil society and agree to give up our privacy together, we can go back to doing something more productive than making a better mask. Remember: arms races are bad for the economy (in the long run). Also, a transparent society includes a transparent government, which is good for democracy, and transparent corporations, which are good for capitalism.
- Managing a shopping cart with thumbnails of the actual items rather than names
- Being able to control selection of paragraphs or words in an editing application (think Gmail spell checker?)
- Manipulating rich HTML elements like IFRAMEs for who-knows-what-killer-app
What I really like about the approach is that from a developer perspective (eg: PHP form parser), I can pretend that it's just a regular web form, while my user may perceive it as much friendlier and more fun.* If you're going to be a degenerate, maybe you should just use Flash like the rest of your kind.
I'm with Brin on this one: how are you going to prevent revealing your identity when every's palmtop is powerful enough to datamine the Net? I'll take a picture of you and do a Google Images+ search for "pictures that feature this object", and once enough people are pushing photographs of every second of their life onto Flikr...
Is there any theoretical evidence that a world run by friendly or unfriendly AIs would do less SETI activity than one run by humans? Besides, the encryption, of course, which is a cool idea.
The first book (Souls in the Great Machine) is almost entirely focused on the creation and operation of the calculor and should be very well received by programmer types. By the timeline of the other books, calculors are just another tool, and McMullen is off steampunking other inventions -- which is still entertaining, but has nothing to do with computers.
Let me get this straight: the reason we don't see any aliens is that their civilizations reached The Singularity and therefore they stopped doing things which would make us notice them? Okay, assuming that the enraptured humans are having enough fun they don't worry about the possibility of ET anymore, shouldn't the AIs still be sending out signals or whatever? Or if The Singularity involves non-friendly AIs, then why haven't they come to Earth to eat us yet?
What are Kurzweil's contributions to Friendliness Theory, anyway? Because personally, as someone with CompSci & Philosophy degrees (but without emphasis in AI or ethics), it strikes me as being a very hard problem.
As someone else commented on this story, The Singularity is a rather blatantly Rapture for science/geeks. This kind of futurism has become indistinguishable from religion. But what's really bad is that universal craving for The Good Word discourages dissen from The Singularity, marginalising all conservative futurists.
So, to mix metaphors, The Singularity meme has eaten all the other futurist memes and now we're left with stupid goo.
So you're saying he's making a major contribution to the "ascension and transcendence of humans" by saying it's inevitable? Is that some kind of second-order self-fulfilling prophecy?
I'm betting the faster my computer can read dead trees, the faster it will singularity my ass.
Futurists are just like science fiction writers, except instead of being entertaining by combining prognostication with insight into the human condition (cyberpunk) or appealing to our mythological archetypes (space opera), futurism is entertaining by making you laugh in either pity or amazement at their naivete. So they're all doing their part to make the world a better place...unlike priests.
If by "genius" you mean "twit", I'm right there with you. Inventions aside, Kurzweil seems very disconnected from reality, and most of his futurism seems so naive that I don't understand why it gets any attention whatsoever. The Age of Spiritual Machines is one of the most useless books I have ever read.
Ah thanks. It's a very interesting name: do they call it that because the inside lights up like a full moon during the night despite the fact that it's shaped nothing like a sun? Or is the name passed down by people who understood that it's mirroring-as-in-reflecting sunlight?
And of course in Eyes of the Calculor <rot13>gur Zveebefha ercebqhprf naq gur puvyq tbrf gb pbby qbja Irahf</rot13>.
Ah right, it's the "natural philosophy" that's archaic, but the the "mathematical principles" makes sense in context.
The Mars Trilogy is a good example because it demonstrates the two uses of space rings: trapping energy and repelling energy. Halo is set on a Dyson Ring, the purpose of which is to trap as much of the sun's energy as a pre-Dyson-Sphere-capable civilization can get.
Sean McMullen's Greatwinter Trilogy also features a ring around Earth for the purposes of blocking sunlight (its name escapes me right now). And I recall some kind of sunblock measure in Clarke's 3001 to counteract vacuum energy.
Especially because Newton's is archaically named: it's about physics. Russell and Whitehead were actually setting out to lay down the principles of mathematics.
Sxip is a horrible example. They've become unsecret yet they still don't have a working product (I know what I'm talking about: if they did, my employer would probably buy it), so what did the secrecy get them? It certainly didn't protect them from competitors, because Microsoft has been trying to give away a product (Passport) in that market for years. As far as I can tell, Sxip's secrecy is mostly about making them cool, which surely does give them a financing and hiring advantage...if only that let them produce something.
Even worse: I get paid to write C#! :(
Why would you write rules that get translated into an intermediate language when you could write what academics call a "compiler" for translating the rules directly into an executable or an "interpreter" for evaluating the rules on the fly? Generators are a sign of an inflexible, poorly designed language (I should know: I get paid to write C#!).
This could be a mature application with business analysts and real money on the line, he doesn't care about your toy solution.