when I first read "individual commercial ratings" I thought that maybe the "individual" was the person -- Tivo providing rating per person on how many ads you sit through.
Now there is another salvo in the arms race for our attention... companies rating how compliant we are to listening to their messaging. Individualized trackable ads. hmmmm. If you are a good boy and sit quietly and listen to the ads, maybe we'll give you a nice discount on the service we got you to think you need.
so I have a few problems with this type of article.
first off, the result is an obvious PR piece for SGI. Such a slant taints the reason for the piece - making it impossible to really judge the significance of the computation. The contactacts ARE the SGI PR folks.
next, the article frames this an achievement in simulation that was "made possible" by the computer. This framing shows the lack of understanding about simulation by the author. In all computer simulation, there is a tradeoff between realism/accuracy and what is possible computationally. There is no hard line beyond which you get to claim, "this was a "realistic" simulation" as they do - especially for black holes, which we have almost no measurements. There is always tremndous guesswork and tradeoff that have to be made.
I tend to wonder if the computer scientists who built the system had much input on this article. I would guess not.
I disagree, we are much closer to creating conscious computers than we are to effective fusion power.
In fact, I would wager that really understanding the universe and its underlying complexity will only be understood by conscious systems much more complex than the human brain - meaning that most likely, effective fusion power will be designed *BY* the intelligent machines. See my sig.
Once "they" control a power plant, then there is no need for the "us" anymore.
I agree... LISP is more remarkable as we see computing revisit many of it's stengths, or as the OP might say, have it spiral back around.
Or stated for the simple minded in search of a moral compass: "There is nothing new under the sun..."
virtualization, generators, and languages
on
The Future of Computing
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
ok, my BS meter is pegged
while the article has lots of intersting data and information, he doesn't know much about predicting the future
He's right on focusing on memory (vs. CPU) - this is where the major bottlenecks are
He completely missed the boat though on virtualization. Everywhere I look there are different examples of virtualization that are driving development choices - and he doesn't mention it once.
he also is missing the tide happening right now with metaprogramming and generators
also missing the boat on the trends in language flexibility that are turning application development into "domain specific language" development. we're at a tipping point over the current 2-3 year horizon where developers are building out the language AT THE SAME time they write their application. coupled with effective reuse strategy, this will revolutionize how quickly and how functional all our apps can be.
it sucks that tesxt is static, there are a huge number of ideas here, and I have not expressed them as well as I'd like, but alas, once submitted, the text can't change, and it presents the same info to each reader, no matter what their context or background is. I like talking to people much better.
While I would love a world where everyone got along - I have come around to the fact that many people really are not bothered much by conflict, and many of them want to win at all costs. That is part of some people's nature.
while I see your point, it breaks down as the state continues to grow.
the state does NOT want people working around it, and left unchecked it will flex it's growing muscle to PREVENT those who do work around it - with manipulation, increasing force, and eventually simply locking up, toturing and killing those who rebel.
This is simply a question of some people thinking it's OK to control other people. To a small degree, it works - and keeps order, to a larger degree, it still works, but people start to get unhappy - to an extreme degree, people are harmed by extreme levels of control.
hmmm... let's put things in perspective here between companies and people.
As far as I can see it, FOSS supports people, and statements like this only drive home the point that companies are driven by wealth to the exclusion and elimination of health for people.
Companies were an exception when the King of England first granted them as favors to a select few. It allowed exceptional rights, and those rights have only grown over time. It has now come to the point where pretty much any organized human behavior must be regulated as a company of some sort, either for profit or nonprofit.
By itself, this is not an issue - organizing people and keeping some controls on what people do are all fine.
The problem is that the rights balance between people and companies is completely out of whack. The interest of the companies are making the rules, instead of following rules set up to make life good for people.
Capitalism basically says we should all be building wealth: results of human activity that transforms the world into usable stuff. Again, a great idea. Wealth is either consumed or kept around as capital to build more wealth. Taken too far, as we have now, the health of people suffers because there is a fanatical drive by enormously powerful companies that only care about wealth creation. Companies only give lip service to people's health when it serves their need to stay competitive in the wealth game.
The most important thing people will do in the next 50 years will be to capitate capitalism and promote wealth only in the context of supporting the health and wellbeing of sentient creatures. Wealth devotion without bounds leads to fanatical capitalism, and lots of unhappy individuals.
We are in an "arms race" between the viruses and the vaccines. THe other side (the viruses) can always recombine and mutate around the current vaccine. The virus we have not seen yet is bird flu in humans with high transmissibility. Until we see this in the wild, we can't possibly know (for sure) if a vaccine would work against it.
The current process for annual flu vaccines are derived from a global search for current viruses, a bunch of annalysis, and a selction of strains which we THINK will be the flu that takes hold during the flu season. Mostly, those guesses are very good, and the flu vaccine covers a large number of different strains.
They only way to really solve this issue would be to create a general vaccine system against all flu-type viruses, and we have no where near the capability to do that now.
by itself, a virus crossing species does not necessarily imply increased morbidity in the new species. In fact, typically, viruses inside other species have little or no effect at all. They usually don't function. Only in rare cases when a cross species jump occurs (typically through mutations/and viral DNA exchange with native viruses), then it MIGHT be dangerous.
Note that in the case of bird flu, the reason people die is from the extreme overreaction by the immune system to the infection. You essentially end up drowning in your own fluids, caused by the immune system reaction. Tamiflu basically down-regulates the a person's immune response.
IANA-virologist, nor am I an expert in epidemiology - but this is how I understand it.
I share your excitement... antiseptics and vaccines are two human achievements that we can all be proud of. most of the rest of what we spend our energy on just keeps us all busy with "busi-ness".
I was shocked when I looked for my last car about 6 months ago. most sedans I looked at leasing got around 20-24 MPG highway and 18-22 city.
there seemed to be huge variation - some were mid 30- and higher, but it was not the rule, the exception. -- I"m not an expert, and I wan't making the choice based on milage. After looking, I was surprised at how low the numbers were.
I wish I had my motorcycle still, where 50+ was the norm, but people would need to accept riding gear in professional sales meetings, or I'll be changing clothes 4 times a day.
This is one of the many successes the Indians and Chineese will have showing up the West (US/Europe) in science and technology. I think over the next 10-20 years, it will become more frequent that we see breakthroughs from these areas.
get into a situation where you stop thinking of work as "work" but rather as your life.
get to a place where over beers on sundays with friends you say things like, "And can you believe it, they actually PAY me to do it! I can't, I just to come in and do what I love and they give me cash."
If you are having trouble with motivation on anything, it's because what you are doing is not what your brain wants you to do. There is a problem in aligning your interests with your actions. Meditate a lot. Read some books like "Do What You Are" and talk to a really good career coach, even if you have to pay them. You will figure it ALL out if you really want to.
I have two thoughts and wonder if you might take a moment to consider them.
I loved quantum mechanics in college. I had a teacher who loved it as well and he put significant energy into it. However, as physics progressed mathematically outside what I could relate to physical (3D) reality, I found it challenging to progress, and drifted away.
Anyway... the thoughts:
It would seem that there are limits on the complexity of what different types of minds can understand. Lower life forms show some intelligent behaviors, such as gathering food and finding mates. As you move up the evolutionary chain, brain size increases, and the degree of complexity of the models and capabilities a creature can manipulate correspondingly increase. Cats and dogs can understand some spoken words, and follow hand signals. Similarly, larger animals have complex models of terrain and social dynamics. Elephants, dolphins, and many primates have all been shown to have complex language systems. However, I expect dogs can't do linear algebra or calculus. I expect that a worm can never understand spoken words. Even the great ape, with several hundred word vocabulary will probably never understand the resolution of the twin paradox.
(1) So what if the real nature of the universe is simply a model that is too complex for the capacity of a (single) human brain to understand?
What if each human studying the physical reality of the universe is like the dog who listens to the spoken words of a group conversation - who probably understands a few words out of context, but really has no chance of understanding why everyone is laughing?
---
So I do a lot of work with computers now. Humans are moving rapidly forward making our machines more functional, and the rate of that progress is also increasing.
Many projects (for example, Ruby on Rails) is promoting extensive "metaprogramming" - where code dynamically generates more code. We have programming systems that are quickly (on ~5 year horizons) approaching novel language creation simultaneous with application development, that then enables significant leaps in functionality with respect to human interactions with computers. I am following and participating in these trends with great excitement.
These and other trends make me feel strongly that computers will approximate and exceed human modeling capacity within my lifetime (another ~60 years). My best guess would be that within 15 years we will see computers that exhibit all outward verbal signs that they are conscious and "understand". It is a philosophical debate as to whether a machine will ever really be conscious, but I think they will eventually be indistinguishable from conscious behavior, which is close enough.
One could assert that even now, computers can manage models of information much more complex than any human can manage (a 5 MB spreadsheet, as a trivial example). Over time, I would posit that computers' models will continue to conform more closely to ones we humans care about and consider important for "intelligent behavior".
I'm being very vague, (as I'm sure you're quite busy) -- but... to jump forward,
(2) Maybe the solution to figuring out the underlying nature of the universe will only occur once we have more intelligent computers that can manage information models far more complex than the human mind can manage?
your post is (understandably) still based in the overriding principle that it's my house and my wife.
Under the system I would envsion, these are not "mine" for you to take - rather they exist, and those who want them can use them freely.
There would be no more concept of "wife". If a woman chose to agree to sleep with you, that's her business. If she has made an agreement with me not to sleep with anyone else, then we agree to that, and she wouldn't sleep with you. It would be her choice.
People love to learn and create when given the chance. People would love to build and create fantastic houses, and given the chance, they would produce many. There would be lots of houses on the beach, and those people who wanted them would use them. When conflicts arose, groups would assemble and resolve them by local norms.
It is a very complex vision in how completely different this type of world would work - and most people have a very hard time seeing it without hours of uneducating their current assumptions.
I am NOT talking about socialism (where groups own things, or in the case of communism, where the government owned everything) - but rather take the WHOLE IDEA that we have a map between resources and individuals, (or their surrogate -/companies/families/gov't/group entities) and ELIMINATE the concept that we should map "ownership" from the social norm.
Do the thought experiments on how this would work tends to unravel much about how both individual and group human dynamics currently work. No governments; local norms, not laws. Local conflict resolution. An armed populous. No more ownership at all, of things, people, or ideas. No buying or bartering. Voluntary joining of larger groups. Allowing people to harm themselves if they want. Anti-status. Mixed and mixing families; (remember, no owning people, like marriage) Lots of changes would have to occur. There would be no more concept of "free" because there would be no ownership. It would take people being a whole lot healthier than they are now for it to work -- but then again, human society not really working great now anyway.
It turns out that people, *when doing things they enjoy* are extremely productive. Every task we have is something that someone enjoys.
It is, however, the way to eliminate the lie of scarcity and start getting people to focus on building HEALTH instead of exclusively trying to build WEALTH.
Hmmmm. Yet another example of a corporation trying to provide the LEAST acceptible product the market will accept.
Economists will argue that consumers have a "choice" and should vote with their feet to another provider if they don't like this practice.
But every corporate entity under capitalism is driven to provide the MINIMUM quality they can get away with (If they don't they fail), so the alternatives are typically not much better for consumers.
There is still no real voice for individuals to counter the "voice" (read: money) of corporate entities.
*sigh*
There ARE real alternatives, but people don't take them seriously.
games have pushed the envolope more than any other area in computer software development
the current rising tsunami happening right now with agile development for web applications (like Ruby on Rails, and similar approaches happening in Perl, Python, java and others)... will take games by storm, in my opinion. there are a few factors here that will make games really interesting:
there will be much more scripting in games,
there will be much more meta-programming (code writing code)
there willo be more layering and customization in the languages we use - with more powerful and expressive languages deep underneith, but with tightly constrained, layered (or mixed-in) frameworks that enforce best practices built on top. we have seen this progression going forward for the last 10 years or so, and it's starting to get really interesting now.
and on the next 5-10 year horizon, we will see applications (driving mostly by desire for better AI in games) that are human-competative in reasoning and interaction - I offer this conjecture without proof, but with significant anecdotal evidence to support the assertion.
I watching for signs of two important things in computer development: a code base that can write another codebase (metaprogram) that is (1) aware of what it just did and (2) can communicate in a complex novel way with the new code set (I'm being vague here, but you get the idea -- think compiler theory for AI), and... a fully autonomous systems that can operate a *power plant*. Once those two things happen, humans are toast. I'd estimate that to be about 2060.
I thought the point of the GPL was to encourage people to share and reuse code. Enforcing that EACH person who reuses code also shares it themselves is counter to this intention. The effect will be less reuse and less sharing overall. Obviously someone has to make it available, and when and upstream provider stops doing so, everyone else would have to pick up the slack.... but enforcing this is actually counter to the intent of the GPL as far as I can see.
As long as there is a Second amendment, there'll be a First.
Hopefully the high school teachers for these athletes gave them enough civics so they recognize just how badly their university is behaving. Really, to tell their own students they have to give up their constitutional rights to maintain their scholarships? Now that's a discussion I'd love to have with the KS administrators: I can hear it now... "Why yes, we do think that the rules and decisions of Kent State University are more important than the Constitution." LOL
my kids are 6 and 8 now. I wish I had access to top univeristy lectures when I was in high school. it would have kept me from being bored out of my head by the drivel spoon fed in public school.
I expect that the mass, nearly-free communication from the Internet will significantly shift our assumptions about education and the ages at which people get different levels of training.
Right now, people are kept out of the professional workplace as long as possible and it has been increasing over time (subtle pressures to reduce competition from young people mostly drives this). more degrees, etc mean you are 22-25 ish before you are treated as "acceptible" in the professional workplace. This is completely ABSURD biologically, where one can compete as an adult (strictly biologically) at about age 16-18. Most primiltive humans had "adluthood" rituals even younger.
With widely available content, advanced degrees will mean less - I mean if you can walk into an engineering firm at age 17 and have taken and understood all the MIT classes on structural engineering - OF COURSE they will hire you in a second. They would pay you less maybe than a EE major, but who cares, the 17 yo will do it in a second. This is mirrored in current higher education and funding too. Most professors are more multidisciplinary (belonging to mutliple depts.) and funding is becoming more collaborative (like the NIH roadmap). THe result is lower importance on specific disciplines.
For my own kids, the world will change so much by the time they will be ready for college, I'm not really thinking the same rules will apply to them when they get to be 17 or 18.
Slashdot Mirror
when I first read "individual commercial ratings" I thought that maybe the "individual" was the person -- Tivo providing rating per person on how many ads you sit through.
Now there is another salvo in the arms race for our attention... companies rating how compliant we are to listening to their messaging. Individualized trackable ads. hmmmm. If you are a good boy and sit quietly and listen to the ads, maybe we'll give you a nice discount on the service we got you to think you need.
so I have a few problems with this type of article.
first off, the result is an obvious PR piece for SGI. Such a slant taints the reason for the piece - making it impossible to really judge the significance of the computation. The contactacts ARE the SGI PR folks.
next, the article frames this an achievement in simulation that was "made possible" by the computer. This framing shows the lack of understanding about simulation by the author. In all computer simulation, there is a tradeoff between realism/accuracy and what is possible computationally. There is no hard line beyond which you get to claim, "this was a "realistic" simulation" as they do - especially for black holes, which we have almost no measurements. There is always tremndous guesswork and tradeoff that have to be made.
I tend to wonder if the computer scientists who built the system had much input on this article. I would guess not.
I disagree, we are much closer to creating conscious computers than we are to effective fusion power.
In fact, I would wager that really understanding the universe and its underlying complexity will only be understood by conscious systems much more complex than the human brain - meaning that most likely, effective fusion power will be designed *BY* the intelligent machines. See my sig.
Once "they" control a power plant, then there is no need for the "us" anymore.
I agree... LISP is more remarkable as we see computing revisit many of it's stengths, or as the OP might say, have it spiral back around.
Or stated for the simple minded in search of a moral compass: "There is nothing new under the sun..."
ok, my BS meter is pegged
while the article has lots of intersting data and information, he doesn't know much about predicting the future
He's right on focusing on memory (vs. CPU) - this is where the major bottlenecks are
He completely missed the boat though on virtualization. Everywhere I look there are different examples of virtualization that are driving development choices - and he doesn't mention it once.
he also is missing the tide happening right now with metaprogramming and generators
also missing the boat on the trends in language flexibility that are turning application development into "domain specific language" development. we're at a tipping point over the current 2-3 year horizon where developers are building out the language AT THE SAME time they write their application. coupled with effective reuse strategy, this will revolutionize how quickly and how functional all our apps can be.
it sucks that tesxt is static, there are a huge number of ideas here, and I have not expressed them as well as I'd like, but alas, once submitted, the text can't change, and it presents the same info to each reader, no matter what their context or background is. I like talking to people much better.
this accepts the premise that people shuold be competing with companies, and in this the people will always lose.
people need to STOP assuming that companies have the best interests of regular people in mind - it is not the case.
simply stop supporting w3c and build a new system. let the governement try and stop the people again
While I would love a world where everyone got along - I have come around to the fact that many people really are not bothered much by conflict, and many of them want to win at all costs. That is part of some people's nature.
while I see your point, it breaks down as the state continues to grow.
the state does NOT want people working around it, and left unchecked it will flex it's growing muscle to PREVENT those who do work around it - with manipulation, increasing force, and eventually simply locking up, toturing and killing those who rebel.
This is simply a question of some people thinking it's OK to control other people. To a small degree, it works - and keeps order, to a larger degree, it still works, but people start to get unhappy - to an extreme degree, people are harmed by extreme levels of control.
hmmm... let's put things in perspective here between companies and people.
As far as I can see it, FOSS supports people, and statements like this only drive home the point that companies are driven by wealth to the exclusion and elimination of health for people.
Companies were an exception when the King of England first granted them as favors to a select few. It allowed exceptional rights, and those rights have only grown over time. It has now come to the point where pretty much any organized human behavior must be regulated as a company of some sort, either for profit or nonprofit.
By itself, this is not an issue - organizing people and keeping some controls on what people do are all fine.
The problem is that the rights balance between people and companies is completely out of whack. The interest of the companies are making the rules, instead of following rules set up to make life good for people.
Capitalism basically says we should all be building wealth: results of human activity that transforms the world into usable stuff. Again, a great idea. Wealth is either consumed or kept around as capital to build more wealth. Taken too far, as we have now, the health of people suffers because there is a fanatical drive by enormously powerful companies that only care about wealth creation. Companies only give lip service to people's health when it serves their need to stay competitive in the wealth game.
The most important thing people will do in the next 50 years will be to capitate capitalism and promote wealth only in the context of supporting the health and wellbeing of sentient creatures. Wealth devotion without bounds leads to fanatical capitalism, and lots of unhappy individuals.
They can't, for sure.
We are in an "arms race" between the viruses and the vaccines. THe other side (the viruses) can always recombine and mutate around the current vaccine. The virus we have not seen yet is bird flu in humans with high transmissibility. Until we see this in the wild, we can't possibly know (for sure) if a vaccine would work against it.
The current process for annual flu vaccines are derived from a global search for current viruses, a bunch of annalysis, and a selction of strains which we THINK will be the flu that takes hold during the flu season. Mostly, those guesses are very good, and the flu vaccine covers a large number of different strains.
They only way to really solve this issue would be to create a general vaccine system against all flu-type viruses, and we have no where near the capability to do that now.
wait... I think this is a bit different
by itself, a virus crossing species does not necessarily imply increased morbidity in the new species. In fact, typically, viruses inside other species have little or no effect at all. They usually don't function. Only in rare cases when a cross species jump occurs (typically through mutations/and viral DNA exchange with native viruses), then it MIGHT be dangerous.
Note that in the case of bird flu, the reason people die is from the extreme overreaction by the immune system to the infection. You essentially end up drowning in your own fluids, caused by the immune system reaction. Tamiflu basically down-regulates the a person's immune response.
IANA-virologist, nor am I an expert in epidemiology - but this is how I understand it.
I share your excitement... antiseptics and vaccines are two human achievements that we can all be proud of. most of the rest of what we spend our energy on just keeps us all busy with "busi-ness".
I was shocked when I looked for my last car about 6 months ago. most sedans I looked at leasing got around 20-24 MPG highway and 18-22 city.
there seemed to be huge variation - some were mid 30- and higher, but it was not the rule, the exception. -- I"m not an expert, and I wan't making the choice based on milage. After looking, I was surprised at how low the numbers were.
I wish I had my motorcycle still, where 50+ was the norm, but people would need to accept riding gear in professional sales meetings, or I'll be changing clothes 4 times a day.
This is one of the many successes the Indians and Chineese will have showing up the West (US/Europe) in science and technology. I think over the next 10-20 years, it will become more frequent that we see breakthroughs from these areas.
get into a situation where you stop thinking of work as "work" but rather as your life.
get to a place where over beers on sundays with friends you say things like, "And can you believe it, they actually PAY me to do it! I can't, I just to come in and do what I love and they give me cash."
If you are having trouble with motivation on anything, it's because what you are doing is not what your brain wants you to do. There is a problem in aligning your interests with your actions. Meditate a lot. Read some books like "Do What You Are" and talk to a really good career coach, even if you have to pay them. You will figure it ALL out if you really want to.
I have two thoughts and wonder if you might take a moment to consider
them.
I loved quantum mechanics in college. I had a teacher who loved it as
well and he put significant energy into it. However, as physics
progressed mathematically outside what I could relate to physical (3D)
reality, I found it challenging to progress, and drifted away.
Anyway... the thoughts:
It would seem that there are limits on the complexity of what
different types of minds can understand. Lower life forms show some
intelligent behaviors, such as gathering food and finding mates. As
you move up the evolutionary chain, brain size increases, and the
degree of complexity of the models and capabilities a creature can
manipulate correspondingly increase. Cats and dogs can understand
some spoken words, and follow hand signals. Similarly, larger animals
have complex models of terrain and social dynamics. Elephants,
dolphins, and many primates have all been shown to have complex
language systems. However, I expect dogs can't do linear algebra or
calculus. I expect that a worm can never understand spoken words.
Even the great ape, with several hundred word vocabulary will probably
never understand the resolution of the twin paradox.
(1)
So what if the real nature of the universe is simply a model that is
too complex for the capacity of a (single) human brain to understand?
What if each human studying the physical reality of the universe is
like the dog who listens to the spoken words of a group conversation -
who probably understands a few words out of context, but really has no
chance of understanding why everyone is laughing?
---
So I do a lot of work with computers now. Humans are moving rapidly
forward making our machines more functional, and the rate of that
progress is also increasing.
Many projects (for example, Ruby on Rails) is promoting extensive
"metaprogramming" - where code dynamically generates more code. We
have programming systems that are quickly (on ~5 year horizons)
approaching novel language creation simultaneous with application
development, that then enables significant leaps in functionality with
respect to human interactions with computers. I am following and
participating in these trends with great excitement.
These and other trends make me feel strongly that computers will
approximate and exceed human modeling capacity within my lifetime
(another ~60 years). My best guess would be that within 15 years we
will see computers that exhibit all outward verbal signs that they are
conscious and "understand". It is a philosophical debate as to
whether a machine will ever really be conscious, but I think they will
eventually be indistinguishable from conscious behavior, which is close
enough.
One could assert that even now, computers can manage models of
information much more complex than any human can manage (a 5 MB
spreadsheet, as a trivial example). Over time, I would posit that
computers' models will continue to conform more closely to ones we
humans care about and consider important for "intelligent behavior".
I'm being very vague, (as I'm sure you're quite busy) -- but... to
jump forward,
(2)
Maybe the solution to figuring out the underlying nature of the
universe will only occur once we have more intelligent computers that
can manage information models far more complex than the human mind can
manage?
your post is (understandably) still based in the overriding principle that it's my house and my wife.
Under the system I would envsion, these are not "mine" for you to take - rather they exist, and those who want them can use them freely.
There would be no more concept of "wife". If a woman chose to agree to sleep with you, that's her business. If she has made an agreement with me not to sleep with anyone else, then we agree to that, and she wouldn't sleep with you. It would be her choice.
People love to learn and create when given the chance. People would love to build and create fantastic houses, and given the chance, they would produce many. There would be lots of houses on the beach, and those people who wanted them would use them. When conflicts arose, groups would assemble and resolve them by local norms.
It is a very complex vision in how completely different this type of world would work - and most people have a very hard time seeing it without hours of uneducating their current assumptions.
Here it is:
/companies/families/gov't/group entities) and ELIMINATE the concept that we should map "ownership" from the social norm.
eliminate the concept of property
I am NOT talking about socialism (where groups own things, or in the case of communism, where the government owned everything) - but rather take the WHOLE IDEA that we have a map between resources and individuals, (or their surrogate -
Do the thought experiments on how this would work tends to unravel much about how both individual and group human dynamics currently work. No governments; local norms, not laws. Local conflict resolution. An armed populous. No more ownership at all, of things, people, or ideas. No buying or bartering. Voluntary joining of larger groups. Allowing people to harm themselves if they want. Anti-status. Mixed and mixing families; (remember, no owning people, like marriage) Lots of changes would have to occur. There would be no more concept of "free" because there would be no ownership. It would take people being a whole lot healthier than they are now for it to work -- but then again, human society not really working great now anyway.
It turns out that people, *when doing things they enjoy* are extremely productive. Every task we have is something that someone enjoys.
It is, however, the way to eliminate the lie of scarcity and start getting people to focus on building HEALTH instead of exclusively trying to build WEALTH.
title says it all. yet another web presentation optimized for ad presentation.
yuk.
gee, like, only editing before anyone else has replied?
it's not rocket science, folks.
Hmmmm. Yet another example of a corporation trying to provide the LEAST acceptible product the market will accept.
Economists will argue that consumers have a "choice" and should vote with their feet to another provider if they don't like this practice.
But every corporate entity under capitalism is driven to provide the MINIMUM quality they can get away with (If they don't they fail), so the alternatives are typically not much better for consumers.
There is still no real voice for individuals to counter the "voice" (read: money) of corporate entities.
*sigh*
There ARE real alternatives, but people don't take them seriously.
like most questions, the answer to "is he REAL" depends on your context:
Scooby Doo is certainly real, in the context of a cartoon character, and a on lunchboxes and pictures on Toy-R-Us products.
Scooby Doo is most certainly not real in the context of living dogs who can talk (poorly) and solve murder mysteries regarding living humans.
===
If you change your context far enough, the answers change. Realizing this is maturity.
If you keep changing the context even further, the questions change. Realizing this is understanding.
(cf. Dukkha and the 4 noble truths)
And finally, if you can change the context all the way, all the questions cease. Realizing this is enlightenment, (so we think)
games have pushed the envolope more than any other area in computer software development
... a fully autonomous systems that can operate a *power plant*. Once those two things happen, humans are toast. I'd estimate that to be about 2060.
the current rising tsunami happening right now with agile development for web applications (like Ruby on Rails, and similar approaches happening in Perl, Python, java and others)... will take games by storm, in my opinion. there are a few factors here that will make games really interesting:
there will be much more scripting in games,
there will be much more meta-programming (code writing code)
there willo be more layering and customization in the languages we use - with more powerful and expressive languages deep underneith, but with tightly constrained, layered (or mixed-in) frameworks that enforce best practices built on top. we have seen this progression going forward for the last 10 years or so, and it's starting to get really interesting now.
and on the next 5-10 year horizon, we will see applications (driving mostly by desire for better AI in games) that are human-competative in reasoning and interaction - I offer this conjecture without proof, but with significant anecdotal evidence to support the assertion.
I watching for signs of two important things in computer development: a code base that can write another codebase (metaprogram) that is (1) aware of what it just did and (2) can communicate in a complex novel way with the new code set (I'm being vague here, but you get the idea -- think compiler theory for AI), and
I'm not an expert on this ... but
... but enforcing this is actually counter to the intent of the GPL as far as I can see.
I thought the point of the GPL was to encourage people to share and reuse code. Enforcing that EACH person who reuses code also shares it themselves is counter to this intention. The effect will be less reuse and less sharing overall. Obviously someone has to make it available, and when and upstream provider stops doing so, everyone else would have to pick up the slack.
How apropos for Kent State!
As long as there is a Second amendment, there'll be a First.
Hopefully the high school teachers for these athletes gave them enough civics so they recognize just how badly their university is behaving. Really, to tell their own students they have to give up their constitutional rights to maintain their scholarships? Now that's a discussion I'd love to have with the KS administrators: I can hear it now... "Why yes, we do think that the rules and decisions of Kent State University are more important than the Constitution." LOL
Go GO Go: EFF, FIRE, and ACLU!
my kids are 6 and 8 now. I wish I had access to top univeristy lectures when I was in high school. it would have kept me from being bored out of my head by the drivel spoon fed in public school.
I expect that the mass, nearly-free communication from the Internet will significantly shift our assumptions about education and the ages at which people get different levels of training.
Right now, people are kept out of the professional workplace as long as possible and it has been increasing over time (subtle pressures to reduce competition from young people mostly drives this). more degrees, etc mean you are 22-25 ish before you are treated as "acceptible" in the professional workplace. This is completely ABSURD biologically, where one can compete as an adult (strictly biologically) at about age 16-18. Most primiltive humans had "adluthood" rituals even younger.
With widely available content, advanced degrees will mean less - I mean if you can walk into an engineering firm at age 17 and have taken and understood all the MIT classes on structural engineering - OF COURSE they will hire you in a second. They would pay you less maybe than a EE major, but who cares, the 17 yo will do it in a second. This is mirrored in current higher education and funding too. Most professors are more multidisciplinary (belonging to mutliple depts.) and funding is becoming more collaborative (like the NIH roadmap). THe result is lower importance on specific disciplines.
For my own kids, the world will change so much by the time they will be ready for college, I'm not really thinking the same rules will apply to them when they get to be 17 or 18.
We'll see....