It's an EEG hooked up to a visual display. It provides a positive cue when the EEG pattern registers activity that the manufacturer considers attentive (this would be terribly subjective) and a negative cue when the EEG pattern registers activity the manufacturer considers inattentive.
The catch is the subjectivity of the triggering of cues and the motivation of the user. In lab animals this is easy, when they register as attentive you give a treat.
I don't know what the positive and minus cues the device uses are, but chances are they don't motivate a 9 year old the way a tasty cereal nugget motivates a gerbil. You'd almost have to resort to negative feedback (electro-shock or loud beeps) on negative cues to get results. Not that I'm advocating that for my cousin Jeff or anything...
Re:1 GHz, a bunch of patents, assembled in China,
on
Son of HAL For Sale
·
· Score: 1
I went to school on the other side of the river...still live there. You're right, they really should do what the rest of the campus does and just buy a bong instead of calling themselves the Media Lab.
I agree with the 1 book/season suggestion. Maybe if this were being done by HBO - like the Sopranos or Oz - this thing would have been amazing. Instead it's being done on Sci Fi.
Let's face it, the Sci Fi folks which brought your the extra-edited versions of Star Trek and cut every movie they ever broadcast shouldn't be trusted with showing very good and reasonably important works, such as Dune.
The thing looks like a bad episode of ST:TNG without the really cool effects or interesting characters. (Feel free to insert a P. Stewart reference or two here).
This series was made because they know they have a sizable audience that will sit throught even the worst adaptations of certain books simply because they are "their" books.
Let's admit that no matter crappy the previews looked we'd all be watching it because it is, afterall, Dune. Now, imagine what's going on in the Producer's office today. Three or four toadies are serving Lattes to some very greasy men (think the Producer in True Romance, for a second) who are rubbing their pinky-ringed hands together and saying something along the lines of "Not only will we be making the next two books, but I hear these same dopes like stuff by that guy who wrote... Starship Troopers". Now their thinking how much money that one made (did Robert get a cut?) and how many books he wrote...
Get the picture? They hope you don't.
1 GHz, a bunch of patents, assembled in China,
on
Son of HAL For Sale
·
· Score: 1
and sold out in London.
How far we must have fallen that our lofty goals (solving all the world's problems, or at least figuring something out) for computers and particularly AI have become nothing more than a marketting ploy or a gimmick.
What the article fails to mention is that the greatest obstacle to AI isn't really the hardware (the stuff covered by all them patents on the motherboard) per se, but the way the hardware is instructed to operate. In other words, it's not the chips that really matter, but what you do with them.
Code sentience. The rest would take care of itself.
More important to me than using is being able to get my work done with the least amount of hassle. This is why my work machine, and my primary home machine (where I do far too much work) run Microsoft.
I think Netscape does count on, to a certain extent, having a core group of users who install the buggy code the produce simply to flaunt being anti-Microsoft. They then move to exploit that group by providing links to their products, selling ad space that can be targetted to that demographic, and other things that keep lining their pockets.
I am considering switching to Linux on the home machine now that I can do almost everything I need in Star Office, but since my new DSL Line is going to use a USB bridge I may hold off for a bit (until I get off my lazy couch and get a router, a few NICs and install them). Chances are that I'll run it for a while, find some annoying thing that I have to do routinely is easier to deal with in Win, and revert.
If I considered myself more of a system administrator or developer I might view this differently. My work environment wouldn't then be Windows desktops with clients written for Windows (or pure HTML clients). As a matter of fact, I wish someone would port DDD and a few other utilities to MS.
Reference to hackers in the media that doesn't involve the law, or any further stirring of the collective fears of the mainstream populace that everyone who knows how to use a computer is trying to steal their money, kidnap their children, or blow up buildings.
And a chance to poke Microsoft with a stick is always appreciated!
It's nice to see that someone finds a use for perfectly good existing technology instead of rushing to push everyone into the next new thing. By using a peer-to-peer or other existing technologies the scientists are giving themselves credit for knowing what they need instead of believing in hype.
It's a lesson millions of Microsoft ME and 98 buyers could have done well with.
Well, the Gestapo liked to do "real investigating" and there was lots of secrets and not a lot of safety.
If the FBI felt the need to go a little wild and beat or intimidate information out of people and didn't have Carnivore to spy on them it would go out and do it. I think we may be safer without encryption, but I agree we won't be more free.
I don't think you understood. I don't think Linux is ready to be a mainstream desktop yet, and don't think it's viable for servers until it is. Bigger backing for existing Solaris, AIX, and HPUX will ensure they dominate servers.
Actually, I don't. But I do feel that if you think Linux should be around for a while you want to get it to the desktop.
I honestly believe, and will continue to do so for some time until I see evidence to the contrary, that the only reason NT is used as a server for applications is because of its dominance of the desktop.
I went to a high school with ~3700 students. We openly distributed pornography and violent content without fear simply because there were so damn many of us they couldn't possibly keep an eye on everyone.
Also, there is nothing quite as satisfying as walking into the copy room, pretending to be running something off for a teacher, making 1000 copies of a sheet, and walking out with 'seditious content' that they effectively produced for you.
Oh, and it helps when your parents are both 'in system', the principal was undergrad with your father, and you're on all the academic squads. I suppose that gives you immunity as well.
Permanent Residence or Leave. Heck, even if you forced a higher tax rate (oh, wait the H1B is higher) or internal passports (oh, wait, that's what the H1B is) or strapped them to a single job with little hope of escaping it (oh, we do that too...) they'd still rather be here. So give them some rights and let them stay.
Or maybe you're afraid they'll get your job. Work harder, stop whining, and certainly spend some time looking for real solutions.
While XML, PAD, and readme do have their uses what you really want to look at is how something like this could be automated and produce a machine readable format that might be rendered into any number of languages (including into other programming lanuages).
Think about what a compiler does. It translates silly little 'human readable' files into machine readable instructions. Yes, compilers have lots more features than that, but the key feature is that it turns my poorly thought out ideas about a problem into a set of instructions that my processor can deal with. So what you want to do is create some sort of meta-file which isn't machine code, per se, but a representation of precisely what the code is doing. You'd want some way of including comments from code into a description block for the main program and for each function (maybe some sort of encoding scheme so that it could be language independent)
The renderer would be able to take that and generate english text OR mandarin OR turkish OR C++ OR JAVA OR COBOL OR (god help us all) PL/I.
So those of you who might have once written a compiler (I'm sorry) take a look at what that process is and think about what you might be able to do. I'd imagine something like:
PROGRAM BOBSHOE
some user defined text
pseudocode
USES OBJECT BLAH
USES OBJECT ANOTHERBLAH
OBJECT BLAH
etc.
So, what do you think?
The basic premise is that capitalism being involved in innovation is bad. Anyone who does something for gain is evil, and anyone who disagrees is part of a vast conspiracy to enslave everyone. Got it. Oh, and Bill Gates is the wellspring from which evil flows into the universe because he is willing to do things to make money that you don't think he ought to.
Wake up.
Journalists work for a living. They are paid. They will do what it takes to get more money if they want more money.
Coders write code for money. They get money and do some neat things with it. And if someone likes some of the neat things they do for money they will get offers of more money. How many of the people who worked on various Linux projects now work for Redhat because the cash is pretty darn comfy?
Academic researchers are not saintly figures. They are all too human: greedy, unsavory, and generally arrogant. Someone wants what they have and they are willing to accept money to give it to them. I have seen researchers lie, cheat, and steal in the name of grant money. I even know one lab researcher who was willing to engage in outright fraud in order to gather donations for a lab.
The last time I checked these projects were jointly funded by public and private money. Maybe what we really need to do is stop milking taxpayers to benefit corporations. Have a nice little free market for funding. Get government out of our pockets and out of schools. If companies want to fund research, or if private individuals want to, they can. And they should reap whatever rewards they can contract from it.
I know, there is that old argument about the common good and pure research not being profitable, etc. I don't really think anyone believes this anymore. The Human Genome Project looks to be the basic building block for a hell of a lot of profit. Getting in at the ground level of such a thing is the cheapest way to make sure you are around when it's all over. Businesses know this. It's about time we realized that they have a stronger motive to fund real ground breaking research than the government does.
And speaking of public funding for grants: They are generally awarded based on name recognition and a quid pro quo agreement. They aren't really awarded to the most qualified or the most important. They sometimes involve kickbacks and bribes.
Some researchers really are working for a better world and to better the common good, but they are increasingly fewer and further between.
How could it be any worse if at least there were a profit motive to keep things honest?
Under a free enterprise model there is no regulation of what you can sell or hoard. If you want to get other people's source code, modify it, sell the binaries, and make lots of money doing it (think early 1980's Microsoft, or not even that long ago...) you can. In fact, in a truly open market there is no such thing as copyright since there should be no governing body to impede free trade with pesky little protections for those who might not be the most fit.
Most people who consider themselves Libertarians are in favor of some specific portion of Libertarian ideas, not the whole or the extent that it leads to. We like our capitalism a little reigned in, our own personal limits enforced, and our own sense of apropriateness unsullied by what other people might find apropriate.
Open Source, while a nice little concept which aids development greatly, is not a business model. The idea that any improvement you make belongs to the community is a sure way to prevent you from capitalizing on your own work. It's basically saying that because you got seeds from the community they own the fruit you raised in the fields.
Sun is giving away Solaris 8 for a good reason: It will let them sell a hell of a lot more hardware and services. The machines come with consulting attached, and you'll need technicians. Who cares if you pay for an OS when you pay big bucks for a guy to come and adjust the fans on the back of an enterprise server?
Slashdot Mirror
It's an EEG hooked up to a visual display. It provides a positive cue when the EEG pattern registers activity that the manufacturer considers attentive (this would be terribly subjective) and a negative cue when the EEG pattern registers activity the manufacturer considers inattentive.
The catch is the subjectivity of the triggering of cues and the motivation of the user. In lab animals this is easy, when they register as attentive you give a treat.
I don't know what the positive and minus cues the device uses are, but chances are they don't motivate a 9 year old the way a tasty cereal nugget motivates a gerbil. You'd almost have to resort to negative feedback (electro-shock or loud beeps) on negative cues to get results. Not that I'm advocating that for my cousin Jeff or anything...
I went to school on the other side of the river...still live there. You're right, they really should do what the rest of the campus does and just buy a bong instead of calling themselves the Media Lab.
I agree with the 1 book/season suggestion. Maybe if this were being done by HBO - like the Sopranos or Oz - this thing would have been amazing. Instead it's being done on Sci Fi.
... Starship Troopers". Now their thinking how much money that one made (did Robert get a cut?) and how many books he wrote...
Let's face it, the Sci Fi folks which brought your the extra-edited versions of Star Trek and cut every movie they ever broadcast shouldn't be trusted with showing very good and reasonably important works, such as Dune.
The thing looks like a bad episode of ST:TNG without the really cool effects or interesting characters. (Feel free to insert a P. Stewart reference or two here).
This series was made because they know they have a sizable audience that will sit throught even the worst adaptations of certain books simply because they are "their" books.
Let's admit that no matter crappy the previews looked we'd all be watching it because it is, afterall, Dune. Now, imagine what's going on in the Producer's office today. Three or four toadies are serving Lattes to some very greasy men (think the Producer in True Romance, for a second) who are rubbing their pinky-ringed hands together and saying something along the lines of "Not only will we be making the next two books, but I hear these same dopes like stuff by that guy who wrote
Get the picture? They hope you don't.
and sold out in London.
How far we must have fallen that our lofty goals (solving all the world's problems, or at least figuring something out) for computers and particularly AI have become nothing more than a marketting ploy or a gimmick.
What the article fails to mention is that the greatest obstacle to AI isn't really the hardware (the stuff covered by all them patents on the motherboard) per se, but the way the hardware is instructed to operate. In other words, it's not the chips that really matter, but what you do with them.
Code sentience. The rest would take care of itself.
More important to me than using is being able to get my work done with the least amount of hassle. This is why my work machine, and my primary home machine (where I do far too much work) run Microsoft.
I think Netscape does count on, to a certain extent, having a core group of users who install the buggy code the produce simply to flaunt being anti-Microsoft. They then move to exploit that group by providing links to their products, selling ad space that can be targetted to that demographic, and other things that keep lining their pockets.
I am considering switching to Linux on the home machine now that I can do almost everything I need in Star Office, but since my new DSL Line is going to use a USB bridge I may hold off for a bit (until I get off my lazy couch and get a router, a few NICs and install them). Chances are that I'll run it for a while, find some annoying thing that I have to do routinely is easier to deal with in Win, and revert.
If I considered myself more of a system administrator or developer I might view this differently. My work environment wouldn't then be Windows desktops with clients written for Windows (or pure HTML clients). As a matter of fact, I wish someone would port DDD and a few other utilities to MS.
Reference to hackers in the media that doesn't involve the law, or any further stirring of the collective fears of the mainstream populace that everyone who knows how to use a computer is trying to steal their money, kidnap their children, or blow up buildings.
And a chance to poke Microsoft with a stick is always appreciated!
It's nice to see that someone finds a use for perfectly good existing technology instead of rushing to push everyone into the next new thing. By using a peer-to-peer or other existing technologies the scientists are giving themselves credit for knowing what they need instead of believing in hype.
It's a lesson millions of Microsoft ME and 98 buyers could have done well with.
I suppose the politics, the intimidation, and the repression that occur in high schools have a place there?
Well, the Gestapo liked to do "real investigating" and there was lots of secrets and not a lot of safety.
If the FBI felt the need to go a little wild and beat or intimidate information out of people and didn't have Carnivore to spy on them it would go out and do it. I think we may be safer without encryption, but I agree we won't be more free.
I'd buy it.
I don't think you understood. I don't think Linux is ready to be a mainstream desktop yet, and don't think it's viable for servers until it is. Bigger backing for existing Solaris, AIX, and HPUX will ensure they dominate servers.
Actually, I don't. But I do feel that if you think Linux should be around for a while you want to get it to the desktop.
I honestly believe, and will continue to do so for some time until I see evidence to the contrary, that the only reason NT is used as a server for applications is because of its dominance of the desktop.
I went to a high school with ~3700 students. We openly distributed pornography and violent content without fear simply because there were so damn many of us they couldn't possibly keep an eye on everyone.
Also, there is nothing quite as satisfying as walking into the copy room, pretending to be running something off for a teacher, making 1000 copies of a sheet, and walking out with 'seditious content' that they effectively produced for you.
Oh, and it helps when your parents are both 'in system', the principal was undergrad with your father, and you're on all the academic squads. I suppose that gives you immunity as well.
Through it, around it, and almost every year a future cubicle rat wedges their moving van under the Mass Ave overpass on Memorial Drive.
Oh, how could I have forgotten.
Just call me Moe. Last name Ron.
Why not give them a choice?
Permanent Residence or Leave. Heck, even if you forced a higher tax rate (oh, wait the H1B is higher) or internal passports (oh, wait, that's what the H1B is) or strapped them to a single job with little hope of escaping it (oh, we do that too...) they'd still rather be here. So give them some rights and let them stay.
Or maybe you're afraid they'll get your job. Work harder, stop whining, and certainly spend some time looking for real solutions.
While XML, PAD, and readme do have their uses what you really want to look at is how something like this could be automated and produce a machine readable format that might be rendered into any number of languages (including into other programming lanuages).
Think about what a compiler does. It translates silly little 'human readable' files into machine readable instructions. Yes, compilers have lots more features than that, but the key feature is that it turns my poorly thought out ideas about a problem into a set of instructions that my processor can deal with. So what you want to do is create some sort of meta-file which isn't machine code, per se, but a representation of precisely what the code is doing. You'd want some way of including comments from code into a description block for the main program and for each function (maybe some sort of encoding scheme so that it could be language independent)
The renderer would be able to take that and generate english text OR mandarin OR turkish OR C++ OR JAVA OR COBOL OR (god help us all) PL/I.
So those of you who might have once written a compiler (I'm sorry) take a look at what that process is and think about what you might be able to do. I'd imagine something like:
PROGRAM BOBSHOE
some user defined text
pseudocode
USES OBJECT BLAH
USES OBJECT ANOTHERBLAH
OBJECT BLAH
etc. So, what do you think?
The basic premise is that capitalism being involved in innovation is bad. Anyone who does something for gain is evil, and anyone who disagrees is part of a vast conspiracy to enslave everyone. Got it. Oh, and Bill Gates is the wellspring from which evil flows into the universe because he is willing to do things to make money that you don't think he ought to. Wake up. Journalists work for a living. They are paid. They will do what it takes to get more money if they want more money. Coders write code for money. They get money and do some neat things with it. And if someone likes some of the neat things they do for money they will get offers of more money. How many of the people who worked on various Linux projects now work for Redhat because the cash is pretty darn comfy? Academic researchers are not saintly figures. They are all too human: greedy, unsavory, and generally arrogant. Someone wants what they have and they are willing to accept money to give it to them. I have seen researchers lie, cheat, and steal in the name of grant money. I even know one lab researcher who was willing to engage in outright fraud in order to gather donations for a lab. The last time I checked these projects were jointly funded by public and private money. Maybe what we really need to do is stop milking taxpayers to benefit corporations. Have a nice little free market for funding. Get government out of our pockets and out of schools. If companies want to fund research, or if private individuals want to, they can. And they should reap whatever rewards they can contract from it. I know, there is that old argument about the common good and pure research not being profitable, etc. I don't really think anyone believes this anymore. The Human Genome Project looks to be the basic building block for a hell of a lot of profit. Getting in at the ground level of such a thing is the cheapest way to make sure you are around when it's all over. Businesses know this. It's about time we realized that they have a stronger motive to fund real ground breaking research than the government does. And speaking of public funding for grants: They are generally awarded based on name recognition and a quid pro quo agreement. They aren't really awarded to the most qualified or the most important. They sometimes involve kickbacks and bribes. Some researchers really are working for a better world and to better the common good, but they are increasingly fewer and further between. How could it be any worse if at least there were a profit motive to keep things honest?
Under a free enterprise model there is no regulation of what you can sell or hoard. If you want to get other people's source code, modify it, sell the binaries, and make lots of money doing it (think early 1980's Microsoft, or not even that long ago...) you can. In fact, in a truly open market there is no such thing as copyright since there should be no governing body to impede free trade with pesky little protections for those who might not be the most fit.
Most people who consider themselves Libertarians are in favor of some specific portion of Libertarian ideas, not the whole or the extent that it leads to. We like our capitalism a little reigned in, our own personal limits enforced, and our own sense of apropriateness unsullied by what other people might find apropriate.
Open Source, while a nice little concept which aids development greatly, is not a business model. The idea that any improvement you make belongs to the community is a sure way to prevent you from capitalizing on your own work. It's basically saying that because you got seeds from the community they own the fruit you raised in the fields.
Sun is giving away Solaris 8 for a good reason: It will let them sell a hell of a lot more hardware and services. The machines come with consulting attached, and you'll need technicians. Who cares if you pay for an OS when you pay big bucks for a guy to come and adjust the fans on the back of an enterprise server?