You're modding me down because the truth hurts. Your favorites gurus are either frauds or crackpots and you can't stand it. Trying to stop this stuff from coming oput is like the music industry trying to stop people from copying music. It can't be done.
...big businesses, the government, charitable organizations and philanthropists. After all, is not art sponsored by the government and other organizations? Maybe Eazel should have applied for a grant, one never knows.
Maybe we should actively pressure our representatives to sponsor free software because it's for the greater public good. Just one man's opinion. I hope the McArthur Foundation and others are listening.
What if a technology based on quantum entanglement is perfected that makes it impossible for anybody to eavesdrop on private peer-to-peer communication? What will the fascist governements do?
Indeed, what will they do? Put a camera in every room in your home or apartment and/or force you to wear spook technology so they can watch your every move? If that happens, we'll all rise up and kick their collective Orwellian arses!
The internet is your weapon. Download it all and copy it all! Demand liberty!
If it can be converted by just a handful of people to a format that can be uploaded to the internet and downloaded by tens of millions around the world, they haven't got a chance.
That is all this amounts to. We should resist all laws that impinge on our freedom.
The only way they can enforce these fascist laws to the letter is by instituting Orwellian forms of governments around the world. If that happens, we should all rise up and kick their collective Orwellian arses.
The internet is your weapon. Copy it all and download it all!
Because the U.S. is the leading economic zone of the world and everybody wants a part of that market.
It would cause unprecedented development around the world.
Paid for by whom?
By the zillions of manufacturers who already manufacture tons of products that are not patented and make an excellent living doing so. Look what happen to Zerox after most of their patents ran out. They've had a monopoly for so long, they got lazy. They forgot how to make a quality product. Others came and did better.
Certainly not corporations, who would see half priced knockoffs soon after they hit the streets. How will they recoup R&D costs?
Only the patent holders who are fleecing the world by taking advantage of unatural laws that take away our freedom. Now, if you ask, "how are new things going to be invented if there are no patent laws?" My answer would be that people can form consortiums to develop new technologies that will be shared for the benefit of everybody. If you think that people cannot get together to innovate, consider NASA. Consider the trip to the moon. Consider the ISS. Consider also that innovation is already heavily funded by governments around the world through grants and contracts. Do a search on the net for DARPA funded projects and you'll get an idea of what I'm talking about.
Getting rid of patent laws would unleash unprecedented growth and allow small companies to compete on a more equal footing. Increased tax revenues would fuel even more grants and innovative projects.
It would cause a mass exodus of all technolgical development from the US to countries that do recognize patents.
I don't think so. All countries would have to follow suit. It would cause unprecedented development around the world. People would no longer be hampered by fascist laws and life saving drugs would suddenly be affordable to third world countries. In case you have forgotten we are one species and the earth is not inhabited by US. citizens alone.
Also the best possible solutions to technological problems would be quickly adopted by all as opposed to people spending an incredible amount of effort trying to circumvent somebody else's patent and reinventing the wheel. What a waste!
But as a public office, it seems reasonable to me that the USPTO be required to make their patent files, well.. public, actually.
I got a better idea. Close down the Patent Office and revoke all patents. That would solve the problem. Trademarks are something else though. They are part of of someone's or some company's identity. Still I think the kind of stuff that people are allowed to trademark are ludicrous.
I don't display my email address in my articles because it keeps me from getting tons of frivolous flames. My email address is at the bottom of my webpage below. Note that I get lots of emails and it may take a little while for me to get to yours.
...they come up with a truly revolutionary OS. We already have a glut of OSes out there, what with MacOS, BeOS, Windows, UNIX, Linux and a bunch of other free and proprietary OSes. The world does not give a rat's ass about another me-too operating system. Unless a new OS is several orders of magnitude better than what's already out there, it's doomed.
The only way a new OS can be orders of magnitude better than the others is for it to solve long standing problems with software systems. What are the biggest problems in the software industry right now? We all know that software sucks. It sucks because it breaks down all the time and takes too damn long to develop. Does AmigaOS offer a solution to either of these problems? Answer: no.
The Amiga OS development team has only one consolation. All the other OSes suck just as much as theirs. The other OSes have an enormous advantage though. They are already accepted by a sizable fraction of the OS market. Can anyone tell me how many people around the world are thinking of buying an Amiga?
You got to hand it to the Amiga team though. They are true believers.
So, even if we use these objects that communicate via message passing, it's just a facade over the real algorithmic execution that's occuring.
Parallelism can easily be simulated in software. I do it all the time. For example, his is how neural networks work. The trick is to hide the sequential nature of the processor by using two lists one for input signals and one for output. Once you get to that level, you're got a signal-based system. Ideally, the only algorithm that should exist in a processor-based system is the single function that runs the message-passing operating system and processes the primitive objects. In the future when we have fullly reconfigurable memory, we'll get rid of the function altogether.
The non-GPL version of what you're talking about is called many names: COM, OLE, Javabeans, VB, Corba...
No. They all suck, especially COM and OLE. They suck because they are all based on the algorithm. One of the problems with algorithmic components is that, even is they are tested and proven to work reliably in one environment, there is no guarantee that they'll work the same way in another environement. Why? because that is the bane of algorithmic systems: event timing varies from one system to another. By contrast all hardware chips retain their temporal signatures wherever they are used.
It's not just BASIC. All programming languages are based on 200 year-old ideas pioneered by Lady Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage. They all have one thing in common: the algorithm.
The algorithmic approach to software construction is the primary reason why software sucks. Software sucks because it is unreliable and takes too long to develop. The invention (again by Lady Ada) of the subroutine, although a great contribution when it was introduced to digital computers in the last century, did not prevent the current software crisis. Planes loaded with people are crashing, airports are shut down and Mars probes costing hundreds of millions of dollars are being lost. And it's all because of the algorithm.
Why the algorithm you ask? Well consider this: The reliability of software is inversely proportional to its complexity while the reliability of the human brain improves as it gets more complex. There is an important lesson to be learned from this. The most obvious difference between software and the brain is that the former uses sequential algorithms whereas the latter is based on parallel streams of signals.
A signal-based system is more reliable because it makes it possible to have strict control over the timing of events. By contrast, one can never be sure when an algorithm will be done, and this creates all sorts of timing problems. It is instructive to note that hardware is orders of magnitude more reliable than software. It is no secret that hardware is inherently parallel and driven by signals. I an convinced that a similar approach to software construction can improve reliability by several orders of magnitude.
So there you have it. I call for the elimination of the algorithm as the basis of software construction. I call for a worldwide effort by geeks everywhere to contribute ideas for the establishment of signal-based software construction methods (GPLed, of course). We need plug-compatible components and message-based communication between objects. We need reliable, downloadble components that can snap together at the click of a mouse. No more function calls! No more languages!
It is about time that software is changed from the cottage industry that it is today and moved into the 21st century. Let's face it, Lady Ada and Charles Babbage were true geniuses and we owe them a great deal, but they did not have to write code for interplanetary probes and air traffic control systems.
The only property that is worthy of the name is tangible property. Anything else, ideas, inventions, formulae, equations, drawings, pictures, music, etc... are up for grab. If you can't chain it or lock it up or put a fence around it, it does not belong to you. Like it or lump it.
People yearn to be free. Anytime somebody tries to control other people's liberty, they get burned. The French have a saying for this, "Chassez la nature, elle revient au galop" which, roughly translated means "Chase away nature, she'll charge back gallopping." Nobody can stop people from transferring and copying files unless Big Brother enacts an Orwellian form of government. And if that happens, we'll all rise up and kick his arse.
You may ask, "how can one make a living from their work as an artist or programmer if they cannot sell it?" The answer is that you either have to keep your work a secret or do something else for a living. The problem is not intellectual property. The problem is the system.
The free information ideal cannot hope to win in a system where a person's livelihood depends on his or her labor. People must be given a means of subsistence other than intellectual property. Intellectual property owners (such as Microsoft and the music industry) will fight freedom with everything they've got. Right now they have two formidable weapons: IP laws and powerful police states to enforce them. But those who yearn to be free also have a formidable weapon, the internet.
The internet and other communication technologies (e.g., file sharing systems) are the first major kinks in the armor of a sick system. As technology progresses, the system will eventually collapse. What will happen to a slave-based economy when robots and advanced artificial intelligences replace everybody, i. e., when human labor, knowledge and expertise become worthless?
And don't think for a minute this won't happen in your lifetime. The internet is the latest giant leap in human communication. Before that came mass telecommunication technologies and before that was the movable press. If history is any indication, we can expect a giant leap in technological progress and scientific knowledge. In fact, it is happening before our very eyes.
We should all demand a system where everybody is guaranteed income property, an estate if you will. There is plenty for everybody and it would eliminate exploitation/slavery.
Communism confiscates all property and enslaves everybody. Capitalism gives property to a few and enslaves the rest. It's sad. The land should not be divided for a price. It should be an inheritance for us and our children and their children. It's the only way to guarantee freedom in a world where human labor is about to go the way of the dinosaurs.
Intellectual property laws exist only because we have a slavery system. Our livelihood depends on working for others so we can pay our taxes. The reason that we have to work for others is that 99% of people have been deprived of an inheritance in the wealth of the land. Income property is owned by a few and the state. The others are slaves. Artists, programmers and inventors depend on their work to make a living. Can we blame them? We all depend on our labor because we are all slaves. So now we are swimming in a ocean of laws and rules that take away our remaining liberties, one by one.
The purpose of the GPL is not the promotion of competitive businesses but to encourage code reuse and cooperation among our fellow humans. I've said this before, the only property that is worthy of the name is tangible property. Anything else, ideas, inventions, formulae, equations, drawings, pictures, music, etc... are up for grab. If you can't chain it or lock it up or put a fence around it, it does not belong to you. Like it or lump it. The GPL encourages people to go back to trading in tangibles goods and share the intangible with their brothers and sisters. Capitalism sets people against one another. Eventually we will become worst than beasts, constantly at each other's throats. The GPL is trying to reverse this animalistic trend.
People yearn to be free. Anytime somebody tries to control other people's liberty, they get burned. The French have a saying for this, "Chassez la nature, elle revient au galop" which, roughly translated means "Chase away nature, she'll charge back gallopping." That is what the GPL is all about, FREEDOM. And freedom is part of human nature.
So if you want to do business, go sell bananas or oranges or something of that nature because your ideas are no longer your ideas once you let them out. Nobody can stop people from transferring and copying files unless Big Brother enacts an Orwellian form of government. And if that happens, we'll all rise up and kick his arse.
When Caldera releases their for-profit code, people around the world will download it for free and pass it around and there isn't a damn thing they can do about it. They'll copy it for the same reason that they make millions of copies of MS Windows 2000 and use it for free. My advice to Caldera is to stop being a cry baby and consider becoming a non-profit organization.
Thanks for the links and the info. Very interesting. I wonder if there has been any sudies done on the ecological impact of the large-scale use of these chimneys.
If we had the technology to build tall structures several miles high, we could conceivably use it to generate electricity. The air in a tall transparent tube, maybe several meters across, should rise up very fast as it is heated by the sun. By installing high-yield wind turbine generators at regular locations inside the tube, it should be possible to generate enough electricity to make it economically attractive.
Questions to greenhouse physicists and structural engineers: What is wrong with the above scenario? Will it work? How much power can one generate from say, a mile-high glass structure that is about 10 meters across? How much would it cost?
There is an awful lot to understand and we don't even come close to having the capability to do so yet.
True but one of the thing that AI did not have thirty or forty years ago was the advanced neurobiological knowledge that was acquired in the ensuing years. We pretty much understand the function of the retina and the retinal ganglion cells, for example, and we are making great strides in our understanding of such important neural sub-assemblies as the cerebellum and the basal ganglia.
In my opinion, contrary to popular wisdom, AI will not arrive by incremental steps, i.e., we will not see intelligent machines slowly advance to human level. The gap between the two levels is astronomical. However, do not be surprised if a sudden breakthrough in computational neuroscience completely changes the field. If that happens, get ready for an explosion of activity. After that, it won't be a question of "is your computer more advanced than mine?" but "how many robots do you have on your estate?" And if you don't have an income producing estate, you're fucked because the worth of your expertise and labor will be zilch.
It seems to me that the internet and file sharing technologies are the beginning of the end for intellectual property laws. The global nature of the internet makes it impractical to police. The only way to truly enforces IP laws would be for several Big Brother-type governments to get together and agree to take draconian measures reminiscent of Orwell's 1984. Do you foresee a time when governments might be willing to take such measures? Do you think the world's citizens would go along with such Big Brother tactics? I, for one, would not.
Did This Guy Conduct a Test Flight Yet?
on
To the Moon, Alice
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· Score: 1
but im pretty sure the brain is able to adapt to weird visual changes
Good post. It's true that the brain is adaptable. The experiment you mentioned (speical glasses that turn everything in the field of vision upside down) is an excellent example of adaptation within the cortex. However glasses do not alter retinotopic mapping. Our sensation of color does not come from the retina but from the visual cortex and this is intact with glasses. Same with the detection of motion, edges, etc... This part of the brain is not as adatable as you think. It is for the most part pre-wired. If you suddenly send motion signals to color layers and vice versa, IMO, it will be extremely hard for these layers to process this information.
Even the center-surround arrangement of retinal cells is preserved in the target layers (area 17) of the primary visual cortex. These are prewired for the perception of edges, fine lines, etc... It is a good bet that color information coming into this area will be filtered out completely.
Another thing that is important for vision is eye saccades. Our eyes are continually making minute movements called saccades, even when we are focusing on a dot. The brain uses saccades to scan fine lines and points. This is basically how we detect edges. Saccades are generated by an automatic feedback circuit that involves retinal cells. If this circuit is missing or damaged by the retinal implant, it will result in impaired vision, probably forcing the subject to consciously and constantly scan the visual field.
And there is also the facotr of ANY improvement over being blind is probably good. Hell, if im totally blind, id be happy with 16 shades of green.
The internet is the main weapon freedom fighters have against increasingly Orwellian governments. We must keep it free (as in freedom) at all costs. We must block all intrusions by those who would spy on us.
information can be easily copied, but it can be locked up. it's when you offer it to others that you lose control of it, because they can always just go to the a/v stream if nothing else.
Slashdot Mirror
You're modding me down because the truth hurts. Your favorites gurus are either frauds or crackpots and you can't stand it. Trying to stop this stuff from coming oput is like the music industry trying to stop people from copying music. It can't be done.
Thanks to the moderators who modded me up.
...big businesses, the government, charitable organizations and philanthropists. After all, is not art sponsored by the government and other organizations? Maybe Eazel should have applied for a grant, one never knows.
Maybe we should actively pressure our representatives to sponsor free software because it's for the greater public good. Just one man's opinion. I hope the McArthur Foundation and others are listening.
This is damn funny. Do you do stand up comedy?
What if a technology based on quantum entanglement is perfected that makes it impossible for anybody to eavesdrop on private peer-to-peer communication? What will the fascist governements do?
Indeed, what will they do? Put a camera in every room in your home or apartment and/or force you to wear spook technology so they can watch your every move? If that happens, we'll all rise up and kick their collective Orwellian arses!
The internet is your weapon. Download it all and copy it all! Demand liberty!
If it can be converted by just a handful of people to a format that can be uploaded to the internet and downloaded by tens of millions around the world, they haven't got a chance.
That is all this amounts to. We should resist all laws that impinge on our freedom.
The only way they can enforce these fascist laws to the letter is by instituting Orwellian forms of governments around the world. If that happens, we should all rise up and kick their collective Orwellian arses.
The internet is your weapon. Copy it all and download it all!
All countries would have to follow suit.
Why?
Because the U.S. is the leading economic zone of the world and everybody wants a part of that market.
It would cause unprecedented development around the world.
Paid for by whom?
By the zillions of manufacturers who already manufacture tons of products that are not patented and make an excellent living doing so. Look what happen to Zerox after most of their patents ran out. They've had a monopoly for so long, they got lazy. They forgot how to make a quality product. Others came and did better.
Certainly not corporations, who would see half priced knockoffs soon after they hit the streets. How will they recoup R&D costs?
Only the patent holders who are fleecing the world by taking advantage of unatural laws that take away our freedom. Now, if you ask, "how are new things going to be invented if there are no patent laws?" My answer would be that people can form consortiums to develop new technologies that will be shared for the benefit of everybody. If you think that people cannot get together to innovate, consider NASA. Consider the trip to the moon. Consider the ISS. Consider also that innovation is already heavily funded by governments around the world through grants and contracts. Do a search on the net for DARPA funded projects and you'll get an idea of what I'm talking about.
Getting rid of patent laws would unleash unprecedented growth and allow small companies to compete on a more equal footing. Increased tax revenues would fuel even more grants and innovative projects.
It would cause a mass exodus of all technolgical development from the US to countries that do recognize patents.
I don't think so. All countries would have to follow suit. It would cause unprecedented development around the world. People would no longer be hampered by fascist laws and life saving drugs would suddenly be affordable to third world countries. In case you have forgotten we are one species and the earth is not inhabited by US. citizens alone.
Also the best possible solutions to technological problems would be quickly adopted by all as opposed to people spending an incredible amount of effort trying to circumvent somebody else's patent and reinventing the wheel. What a waste!
But as a public office, it seems reasonable to me that the USPTO be required to make their patent files, well .. public, actually.
I got a better idea. Close down the Patent Office and revoke all patents. That would solve the problem. Trademarks are something else though. They are part of of someone's or some company's identity. Still I think the kind of stuff that people are allowed to trademark are ludicrous.
I don't display my email address in my articles because it keeps me from getting tons of frivolous flames. My email address is at the bottom of my webpage below. Note that I get lots of emails and it may take a little while for me to get to yours.
...they come up with a truly revolutionary OS. We already have a glut of OSes out there, what with MacOS, BeOS, Windows, UNIX, Linux and a bunch of other free and proprietary OSes. The world does not give a rat's ass about another me-too operating system. Unless a new OS is several orders of magnitude better than what's already out there, it's doomed.
The only way a new OS can be orders of magnitude better than the others is for it to solve long standing problems with software systems. What are the biggest problems in the software industry right now? We all know that software sucks. It sucks because it breaks down all the time and takes too damn long to develop. Does AmigaOS offer a solution to either of these problems? Answer: no.
The Amiga OS development team has only one consolation. All the other OSes suck just as much as theirs. The other OSes have an enormous advantage though. They are already accepted by a sizable fraction of the OS market. Can anyone tell me how many people around the world are thinking of buying an Amiga?
You got to hand it to the Amiga team though. They are true believers.
So, even if we use these objects that communicate via message passing, it's just a facade over the real algorithmic execution that's occuring.
Parallelism can easily be simulated in software. I do it all the time. For example, his is how neural networks work. The trick is to hide the sequential nature of the processor by using two lists one for input signals and one for output. Once you get to that level, you're got a signal-based system. Ideally, the only algorithm that should exist in a processor-based system is the single function that runs the message-passing operating system and processes the primitive objects. In the future when we have fullly reconfigurable memory, we'll get rid of the function altogether.
The non-GPL version of what you're talking about is called many names: COM, OLE, Javabeans, VB, Corba...
No. They all suck, especially COM and OLE. They suck because they are all based on the algorithm. One of the problems with algorithmic components is that, even is they are tested and proven to work reliably in one environment, there is no guarantee that they'll work the same way in another environement. Why? because that is the bane of algorithmic systems: event timing varies from one system to another. By contrast all hardware chips retain their temporal signatures wherever they are used.
It's not just BASIC. All programming languages are based on 200 year-old ideas pioneered by Lady Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage. They all have one thing in common: the algorithm.
The algorithmic approach to software construction is the primary reason why software sucks. Software sucks because it is unreliable and takes too long to develop. The invention (again by Lady Ada) of the subroutine, although a great contribution when it was introduced to digital computers in the last century, did not prevent the current software crisis. Planes loaded with people are crashing, airports are shut down and Mars probes costing hundreds of millions of dollars are being lost. And it's all because of the algorithm.
Why the algorithm you ask? Well consider this: The reliability of software is inversely proportional to its complexity while the reliability of the human brain improves as it gets more complex. There is an important lesson to be learned from this. The most obvious difference between software and the brain is that the former uses sequential algorithms whereas the latter is based on parallel streams of signals.
A signal-based system is more reliable because it makes it possible to have strict control over the timing of events. By contrast, one can never be sure when an algorithm will be done, and this creates all sorts of timing problems. It is instructive to note that hardware is orders of magnitude more reliable than software. It is no secret that hardware is inherently parallel and driven by signals. I an convinced that a similar approach to software construction can improve reliability by several orders of magnitude.
So there you have it. I call for the elimination of the algorithm as the basis of software construction. I call for a worldwide effort by geeks everywhere to contribute ideas for the establishment of signal-based software construction methods (GPLed, of course). We need plug-compatible components and message-based communication between objects. We need reliable, downloadble components that can snap together at the click of a mouse. No more function calls! No more languages!
It is about time that software is changed from the cottage industry that it is today and moved into the 21st century. Let's face it, Lady Ada and Charles Babbage were true geniuses and we owe them a great deal, but they did not have to write code for interplanetary probes and air traffic control systems.
Almost no one pays for content in any medium.
The only property that is worthy of the name is tangible property. Anything else, ideas, inventions, formulae, equations, drawings, pictures, music, etc... are up for grab. If you can't chain it or lock it up or put a fence around it, it does not belong to you. Like it or lump it.
People yearn to be free. Anytime somebody tries to control other people's liberty, they get burned. The French have a saying for this, "Chassez la nature, elle revient au galop" which, roughly translated means "Chase away nature, she'll charge back gallopping." Nobody can stop people from transferring and copying files unless Big Brother enacts an Orwellian form of government. And if that happens, we'll all rise up and kick his arse.
You may ask, "how can one make a living from their work as an artist or programmer if they cannot sell it?" The answer is that you either have to keep your work a secret or do something else for a living. The problem is not intellectual property. The problem is the system.
The free information ideal cannot hope to win in a system where a person's livelihood depends on his or her labor. People must be given a means of subsistence other than intellectual property. Intellectual property owners (such as Microsoft and the music industry) will fight freedom with everything they've got. Right now they have two formidable weapons: IP laws and powerful police states to enforce them. But those who yearn to be free also have a formidable weapon, the internet.
The internet and other communication technologies (e.g., file sharing systems) are the first major kinks in the armor of a sick system. As technology progresses, the system will eventually collapse. What will happen to a slave-based economy when robots and advanced artificial intelligences replace everybody, i. e., when human labor, knowledge and expertise become worthless?
And don't think for a minute this won't happen in your lifetime. The internet is the latest giant leap in human communication. Before that came mass telecommunication technologies and before that was the movable press. If history is any indication, we can expect a giant leap in technological progress and scientific knowledge. In fact, it is happening before our very eyes.
We should all demand a system where everybody is guaranteed income property, an estate if you will. There is plenty for everybody and it would eliminate exploitation/slavery.
Communism confiscates all property and enslaves everybody. Capitalism gives property to a few and enslaves the rest. It's sad. The land should not be divided for a price. It should be an inheritance for us and our children and their children. It's the only way to guarantee freedom in a world where human labor is about to go the way of the dinosaurs.
Intellectual property laws exist only because we have a slavery system. Our livelihood depends on working for others so we can pay our taxes. The reason that we have to work for others is that 99% of people have been deprived of an inheritance in the wealth of the land. Income property is owned by a few and the state. The others are slaves. Artists, programmers and inventors depend on their work to make a living. Can we blame them? We all depend on our labor because we are all slaves. So now we are swimming in a ocean of laws and rules that take away our remaining liberties, one by one.
Demand liberty. Always!
The purpose of the GPL is not the promotion of competitive businesses but to encourage code reuse and cooperation among our fellow humans. I've said this before, the only property that is worthy of the name is tangible property. Anything else, ideas, inventions, formulae, equations, drawings, pictures, music, etc... are up for grab. If you can't chain it or lock it up or put a fence around it, it does not belong to you. Like it or lump it. The GPL encourages people to go back to trading in tangibles goods and share the intangible with their brothers and sisters. Capitalism sets people against one another. Eventually we will become worst than beasts, constantly at each other's throats. The GPL is trying to reverse this animalistic trend.
People yearn to be free. Anytime somebody tries to control other people's liberty, they get burned. The French have a saying for this, "Chassez la nature, elle revient au galop" which, roughly translated means "Chase away nature, she'll charge back gallopping." That is what the GPL is all about, FREEDOM. And freedom is part of human nature.
So if you want to do business, go sell bananas or oranges or something of that nature because your ideas are no longer your ideas once you let them out. Nobody can stop people from transferring and copying files unless Big Brother enacts an Orwellian form of government. And if that happens, we'll all rise up and kick his arse.
When Caldera releases their for-profit code, people around the world will download it for free and pass it around and there isn't a damn thing they can do about it. They'll copy it for the same reason that they make millions of copies of MS Windows 2000 and use it for free. My advice to Caldera is to stop being a cry baby and consider becoming a non-profit organization.
Thanks for the links and the info. Very interesting. I wonder if there has been any sudies done on the ecological impact of the large-scale use of these chimneys.
If we had the technology to build tall structures several miles high, we could conceivably use it to generate electricity. The air in a tall transparent tube, maybe several meters across, should rise up very fast as it is heated by the sun. By installing high-yield wind turbine generators at regular locations inside the tube, it should be possible to generate enough electricity to make it economically attractive.
Questions to greenhouse physicists and structural engineers: What is wrong with the above scenario? Will it work? How much power can one generate from say, a mile-high glass structure that is about 10 meters across? How much would it cost?
There is an awful lot to understand and we don't even come close to having the capability to do so yet.
True but one of the thing that AI did not have thirty or forty years ago was the advanced neurobiological knowledge that was acquired in the ensuing years. We pretty much understand the function of the retina and the retinal ganglion cells, for example, and we are making great strides in our understanding of such important neural sub-assemblies as the cerebellum and the basal ganglia.
In my opinion, contrary to popular wisdom, AI will not arrive by incremental steps, i.e., we will not see intelligent machines slowly advance to human level. The gap between the two levels is astronomical. However, do not be surprised if a sudden breakthrough in computational neuroscience completely changes the field. If that happens, get ready for an explosion of activity. After that, it won't be a question of "is your computer more advanced than mine?" but "how many robots do you have on your estate?" And if you don't have an income producing estate, you're fucked because the worth of your expertise and labor will be zilch.
It seems to me that the internet and file sharing technologies are the beginning of the end for intellectual property laws. The global nature of the internet makes it impractical to police. The only way to truly enforces IP laws would be for several Big Brother-type governments to get together and agree to take draconian measures reminiscent of Orwell's 1984. Do you foresee a time when governments might be willing to take such measures? Do you think the world's citizens would go along with such Big Brother tactics? I, for one, would not.
Or is this one going to be the maiden flight?
...they're way ahead of their times. On the other hand, many acclaimed mainstream experts are actually total nuts and get away with it. Go figure.
but im pretty sure the brain is able to adapt to weird visual changes
Good post. It's true that the brain is adaptable. The experiment you mentioned (speical glasses that turn everything in the field of vision upside down) is an excellent example of adaptation within the cortex. However glasses do not alter retinotopic mapping. Our sensation of color does not come from the retina but from the visual cortex and this is intact with glasses. Same with the detection of motion, edges, etc... This part of the brain is not as adatable as you think. It is for the most part pre-wired. If you suddenly send motion signals to color layers and vice versa, IMO, it will be extremely hard for these layers to process this information.
Even the center-surround arrangement of retinal cells is preserved in the target layers (area 17) of the primary visual cortex. These are prewired for the perception of edges, fine lines, etc... It is a good bet that color information coming into this area will be filtered out completely.
Another thing that is important for vision is eye saccades. Our eyes are continually making minute movements called saccades, even when we are focusing on a dot. The brain uses saccades to scan fine lines and points. This is basically how we detect edges. Saccades are generated by an automatic feedback circuit that involves retinal cells. If this circuit is missing or damaged by the retinal implant, it will result in impaired vision, probably forcing the subject to consciously and constantly scan the visual field.
And there is also the facotr of ANY improvement over being blind is probably good. Hell, if im totally blind, id be happy with 16 shades of green.
Agreed.
The internet is the main weapon freedom fighters have against increasingly Orwellian governments. We must keep it free (as in freedom) at all costs. We must block all intrusions by those who would spy on us.
Demand liberty. Always
information can be easily copied, but it can be locked up. it's when you offer it to others that you lose control of it, because they can always just go to the a/v stream if nothing else.
You're right.