Okay, the Library of Congress has been estimated to contain about 10 Terabyte, so I buy the 1000 * LoC = 15 Petabyte. But archive.org alone expanded its storage capacity to 1 Petabyte in 2005, so the CERN is not going to generate anything near "22 Internet" (whatever that might be). This estimate from 2002 calculates the size of the internet as about 530 Exabyte, 440 Exabyte of which are email, 157 Petabyte for the "surface web"
The company that produced Blender was NaN Technologies (Not a Number, from the error message). Neo Geo was a game console based on arcade games in the 90s.
No, it's not what your looking for, just interesting and informative regarding the technical problems.
HIPerWall is a 200 Megapixel display, based on 50 Apple 30" Cinema Displays driven by 25 Dual G5 PowerMacs plus one controller. It's a project at the University of California to explore very high resolution displays. HIPerWall is short for Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Wall. The PowerMacs are connected and act as one large display, allowing even video to be split over the whole area. The main problem they seem to have solved is the software to split the display over several separate machines, a problem you will also have if you try this with Windows and laptops, therefore this might be a good place to look for some experience. Apple has a nice project description in their science section.
Rosling gave a 20min presentation of Trendalyzer at the TED 2006 conference, using it to debunk some of the prejudices we have about the world. Turns out chimpanzees beat swedish professors when making claims about the world. Worth watching, as are many of the presentations at TEDtalks.
I think one has to see Rosling work with Trendalyzer to appreciate what that piece of software can do. He got standing ovations for his presentation at the TED conference in 2006. Very cool.
Hans Rosling is professor of international health at Sweden's world-renowned Karolinska Institute, and founder of Gapminder, a non-profit that brings vital global data to life. With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, he debunks a few myths about the "developing" world.[from the TED site]
This is ways more impressive than you'd guess from the video, which doesn't look much different from all the other walking biped robot video (it's less shiny than most). Since this always pops up and always has to be explained:
not dynamically balanced:
When the robot (e.g Asimo) moves, it's center of gravity is ALWAYS above the foot it is standing on. As a consequence, the robot could freeze at any moment without falling. Humans can walk that way, but it's slow.
dynamically balanced:
The center of gravity is not above the foot, basically it's falling forward, the motion cannot be stopped without falling. Much faster to move, much harder to calculate. Anybots managed this, which makes their bots a great achievement. We move this way.
In 1992 Harry Harrison (of SF fame) and Marvin Minsky (of AI fame) collaborated on The turing option, trying to merge Minsky's ideas about how an artificial mind could work with a SF story. Wasn't exactly a masterpiece, but there was an astonishing twist: In the book a brilliant scientist creates the first true AI and embeds it into a sort of fractal robot, whose arms are split into more arms like branches on a tree, ending with thousands of autonomous arms with their own vision each. And the first place this system is used (after being stolen): in agriculture, picking up bugs.
So I will predict the first mass use of Purdue's Tricorder: Japanese toilets!!!. It can already recognize "biomarkers" in urine, so someone will build a cheap version of it into a toilet and every time you take a dump it will tell you what you should not have been eating, how sick you will be tomorrow and that if you continue that way your insurance won't cover your therapy. It will save the health systems billions.
The article that describes the unusual movement in the market and the possibility of a buyout is from Reuters, so it can be considered valid. Only the idiotic discussion about IBM buying AMD is from Yahoo.
TFA does not talk about a buyout for technology reasons. No, IBM does not want to compete with Intel on the x86 market. This is about a private equity firm (aka a group with a lot of money) possibly trying to buy a large part of AMD. It's all about money, not tech.
Why would they do this? They either believe that AMDs stock is undervalued (it slipped 12% since January due to $574 million forth quarter loss) or they expect the company to fare pretty good in the future. Any way, they'd make money. A third option is always someone believing the single parts of the company are worth more than the stock and breaking it up and selling them separately will be profitable, but AMD is not sufficiently diversified to make this likely.
So what would happen if the rumors were true? Someone else would receive the bonus in the future.
As far as I remember the Space Shuttle not only has redundant computer systems, but also redundant software, i.e. the software has been developed twice to ensure that software bugs don't cause a catastrophe. I'd prefer to know that systems capable of carrying weapons which can kill hundreds of thousands of people were designed with the same safety in mind.
I have a tendency to believe that humans can err, but are basically good. And even Microsoft consists of humans. So my first reaction was "Oh good, they are not as soulless as we believe, this was an honest mistake." That option had already been pointed out during the discussion on slashdot as a problem within their process:
Microsoft collects suggestions from different sources
Someone suggests the BlueJ functionality
Someone extracts a list of features that should actually be implemented
Some developer implements the function, not knowing where it came from
At the end someone sees the function, attributed to the developer, does not see the BlueJ connection and suggests it for patent application, because this is the routine way to handle new ideas at Microsoft
So, an honest mistake. But this being Microsoft it took me seconds to fall into conspiracy mode. How could they have such mistakes in their process, if they care about intellectual property? Was the mistake that they didn't hide it well? Did they simply try if they can get through with this? Can an entity that consists of basically good humans be not good in the end? (I'm afraid yes). So I still cannot decide if I can trust them or not, they seem to have lied too often in the past.
I develop educational software myself, so I'm very pleased with this. Two points seem to be especially interesting:
Although Blackboard sued Desire2Learn, a commercial entity, for patent infringement, the reexamination is drive by three open source projects, supported by pro-bono Software Freedom Law Center. So a tendency of free software to fight patents directly.
According to TFA 70% of all reexaminations lead to narrowing or revoking the patent, but this is an average over all reexaminations. There has been a lot of prior art here, so I think the chances are even higher here.
... by 2020 using 4.5nm wires it should be possible to pack in the same amount of transistors in a space of just 4% of what is currently possible on a 45nm
So it should say 25 times as dense.
Moore's law is not about inefficient FPGA intercon
on
Could HP Beat Moore's Law?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Since the wiring in an FPGA is not fixed, they have to integrate more flexible ways of routing. According to TFA this takes up 80% to 90% of the silicon, leading to a much worse ratio of wiring to transistors dedicated to logic processing compared to "normal" chips. HP is developing something they call "field programmable nanowire interconnect (FPNI)", which consumes a lot less space. So they are not beating Moore's law, they improve chip space use in FPGAs to become similar to what todays dies with fixed routing achieve.
And even if you are desperately seeking more efficient FPGA, you'd have to be patient. TFA mentions that they are targeting a 25-fold increase packing density compared to todays 45nm chips in 2020. That's thirteen years, which in Moore's laws steps means about eight 18 month periods, each doubling density. My math may be flawed, but shouldn't that mean that by then we have 2^8 = 256 times the density in the normal process as we have today?
It seems humans at a certain level are inherently lazy.
Don't think of is as lazy. Think of it as more economic in the short term.
Pleasure and avoiding unpleasant situations are major forces of motivation, and this actually makes sense evolutionary. Having sex not only is fun, but also prevents extinction, eating makes you feel good and prevents starving. Heating and air conditioning keep your environment in a temperature range not only comfortable, but also minimize the chance of freezing or endangering overstressing your heart. Watching TV gives more immediate pleasure than studying quantum physics. Small children usually act based on these economics.
But "learning quantum physics is more rewarding in the long run", so shouldn't you do it anyway? And one of the things that happens during socialization/growing up is learning to postpone pleasure. One nifty trick is to project your pleasure onto something else. A lot of people get kicks of doing a good jobs. If you play video games you are rewarded by points, which completely lack any positive physical feedback, but you have learned to feel good about them.
Now all this happens unconsciously. Someone who is very self disciplined has somehow found ways to gain his/her rewards in the process, so s/he can keep up motivation even through boring tasks. Unfortunately these peoples are often not aware that they are basically tricking themselves and so they flood everybody else with useless tips (the "just do it" kind), usually making it worse, because they cannot really explain what they do to stay motivated, make something difficult look very easy and thereby frustrate the other ones who fail because they believed the simplified version.
The problem is ways more complex and one of the big failures of our educational system is that it assumes that people act based mainly on logic, not that logic only works if it is synced with the basically hormonally run brain. To know is not necessarily to act. I have no short answer to how to change that and only an incomplete long answer. But a start is to forget about lazy and acknowledge that you choose anything for a reason, even if that reason is not what you would superficially consider logical. If you want your brain to do something, you have to offer it some reward now, not in two years. Lots of possible tricks, e.g. visualize your goal in the brightest colors for 20 minutes everyday before you start working. Might work for some people.
I believe that understanding how we learn and are motivated would lead to a leap in human evolution, but we are at the very beginnings. Add some decades for advancing neurology research here.
So your point is that going to university forces you to learn the material and that is why it's better?
Somewhat simplified, but basically: yes.
Get some self discipline.
Great idea, why did I never think of that? Or why didn't billions of other people not simply get some self discipline? Not only would it solve all the problems of our educational systems, it would also rid us of smokers and obese people in no time. I'm actually in the educational business and the big problem is motivation, not access to information. Ever bought a language course on books and CDs? They are flying of the shelves, yet almost nobody (besides the people that already have hardcore self discipline) learns a language with these.
Should you actually have a solution how (or even where) someone can "Get some self discipline", patent it and get rich within seconds. A large part of human kind has been looking for a working solution for centuries. And as a hint: Just do it, Stop whining, Turn on your brain or You only have to really want to are no the solution.
Don't get me wrong: Having the material available for free is great, even though a large part of the courses are incomplete in that they refer you to the standard literature for reference like most regular university courses will. But this is basically a logistic solution, a lot of knowledge is available today to anybody who can get hold of a library card at the local university and a lot of basic knowledge is no further away than the wikipedia.
But you will find that the number of people studying advanced calculus or Sino-Tibetian languages outside of university courses is small, even though a lot of material is available for free. Learning complex subjects is a process, not just a question of getting the information, and the process (with tutorials and working with other students and asking questions and assignments and so on) is what MIT is still selling, the content of OCW is only a small part of that.
Fortunately OCW is not simply free, but (at least partly) licensed under a Creative Commons license allowing non commercial sharing and remixing (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5). While you may not be able to replicate the experience of studying at MIT, someone may take the content and add e.g. a technical communications layer.
You are into advanced web 3.0 elearning platform development, but have no way to create the content? Take OCW, reuse what they have and give the world a new learning experience? You always wanted to write a shoot-'em up game based on and explaining the principles on quantum physics? You solve the DirectX/OpenGL/game engine magic and compensate your lack of talent as a physics tutor by using parts of 8.04 Quantum Physics I, Spring 2006.
These are primitive ideas, but I think about OCW more as a basis on which people can experiment than a library. Libraries have been around for a long time, unfortunately the majority of people don't use them. To reach the masses, you have to somehow turn the content of OCW into something compatible to a game console. Give it a shot!
Starbucks is certainly quite successful at projecting an image of social responsiblity, yes - so much so that uninformed people like you believe that they created the fair trade movement, when actually Fair Trade is a decades old idea and Starbucks use of a tiny amout of Fair Trade coffee is just greenwash.
The article you linked just says that Starbucks only buys a small amount of FairTrade coffee. But it says nothing about how much fairly traded coffee they buy. These are two different concepts. FairTrade is a trademark for a certification process. If something is labeled you can be assured that it is fairly traded, but if something is not labeled FairTrade you cannot be sure of the opposite.
Starbucks is a sufficient large buyer to make it interesting to implement their own fair trading. And there may be good reasons for this, e.g. the overhead of the FairTrade process. In the YouTube video they claim that they often pay even more than FairTrade, and this seems completely possible since they could optimize logistics in a way that selling FairTrade coffee to consumers wouldn't allow.
So the complaint in the linked article is that the money Starbucks spends on coffee is not run through the FairTrade organization, not that the coffee is not traded fairly. Somehow they forgot to make this more obvious.
Should any fairly traded product be bought from FairTrade? I don't think so. Competition does not only lower prices, it also increases efficiency (thereby allowing lowering the prices). If Starbucks can pay the coffee farmers more than FairTrade due to their better process, I welcome this, because it will increase the consumption of fairly traded coffee in a significant way, while this might not happen if the price difference stays the same as it is today possibly due to inefficiencies in the FairTrade process.
I don't know these things, I have no numbers about how much Starbucks pays coffee farmers etc. But I have the ability to distinguish between a justified criticism and someone trying to defend their monopoly by calling someone else unethical.
The LHC will consume some 120 megawatts and is predicted to run for between 15 years and 20 years. It will be rested for three months in winter because the French power station that supplies it is needed for the domestic grid.
So I guess almost all the world's particle physicists will be home for christmas.
This is what everybody told the music industry for years: Don't try to fight down P2P, understand that these are your customers and give them an incentive to buy something from you instead of trying to force it down their throats. Now, after maybe six or seven years, the message got through.
Just imagine what would have happened if one of the major labels would have done this right from the beginning and what this would have done for their market share compared to the other ones who prefer to sue kids and grannies.
I wouldn't worry about Yahoos attempt to make money with flickr and del.icio.us and whether it might ruin those sites or not. The social network idea matches very nicely with what Yahoo has done in the past to make money, so they won't have to force those sites into another concept.
When Yahoo first appeared it was a bookmark list edited by one human. Search engine weren't as good as today and a directory like Yahoo often was much more useful. This changed when the web grew so fast that that no company could hope to keep up, resulting in Yahoo charging for faster integration into their index and the index becoming out of date very fast.
One attempt to improve the situation was to increase the number of contributers with the OpenDirectory, but even these where overwhelmed and today they cannot even handle the spam that is created non stop in dmoz, let alone keep pace with the web.
So we became dependent more on search engines than humans to find what we are looking for, fortunately for all of us Google proved to be very useful. But even Google has it's single point of failure, the one and only ranking algorithm. And although it's not trivial to cheat, the fact that Google reduces the web to basically the first ten entries on the first page leads to the same situation as with Yahoo and dmoz before: The web is not covered properly.
Enter social networks. Del.icio.us is like a dmoz where every user is a contributer. And nobody decides what is on top, it's pure statistics, much harder to cheat when hundreds of thousands of users are involved. With a limited amount of information sources you can easily manipulate an election, but the web provides a much larger base for building you own opinion, and it usually shows.
But what's really great about social networks is that the effort to contribute is so small. Extending dmoz is work, saving an URL at del.icio.us is something you primarily do for yourself, so we don't have to expect that the project will fail once the first movers are burned out. Given the ever increasing amount of information and the lack of progress in AI to sort through all this for us, we will become more and more dependent on others to filter for us. Information has become basically free, but finding the right information has become a challenge simply due to the sheer amount.
And here Yahoo closes the loop. The will never beat Google as a pure search engine, but maybe they can build the third generation of directories with their social network sites and continue to make money the way they always have: If you have the eye balls, enough people will buy something extra. And we will once again see Yahoo as the most efficient way to find information, because it is driven by humans.
We've seen a change of purpose in virus/trojan creation over the last years, from being a cracker or script kiddy ego thing to being the base of obviously lucrative spam distribution via cracked machines. The malware market has become more sophisticated, e.g. today malware usually will not crash a machine or cause any noticeable problems for the user, because the prime target is to use the machine as long as possible. So malware behavior is driven by business needs.
Now any option to make money will attract someone, in the case of illegal business often organized crime, which operates very much like any other business, just without regulation and taxes. And one thing business usually does is looking for options to grow and extend into other markets.
The spam distribution business seems just fine right now, and with more people getting online there is still some growth potential, but filters and trained users will limit that market. So if you switch from targeting the masses to individuals and specific companies you gain two things:
Detection rate is much lower, since the development of anti malware tools today only works because the cost for the development is spread over a large number of users. Unless this can be somehow automated, effective protection will become very expensive and only affordable by larger business or people with sensitive data like the military.
The revenue per customer will increase, since industrial espionage, blackmailing, insider training and other neat things available to those with the right data are much more profitable than a percentage in Viagra sales.
So once again, this is not mainly a technical problem: As long as someone finds a way to make money with it, it will not go away, but only get worse. Your best option might be to make sure that your business model allows your data to simply be open, so stealing will not work. If you develop open source software, your source can not be stolen or destroyed. But make sure you have backups of your consulting customers list on separate media.
I didn't mean to say that text is useless, just insufficient. Forums are actually a good example for this: They work because all the participants are able to create text and the forum itself provides a minimal structure by displaying the discussion thread. But after the discussion has ended, there remains a lot of redundant information. It is often ways more efficient to find and follow a former discussion about the subject you are researching than rethinking it yourself, but it requires you to rethink the whole process of the discussion, although you are only interested in the subject.
For efficiency reasons it would be nice if someone would take the thread, extract the main information and turn it into a wiki with references to the original forum. That would allow people to get to the information with less effort and also enable updates of the content. There are attempts at combined forums and wikis, but they fail partly due to the character of written text. It simply is not enough to recombine the posts from the forum discussion, usually someone will basically have to rewrite the whole thing. This is due to text being intended to be read in a consecutive order, you cannot simply swap sentences.
To make this more flexible, one would need parts of the posts to be identified by subjects, like automatically creating a table of content in a word processor from headers. The semantic web idea goes into that direction and is actually a step beyond pure text, but even this fails to appeal to the masses so far. Ideally you could rearrange information parts by reorganizing the table of content, moving the structure of the subject on a higher level of abstraction. This would be a first step from forums as blackboard to forums as knowledge containers and managers.
I'll give them the benefit of trying to start a realistic project without any fancy, not-yet existing technology, and therefore accept that their attempt for collective intelligence is writing a business book in what they call Wikipedia-style, so far with 300 participants. But I believe that books or the written word in general is not the right tool for collective intelligence and in fact right now stopping us from making some advances e.g. in education.
We've all grown up in a culture dominated by information transfer via text and been trained by our educational system to be producers of text ourselves. I'm currently doing it on slashdot, everybody is communicating via email and IM, because that's what we've learned.
But there has been a lot of research showing that richer media (not flash, but visualization and simulation) are often much more appropriate to describe complex subjects. There has been a trend for a long time to stuff text books with more graphics, diagrams, pictures, and educational software with videos, animations and so on. A picture can say more than a thousand words if placed in the right context.
Unfortunately we are not yet trained to use more than a basic hypertext processor for media creation. How many teachers can even draw a diagram? How many websites have useful graphics? If you look at wikipedia, it's basically a large book with a few photos and even fewer good diagrams, no simulations or whatever. So when reading e.g. wikipedia it is up to the reader again to create an internal visualization and hope to match the image intended by the authors.
I believe to make progress in collective intelligence we have to move our media production to match the mental capabilities of humans. Text was very useful when it was the only technical viable solution, but today there are many more and better media types, only our culture of media creation is behind the possibilities by some decades. YouTube may be a nice step in the right direction and what Lawrence Lessing said about creating CC licensed rich flash content also is. But starting another wiki style pseudo book is not.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, the Library of Congress has been estimated to contain about 10 Terabyte, so I buy the 1000 * LoC = 15 Petabyte. But archive.org alone expanded its storage capacity to 1 Petabyte in 2005, so the CERN is not going to generate anything near "22 Internet" (whatever that might be). This estimate from 2002 calculates the size of the internet as about 530 Exabyte, 440 Exabyte of which are email, 157 Petabyte for the "surface web"
The company that produced Blender was NaN Technologies (Not a Number, from the error message). Neo Geo was a game console based on arcade games in the 90s.
No, it's not what your looking for, just interesting and informative regarding the technical problems.
HIPerWall is a 200 Megapixel display, based on 50 Apple 30" Cinema Displays driven by 25 Dual G5 PowerMacs plus one controller. It's a project at the University of California to explore very high resolution displays. HIPerWall is short for Highly Interactive Parallelized Display Wall. The PowerMacs are connected and act as one large display, allowing even video to be split over the whole area. The main problem they seem to have solved is the software to split the display over several separate machines, a problem you will also have if you try this with Windows and laptops, therefore this might be a good place to look for some experience. Apple has a nice project description in their science section.
Rosling gave a 20min presentation of Trendalyzer at the TED 2006 conference, using it to debunk some of the prejudices we have about the world. Turns out chimpanzees beat swedish professors when making claims about the world. Worth watching, as are many of the presentations at TEDtalks.
I think one has to see Rosling work with Trendalyzer to appreciate what that piece of software can do. He got standing ovations for his presentation at the TED conference in 2006. Very cool.
This is ways more impressive than you'd guess from the video, which doesn't look much different from all the other walking biped robot video (it's less shiny than most). Since this always pops up and always has to be explained:
not dynamically balanced: When the robot (e.g Asimo) moves, it's center of gravity is ALWAYS above the foot it is standing on. As a consequence, the robot could freeze at any moment without falling. Humans can walk that way, but it's slow. dynamically balanced: The center of gravity is not above the foot, basically it's falling forward, the motion cannot be stopped without falling. Much faster to move, much harder to calculate. Anybots managed this, which makes their bots a great achievement. We move this way.In 1992 Harry Harrison (of SF fame) and Marvin Minsky (of AI fame) collaborated on The turing option, trying to merge Minsky's ideas about how an artificial mind could work with a SF story. Wasn't exactly a masterpiece, but there was an astonishing twist: In the book a brilliant scientist creates the first true AI and embeds it into a sort of fractal robot, whose arms are split into more arms like branches on a tree, ending with thousands of autonomous arms with their own vision each. And the first place this system is used (after being stolen): in agriculture, picking up bugs.
So I will predict the first mass use of Purdue's Tricorder: Japanese toilets!!!. It can already recognize "biomarkers" in urine, so someone will build a cheap version of it into a toilet and every time you take a dump it will tell you what you should not have been eating, how sick you will be tomorrow and that if you continue that way your insurance won't cover your therapy. It will save the health systems billions.
.Oh, and I'm serious about the toilet part.
The article that describes the unusual movement in the market and the possibility of a buyout is from Reuters, so it can be considered valid. Only the idiotic discussion about IBM buying AMD is from Yahoo.
TFA does not talk about a buyout for technology reasons. No, IBM does not want to compete with Intel on the x86 market. This is about a private equity firm (aka a group with a lot of money) possibly trying to buy a large part of AMD. It's all about money, not tech.
Why would they do this? They either believe that AMDs stock is undervalued (it slipped 12% since January due to $574 million forth quarter loss) or they expect the company to fare pretty good in the future. Any way, they'd make money. A third option is always someone believing the single parts of the company are worth more than the stock and breaking it up and selling them separately will be profitable, but AMD is not sufficiently diversified to make this likely.
So what would happen if the rumors were true? Someone else would receive the bonus in the future.
As far as I remember the Space Shuttle not only has redundant computer systems, but also redundant software, i.e. the software has been developed twice to ensure that software bugs don't cause a catastrophe. I'd prefer to know that systems capable of carrying weapons which can kill hundreds of thousands of people were designed with the same safety in mind.
I have a tendency to believe that humans can err, but are basically good. And even Microsoft consists of humans. So my first reaction was "Oh good, they are not as soulless as we believe, this was an honest mistake." That option had already been pointed out during the discussion on slashdot as a problem within their process:
So, an honest mistake. But this being Microsoft it took me seconds to fall into conspiracy mode. How could they have such mistakes in their process, if they care about intellectual property? Was the mistake that they didn't hide it well? Did they simply try if they can get through with this? Can an entity that consists of basically good humans be not good in the end? (I'm afraid yes). So I still cannot decide if I can trust them or not, they seem to have lied too often in the past.
I develop educational software myself, so I'm very pleased with this. Two points seem to be especially interesting:
Me bad. TFA:
So it should say 25 times as dense.
Since the wiring in an FPGA is not fixed, they have to integrate more flexible ways of routing. According to TFA this takes up 80% to 90% of the silicon, leading to a much worse ratio of wiring to transistors dedicated to logic processing compared to "normal" chips. HP is developing something they call "field programmable nanowire interconnect (FPNI)", which consumes a lot less space. So they are not beating Moore's law, they improve chip space use in FPGAs to become similar to what todays dies with fixed routing achieve.
And even if you are desperately seeking more efficient FPGA, you'd have to be patient. TFA mentions that they are targeting a 25-fold increase packing density compared to todays 45nm chips in 2020. That's thirteen years, which in Moore's laws steps means about eight 18 month periods, each doubling density. My math may be flawed, but shouldn't that mean that by then we have 2^8 = 256 times the density in the normal process as we have today?
Don't think of is as lazy. Think of it as more economic in the short term.
Pleasure and avoiding unpleasant situations are major forces of motivation, and this actually makes sense evolutionary. Having sex not only is fun, but also prevents extinction, eating makes you feel good and prevents starving. Heating and air conditioning keep your environment in a temperature range not only comfortable, but also minimize the chance of freezing or endangering overstressing your heart. Watching TV gives more immediate pleasure than studying quantum physics. Small children usually act based on these economics.
But "learning quantum physics is more rewarding in the long run", so shouldn't you do it anyway? And one of the things that happens during socialization/growing up is learning to postpone pleasure. One nifty trick is to project your pleasure onto something else. A lot of people get kicks of doing a good jobs. If you play video games you are rewarded by points, which completely lack any positive physical feedback, but you have learned to feel good about them.
Now all this happens unconsciously. Someone who is very self disciplined has somehow found ways to gain his/her rewards in the process, so s/he can keep up motivation even through boring tasks. Unfortunately these peoples are often not aware that they are basically tricking themselves and so they flood everybody else with useless tips (the "just do it" kind), usually making it worse, because they cannot really explain what they do to stay motivated, make something difficult look very easy and thereby frustrate the other ones who fail because they believed the simplified version.
The problem is ways more complex and one of the big failures of our educational system is that it assumes that people act based mainly on logic, not that logic only works if it is synced with the basically hormonally run brain. To know is not necessarily to act. I have no short answer to how to change that and only an incomplete long answer. But a start is to forget about lazy and acknowledge that you choose anything for a reason, even if that reason is not what you would superficially consider logical. If you want your brain to do something, you have to offer it some reward now, not in two years. Lots of possible tricks, e.g. visualize your goal in the brightest colors for 20 minutes everyday before you start working. Might work for some people.
I believe that understanding how we learn and are motivated would lead to a leap in human evolution, but we are at the very beginnings. Add some decades for advancing neurology research here.
Somewhat simplified, but basically: yes.
Great idea, why did I never think of that? Or why didn't billions of other people not simply get some self discipline? Not only would it solve all the problems of our educational systems, it would also rid us of smokers and obese people in no time. I'm actually in the educational business and the big problem is motivation, not access to information. Ever bought a language course on books and CDs? They are flying of the shelves, yet almost nobody (besides the people that already have hardcore self discipline) learns a language with these.
Should you actually have a solution how (or even where) someone can "Get some self discipline", patent it and get rich within seconds. A large part of human kind has been looking for a working solution for centuries. And as a hint: Just do it, Stop whining, Turn on your brain or You only have to really want to are no the solution.
Don't get me wrong: Having the material available for free is great, even though a large part of the courses are incomplete in that they refer you to the standard literature for reference like most regular university courses will. But this is basically a logistic solution, a lot of knowledge is available today to anybody who can get hold of a library card at the local university and a lot of basic knowledge is no further away than the wikipedia.
But you will find that the number of people studying advanced calculus or Sino-Tibetian languages outside of university courses is small, even though a lot of material is available for free. Learning complex subjects is a process, not just a question of getting the information, and the process (with tutorials and working with other students and asking questions and assignments and so on) is what MIT is still selling, the content of OCW is only a small part of that.
Fortunately OCW is not simply free, but (at least partly) licensed under a Creative Commons license allowing non commercial sharing and remixing (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5). While you may not be able to replicate the experience of studying at MIT, someone may take the content and add e.g. a technical communications layer.
You are into advanced web 3.0 elearning platform development, but have no way to create the content? Take OCW, reuse what they have and give the world a new learning experience? You always wanted to write a shoot-'em up game based on and explaining the principles on quantum physics? You solve the DirectX/OpenGL/game engine magic and compensate your lack of talent as a physics tutor by using parts of 8.04 Quantum Physics I, Spring 2006.
These are primitive ideas, but I think about OCW more as a basis on which people can experiment than a library. Libraries have been around for a long time, unfortunately the majority of people don't use them. To reach the masses, you have to somehow turn the content of OCW into something compatible to a game console. Give it a shot!
The article you linked just says that Starbucks only buys a small amount of FairTrade coffee. But it says nothing about how much fairly traded coffee they buy. These are two different concepts. FairTrade is a trademark for a certification process. If something is labeled you can be assured that it is fairly traded, but if something is not labeled FairTrade you cannot be sure of the opposite.
Starbucks is a sufficient large buyer to make it interesting to implement their own fair trading. And there may be good reasons for this, e.g. the overhead of the FairTrade process. In the YouTube video they claim that they often pay even more than FairTrade, and this seems completely possible since they could optimize logistics in a way that selling FairTrade coffee to consumers wouldn't allow.
So the complaint in the linked article is that the money Starbucks spends on coffee is not run through the FairTrade organization, not that the coffee is not traded fairly. Somehow they forgot to make this more obvious.
Should any fairly traded product be bought from FairTrade? I don't think so. Competition does not only lower prices, it also increases efficiency (thereby allowing lowering the prices). If Starbucks can pay the coffee farmers more than FairTrade due to their better process, I welcome this, because it will increase the consumption of fairly traded coffee in a significant way, while this might not happen if the price difference stays the same as it is today possibly due to inefficiencies in the FairTrade process.
I don't know these things, I have no numbers about how much Starbucks pays coffee farmers etc. But I have the ability to distinguish between a justified criticism and someone trying to defend their monopoly by calling someone else unethical.
This is what everybody told the music industry for years: Don't try to fight down P2P, understand that these are your customers and give them an incentive to buy something from you instead of trying to force it down their throats. Now, after maybe six or seven years, the message got through.
Just imagine what would have happened if one of the major labels would have done this right from the beginning and what this would have done for their market share compared to the other ones who prefer to sue kids and grannies.
I wouldn't worry about Yahoos attempt to make money with flickr and del.icio.us and whether it might ruin those sites or not. The social network idea matches very nicely with what Yahoo has done in the past to make money, so they won't have to force those sites into another concept.
When Yahoo first appeared it was a bookmark list edited by one human. Search engine weren't as good as today and a directory like Yahoo often was much more useful. This changed when the web grew so fast that that no company could hope to keep up, resulting in Yahoo charging for faster integration into their index and the index becoming out of date very fast.
One attempt to improve the situation was to increase the number of contributers with the OpenDirectory, but even these where overwhelmed and today they cannot even handle the spam that is created non stop in dmoz, let alone keep pace with the web.
So we became dependent more on search engines than humans to find what we are looking for, fortunately for all of us Google proved to be very useful. But even Google has it's single point of failure, the one and only ranking algorithm. And although it's not trivial to cheat, the fact that Google reduces the web to basically the first ten entries on the first page leads to the same situation as with Yahoo and dmoz before: The web is not covered properly.
Enter social networks. Del.icio.us is like a dmoz where every user is a contributer. And nobody decides what is on top, it's pure statistics, much harder to cheat when hundreds of thousands of users are involved. With a limited amount of information sources you can easily manipulate an election, but the web provides a much larger base for building you own opinion, and it usually shows.
But what's really great about social networks is that the effort to contribute is so small. Extending dmoz is work, saving an URL at del.icio.us is something you primarily do for yourself, so we don't have to expect that the project will fail once the first movers are burned out. Given the ever increasing amount of information and the lack of progress in AI to sort through all this for us, we will become more and more dependent on others to filter for us. Information has become basically free, but finding the right information has become a challenge simply due to the sheer amount.
And here Yahoo closes the loop. The will never beat Google as a pure search engine, but maybe they can build the third generation of directories with their social network sites and continue to make money the way they always have: If you have the eye balls, enough people will buy something extra. And we will once again see Yahoo as the most efficient way to find information, because it is driven by humans.
We've seen a change of purpose in virus/trojan creation over the last years, from being a cracker or script kiddy ego thing to being the base of obviously lucrative spam distribution via cracked machines. The malware market has become more sophisticated, e.g. today malware usually will not crash a machine or cause any noticeable problems for the user, because the prime target is to use the machine as long as possible. So malware behavior is driven by business needs.
Now any option to make money will attract someone, in the case of illegal business often organized crime, which operates very much like any other business, just without regulation and taxes. And one thing business usually does is looking for options to grow and extend into other markets.
The spam distribution business seems just fine right now, and with more people getting online there is still some growth potential, but filters and trained users will limit that market. So if you switch from targeting the masses to individuals and specific companies you gain two things:
So once again, this is not mainly a technical problem: As long as someone finds a way to make money with it, it will not go away, but only get worse. Your best option might be to make sure that your business model allows your data to simply be open, so stealing will not work. If you develop open source software, your source can not be stolen or destroyed. But make sure you have backups of your consulting customers list on separate media.
I didn't mean to say that text is useless, just insufficient. Forums are actually a good example for this: They work because all the participants are able to create text and the forum itself provides a minimal structure by displaying the discussion thread. But after the discussion has ended, there remains a lot of redundant information. It is often ways more efficient to find and follow a former discussion about the subject you are researching than rethinking it yourself, but it requires you to rethink the whole process of the discussion, although you are only interested in the subject.
For efficiency reasons it would be nice if someone would take the thread, extract the main information and turn it into a wiki with references to the original forum. That would allow people to get to the information with less effort and also enable updates of the content. There are attempts at combined forums and wikis, but they fail partly due to the character of written text. It simply is not enough to recombine the posts from the forum discussion, usually someone will basically have to rewrite the whole thing. This is due to text being intended to be read in a consecutive order, you cannot simply swap sentences.
To make this more flexible, one would need parts of the posts to be identified by subjects, like automatically creating a table of content in a word processor from headers. The semantic web idea goes into that direction and is actually a step beyond pure text, but even this fails to appeal to the masses so far. Ideally you could rearrange information parts by reorganizing the table of content, moving the structure of the subject on a higher level of abstraction. This would be a first step from forums as blackboard to forums as knowledge containers and managers.
define intelligent
I'll give them the benefit of trying to start a realistic project without any fancy, not-yet existing technology, and therefore accept that their attempt for collective intelligence is writing a business book in what they call Wikipedia-style, so far with 300 participants. But I believe that books or the written word in general is not the right tool for collective intelligence and in fact right now stopping us from making some advances e.g. in education.
We've all grown up in a culture dominated by information transfer via text and been trained by our educational system to be producers of text ourselves. I'm currently doing it on slashdot, everybody is communicating via email and IM, because that's what we've learned.
But there has been a lot of research showing that richer media (not flash, but visualization and simulation) are often much more appropriate to describe complex subjects. There has been a trend for a long time to stuff text books with more graphics, diagrams, pictures, and educational software with videos, animations and so on. A picture can say more than a thousand words if placed in the right context.
Unfortunately we are not yet trained to use more than a basic hypertext processor for media creation. How many teachers can even draw a diagram? How many websites have useful graphics? If you look at wikipedia, it's basically a large book with a few photos and even fewer good diagrams, no simulations or whatever. So when reading e.g. wikipedia it is up to the reader again to create an internal visualization and hope to match the image intended by the authors.
I believe to make progress in collective intelligence we have to move our media production to match the mental capabilities of humans. Text was very useful when it was the only technical viable solution, but today there are many more and better media types, only our culture of media creation is behind the possibilities by some decades. YouTube may be a nice step in the right direction and what Lawrence Lessing said about creating CC licensed rich flash content also is. But starting another wiki style pseudo book is not.