Now do the same thing for the rest of the Google services, and don't forget to speculate on all the alpha products like you've already done for Spreadsheets.
You wish. How about using your own brain and see if you can find something search related for every service they provide?
I did it for some of them. I also commented there that I did not claim that Google only does search, but that everything they do revolves around search, because that's what they make money from. I'm pretty sure they also produce t-shirts and hats with Google logos and maybe sell them to visitors, but the fact that you find something that is not directly related to search does not invalidate that their main business focus is and will be search.
I don't know Picasa, Checkout, Finance, Web accelerator, and Talk
Alerts, GMail and Blogspot are simply more text search with ads.
I'm not sure about ads and Desktop (don't use it), but the link to search is rather obvious. The fact that it does more will get more people to use it.
Earth (and maps) allow you to find locations and allow others to add comments and Google to accept paid ads again. "Where is the next supermarket/gas station?" is a very valuable question. SketchUp is a tool to get more people to use Earth.
Calendar and Spreadsheet may be used for context advertising just like searching Word and PowerPoint documents is right now. Also, it may be directed vs. Microsoft to stop them from making inroads with Office live.
I do not claim that search is the ONLY thing Google does. But I think that basically everything Google does helps people find something and the reason for this is that Google can sell ads to customers which sell something similar to what the users are looking for or where the users are located. They have not entered into retail or web services (besides selling their search engine to AOL and others). They stick to what they do best and find new areas to do this in. No, I'm not sure about the strategy behind spreadsheet, but if I had to choose between "selling web services to business" and "selling more ads" I'd choose the later.
Well, isn't that obvious? Text messaging and text ads based on the content of the message? Just like ads in Google Mail? And btw, "beta" is googlish for "we have not yet found how to make money from it", see years of news in beta due to the problem how not to piss of the news providers.
How is a JavaScript map client "search"? (Sure you can "search" for businesses, but the results are pretty unreliable.)
Replace "search" with "find". I "find" a lot of locations/remarks from other users with maps/Google earth. And I have used them to find my way around in places I visit. "Finding" a restaurant/supermarket/cinema is as useful on a map as finding a web site on a search engine. And whoever provides me with the best tool to find something in my environment or manage my routes more easily will automatically get a large share of my eye balls for payed advertisement.
How is a JavaScript spreadsheet program "search"?
Just like searching.doc files, only more convenient since they store them on their own servers while having a chance to keep one of their main competitors for the payed search marked from successfully transforming their main software product into the "must have" web service for business and also advocating open file formats which can be searched easily?
Several years ago everybody was going portal. Every search engine added shopping, communities, finance tips, travel, free mail account and tried to lure users into spending as much time as possible on their site as possible to get their cash and more cash from advertisers.
Then came Google with a simple interface and did one thing: search. And basically everything Google released since then was build around search. Even the videos. But music is very hierarchically organized: Artist - Album - Track. You seldom have to search for something, maybe you'll use Google to search for the lyrics if you cannot remember the name of the track.
Now everybody predicting that Google will go into music just falls into the portal trap. Hey, they did search, they have news, they do mail, so they must aim to become a portal, hence they will try to do everything and so they must want to do music.
Think: Google = search. If the product does not fit, there is no way to make money from it for Google and they won't do it (there will always be exceptions, but that is the general rule so far).
They neither take up tons of space nor do they slaughter birds. There have been a number of studies to determine if they have a negative impact on birds by either killing them when they accidently fly into the wings or disturb and drive them away by the noise they make. Both claims have been proven to be completely wrong, birds aren't stupid enough to fly into the wings and get as easily used to the noise as they get to street noise. If they are an eyesore is a question of personal taste. I prefer their sight compared to highways or the towers of overland power lines. And I guess that nobody will notice them any more than any other structure humans place in the landscape once one generation has passed and they have become "normal".
The main problem with stirling engines and reflective dishes is that they consume a lot of space, most of which is the empty area between dish and engine. While they may be more efficient and their production be less hazardous to the environment, they cannot compete with solar panels which can be put on roof tops or basically any flat surface. Newer PV technology even promises "paint on" solar cells. They are simply less invasive and therefore can be put into more places, leveling their lower efficiency. For rural areas this may be different, but for cities PV wins.
Hm, looks simply like a small sterling engine or mini gas turbine used to drive an AC. They managed to make it cheap so it will be applicable in small installations, but both the sterling engine and the gas turbine (using a fluid in a closed circuit) require a temperature difference, so the machine would not be driven by heat alone. You'd have to cool down the steam after it had passed the generator to make it condensate to a fluid again and pump it back into the thermal collectors. The article does not mention how this should be done or where the energy for this should come from.
Power stations using closed fluid circuits (e.g. nuclear plants) use a secondary circuit to cool the first one after the steam passed the turbine. They are usually located near rivers for this. Larger installations for sterling engines can store heat during the day in a water tank and use the difference in temperature between the water and the surrounding cooler air during the night to drive a sterling engine. This obviously works best in areas where the difference in temperature between day and night is significant, i.e. deserts. I don't think it to be realistic to turn 1/4 of your apartment into a heat/cold storage just to drive the AC.
So in the end they made it cheaper, but inefficient (5%) even compared to solar panels (20%) without offering something that could replace a conventional AC. To achieve this you'd still have to build houses in a smarter way, e.g. isolate the walls from the inside and outside and use them as thermal storage. More energy efficient construction has been done for cold regions (where houses require almost no heating during winter when isolated well, the inhabitants' body heat is sufficient) and warmer regions (traditional buildings build with clay and wind-traps and smaller windows to the sunny side). So it is possible, but do not expect too much from our current architecture.
... and you still don't seem able to clearly differentiate between ability to process information and quantity of available information
I'm pretty sure that I can clearly differentiate between ability to process information and quantity of available information. What I seem to not have made clear is that I think that trying to discuss (human) intelligence as only processing or the information itself makes no sense and that both influence each other. My ability to process information determines which information is available to me (if I cannot read, books aren't) and the information available determines my processing capabilities (if there are only two books on a subject, I will never have to develop a process to determine which of them to read, but I will if there are 200). Therefore changing the available information (quantity, quality, ease and speed of access) WILL change my processing and thereby my intelligence, even though I could describe them independent of each other.
The quantity (and quality) of information is irrelevant if a human cannot access them and processing power does not matter if there is nothing to process. To use the processor speed/disk size analogy: you can plug a 750GB PATA drive into an old 486 board or start your Athlon64 with your 40MB delivering 0,5MB/sec hard disk from 1990. You may find a useful purpose for this, but usually you'll end with an "unbalanced system" which is basically useless. Okay, now the analogy got even worse, but the basic idea should be clear: sometimes the relation between the different parts is more important than the parts themselves.
One of the main reasons why the differentiation may make sense with machines, but not so much with humans, is our excellent ability to associate and recognize patterns. The ability to apply a method used to solve a problem in one area onto a completely other area will generally be considered "intelligent". Both association and pattern recognition require a large information/knowledge base, which usually will not be considered being a part of intelligence and any IQ test tries to eliminate these cultural dependent aspects. But this is also one of the main criticism about the whole IQ idea: that you can define intelligence detached from social surrounding. Once you leave the technical definition of the IQ (which only works in specific tests anyway) you will find that the ability to process information alone isn't worth that much.
Since all this started with the "augmented intelligence and wikipedia" statement, your criticism should actually go further: my description of (one aspect of) intelligence did not only mix information processing and information availability, but also existing world models (this includes ideas like ethics and moral) and action taken (i.e. if you are unable to (re)act you are not intelligent, even if your analysis was brilliant). But this was intended, because I think that intelligence is not the ability to process information, it is much more. This will prevent expressing intelligence by a number, but that's not really a loss.And I'm not the only one with such a broad definition of intelligence.
For me Wikipedia is "augmented intelligence", but before that I had the Encyclopedia Britannica
Perhaps if you augmented your intelligence a bit more, you'd understand that it's not the same as knowledge or information.
Okay, this came out wrong. I do not think that wikipedia represents intelligence and therefore it cannot be "augmented intelligence". I think that (one aspect of) intelligence is the ability to process information, evaluate it in combination with other information/knowledge acquired before, establish a position in a world model, decide on an action based on formerly known actions or develop a new action and finally perform it. So for me Wikipedia can augment a humans intelligence not simply by providing more information, but by providing it in a way that it may be added to the regular information processing habit.
Let's say I make 500 conscious decisions every day (which shirt to wear, which food to eat, take the new job, press the red button etc.). For almost any of these decisions I can rely on a mix of internal information (already acquired knowledge and deductions) and external information (books, web, Wikipedia, ask someone). I will not visit the public library 500 times a day, but I may call up an article from the wikipedia 20 times a day. It's not just about availability of information, it's also about "process compatibility". Therefore the encyclopedia on the desk may not be counted as augmenting my "intelligence process" (access is too slow for me to be willing to use it all the time), while the wikipedia may. This depends on your personal process, I'm sure there have always been people who look up every foreign word they don't know while most try to guess, and wikipedia will not become a part of your routine unless you replace your modem by DSL or cable.
Well, I doubt it. I agree with most of the idea of the 6:17 cast and even agree that educational and social changes like widespread literacy may be considered a singularity, but I seriously doubt the timeframe of one generation/30 years they mention. Literacy was adapted over hundreds of years, network communities have been developing for at least 30 years and are still primitive and very far from a "collective mind". For me Wikipedia is "augmented intelligence", but before that I had the Encyclopedia Britannica on my iBook and before that an encyclopedia on my desk, so this to is evolved. And since the Wikipedia is created by so many, it may be considered a primitive product of the "meta intelligence" described.
Btw, the piece from NPR focuses (very trendy) on collaboration and advanced information management, they do not lay great hope on a major breakthrough in AI.
Your GPS receiver will have very little trouble in 'Urban Canyons' and foliage if the GPS chip is a SiRF chip (The SiRFStar III to be precise). The Forerunner 305 has it.
I love the Garmin (worn like a wrist watch, but makes a Casio GShock look tiny), but hate the fact that GPS and large buildings do not really match. Living in Berlin there is no way to avoid them without getting out of town first. I always run the same route and the distance measured by the Garmin varies about 10% each time.
So I'd actually consider to add the sensor as an addition to what I'm already wearing, just to gain accuracy (yes, running can make you quite obsessive). I'd probably keep the Garmin due to the heart rate monitor and some other nice features. The price of the sensor is neglectable compared to the shoes and cloth I wear out per year, the worst thing would be eventually being forced to switch the shoe brand.
I am possibly close to the perfect target group: I run a lot, I care a lot about how much I run, I listen to music and more while I run. I would match perfectly if I had not already tried to satisfy my desires with appropriate technology. So the only remaining upsale will be for Nike.
Even though I wrote it myself, I am somewhat scared about the moderation. A couple of hour ago it was 3-Funny. It was intended to be funny. Now it is 4-Insightful.
I will not assume that a lot of slashdot users will support the idea of solving problems by removing the part of the population that causes the problem. Most will be aware that a) even idiots usually have positive sides, b) an idiot in one area may be a genius in another, c) trying to fix something complex like society with a hammer will most likely not result in the society you wanted and d) that it is ethically impossible to avoid misjudgment and injustice about who is worthy existing or not. I'm a native German and due to our history we are very aware what kind of disaster one can create if you allow yourself to consider something like this an acceptable solution, so I'm basically trained to be oversensitive about this issue. But "Insightful" is still scary.
However... it is interesting to note that on the same day this article comes out, Microsoft stock drops 11%, while Google stock stays flat. It seems that Wall Street is wagering that Microsoft will lose this war.
No, they also reported quarterly revenues and the analysts where disappointed. There were some announcements about a strategic shift toward web services and reports of more losses in the entertainment and home area. Only the business software is where it should be, and many people expect that adaptation of Vista will not be as huge as Microsoft hopes, so basically all areas where Microsoft tried to diversify lose money and their cash cow is in danger. A good reason for a stock drop. It's not all about fighting Google.
Yes but you could easily and logically carry that to the next step and say "because MSN search will be the default home page in IE7 they will draw a number of users who simply find it easiest to keep it that way".
Yes, but this is (as you stated) already the case: msn.com as the standard IE startpage features a "Search the Web" field at the top of the page. If this would be sufficient, MSN/Microsoft search would already be the most popular search engine. But Google managed to catch the top spot. It is much easier to type www.google.com into IE than to download and install software, so I guess the advantage in comfort does not apply here as heavily. I know a number of people who use Firefox as their standard browser, but search not by entering the search term in the field in in Firefox, but call Google manually first. I'm always astonished about that, but they don't seem to mind. Calling an URL is sufficiently low tech to be handled by the majority.
The company also noted that its search ad revenue fell during the quarter as it tried to shift its online advertising away from a service provided by Yahoo to the newly developed MSN Ad Center system.
This may of course change in the future, but I somehow doubt they can touch Google or Yahoo. The whole race for the crown is about the search based ads, not about who uses which search engine. So Microsoft has not only to get a lot of users to use MSN search as their standard search engine, they also have to convince all the advertisers that their system works at least as good or better than those from Google or Yahoo/Overture.
When Microsoft entered a market late in the past, they always could leverage their market position. It was easier to use the already installed IE then to download another browser, it was easier to use Windows Media Player than to download and install RealPlayer or Quicktime. If Microsoft had no leverage in the market, they used their money: They bought shares in cable companies, started cooperations with mobile phone makers or massively subsidized XBOX/360.
But what could they use this time? Desktop search integrated into Vista? Standard search in IE7? Lower prices for advertisers? Most likely all, but nothing will give them a real advantage. They will have to really compete and innovate this time, and that is not something they are good at.
Explain all the dictionary phrase spam, that has no valid message then? just jumbles of phrases- and nothing advertised?
I'm astonished by those all the time. My Thunderbird is throwing out about 2000 mails a day, and I am often confused about those it didn't catch. I could not recognize them as spam either, since they contain no product names, no links, nothing.
But since I believe that nothing that can be explained with stupidity should be explained by conspiracy theories, I assume these are accidents.
Technical advances
Better tricks to fool spam filters, like the examination of text the user has written mentioned in TFA. This is close to impossible to stop, the only way is to try to be faster in developing better anti spam tools.
Lack of security
Most spam today is send from captured machines, and in the future these machines will not only be used to send but also to improve spam. This could be helped by better educated users, better default system security or easier to understand security configurations. At least there is hope.
Response
The only reason for all this spam is that it still pays. Even though it is a very small number of people, it is enough to finance the whole illegal business of building bot nets, stealing addresses etc. If there was a way to stop people to buy that stuff, the other two points would be irrelevant. Unfortunately this is not going to happen, which is the most frustrating part.
I think this is great, but it will still take some time to be used in daily life. This looks like one of the biped robots we have seen in the last years who has the possibility to carry a person. These bots can balance each step, but they are always in balance. A person which is walking or running is not in a permanent state of standing, but falling. To move forward at a reasonable pace you have to abandon stability and use gravity to draw you forward and reestablishing balance once you set down your foot.
This is difficult enough on a fixed floor (watch babies learn to walk), but much harder on something like grass or inside a moving train. Considering how long it took to get robots to even stand it will still take some time to walk. So if you depend on a wheelchair today and would like to actually move at decent speeds, you may be out of luck for some time.
Sounds nice, but will actually make it worse
on
Public Patents?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It sounds like a nice solution, unfortunately it is not. It would require two mayor changes:
A reverse of the policy of patent offices as profit centers. Almost all western countries have challenged their patent offices to make money. The only way they can make money is by charging for registering as many patents as possibly. This is one of the major problems driving all the trouble we have today. If it wasn't in the interest of the patent office to accept patents, they would check more thoroughly.
MUCH MUCH more personnel for the patent office. If it is free thousands of patent applications will flood the patent office, including many that are already covered by other patents. I doubt that those people that do not apply public patents today (which is possible and cheaper than a regular patent) due to the cost will actually start an intensive (and costly) patent research before applying a free patent in the future. Since patent offices are obviously incapable of handling todays workload, this would finally kill them, resulting in even more trivial patents being accepted due to lack of proper checking.
I'm not a friend of patents, but I see that they have their place. Making them free is an attempt to fight a symptom (patenting trivial things) by being faster and patent any possible trivial thing first so no idiot can use a stupid patent to blackmail everybody. But the real problem is the lack of quality in the review process and the dependency of the patent office on the registration fees (see above).
So I suggest to:
raise the bar for inventions. No software patents, no business patents. You can patent an implementation, but not an idea. In case of doubt, say no. The applicant has to prove that his invention is patent worthy (yes, this will harm small inventors)
give the patent office more money. And if they fuck up and register something that was covered by prior art or is just current state of the art, fire them. Let them feel the pain and they will learn.
The problem is not the computer technology. The problem is that we are at the very beginnings of understanding how our brains work. Think about artificial intelligence: since the 1960 the breakthrough of creating an intelligent computer was always just ten years in the future (longtime running gag, so today they are more careful with these predictions). But we still have no clue what exactly makes us intelligent. We do not even seem to have a clue how to be intelligent, even less how to recreate that from scratch.
As far as I understand it, it will not increase the maximal amount of energy you could produce on your roof. Actually, this would decrease. If you pack regular PV cells on your whole roof, this would generate the most energy. But at the highest cost.
Most installations do not cover the whole roof, only parts. With these new cells integrated in holographic lenses you can actually cover more of the roof area for almost the same price. And although the area of active silicon will not increase, the lenses will concentrate the solar energy from the increased area onto the silicon resulting in a higher energy production.
The most astonishing part is that NeuroSky actually got some seed money (maybe from the CEOs mom?) and are looking for a first round of venture capital.
"But we have worked on a way for detecting them with a low-cost technology and then interpreting what they mean."
What the article describes is that they offer a cheap EEG. That's about it. The second part (... interpreting what they mean... ) is complete bullshit. What you can measure from an EEG is the sum of all the neurons in your cortex firing all the time. There are typical patterns, e.g. the general frequency changes when you are relaxed. This is rather easy to determine. But controlling a video game? Imagine "to fire press button A or meditate for five minutes".
This is by the way exactly what the other company mentioned (CyberLearning Technology) sells for a lot of money to hopeless parents with kids that have ADHD. Basically if you do not concentrate, you cannot reach maximum speed. A simple biofeedback system, think "$5 self-build lie detector with skin resistance measuring", only with a $584 price tag. It actually works, but the price is somewhat ridiculous.
Now there are ways to use an EEG to control a more advanced interface. If you have enough sensors you can try to calculate the 3D source from where a pattern came in the brain, like you can reversely calculate where a sound came from if you place several microphones in a room and compare the different runtimes of the sound waves. thus giving you much more precise input. I heard a lecture about this at the Aachen University of Technology almost 10 years ago, a very interesting cooperation between their medical department and their computer scientists, than using a massive amount of machine power. You still have to solve the puzzle how to consciously create these patterns.
On this years CeBIT I talked to a group from another university that presented an EEG interface for paraplegics. They could determine whether the signal came from the right or left hemisphere of the brain by having the person "think" left or right. The system allowed the user to enter about 15 characters per minute after a lot of training, but actually ran on a recent PC.
Unfortunately the rate cannot be easily increased, since the signals are kind of fuzzy. But if DSPs and some generations of software allowed to squeeze >25MBit through a pair of copper lines which where said to top at 56kbit, they may do something similar to EEGs. But not soon. NeuroSky and Cyberlearning will long be forgotten by then.
Slashdot Mirror
Wasn't that hard.
You wish. How about using your own brain and see if you can find something search related for every service they provide?
I did it for some of them. I also commented there that I did not claim that Google only does search, but that everything they do revolves around search, because that's what they make money from. I'm pretty sure they also produce t-shirts and hats with Google logos and maybe sell them to visitors, but the fact that you find something that is not directly related to search does not invalidate that their main business focus is and will be search.
I do not claim that search is the ONLY thing Google does. But I think that basically everything Google does helps people find something and the reason for this is that Google can sell ads to customers which sell something similar to what the users are looking for or where the users are located. They have not entered into retail or web services (besides selling their search engine to AOL and others). They stick to what they do best and find new areas to do this in. No, I'm not sure about the strategy behind spreadsheet, but if I had to choose between "selling web services to business" and "selling more ads" I'd choose the later.
Well, isn't that obvious? Text messaging and text ads based on the content of the message? Just like ads in Google Mail? And btw, "beta" is googlish for "we have not yet found how to make money from it", see years of news in beta due to the problem how not to piss of the news providers.
Replace "search" with "find". I "find" a lot of locations/remarks from other users with maps/Google earth. And I have used them to find my way around in places I visit. "Finding" a restaurant/supermarket/cinema is as useful on a map as finding a web site on a search engine. And whoever provides me with the best tool to find something in my environment or manage my routes more easily will automatically get a large share of my eye balls for payed advertisement.
Just like searching .doc files, only more convenient since they store them on their own servers while having a chance to keep one of their main competitors for the payed search marked from successfully transforming their main software product into the "must have" web service for business and also advocating open file formats which can be searched easily?
Several years ago everybody was going portal. Every search engine added shopping, communities, finance tips, travel, free mail account and tried to lure users into spending as much time as possible on their site as possible to get their cash and more cash from advertisers.
Then came Google with a simple interface and did one thing: search. And basically everything Google released since then was build around search. Even the videos. But music is very hierarchically organized: Artist - Album - Track. You seldom have to search for something, maybe you'll use Google to search for the lyrics if you cannot remember the name of the track.
Now everybody predicting that Google will go into music just falls into the portal trap. Hey, they did search, they have news, they do mail, so they must aim to become a portal, hence they will try to do everything and so they must want to do music.
Think: Google = search. If the product does not fit, there is no way to make money from it for Google and they won't do it (there will always be exceptions, but that is the general rule so far).
They neither take up tons of space nor do they slaughter birds. There have been a number of studies to determine if they have a negative impact on birds by either killing them when they accidently fly into the wings or disturb and drive them away by the noise they make. Both claims have been proven to be completely wrong, birds aren't stupid enough to fly into the wings and get as easily used to the noise as they get to street noise. If they are an eyesore is a question of personal taste. I prefer their sight compared to highways or the towers of overland power lines. And I guess that nobody will notice them any more than any other structure humans place in the landscape once one generation has passed and they have become "normal".
The main problem with stirling engines and reflective dishes is that they consume a lot of space, most of which is the empty area between dish and engine. While they may be more efficient and their production be less hazardous to the environment, they cannot compete with solar panels which can be put on roof tops or basically any flat surface. Newer PV technology even promises "paint on" solar cells. They are simply less invasive and therefore can be put into more places, leveling their lower efficiency. For rural areas this may be different, but for cities PV wins.
It's stirling engine after Rev. Robert Stirling, not sterling engine.
Hm, looks simply like a small sterling engine or mini gas turbine used to drive an AC. They managed to make it cheap so it will be applicable in small installations, but both the sterling engine and the gas turbine (using a fluid in a closed circuit) require a temperature difference, so the machine would not be driven by heat alone. You'd have to cool down the steam after it had passed the generator to make it condensate to a fluid again and pump it back into the thermal collectors. The article does not mention how this should be done or where the energy for this should come from.
Power stations using closed fluid circuits (e.g. nuclear plants) use a secondary circuit to cool the first one after the steam passed the turbine. They are usually located near rivers for this. Larger installations for sterling engines can store heat during the day in a water tank and use the difference in temperature between the water and the surrounding cooler air during the night to drive a sterling engine. This obviously works best in areas where the difference in temperature between day and night is significant, i.e. deserts. I don't think it to be realistic to turn 1/4 of your apartment into a heat/cold storage just to drive the AC.
So in the end they made it cheaper, but inefficient (5%) even compared to solar panels (20%) without offering something that could replace a conventional AC. To achieve this you'd still have to build houses in a smarter way, e.g. isolate the walls from the inside and outside and use them as thermal storage. More energy efficient construction has been done for cold regions (where houses require almost no heating during winter when isolated well, the inhabitants' body heat is sufficient) and warmer regions (traditional buildings build with clay and wind-traps and smaller windows to the sunny side). So it is possible, but do not expect too much from our current architecture.
I'm pretty sure that I can clearly differentiate between ability to process information and quantity of available information. What I seem to not have made clear is that I think that trying to discuss (human) intelligence as only processing or the information itself makes no sense and that both influence each other. My ability to process information determines which information is available to me (if I cannot read, books aren't) and the information available determines my processing capabilities (if there are only two books on a subject, I will never have to develop a process to determine which of them to read, but I will if there are 200). Therefore changing the available information (quantity, quality, ease and speed of access) WILL change my processing and thereby my intelligence, even though I could describe them independent of each other.
The quantity (and quality) of information is irrelevant if a human cannot access them and processing power does not matter if there is nothing to process. To use the processor speed/disk size analogy: you can plug a 750GB PATA drive into an old 486 board or start your Athlon64 with your 40MB delivering 0,5MB/sec hard disk from 1990. You may find a useful purpose for this, but usually you'll end with an "unbalanced system" which is basically useless. Okay, now the analogy got even worse, but the basic idea should be clear: sometimes the relation between the different parts is more important than the parts themselves.
One of the main reasons why the differentiation may make sense with machines, but not so much with humans, is our excellent ability to associate and recognize patterns. The ability to apply a method used to solve a problem in one area onto a completely other area will generally be considered "intelligent". Both association and pattern recognition require a large information/knowledge base, which usually will not be considered being a part of intelligence and any IQ test tries to eliminate these cultural dependent aspects. But this is also one of the main criticism about the whole IQ idea: that you can define intelligence detached from social surrounding. Once you leave the technical definition of the IQ (which only works in specific tests anyway) you will find that the ability to process information alone isn't worth that much.
Since all this started with the "augmented intelligence and wikipedia" statement, your criticism should actually go further: my description of (one aspect of) intelligence did not only mix information processing and information availability, but also existing world models (this includes ideas like ethics and moral) and action taken (i.e. if you are unable to (re)act you are not intelligent, even if your analysis was brilliant). But this was intended, because I think that intelligence is not the ability to process information, it is much more. This will prevent expressing intelligence by a number, but that's not really a loss.And I'm not the only one with such a broad definition of intelligence.
Okay, this came out wrong. I do not think that wikipedia represents intelligence and therefore it cannot be "augmented intelligence". I think that (one aspect of) intelligence is the ability to process information, evaluate it in combination with other information/knowledge acquired before, establish a position in a world model, decide on an action based on formerly known actions or develop a new action and finally perform it. So for me Wikipedia can augment a humans intelligence not simply by providing more information, but by providing it in a way that it may be added to the regular information processing habit.
Let's say I make 500 conscious decisions every day (which shirt to wear, which food to eat, take the new job, press the red button etc.). For almost any of these decisions I can rely on a mix of internal information (already acquired knowledge and deductions) and external information (books, web, Wikipedia, ask someone). I will not visit the public library 500 times a day, but I may call up an article from the wikipedia 20 times a day. It's not just about availability of information, it's also about "process compatibility". Therefore the encyclopedia on the desk may not be counted as augmenting my "intelligence process" (access is too slow for me to be willing to use it all the time), while the wikipedia may. This depends on your personal process, I'm sure there have always been people who look up every foreign word they don't know while most try to guess, and wikipedia will not become a part of your routine unless you replace your modem by DSL or cable.
Well, I doubt it. I agree with most of the idea of the 6:17 cast and even agree that educational and social changes like widespread literacy may be considered a singularity, but I seriously doubt the timeframe of one generation/30 years they mention. Literacy was adapted over hundreds of years, network communities have been developing for at least 30 years and are still primitive and very far from a "collective mind". For me Wikipedia is "augmented intelligence", but before that I had the Encyclopedia Britannica on my iBook and before that an encyclopedia on my desk, so this to is evolved. And since the Wikipedia is created by so many, it may be considered a primitive product of the "meta intelligence" described.
Btw, the piece from NPR focuses (very trendy) on collaboration and advanced information management, they do not lay great hope on a major breakthrough in AI.
Damn! More toys to buy.
I'm currently running 55km each week. I usually carry:
I love the Garmin (worn like a wrist watch, but makes a Casio GShock look tiny), but hate the fact that GPS and large buildings do not really match. Living in Berlin there is no way to avoid them without getting out of town first. I always run the same route and the distance measured by the Garmin varies about 10% each time.
So I'd actually consider to add the sensor as an addition to what I'm already wearing, just to gain accuracy (yes, running can make you quite obsessive). I'd probably keep the Garmin due to the heart rate monitor and some other nice features. The price of the sensor is neglectable compared to the shoes and cloth I wear out per year, the worst thing would be eventually being forced to switch the shoe brand.
I am possibly close to the perfect target group: I run a lot, I care a lot about how much I run, I listen to music and more while I run. I would match perfectly if I had not already tried to satisfy my desires with appropriate technology. So the only remaining upsale will be for Nike.
Even though I wrote it myself, I am somewhat scared about the moderation. A couple of hour ago it was 3-Funny. It was intended to be funny. Now it is 4-Insightful.
I will not assume that a lot of slashdot users will support the idea of solving problems by removing the part of the population that causes the problem. Most will be aware that a) even idiots usually have positive sides, b) an idiot in one area may be a genius in another, c) trying to fix something complex like society with a hammer will most likely not result in the society you wanted and d) that it is ethically impossible to avoid misjudgment and injustice about who is worthy existing or not. I'm a native German and due to our history we are very aware what kind of disaster one can create if you allow yourself to consider something like this an acceptable solution, so I'm basically trained to be oversensitive about this issue. But "Insightful" is still scary.
I think this would be an universal solution to almost all of mankinds problems.
Yes, but this is (as you stated) already the case: msn.com as the standard IE startpage features a "Search the Web" field at the top of the page. If this would be sufficient, MSN/Microsoft search would already be the most popular search engine. But Google managed to catch the top spot. It is much easier to type www.google.com into IE than to download and install software, so I guess the advantage in comfort does not apply here as heavily. I know a number of people who use Firefox as their standard browser, but search not by entering the search term in the field in in Firefox, but call Google manually first. I'm always astonished about that, but they don't seem to mind. Calling an URL is sufficiently low tech to be handled by the majority.
From the end of TFA:
This may of course change in the future, but I somehow doubt they can touch Google or Yahoo. The whole race for the crown is about the search based ads, not about who uses which search engine. So Microsoft has not only to get a lot of users to use MSN search as their standard search engine, they also have to convince all the advertisers that their system works at least as good or better than those from Google or Yahoo/Overture.
When Microsoft entered a market late in the past, they always could leverage their market position. It was easier to use the already installed IE then to download another browser, it was easier to use Windows Media Player than to download and install RealPlayer or Quicktime. If Microsoft had no leverage in the market, they used their money: They bought shares in cable companies, started cooperations with mobile phone makers or massively subsidized XBOX/360.
But what could they use this time? Desktop search integrated into Vista? Standard search in IE7? Lower prices for advertisers? Most likely all, but nothing will give them a real advantage. They will have to really compete and innovate this time, and that is not something they are good at.
I'm astonished by those all the time. My Thunderbird is throwing out about 2000 mails a day, and I am often confused about those it didn't catch. I could not recognize them as spam either, since they contain no product names, no links, nothing.
But since I believe that nothing that can be explained with stupidity should be explained by conspiracy theories, I assume these are accidents.
Technical advances Better tricks to fool spam filters, like the examination of text the user has written mentioned in TFA. This is close to impossible to stop, the only way is to try to be faster in developing better anti spam tools. Lack of security Most spam today is send from captured machines, and in the future these machines will not only be used to send but also to improve spam. This could be helped by better educated users, better default system security or easier to understand security configurations. At least there is hope. Response The only reason for all this spam is that it still pays. Even though it is a very small number of people, it is enough to finance the whole illegal business of building bot nets, stealing addresses etc. If there was a way to stop people to buy that stuff, the other two points would be irrelevant. Unfortunately this is not going to happen, which is the most frustrating part.
I think this is great, but it will still take some time to be used in daily life. This looks like one of the biped robots we have seen in the last years who has the possibility to carry a person. These bots can balance each step, but they are always in balance. A person which is walking or running is not in a permanent state of standing, but falling. To move forward at a reasonable pace you have to abandon stability and use gravity to draw you forward and reestablishing balance once you set down your foot.
This is difficult enough on a fixed floor (watch babies learn to walk), but much harder on something like grass or inside a moving train. Considering how long it took to get robots to even stand it will still take some time to walk. So if you depend on a wheelchair today and would like to actually move at decent speeds, you may be out of luck for some time.
It sounds like a nice solution, unfortunately it is not. It would require two mayor changes:
I'm not a friend of patents, but I see that they have their place. Making them free is an attempt to fight a symptom (patenting trivial things) by being faster and patent any possible trivial thing first so no idiot can use a stupid patent to blackmail everybody. But the real problem is the lack of quality in the review process and the dependency of the patent office on the registration fees (see above).
So I suggest to:The problem is not the computer technology. The problem is that we are at the very beginnings of understanding how our brains work. Think about artificial intelligence: since the 1960 the breakthrough of creating an intelligent computer was always just ten years in the future (longtime running gag, so today they are more careful with these predictions). But we still have no clue what exactly makes us intelligent. We do not even seem to have a clue how to be intelligent, even less how to recreate that from scratch.
As far as I understand it, it will not increase the maximal amount of energy you could produce on your roof. Actually, this would decrease. If you pack regular PV cells on your whole roof, this would generate the most energy. But at the highest cost.
Most installations do not cover the whole roof, only parts. With these new cells integrated in holographic lenses you can actually cover more of the roof area for almost the same price. And although the area of active silicon will not increase, the lenses will concentrate the solar energy from the increased area onto the silicon resulting in a higher energy production.
The most astonishing part is that NeuroSky actually got some seed money (maybe from the CEOs mom?) and are looking for a first round of venture capital.
What the article describes is that they offer a cheap EEG. That's about it. The second part ( ... interpreting what they mean ... ) is complete bullshit. What you can measure from an EEG is the sum of all the neurons in your cortex firing all the time. There are typical patterns, e.g. the general frequency changes when you are relaxed. This is rather easy to determine. But controlling a video game? Imagine "to fire press button A or meditate for five minutes".
This is by the way exactly what the other company mentioned (CyberLearning Technology) sells for a lot of money to hopeless parents with kids that have ADHD. Basically if you do not concentrate, you cannot reach maximum speed. A simple biofeedback system, think "$5 self-build lie detector with skin resistance measuring", only with a $584 price tag. It actually works, but the price is somewhat ridiculous.
Now there are ways to use an EEG to control a more advanced interface. If you have enough sensors you can try to calculate the 3D source from where a pattern came in the brain, like you can reversely calculate where a sound came from if you place several microphones in a room and compare the different runtimes of the sound waves. thus giving you much more precise input. I heard a lecture about this at the Aachen University of Technology almost 10 years ago, a very interesting cooperation between their medical department and their computer scientists, than using a massive amount of machine power. You still have to solve the puzzle how to consciously create these patterns.
On this years CeBIT I talked to a group from another university that presented an EEG interface for paraplegics. They could determine whether the signal came from the right or left hemisphere of the brain by having the person "think" left or right. The system allowed the user to enter about 15 characters per minute after a lot of training, but actually ran on a recent PC.
Unfortunately the rate cannot be easily increased, since the signals are kind of fuzzy. But if DSPs and some generations of software allowed to squeeze >25MBit through a pair of copper lines which where said to top at 56kbit, they may do something similar to EEGs. But not soon. NeuroSky and Cyberlearning will long be forgotten by then.