This reminds me of how the Brown family successfully sued Simpson after the jury found him Not Guilty for murder of his ex-wife.
While I agree that Microsoft must pay the price for its unlawful practices (for it was found Guilty of the most important charge), this sounds a lot like a double trial to me. Many people may have hoped that Microsoft would "suffer more" for its crimes, but it is not equitable to double charge Microsoft in order to pay wronged individuals and then to pay the government (which ultimately represents the wronged individuals).
I hope that other companies have the sense not to join Netscape in this useless attempt at revenge.
"But I quickly learn that the engine of the new economy is fueled by methods and labor practices more commonly associated with the old industrial era.
I saw this writer in a television documentary on public television a few months ago. He struck me as bitter about the success of others and overly prideful of his own mechanical labor.
Simply put, those closer to the implementation of the thoughts of others are paid less.
Raj Jayadev's paid contribution to the company is to mechanically assembles designs. The engineers are paid more than he is for the designs and assembly instructions. The designers of the business process are paid even more. None of these groups should be prideful of their own contribution, and none should covet the pay nor power that others have.
He is lower on the decision chain and he should not be so bitter about that. While his strategy of organized complaining and "unionizing" may help a group of workers with pay and conditions, I would argue that self improvement (and group improvement) help a lot more.
Increasingly, we become the next layer down in a new system. Our consumption and daily work is increasingly supporting a new life form that needs our contribution of buying power and various forms of system maintenance.
Its blood is money. Its brain is a network of corporate transactions.
Human boards of directors still control its various nodes, for now.
If robots further automate the maintenance of this system, then we will have to provide more and more intellectually oriented services in echange for continued consuption of resources.
Once we are surpassed in the intellectual arena... well, we had really better not let ourselves be intellectually surpassed.
Employees, serfs, slaves, whatever you want to call us, we have always been mercenaries. We, alone, and sometimes in groups, determine our economic fate.
Do you want to be an owner? Save up and invest your surplus energy in some form of business. Do you want to serve humanity? Save up and invest your surplus energy in humanity.
What work gives us is the power to do more than just work. As long as we think that the means is the end, then that is all we will ever do.
If Kamen's Segway becomes as popular as I think it will, Segway busses will be deployed in every major city to take advantage of this new class of mass transit passenger.
Segway riders will enter and exit this special "tall" bus or subway car on their own vehicle via a special ramp at each stop. There could also be a charger for each passenger/sub-vehicle and a small workspace (with ethernet, of course) on the inside of this vehicle as well.
The book begins with this incredible battle scene in which a handful of soldiers in armored suits that can jump miles at a time take over an entire planet.
- James
Does the definition of "intelligence" matter?
on
True Names
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· Score: 1
I see many comments here (and in other related slashdot posts) that are doubtful of the probability of a singularity event emerging from the widespread networking of silicon computers.
Do we have some sort of permanent monopoly on intelligence? Consider whether or not alternative forms of intelligence (or, at the very least, operating successfully in modern human society) is possible - irregardless of whether the result behaves human.
Software engineered by humans running on networked silicon computers will some day be able to write new software that can perform more complex functions. While this will initially be a humble process at best, it will be improved upon, just as the silicon architectures that software runs on now have improved dramatically over the years.
Money and effort will be allocated toward the development of such a process, for more money and effort can be saved by it.
When this level of accomplishment is reached (i.e. human engineering has made this possible), it won't matter that this software behaves in a way unlike the input and output of a network of human neurons.
What will matter will be our interaction with and reaction to these process-beings which may (some day) surpass many capabilities of a single human. We had better think about how we may successfully operate along side such beings, for a world with them in it may be a much faster and more dangerous world than any we have previously built.
I don't know what the big problem with lawyers is and why everyone thinks that they are the "true victors" in legal battles.
How much would you pay for someone to slurp up thousands of pages of legal procedures, associate your offensive and defensive tactics with the appropriate laws and precedents from a gigantic pool of possibilities, and then, on the fly, respond to the same from two other sides of the courtroom (the opposing legal team and the Judge).
What could be a more damaging task for the human brain (besides perl programming)?
I am not an attorney. I don't ever want to be an attorney. I'll stick with the perl programming for now.
At the Hollywood Stock Exchange, as with any resource-based game, we have always had "manipulators". Sometimes acting alone, sometimes in collusion, manipulators have used all kinds of strategies to move the price of movie or music securities to their benefit. Various people here at HSX use database queries to ferret out these silly individuals, and, through a formal decision process, penalize them (in $HSX of course).
We found that taking strong action against manipulators, while at times appears harsh, actually protects the integrity of the game play and keeps our community of hundreds of thousands of players happy.
In our ongoing simulation of social/market dynamics, the "Prosperity through punishment" theory has been applied successfully.
Who would you rather have the cutting edge technology - a republic with the US constitution as its kernel and thousands of checks and balances, or a corporation who's primary interest (for good reason) is profit for its shareholders?
It is not as if we cannot possibly keep an eye on our own government. Information communities such as this one are a powerful counterbalance to government power, not to mention a multitude of technologies and legal remedies which are available to all US citizens.
On the parallel port software interface side, I have successfully used the parapin library in my pc-to-breadboard experiments. This way you can spend more time on the hardware and the imaging and less on the hardware interface.
"parapin makes it easy to write C code under Linux that controls individual pins on a PC parallel port. This kind of control is very useful for electronics projects that use the PC's parallel port as a generic digital I/O interface. Parapin goes to great lengths to insulate the programmer from the somewhat complex parallel port programming interface provided by the PC hardware, making it easy to use the parallel port for digital I/O."
Hey, lets develop this green stuff which can take energy from the Sun and store it for later. Like, we could eat this green stuff. We could even feed this green stuff to other animals and make hamburgers and stuff.
The possibilities of using the Sun for energy are endless.
If public funds were used to finance the research, then it should be public information. The only exceptions should be driven by security concerns. If private monies are put into the mix, let us thank the donor for their donation.
We are the public and our tax dollars are used to generate this information. We own it.
I would say that the William Gibson's "Neuromancer" and its description of cyberspace had the biggest effect on the development of the culture of the internet as well as many conventions and actual inventions.
Although this book is arguably more the chicken than the egg, this is where the term cyberspace was coined and where many command line conventions were translated into a three dimensional internet. He described a "consentual hallucination" of end users interacting with AI agents, servers, and viruses in a powerful and haunting way. Many a dollar and many lines of code have been plunged into attempts to make a world that even comes close to Gibson's cyberspace.
"Neuromancer" is what got a lot of people interested in "cyberspace" engineering, including myself.
So let us in on the secret - is this enormous project actually the raw output from some radically complex Lisp application?
Re:Google Image search strikes again
on
Bert Is Evil
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· Score: 1
The search for "osama bin laden" gets the best result - Bert is on the first page.
Go Google!
Culturally owned...
on
Bert Is Evil
·
· Score: 4, Funny
...by the B3rt xpl0it.
Accounting Says: A Good Time to Merge
on
HP Buys Compaq
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Believe it or not, this is a very good time for these two corporations to do a large-scale merger.
When mergers like this occur during the wonderful times of "irrational exuberence", the resulting behemoth has to pay down an asset called "Goodwill". This is what they (over)paid beyond asset value for the company that they euphorically, and often stupidly, bought.
In the case of the huge AOL/Time-Warner merger, note that their balance sheet still has a $126,618,000,000 asset called "Goodwill and other intangible assets" recorded in June, 2001. This asset may look impressive on first scan, but the fact is that AOL has to pay this down over many years according to, I believe, requirements of accounting standards (GAAP).
Many smaller companies have serious "indigestion" from this effect and sometimes have sudden "charges" of billions to pay for previous lapses of good business judgement in the past. And wouldn't it suck if the stock price of the merged, over-stuffed company rapidly plummeted? I know that there are folks reading this who personally know what I am talking about.
In the merger between HP and Compaq, for obvious reasons the resulting "Goodwill" asset will be beneficially minimized. Correct me if I am wrong, but it looks as if the new HP is paying $25.0B for $23.9B of Compaq assets. This is going to create a behemoth all right, but one with out a food coma.
If HP and Compaq really want to get together then the conditions at present are optimal (unless they want a really big-ass number on their balance sheet for ten years).
I was talking with a friend last night and we were joking that we should write a "patriotic" anti-worm worm which spreads itself and, once it has infected a vulnerable system, fixes this stupid problem.
Best of all, it would replace the "hacked by chinese" with a jpg of Wally George's "USA IS #1" space shuttle poster.
Unfortunately, this would probably land you in just as much trouble as the originator of this mess (er, I mean the worm coders).
When I first started working at the Hollywood Stock Exchange we often discussed funding movies through the exchange by offering shares of ownership in a movie concept. This is what got the Virtual Producer effort going. It doesn't look like we're going to be offering this kind of shares any time soon - we're focused on the data mining and improving the game for now.
In email discussions, I always argued for issuing bonds over issuing shares of ownership in a media property because bonds are less risky for an investor, so long as they can properly assess the ability for the property to generate the promised income. A stock, as we all know, can soar and crash. There are also huge issues surrounding ownership after bankrupsy, SEC regulations, and so on. Through the bond price may fluctuate, it will continue to generate income (unless they are unable to pay) until it is due.
I think that there is definitely a future for creating bonds for intellectual property, whether a film, software, a book, or whatever. Heck, junk boonds in risky movies and software projects could also have a big impact. However, bonds will be most successfully issued by individuals or groups having a good deal of credibility. Example: a prominent oss engineer funds a new version of his product by issuing a bond based on future corporate sales.
Who cares if an AI is "intelligent" by any definition? We need to worry about the actual real-world cababilities of an AI or set of AI's.
Imagine if you could take a set of web services that could:
1. Maintain an online stock trading account
2. Maintain its own application hosting account at an ISP
3. Pay the ISP with proceeds from the stock trading
5. Create an altered version of its core settings and code
4. Copy all of its altered software capabilities to an other ISP when it has made enough money to do so.
5. Create a new online stock account for the "offspring".
Is this mechanism intelligent? Maybe not. Could this eventually cause trouble? Sure could.
This is a very interesting debate, although while we debate this, a lot of people out there are starving while attempting to scrape a pathetic living from the soil.
I watched this NOVA about modified crops a few weeks ago. One section of the show depicted how this group of eco-terrorists burned down a lab working on a solution which could have helped third-world farmers.
There was some very informative footage of the affected piss-poor farmers planting a couple hundred sweet potatoes in soil that could barely support it. I cracked up at the irony of how college-educated eco-terrorists had enough calories to make a total ruckuss protesting outside of biotech corps and universities (not to mention to burn down labs).
Hey, sure, we could just say that there are too many people out there, that these crops are dangerous, and so on. But it is easy to say that when we get to eat a juicy hamburger for dinner every day. Go ahead and try living off of crops grown in your back yard from seeds you could barely afford, watered with hope.
This fantasy "lifestyle" is often funded by debt, and the payments of this debt are funded by mundane jobs (which many find hard to quit). People are getting trapped by their own folly. We, not the "corporations" are ultimately responsible for our lives and for the system that we are all creating.
This is not serfdom; it actually sharecropping. Worst of all, most choose to be sharecroppers.
I think that we need to start realizing that we do not have to participate in the sharecropping system, or can participate on our own terms.
Talk to people. Tell consumerists that it is OK not to live like they appear to on "Friends". Tell Windows users that they may actually get more out of a Mac or Linux. Encourage people to stop getting into debt. Most of all, let people know that there is more to life than work, watching/living tv, and buying shit on the weekend.
Why do we assume that an "apparent anomalous acceleration is acting on Pioneer 10 and 11"?
Perhaps this observed acceleration is actually us "decelerating". Could our close proximity to a large source of gravitation (the sun) lead to such an observation?
We need to, er, Think Different(TM) about stuff like this.
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of how the Brown family successfully sued Simpson after the jury found him Not Guilty for murder of his ex-wife.
While I agree that Microsoft must pay the price for its unlawful practices (for it was found Guilty of the most important charge), this sounds a lot like a double trial to me. Many people may have hoped that Microsoft would "suffer more" for its crimes, but it is not equitable to double charge Microsoft in order to pay wronged individuals and then to pay the government (which ultimately represents the wronged individuals).
I hope that other companies have the sense not to join Netscape in this useless attempt at revenge.
I saw this writer in a television documentary on public television a few months ago. He struck me as bitter about the success of others and overly prideful of his own mechanical labor.
Simply put, those closer to the implementation of the thoughts of others are paid less.
Raj Jayadev's paid contribution to the company is to mechanically assembles designs. The engineers are paid more than he is for the designs and assembly instructions. The designers of the business process are paid even more. None of these groups should be prideful of their own contribution, and none should covet the pay nor power that others have.
He is lower on the decision chain and he should not be so bitter about that. While his strategy of organized complaining and "unionizing" may help a group of workers with pay and conditions, I would argue that self improvement (and group improvement) help a lot more.
Increasingly, we become the next layer down in a new system. Our consumption and daily work is increasingly supporting a new life form that needs our contribution of buying power and various forms of system maintenance.
Its blood is money. Its brain is a network of corporate transactions.
Human boards of directors still control its various nodes, for now.
If robots further automate the maintenance of this system, then we will have to provide more and more intellectually oriented services in echange for continued consuption of resources.
Once we are surpassed in the intellectual arena... well, we had really better not let ourselves be intellectually surpassed.
Employees, serfs, slaves, whatever you want to call us, we have always been mercenaries. We, alone, and sometimes in groups, determine our economic fate.
Do you want to be an owner? Save up and invest your surplus energy in some form of business. Do you want to serve humanity? Save up and invest your surplus energy in humanity.
What work gives us is the power to do more than just work. As long as we think that the means is the end, then that is all we will ever do.
If Kamen's Segway becomes as popular as I think it will, Segway busses will be deployed in every major city to take advantage of this new class of mass transit passenger.
Segway riders will enter and exit this special "tall" bus or subway car on their own vehicle via a special ramp at each stop. There could also be a charger for each passenger/sub-vehicle and a small workspace (with ethernet, of course) on the inside of this vehicle as well.
I'm not talking about the movie.
The book begins with this incredible battle scene in which a handful of soldiers in armored suits that can jump miles at a time take over an entire planet.
- James
I see many comments here (and in other related slashdot posts) that are doubtful of the probability of a singularity event emerging from the widespread networking of silicon computers.
Do we have some sort of permanent monopoly on intelligence? Consider whether or not alternative forms of intelligence (or, at the very least, operating successfully in modern human society) is possible - irregardless of whether the result behaves human.
Software engineered by humans running on networked silicon computers will some day be able to write new software that can perform more complex functions. While this will initially be a humble process at best, it will be improved upon, just as the silicon architectures that software runs on now have improved dramatically over the years.
Money and effort will be allocated toward the development of such a process, for more money and effort can be saved by it.
When this level of accomplishment is reached (i.e. human engineering has made this possible), it won't matter that this software behaves in a way unlike the input and output of a network of human neurons.
What will matter will be our interaction with and reaction to these process-beings which may (some day) surpass many capabilities of a single human. We had better think about how we may successfully operate along side such beings, for a world with them in it may be a much faster and more dangerous world than any we have previously built.
I don't know what the big problem with lawyers is and why everyone thinks that they are the "true victors" in legal battles.
How much would you pay for someone to slurp up thousands of pages of legal procedures, associate your offensive and defensive tactics with the appropriate laws and precedents from a gigantic pool of possibilities, and then, on the fly, respond to the same from two other sides of the courtroom (the opposing legal team and the Judge).
What could be a more damaging task for the human brain (besides perl programming)?
I am not an attorney. I don't ever want to be an attorney. I'll stick with the perl programming for now.
We found that taking strong action against manipulators, while at times appears harsh, actually protects the integrity of the game play and keeps our community of hundreds of thousands of players happy.
In our ongoing simulation of social/market dynamics, the "Prosperity through punishment" theory has been applied successfully.
Who would you rather have the cutting edge technology - a republic with the US constitution as its kernel and thousands of checks and balances, or a corporation who's primary interest (for good reason) is profit for its shareholders?
It is not as if we cannot possibly keep an eye on our own government. Information communities such as this one are a powerful counterbalance to government power, not to mention a multitude of technologies and legal remedies which are available to all US citizens.
Powerlessness and paranoia are a state of mind.
On the parallel port software interface side, I have successfully used the parapin library in my pc-to-breadboard experiments. This way you can spend more time on the hardware and the imaging and less on the hardware interface.
"parapin makes it easy to write C code under Linux that controls individual pins on a PC parallel port. This kind of control is very useful for electronics projects that use the PC's parallel port as a generic digital I/O interface. Parapin goes to great lengths to insulate the programmer from the somewhat complex parallel port programming interface provided by the PC hardware, making it easy to use the parallel port for digital I/O."
- James
Hey, lets develop this green stuff which can take energy from the Sun and store it for later. Like, we could eat this green stuff. We could even feed this green stuff to other animals and make hamburgers and stuff.
The possibilities of using the Sun for energy are endless.
If public funds were used to finance the research, then it should be public information. The only exceptions should be driven by security concerns. If private monies are put into the mix, let us thank the donor for their donation.
We are the public and our tax dollars are used to generate this information. We own it.
Give it to us at the bare cost of distribution.
I would say that the William Gibson's "Neuromancer" and its description of cyberspace had the biggest effect on the development of the culture of the internet as well as many conventions and actual inventions.
Although this book is arguably more the chicken than the egg, this is where the term cyberspace was coined and where many command line conventions were translated into a three dimensional internet. He described a "consentual hallucination" of end users interacting with AI agents, servers, and viruses in a powerful and haunting way. Many a dollar and many lines of code have been plunged into attempts to make a world that even comes close to Gibson's cyberspace.
"Neuromancer" is what got a lot of people interested in "cyberspace" engineering, including myself.
So let us in on the secret - is this enormous project actually the raw output from some radically complex Lisp application?
The search for "osama bin laden" gets the best result - Bert is on the first page.
Go Google!
...by the B3rt xpl0it.
When mergers like this occur during the wonderful times of "irrational exuberence", the resulting behemoth has to pay down an asset called "Goodwill". This is what they (over)paid beyond asset value for the company that they euphorically, and often stupidly, bought.
In the case of the huge AOL/Time-Warner merger, note that their balance sheet still has a $126,618,000,000 asset called "Goodwill and other intangible assets" recorded in June, 2001. This asset may look impressive on first scan, but the fact is that AOL has to pay this down over many years according to, I believe, requirements of accounting standards (GAAP).
Many smaller companies have serious "indigestion" from this effect and sometimes have sudden "charges" of billions to pay for previous lapses of good business judgement in the past. And wouldn't it suck if the stock price of the merged, over-stuffed company rapidly plummeted? I know that there are folks reading this who personally know what I am talking about.
In the merger between HP and Compaq, for obvious reasons the resulting "Goodwill" asset will be beneficially minimized. Correct me if I am wrong, but it looks as if the new HP is paying $25.0B for $23.9B of Compaq assets. This is going to create a behemoth all right, but one with out a food coma.
If HP and Compaq really want to get together then the conditions at present are optimal (unless they want a really big-ass number on their balance sheet for ten years).
Best of all, it would replace the "hacked by chinese" with a jpg of Wally George's "USA IS #1" space shuttle poster.
Unfortunately, this would probably land you in just as much trouble as the originator of this mess (er, I mean the worm coders).
What about the Pi system?
"I'll take 6.28318... tickets for me an my girlfriend"
In email discussions, I always argued for issuing bonds over issuing shares of ownership in a media property because bonds are less risky for an investor, so long as they can properly assess the ability for the property to generate the promised income. A stock, as we all know, can soar and crash. There are also huge issues surrounding ownership after bankrupsy, SEC regulations, and so on. Through the bond price may fluctuate, it will continue to generate income (unless they are unable to pay) until it is due.
I think that there is definitely a future for creating bonds for intellectual property, whether a film, software, a book, or whatever. Heck, junk boonds in risky movies and software projects could also have a big impact. However, bonds will be most successfully issued by individuals or groups having a good deal of credibility. Example: a prominent oss engineer funds a new version of his product by issuing a bond based on future corporate sales.
Imagine if you could take a set of web services that could:
1. Maintain an online stock trading account
2. Maintain its own application hosting account at an ISP
3. Pay the ISP with proceeds from the stock trading
5. Create an altered version of its core settings and code
4. Copy all of its altered software capabilities to an other ISP when it has made enough money to do so. 5. Create a new online stock account for the "offspring".
Is this mechanism intelligent? Maybe not. Could this eventually cause trouble? Sure could.
I watched this NOVA about modified crops a few weeks ago. One section of the show depicted how this group of eco-terrorists burned down a lab working on a solution which could have helped third-world farmers.
There was some very informative footage of the affected piss-poor farmers planting a couple hundred sweet potatoes in soil that could barely support it. I cracked up at the irony of how college-educated eco-terrorists had enough calories to make a total ruckuss protesting outside of biotech corps and universities (not to mention to burn down labs).
Hey, sure, we could just say that there are too many people out there, that these crops are dangerous, and so on. But it is easy to say that when we get to eat a juicy hamburger for dinner every day. Go ahead and try living off of crops grown in your back yard from seeds you could barely afford, watered with hope.
This is not serfdom; it actually sharecropping. Worst of all, most choose to be sharecroppers.
I think that we need to start realizing that we do not have to participate in the sharecropping system, or can participate on our own terms.
Talk to people. Tell consumerists that it is OK not to live like they appear to on "Friends". Tell Windows users that they may actually get more out of a Mac or Linux. Encourage people to stop getting into debt. Most of all, let people know that there is more to life than work, watching/living tv, and buying shit on the weekend.
>
Perhaps this observed acceleration is actually us "decelerating". Could our close proximity to a large source of gravitation (the sun) lead to such an observation?
We need to, er, Think Different(TM) about stuff like this.