"Nonsense. Imagine Bilbo kills one of the dwarfs for no reason and they all laugh and continue with their business. That wouldn't make sense and you'd be immediately pulled back from the scene and think WTF am I watching? Why the director do that? The suspension of disbelief would be broken."
I imagine you haven't watched one of those violent kiddie cartoons?
Bad comparison (although I'm pro-driverless car), unless you're thinking of dedicated driver-free lanes that basically turns the supposedly autonomous vehicles into glorified train cars. You might as well say that driverless cars are as safe as elevators and when was the last time an elevator killed someone?
Right. I won't trust a defense contractor whose security gets compromised using phishing emails. If the intrusion is more low level than that (the mythical compromised routers), then they might have a good excuse. If the story is true, and the Israelis aren't just making it up as a cover story or honeypot to attract would-be cyber-attackers from other less technically competent nations (Iran, N Korea, etc), then the defense contractors should be banned from future military contracts.
WTF? It's fantasy with wizards, elves and dragons, and you're talking about suspension of disbelief? If it's an Asimov or AC Clarke adaptation maybe we can start talking about believability, but a high fantasy like this one? Anything goes, except perhaps when it comes to absolute immortality. Apparently "immortal" characters or monsters tend to have some sort of weakness that allow them to get killed by a determined hero or villain.
Mod parent up. A (properly) modifed/etc/hosts file (in case you're using Linux/Unix, don't know the Windows/Mac equivalent) should be more efficient than a browser based solution. I say more efficient because you effectively cut out one step in the web browsing chain, as links to the "blocked" web sites are simply redirected to localhost (127.0.0.) instead of being first handed over to the OS for DNS resolution and then blocked by browser.
However, compared to a browser extension, the hosts files hack can't do wildcard pattern matching, so if you want to block Facebook, you can't just input "*facebook.com" but every subdomain like www.facebook.com, cdn.facebook.com, etc.
MicroNokia has been pursuing the lower end of the smartphone market using non-Windows devices (actually I think they're pursuing the higher end of the feature phone market), even coming up with their own generic Amazonesque Android phone.
At the lower end, you don't need a Play/Appstore sized ecosystem. Just Angry Birds, Facebook and Twitter.
" How could a stupid cunt like you even bother posting such a moronic comment? Seriously, go die in a fire and I hope your kids get leukemia. Only someone with severe autism and Down's syndrome would be so clueless about psychology."
But Linus, despite the vulgarity of some of his rants, doesn't use language like that. Unless you can provide a link to prove otherwise, Linus hasn't used terms that poke fun at people with disabilities ("autism") or used sexist language ("cunt"). He does use generic terms of abuse like shit and fuck, which doesn't really qualify as sexist since it can both men and women (and homosexuals) fuck.
The EU directive gives at best a false sense of privacy, since the information itself isn't removed, but only the links, kind of like the way an OS might "remove" a file but still preserve its data ready to be "undeleted" (unless it's a filesystem that tends to overwrite unused blocks).
The EU regulators don't want to appear as "censors" (with the unsavory connotation that the word carries in a presumably democratic environment) so they don't go after the source. This reeks of institutional hypocrisy. Why not just go after the publishers. If they shut down the publishers, bloggers, etc, then all that Google and Bing would be left are the dead links.
The word for this is witch hunt. A simple correlation is enough. Just as merely being unusual marked a person as a witch when a plague broke out, posting unusual comments in social media, right before or after a terrorist incident, now marks you as a terrorist.
So if a Googler doesn't know perl. You'd say dumb Googler? Somehow that sounds more like a joke than an insult. I say it't the intent more than the word that counts. Woman isn't an insulting word and yet it can be used as an insult.
LOL. If Kurzweil's future ever comes true, then even sex will be outsourced via the exponential evolution of today's cam sex. Be careful of getting a virus though.
"Of course, old favorites won't disappear. They'll be a handful of new discoveries each year from self-publishing. Enough that books won't be "dead". But the idea that book reading will become marginal enough that it's cultural significance will essentially be irrelevant."
More books or at least book-length works are being published now than in the past. So a few percentage of good books out of a couple of million bad books is still a lot.
This development parallells the development of culture in other fields, such as music. Before the nineteenth century, you could probably count on your fingers and toes the number of composers who were as good as Beethoven and Mozart, since any would-be Beethoven would need not just be talented but had to live near a place where he could hear good live music that he could learn to imitate first then later surpass with masterpieces of his own.
With the development of recorded music and mass-produced musical instruments, any middle-class person of even mediocre musical talent could listen to good or nearly good music just just by switching on the turn table and later the cassette and CD players.
Today, people have greater access to writing and greater access to a possible audience. Many of today's "books" are actually written in "submarine" form, probably serialized in the writer's blog or written as fan faction. And so, the audience even gets access to the act of writing itself. Writers who blog their novels get feedback from readers whose collective comments effectively make them "crowd" editors, similar to the way Wikipedia works.
What you lament is the coming demise of writing and culture is no more than the death of the rock star, or the Shakespeares or Beethovens of the past because their numbers have multiplied through the spread of mass culture.
Given the lack of a single dominant mobile office suite, there are potentially more users out there for a LibreOffice version for Android than for users of the Windows, Mac and Linux versions combined. So why's the Android version forever stuck in demoware limbo?
You joke. But the names are probably going to go through some sort of machine filtering that'll eliminate Fuckeroo, Sexoid, or Goatse then vetted by a panel of religious and cultural sensitivity "experts" and everybody else with a loud mouth or a big stick to eliminate names likely to get on somebody's goat like Tiananmen, Bin Laden, Zion, etc. Only then does the Internets get to vote to short list of approved names, pretty much like a Slashdot poll.
The corollary here is that intelligence isn't always an advantage. Or else all chimps would have evolved human class intelligence. The question I'd like answered is, what natural advantages does innate stupidity confer upon a creature that enables it to spread its just as efficiently or even bettera than an intelligent creature. Maybe the neurons required to be good at puzzle solving and the like are subtracted from the total needed for street or jungle "smarts".
"Rockchip RK3288 is coming, should be affordable, and the company is spending a lot of effort making sure it's well supported in mainline."
Citation needed. Mind supporting your statement with a link? AFAIK RK has one of the poorest FOSS support among Chinese SOC makers (compared to Allwinner and Amlogic). The RK source code floating in the net tend to be "leaks" or in any case releases that aren't official supported by the company. Also for a long time there was no official way to flash firmware onto the embedded flash storage of an Android device unless you use RK's Windows only firmware tool. (This changed recently with the appearance of a binary only Linux upgrade tool.) Opensource RK flash tools are quite limited in that they are unable to partition the flash storage or to change the bootloader, needed when upgrading between incompatible Android versions or loading desktop Linux.
Well, no human alive today in any case. All so-called "original" works produced today are derivatives of older works (Shakespeare, folklore, etc) or quirks produced by the artist's mental state. Among deceased artists Van Gogh and Edgar Allan Poe are famous examples. Another reason why we should stop this "all rights reserved" nonsense of the traditional copyright system, where the artist is presumed to be a god that produces unique worlds out of nothing.
"And we currently have no idea how to create intelligent software."
Of course we can't create "intelligent" software if the definition is stacked in favor of philosophically disputable notions like consciousness. Is Google Search conscious? Does the Siri system really "understand" what I tell it to?
This is what's preventing machines from being defined as "intelligent". But if some future machine can exponentially compute, brute-force if you will, all the "calcuations" needed by a human to start an "intelligent" conversation, shouldn't that qualify as intelligence? Or would you say that a two-year old child shouldn't be considered "intelligent" because she can't understand what we're talking about.
Engineers don't do things accidentally unless they fuck up. So unless we can prove the whales know what they're doing, they're acting more like the pre-agricultural humans who accidentally spread seeds wherever they spit and shit. Not quite agriculture.
"Back in the 1960s after the moon landings, people would have expected we would be well past Mars by now. Probably Jupiter, Saturn or other stars."
Your example and the frequently quoted one about flying cars is the wrong analogy to make. There's a reason to be more optimistic, or pessimistic (depending on whether you view machine intelligence as threat), with regard the progress of AI.
Up until now, nobody has been mass producing man-rated spaceships, or flying cars and warp drives for that matter. On the other hand, computers and computer parts have been mass-produced since shortly after Jack Kilby invented the transistor. This is the reason for the so-called Moore's Law.
Now, unless you can prove that the very idea of AI is impossible, then the development of increasingly powerful computers as an aftereffect of Moore's Law and similar technologies (massively parallel computing etc) will result in systems exponentially more powerful than IBM's Watson. At some point a future Watson or Google AI system will make "decisions" indistinguishable from a human's.
Now, if Boeing and others are mass producing rocket parts at the same volume that Ford, Toyota, and their suppliers, etc are producing automobile parts (or Samsung and Foxconn smartphone parts), I'd say we'd not only be on Mars right now, we'd have a space colony on Pluto, if that's an interesting enough minor planet.
You should blame Google, Facebook and other Big Data companies for making indiscriminate surveillance somewhat palatable to the masses, who'll be thinking, it's okay for Google and Facebook to spy on us merely for profit, so it should be okay for the government to spy on us to prevent (omg) TERRORISM.
"Microsoft isn't implying that. They trying to convince customers they don't have NSA backdoors."
Yes this smells more like a PR move than anything else. Any government serious about security will roll out its own software stack, which unlike hardware costs practicallly nothing after the initial development. This will limit the attack vector to rogue chips.
Maybe China had something to do with it? I'm too lazy to search for it now, but I remember reading a story about the Chinese government banning upgrades to Windows 8 for their ageing XP machines.
Slashdot Mirror
"Nonsense. Imagine Bilbo kills one of the dwarfs for no reason and they all laugh and continue with their business. That wouldn't make sense and you'd be immediately pulled back from the scene and think WTF am I watching? Why the director do that? The suspension of disbelief would be broken."
I imagine you haven't watched one of those violent kiddie cartoons?
Bad comparison (although I'm pro-driverless car), unless you're thinking of dedicated driver-free lanes that basically turns the supposedly autonomous vehicles into glorified train cars. You might as well say that driverless cars are as safe as elevators and when was the last time an elevator killed someone?
Right. I won't trust a defense contractor whose security gets compromised using phishing emails. If the intrusion is more low level than that (the mythical compromised routers), then they might have a good excuse. If the story is true, and the Israelis aren't just making it up as a cover story or honeypot to attract would-be cyber-attackers from other less technically competent nations (Iran, N Korea, etc), then the defense contractors should be banned from future military contracts.
WTF? It's fantasy with wizards, elves and dragons, and you're talking about suspension of disbelief? If it's an Asimov or AC Clarke adaptation maybe we can start talking about believability, but a high fantasy like this one? Anything goes, except perhaps when it comes to absolute immortality. Apparently "immortal" characters or monsters tend to have some sort of weakness that allow them to get killed by a determined hero or villain.
Mod parent up. A (properly) modifed /etc/hosts file (in case you're using Linux/Unix, don't know the Windows/Mac equivalent) should be more efficient than a browser based solution. I say more efficient because you effectively cut out one step in the web browsing chain, as links to the "blocked" web sites are simply redirected to localhost (127.0.0.) instead of being first handed over to the OS for DNS resolution and then blocked by browser.
However, compared to a browser extension, the hosts files hack can't do wildcard pattern matching, so if you want to block Facebook, you can't just input "*facebook.com" but every subdomain like www.facebook.com, cdn.facebook.com, etc.
MicroNokia has been pursuing the lower end of the smartphone market using non-Windows devices (actually I think they're pursuing the higher end of the feature phone market), even coming up with their own generic Amazonesque Android phone.
At the lower end, you don't need a Play/Appstore sized ecosystem. Just Angry Birds, Facebook and Twitter.
" How could a stupid cunt like you even bother posting such a moronic comment? Seriously, go die in a fire and I hope your kids get leukemia. Only someone with severe autism and Down's syndrome would be so clueless about psychology."
But Linus, despite the vulgarity of some of his rants, doesn't use language like that. Unless you can provide a link to prove otherwise, Linus hasn't used terms that poke fun at people with disabilities ("autism") or used sexist language ("cunt"). He does use generic terms of abuse like shit and fuck, which doesn't really qualify as sexist since it can both men and women (and homosexuals) fuck.
The EU directive gives at best a false sense of privacy, since the information itself isn't removed, but only the links, kind of like the way an OS might "remove" a file but still preserve its data ready to be "undeleted" (unless it's a filesystem that tends to overwrite unused blocks).
The EU regulators don't want to appear as "censors" (with the unsavory connotation that the word carries in a presumably democratic environment) so they don't go after the source. This reeks of institutional hypocrisy. Why not just go after the publishers. If they shut down the publishers, bloggers, etc, then all that Google and Bing would be left are the dead links.
Well Libertarian gunfreak, a knife is infinitely reusable after you wipe the blood off, although my prefered Zombie weapon is a long sword.
The word for this is witch hunt. A simple correlation is enough.
Just as merely being unusual marked a person as a witch when a plague broke out, posting unusual comments in social media, right before or after a terrorist incident, now marks you as a terrorist.
So if a Googler doesn't know perl. You'd say dumb Googler? Somehow that sounds more like a joke than an insult. I say it't the intent more than the word that counts. Woman isn't an insulting word and yet it can be used as an insult.
LOL. If Kurzweil's future ever comes true, then even sex will be outsourced via the exponential evolution of today's cam sex. Be careful of getting a virus though.
"Of course, old favorites won't disappear. They'll be a handful of new discoveries each year from self-publishing. Enough that books won't be "dead". But the idea that book reading will become marginal enough that it's cultural significance will essentially be irrelevant."
More books or at least book-length works are being published now than in the past. So a few percentage of good books out of a couple of million bad books is still a lot.
This development parallells the development of culture in other fields, such as music. Before the nineteenth century, you could probably count on your fingers and toes the number of composers who were as good as Beethoven and Mozart, since any would-be Beethoven would need not just be talented but had to live near a place where he could hear good live music that he could learn to imitate first then later surpass with masterpieces of his own.
With the development of recorded music and mass-produced musical instruments, any middle-class person of even mediocre musical talent could listen to good or nearly good music just just by switching on the turn table and later the cassette and CD players.
Today, people have greater access to writing and greater access to a possible audience. Many of today's "books" are actually written in "submarine" form, probably serialized in the writer's blog or written as fan faction. And so, the audience even gets access to the act of writing itself. Writers who blog their novels get feedback from readers whose collective comments effectively make them "crowd" editors, similar to the way Wikipedia works.
What you lament is the coming demise of writing and culture is no more than the death of the rock star, or the Shakespeares or Beethovens of the past because their numbers have multiplied through the spread of mass culture.
Given the lack of a single dominant mobile office suite, there are potentially more users out there for a LibreOffice version for Android than for users of the Windows, Mac and Linux versions combined. So why's the Android version forever stuck in demoware limbo?
You joke. But the names are probably going to go through some sort of machine filtering that'll eliminate Fuckeroo, Sexoid, or Goatse then vetted by a panel of religious and cultural sensitivity "experts" and everybody else with a loud mouth or a big stick to eliminate names likely to get on somebody's goat like Tiananmen, Bin Laden, Zion, etc. Only then does the Internets get to vote to short list of approved names, pretty much like a Slashdot poll.
The corollary here is that intelligence isn't always an advantage. Or else all chimps would have evolved human class intelligence. The question I'd like answered is, what natural advantages does innate stupidity confer upon a creature that enables it to spread its just as efficiently or even bettera than an intelligent creature. Maybe the neurons required to be good at puzzle solving and the like are subtracted from the total needed for street or jungle "smarts".
"Rockchip RK3288 is coming, should be affordable, and the company is spending a lot of effort making sure it's well supported in mainline."
Citation needed. Mind supporting your statement with a link? AFAIK RK has one of the poorest FOSS support among Chinese SOC makers (compared to Allwinner and Amlogic). The RK source code floating in the net tend to be "leaks" or in any case releases that aren't official supported by the company. Also for a long time there was no official way to flash firmware onto the embedded flash storage of an Android device unless you use RK's Windows only firmware tool. (This changed recently with the appearance of a binary only Linux upgrade tool.) Opensource RK flash tools are quite limited in that they are unable to partition the flash storage or to change the bootloader, needed when upgrading between incompatible Android versions or loading desktop Linux.
Well, no human alive today in any case. All so-called "original" works produced today are derivatives of older works (Shakespeare, folklore, etc) or quirks produced by the artist's mental state. Among deceased artists Van Gogh and Edgar Allan Poe are famous examples. Another reason why we should stop this "all rights reserved" nonsense of the traditional copyright system, where the artist is presumed to be a god that produces unique worlds out of nothing.
"And we currently have no idea how to create intelligent software." Of course we can't create "intelligent" software if the definition is stacked in favor of philosophically disputable notions like consciousness. Is Google Search conscious? Does the Siri system really "understand" what I tell it to? This is what's preventing machines from being defined as "intelligent". But if some future machine can exponentially compute, brute-force if you will, all the "calcuations" needed by a human to start an "intelligent" conversation, shouldn't that qualify as intelligence? Or would you say that a two-year old child shouldn't be considered "intelligent" because she can't understand what we're talking about.
Engineers don't do things accidentally unless they fuck up. So unless we can prove the whales know what they're doing, they're acting more like the pre-agricultural humans who accidentally spread seeds wherever they spit and shit. Not quite agriculture.
"Back in the 1960s after the moon landings, people would have expected we would be well past Mars by now. Probably Jupiter, Saturn or other stars."
Your example and the frequently quoted one about flying cars is the wrong analogy to make. There's a reason to be more optimistic, or pessimistic (depending on whether you view machine intelligence as threat), with regard the progress of AI.
Up until now, nobody has been mass producing man-rated spaceships, or flying cars and warp drives for that matter. On the other hand, computers and computer parts have been mass-produced since shortly after Jack Kilby invented the transistor. This is the reason for the so-called Moore's Law.
Now, unless you can prove that the very idea of AI is impossible, then the development of increasingly powerful computers as an aftereffect of Moore's Law and similar technologies (massively parallel computing etc) will result in systems exponentially more powerful than IBM's Watson. At some point a future Watson or Google AI system will make "decisions" indistinguishable from a human's.
Now, if Boeing and others are mass producing rocket parts at the same volume that Ford, Toyota, and their suppliers, etc are producing automobile parts (or Samsung and Foxconn smartphone parts), I'd say we'd not only be on Mars right now, we'd have a space colony on Pluto, if that's an interesting enough minor planet.
So it's free because the product isn't the app but the user who supplies the data for Big Data to crunch.
You should blame Google, Facebook and other Big Data companies for making indiscriminate surveillance somewhat palatable to the masses, who'll be thinking, it's okay for Google and Facebook to spy on us merely for profit, so it should be okay for the government to spy on us to prevent (omg) TERRORISM.
"Microsoft isn't implying that. They trying to convince customers they don't have NSA backdoors."
Yes this smells more like a PR move than anything else. Any government serious about security will roll out its own software stack, which unlike hardware costs practicallly nothing after the initial development. This will limit the attack vector to rogue chips.
Maybe China had something to do with it? I'm too lazy to search for it now, but I remember reading a story about the Chinese government banning upgrades to Windows 8 for their ageing XP machines.