Simply put : the projected technological growth curve suggests that we will have self replicating robots (and possibly artificial intelligence smart enough to control them) within a century.
There's no practical point to learn a language other than english. It's the lingua franca. ALL top research conferences and journals are english only.
Now, if you want to learn a language for reasons other than practicality that you could actually use in a quasi-engineering setting, learn Mandarin. Face it. It's this the most common foreign language you hear around engineering campuses. Even if you only learn a few words, you'll impress the hell out of them.
Your analysis fails to take into account that these differing design philosophies predate the open source movement.
The PC branch (for lack of a better word) of the philosophy tree came from a world of a single machine with a single user that could only do a single thing. Therefore, if you wanted to do multiple things, you had to have your programs do multiple things.
On the other side we have the UNIX branch. This branch is dominated by two very powerful ideas since Thompson, Ritchie, McIlroy created UNIX back in the 60s.
Everything is a file
Lots of IPC
So what does this mean? It means that it's incredibly easy for developers to manipulate hardware. Want to record audio? cat/dev/audio > myvoice.au. Want to play it back? cat myvoice.au >/dev/audio. Secondly, it means that you can create lots of very simple programs and use them in combination to solve complex problems. This is the reason you have lots of programs that simply read input from either a file or from stdin and output text to stdout. This also leads to the idea of "fail silently" since no one wants "Parse Error" to show up in their pipe chain. This gives you the rule of "One, two, or infinitely many" arguments.
So why did the UNIX Philosophy dominate the open source world? Simple. Open source comes from academia, and researchers distributing source code, and all research was, and still is, dominated by UNIX machines. Eventually these practices became codified.
But why was source code traded instead of just binaries? Ahh, not necessarily out of altruism, but out of pragmatism. See, UNIX machines differed wildly in their set ups. Different compilers, different libraries, different processors. In a very real sensed, no two machines were identical, and so you had to ship the code and have it compiled on the machine. Sometimes the code obfuscated, sometimes it just had a sign reading "Don't Look Here" hanging on it. Saying, "Go ahead and read it and modify it" isn't much of a jump when you're simply acknowledging that that it's going to happen anyway.
It's all part of the "Unix Philosophy." Google it. So while what you say might be partially true, it's not the primary cause.
Damn kids these days. They don't even know their own history.
why are they concentrating on how *profitable* the long tail is?
As far as I see it, the long tail isn't about PROFIT, but about how much society wants the entertainment.
You missed the point of the LongTail. It's all about profit. It's that you can make a profit by selling an incredibly large volume of incredibly low demand items.
The long tail is showing that copyright lengths ARE damaging society. And it not being profitable enough to make a business on shows that there is NO BUSINESS LOSS in shortening copyright to a time where works are still wanted.
Really, copyright now is more about the accountants' abject fear that someone else is making money and not them.
Shit, if you're not SELLING a good, why not let someone else do it, or even just release it for free and forget about it? Because in that case, there's no money for you to make. That you don't want to spend the effort to MAKE the money in the first place seems irrelevant to your accounting brain.
Again you missed the point. If you're not offering the low demand goods for sell, the LongTail says you've missed a business opportunity, assuming of course that you can sell the low demand good at a profit. If you can't sell the low demand good at a profit, but believe someone else can, then what you should do is partner with them, otherwise hold on to the good until you can sell it at a profit yourself.
I'm sorry, but the LongTail essay just isn't what you want it to be about.
As an American who has flown internationally, it's to embarrassing. Hell even China didn't treat me that bad, and they required I tell them what hotel I was staying at and then a sign a paper at the hotel confirming that I actually arrived.
You're never going to watch that stuff, and your kid will never want to watch it.
Look how rarely you flip through photos, and that's a shared communal experience since you talk. Video is boring. You sit quietly and watch for hours on end. Screw that.
Have you ever wanted to watch any home movies your parents made? Of course not!
I'd go further. To call them "Artificial Intelligences" is grandiose. A lot of times they boil down to two things:
Counting
Linear Algebra
Look it's cool that you solve (or at least useful facsimile of a solution) a lot of problems with these techniques. But to say that they're "intelligent" is to go way too far. If you insist on applying a biological metaphor, stimulus-response is more appropriate.
The term "artificial intelligence" is way too loaded with ideas of super intelligent robots and the like. That's why it's called "machine learning" now. (Better, but...)
I don't mean this to sound condescending or flippant, because that's not my intent, but what's the idea behind Unitarian Universalists?
From what I understand, the UU is the most laid back church on the planet. If you want to believe that Jesus is the son of God, cool. If you don't, hey, that's fine too. You want to believe in animistic spirits? We've got a pew just for you. Think all of this is a load of crap? Hey, we're having a potluck next week that you might be interested in.
From the outside it strikes me as kind of the church people join when they want fellowship and community a church gives, but none of dogma. Not that that's a bad thing. It's cool that something like that exists, but it does seem kind of grab-baggy, or The First Church of the Potpourri, if you will.
I long thought that even the dullest knife in the drawer can tell there's a fundamental difference between the government a government purchase order and a government grant. Apparently, I was mistaken.
In all honesty lots of groups use municipal facilities. The facilities are there for everyone. I don't agree with the BSA's policies regarding gays and atheists, but I also don't have a problem with them using the facilities. Just as long as the Gay Atheist Scouts of America (one can dream can't he?) can use the facilities as well.
As a matter of fact, the BSA isn't against non-Christians. Quite the contrary. The BSA encourages people of all faiths to participate and earn appropriate badges. The BSA, is just anti-atheist.
Oh and your ice ball would never work. First, heat transfers from outside to the inside. Second, the moon doesn't have an atmosphere for a reason. It's too small, and lacks a magnetosphere.
But what is there to learn on the moon, that can't be learned on Earth? All it is is a rock. A rock without an atmosphere and 1/6 gravity. Vacuums are easily creatable in the lab. Nothing has been found to require a lack of gravity to be made.
Face it. The only reason/.ers want to go to the moon is romance. As Bruce Sterling said about about space colonization:
I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.
The reason why being published in peer reviewed journals and conferences is an indicator of success is because the the community of researchers have (blindly) determined that your work is novel, interesting, and effective. Call me crazy, but if someone is producing novel, interesting, and effective work, then I'd think that person is a good researcher.
I challenge anyone to come up with another metric for the quality of a researcher.
Slashdot Mirror
You're command of the etymology of the word "robot" and your faux-intellectualism is astounding. I believe I am what the ruffians call, "p0wned."
Now THAT'S science fantasy!
Oh it's totally different! See on the moon and Mars, the planet's atmosphere doesn't slowly dissolve your shelter. Here it does!
Totally different. :P
There's no practical point to learn a language other than english. It's the lingua franca. ALL top research conferences and journals are english only.
Now, if you want to learn a language for reasons other than practicality that you could actually use in a quasi-engineering setting, learn Mandarin. Face it. It's this the most common foreign language you hear around engineering campuses. Even if you only learn a few words, you'll impress the hell out of them.
Your analysis fails to take into account that these differing design philosophies predate the open source movement.
The PC branch (for lack of a better word) of the philosophy tree came from a world of a single machine with a single user that could only do a single thing. Therefore, if you wanted to do multiple things, you had to have your programs do multiple things.
On the other side we have the UNIX branch. This branch is dominated by two very powerful ideas since Thompson, Ritchie, McIlroy created UNIX back in the 60s.
So what does this mean? It means that it's incredibly easy for developers to manipulate hardware. Want to record audio? cat /dev/audio > myvoice.au. Want to play it back? cat myvoice.au > /dev/audio. Secondly, it means that you can create lots of very simple programs and use them in combination to solve complex problems. This is the reason you have lots of programs that simply read input from either a file or from stdin and output text to stdout. This also leads to the idea of "fail silently" since no one wants "Parse Error" to show up in their pipe chain. This gives you the rule of "One, two, or infinitely many" arguments.
So why did the UNIX Philosophy dominate the open source world? Simple. Open source comes from academia, and researchers distributing source code, and all research was, and still is, dominated by UNIX machines. Eventually these practices became codified.
But why was source code traded instead of just binaries? Ahh, not necessarily out of altruism, but out of pragmatism. See, UNIX machines differed wildly in their set ups. Different compilers, different libraries, different processors. In a very real sensed, no two machines were identical, and so you had to ship the code and have it compiled on the machine. Sometimes the code obfuscated, sometimes it just had a sign reading "Don't Look Here" hanging on it. Saying, "Go ahead and read it and modify it" isn't much of a jump when you're simply acknowledging that that it's going to happen anyway.
It's all part of the "Unix Philosophy." Google it. So while what you say might be partially true, it's not the primary cause.
Damn kids these days. They don't even know their own history.
16mb is a ton for something like that.
Try something new.
You missed the point of the LongTail. It's all about profit. It's that you can make a profit by selling an incredibly large volume of incredibly low demand items.
The long tail is showing that copyright lengths ARE damaging society. And it not being profitable enough to make a business on shows that there is NO BUSINESS LOSS in shortening copyright to a time where works are still wanted.
Really, copyright now is more about the accountants' abject fear that someone else is making money and not them.
Again you missed the point. If you're not offering the low demand goods for sell, the LongTail says you've missed a business opportunity, assuming of course that you can sell the low demand good at a profit. If you can't sell the low demand good at a profit, but believe someone else can, then what you should do is partner with them, otherwise hold on to the good until you can sell it at a profit yourself.
I'm sorry, but the LongTail essay just isn't what you want it to be about.
As an American who has flown internationally, it's to embarrassing. Hell even China didn't treat me that bad, and they required I tell them what hotel I was staying at and then a sign a paper at the hotel confirming that I actually arrived.
I'm also sure that you don't know what you're talking about by attempting to combine the two in your snide comment.
I'm sure that's what we can solve.
convex optimization
decision theory
Magic
You're never going to watch that stuff, and your kid will never want to watch it.
Look how rarely you flip through photos, and that's a shared communal experience since you talk. Video is boring. You sit quietly and watch for hours on end. Screw that.
Have you ever wanted to watch any home movies your parents made? Of course not!
DARPA is a place? Really? Hell, I thought everyone just got their DARPA grant, and went on doing whatever it is their doing. A la an NSF grant.
Because you're not a multinational. Duh!
Look it's cool that you solve (or at least useful facsimile of a solution) a lot of problems with these techniques. But to say that they're "intelligent" is to go way too far. If you insist on applying a biological metaphor, stimulus-response is more appropriate.
The term "artificial intelligence" is way too loaded with ideas of super intelligent robots and the like. That's why it's called "machine learning" now. (Better, but...)
The singularity is simply blind faith for people that fancy themselves as being smart.
The same thing we've always used: xfree86
I don't mean this to sound condescending or flippant, because that's not my intent, but what's the idea behind Unitarian Universalists?
From what I understand, the UU is the most laid back church on the planet. If you want to believe that Jesus is the son of God, cool. If you don't, hey, that's fine too. You want to believe in animistic spirits? We've got a pew just for you. Think all of this is a load of crap? Hey, we're having a potluck next week that you might be interested in.
From the outside it strikes me as kind of the church people join when they want fellowship and community a church gives, but none of dogma. Not that that's a bad thing. It's cool that something like that exists, but it does seem kind of grab-baggy, or The First Church of the Potpourri, if you will.
I long thought that even the dullest knife in the drawer can tell there's a fundamental difference between the government a government purchase order and a government grant. Apparently, I was mistaken.
In all honesty lots of groups use municipal facilities. The facilities are there for everyone. I don't agree with the BSA's policies regarding gays and atheists, but I also don't have a problem with them using the facilities. Just as long as the Gay Atheist Scouts of America (one can dream can't he?) can use the facilities as well.
As a matter of fact, the BSA isn't against non-Christians. Quite the contrary. The BSA encourages people of all faiths to participate and earn appropriate badges. The BSA, is just anti-atheist.
But why would you want to do any of this?
Oh and your ice ball would never work. First, heat transfers from outside to the inside. Second, the moon doesn't have an atmosphere for a reason. It's too small, and lacks a magnetosphere.
Face it. The only reason
The reason why being published in peer reviewed journals and conferences is an indicator of success is because the the community of researchers have (blindly) determined that your work is novel, interesting, and effective. Call me crazy, but if someone is producing novel, interesting, and effective work, then I'd think that person is a good researcher.
I challenge anyone to come up with another metric for the quality of a researcher.