He's talking about a flaw in the movie "The Matrix", not about anything related to the real world or creationism. In the movie the sky is all blocked off so there's no solar power and no plants grow. Where does the energy needed by the machines come from? It's generated from human body heat. Where does the humans' food come from? From the bodies of the dead humans...
Obviously, this is no way to generate energy. You'd always get less useful energy out than you put in, in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics. However, the only reason the machines keep the humans around (at least as it is explained in the movie) is as power generators.
It's a clear absurdity in the movie, unless you assume that the humans really had no idea what they were being used for, and didn't understand thermodynamics. Some of the web comics explained the humans variously as a kind of cheap memory chip or hard drive, IT workers, and soldiers.
So, you want to talk about stuff that morons are spouting? There's only one here...
Nobody identifies with him and his motives. He wasn't targeting any group, he didn't have anything against the people he shot.
People call him a "good boy" for some reason. Apparently he was a popular kid who's girlfriend broke up with him (or something...) and he went berserk, not to get revenge but just to get attention.
He was a copycat attacker.
This is the kind of thing that is directly attributable to the excessive media coverage, and even more to discussions like this, where people identify with the Columbine killers! I can understand the hatred of the evils of highschool (I was treated rather poorly by my peers and some teachers as well, and felt the same urge to homicidal retaliation), but these guys were sick, evil bastards. They had a history of general nastyness which should have clued people in to the fact that these were not your typical geeks, goths, or whatever. I haven't seen many people stress the importance of the distinction between these demented individuals and the general population of geeks and other "personality" outcasts. It's a damn' rare combination: to be a geek and to put such a low value on human life, including one's own, outside of one's fantasies.
The only thing people can identify with, in this case, is the pain, not the action. Many people have had their heart ripped in two by a bad relationship, very few people thought that going out and shooting people at random would make them feel better.
In any case, better that people ignore these psychopaths than give more media coverage to inspire more copycats.
Did anyone else think that Yoda screwed up his grammar and spoke in a funny up-and-down voice because he had been alone on a swamp planet for 20 odd years?
Geez, this little green dude was talking to monarchs and ambassadors for centuries, you'd think he'd be a little more polished than the hermit we met in Empire!
When I heard "He had no father" it sure sounded to me like "He had no father raising him." As she went on I got more of the idea that she didn't have too firm a grasp on the reproductive process, which is entirely believable in a slave. BTW, she _was_ a slave, and probably looked pretty good in her younger days. I wouldn't be surprised if she was (if you'll excuse the expression) passed around at parties...
While everybody seems to have the feeling that some race's toes have been stepped on, nobody can pin it down to which one! (and have a significant number agree on it)
Yes, there is some stuff there that could be interpreted as racially-biased, but only if you are looking for something to be offended by. I think this is just a case of someone making a movie and not worrying about how such things will be interpreted.
We are getting spoiled by directors who wonder whether there are enough blacks or asians and whether they are stereotyped, or whether this alien species suggests a certain culture too much or casts one in a bad light, or is afraid to give stupid aliens broken English (or Basic, as the case may be) because it might anyone with a (non-English, non-American) accent.
Honestly, seeking the perfect balance (rather than simply ignoring race) is a racist attitude too. Not the mean, spiteful racism that attacks a group ("those niggers ought to learn their place!"), but the cowardly PC racism that fears irrational reactions from a group ("those african americans are so easily offended, we need to make sure there is an appropriate number in sufficient roles, but not so many that it becomes a 'black film' and loses the large white audience, so many of whom are racist that they won't go see a good movie if there are too many african americans in it").
Mutual dependence does not preclude control. Your brain controls your muscles, even though it needs them, and even though it must take their state and needs into account when issuing orders.
If you don't define this as control, you're redefining the word in such a way that it is useless. All masters factor in the needs and limitations of their servants, if that invalidates the idea of control then the word is invalidated for all uses.
Mitochondria are enclosed by their host-cells. As a living being it responds to its environment, which is part of the host-cell. The host-cells have evolved to manipulate the mitochondria to perform on command, whether to reproduce during growth or increase output during exertion.
"Mitochondria: Small genetic particles in every cell that govern how it works."
That is not a valid description of mitochondria. Mitochondria are analagous to power generators, they produce the ATP which is used for intra-cellular energy transport. I forget some of the details, but I believe they are responsible for aerobic respiration, using oxygen and glucose as fuel to convert the spent ADP to ATP.
They have their own genetic material which is completely seperate from that of their host. They reproduce asexually (and, incidentally, do everything else) in response to chemical cues from the host cell.
Mitochondria do not govern the cell in which they reside, they are governed by it, and work as an organelle within it.
The genetic material within organelles has been a big deal in the press because it has been used to produce a (IMHO unreliable) estimate of the number of generations since "Eve" (a supposed common direct-line female ancestor of all humans). It was suited to this because, due to its seperate genetic material and asexual reproduction, the only changes throughout its otherwise static genome are due to mutation (unlike the nuclear DNA which is sexually mixed, so you have to isolate genes to find all but the most gross mutations).
Don't interpret things so broadly. You obviously decided "no one is going to want to share" didn't apply to cookies or the double seats in buses, so why didn't you make the obvious connection that it only applied to things currently protected by current IP laws?
Pure science and mathematics are not protected by IP laws. It's practically impossible to make a profit from keeping a slight advancement in physics secret, so there's no real need to encourage people to give it away. What else would they do with it? If they give it away they get recognition and respect which may lead to jobs or gifts, if they keep it secret it does nobody any good.
As for the "great" Greek literature (IMHO only called great because it's old; I've read a fair bit and find it tedious and silly, if any of it was written today it wouldn't even find a publisher), there's pathetically little of it compared to the vast number of new works available every year these days.
OTOH, without a patent, many truly revolutionary inventions would be kept secret for the business advantage they provide. Without copyrights, serious writing would be a hobby for the idle rich as it was in the bad old days. Movie theatres would have huge security expenses and nothing would ever be released on video. Nobody would develop computer games more complex than MineSweeper.
I agree that there are problems with current IP law, but I don't agree that they are so terrible that the whole concept of IP should be thrown out.
"If everyone were able to knock out cheap ripoffs of other people's works, it would be very hard for people with only a passing knowledge of the work to sort out the originals from the copies."
The changes I described in my original post would require all unauthorized derivative works to be marked as such.
I'm surprised that I haven't seen anyone mention the importance of distinguishing between the right to produce verbatim copies and the right to produce derivative works.
In short, I think "fair use" should be greatly extended, beyond the needs of reviewers and parody-writers to all derivative works.
Fanfic is copyright violation, but darkfic (extremely twisted parody) is not. Similarly, pornographers freely trample the wholesome images of family entertainment while honest artists are prevented from writing tasteful side-stories relating to events and characters which have become cultural icons. I once came across a parody of The Hobbit which was the most pathetic piece of literary tripe I've ever had the misfortune to glance at, but one of the most beatiful works of animation ever produced is incomplete despite the approval of the copyright owner (because of earlier contracts signed which were only possible due to the excessive powers given to the copyright holder; "enough rope to hang yourself").
Currently, copyright law discourages valid creative, though derivative, works which increase "mindshare" and thus marketability of the original work, and encourages unpleasant mockeries which are used as cheap hooks to attract buyers and reduce the value of the works they are derived from.
I would much rather see a general requirement for products to be labeled "unauthorized derivitive work of X." This would make it clear what is canonical to the storyline, and what is Joe X's take on the story.
Also, the specific exception of parody is not adequate to allow the creation of works that would otherwise never have permission granted (incidentally, I've heard more than one author praise a well-executed parody of his own work). Parody is not the only way to challenge the ideas set in a story. An unauthorized sequel might be the best way to express disagreement over the long-term consequences of the actions of the hero.
Minsky uses a functional definition of consciousness/self-awareness (which he seems to use interchangeably): having information about how the object processing the information works.
It is hard to deny that there is something very odd about the human brain, beyond its superficial function. It can't be described in words made to deal with the physical world, or even the emotions. The simple fact of being, and being aware of being, is utterly beyond all attempted explanations. Presumably you can explain human behavior with current physics and neural anatomy, but I've never heard a remotely plausible explanation of why or how the I inside of me is here to hear my thoughts and taste my food and ride along in a body and mind that it only has weak control of.
"Consciousness" is the word commonly used for this phenomenon, but this word has been hijacked by computer scientists and others to mean simply that information is being gathered and processed. "Self-awareness" is commonly, and IMHO more appropriately, applied to creatures whose behavior reflects knowledge that the creature in the mirror is themselves; it doesn't imply anything beyond good information processing capability to me. I prefer to use the word "soul," though I don't mean to imply that it is necessarily eternal; my personal belief (though I sincerely hope otherwise) is that the soul has no existence outside of the brain and ceases to be at death.
I have long thought that it might be possible to create a computer program on a normal serial-execution computer (or synchronous network; I will use the term "serial computer" to apply only to these machines) that would be externally indistinguishable from the mind of a human (passes the Turing test, displays emotion, creates original works of art) but would not have a soul. Anything a serial computer does can be done with gears or by a person working with pencil and paper (speed not being an issue). I think everyone will agree with me when I say that algorithms followed out on paper can't have a soul entirely seperate from that of the person working the pencil.
This is not to say that I accept entirely that serial computers can do everything that brains can. Asynchronous analog systems can physically simulate real-world phenomena that can't be simulated by discrete calculation. Perhaps many of the basic characteristics of human thought are only achieveable by an asynchronous neural net. Perhaps only the actual soul is impossible to create in a computer program, and in such a way that we'll never know the difference. We just don't know.
However, I don't believe that the issue of the soul can simply be ignored. It is real, no human can deny that, no matter how inconveniently unmeasurable it is.
I don't know what a link to this article is doing on/. . It's not news, there's no mention of new information, it's an unprofessional vague blurb on AI from someone who doesn't seem to understand the basic issues.
This is apparent from the examples chosen:
Robodyne Cybernetics is a pathetic joke Joe Michael played on himself. Basically, he heard about "utility fog" and decided it would be a good idea even if the units were the size of bricks rather than the size of animal cells. He's the laughing stock of comp.robotics.misc and only manages to continue to attract interest from the uninformed due to being utterly impervious to logic. He has never answered a challenge intelligently, but rather insists without evidence that a set of blocks held together with electromagnets can do any job better than a specialized robot and tells you to buy his CD-ROM so you can watch his video clip of his "prototype": a block being pulled across other blocks with a string.
The emergent behavior of boids is unsurprising when you think about it. The boids are programmed to avoid running into anything while staying as close to other boids as possible (since the goals contradict each other a bit, they balance out to maintain a certain amount of distance between the boids). Reaching an obstacle, the boids which come close to it steer so they won't hit it and the rest of the flock moves away (in what is nearly a compression wave)
A biplane bot that was programmed to learn learned?! Ooo, get on the wire, this must be a big story!
It's one thing for a program to optimize its performance at a certain task for which it is programmed and given all the relevant data, it's quite another for a general program to be given multiple arbitrary goals or values, prioritize them, choose what data to collect, form a strategy, and make useful progress.
Even worse is the idea of a "general liberal arts education." History, philosophy, languages, et c. are all better learned from an informal private study of books and conversation with other interested people. You get two little bonuses in university: having your professor's ideas crammed down your throat, and being required to do endless amounts of worthless busy work to demonstrate that you swallowed it.
My (technical subject, in class) university experience consisted of incomprehensible lectures, poorly chosen reading materials, and tests that had no relation to one's ability to do real-world work (prime example, calculus: solving many trivial problems in a restricted period of time, rather than eventually solving non-trivial problems).
Worst of all is the cookie-cutter approach to education. This subject will take you X months to learn, then you will either pass it and regardless of how much of it you forget the credit will not be taken away, or you will fail it and no matter how close you were to passing you have to take the whole thing over again. How ridiculous!
I've never met an engineer who could pass a second-year calculus exam if it was dropped in front of him one random afternoon.
Universities are an archaic institution from the days when illiteracy was the norm, books were hideously expensive, and travel was something you did a few times in your life, if you were lucky. Knowledge was rare and people had to gathered around the educated few (professors) if they wanted to learn. Things have changed. Information can be easily and cheaply transported. Travel is inexpensive and common. The factors that made universities necessary are gone.
And if you don't know, there's ls, man -k (or man, if you're looking for particular options), and automatic completion (with e.g. tcsh or 4dos)... So there are definitely memory aids in CLIs as well.
Not inherently. These are commands which you must learn before using, not a fundamental part of the interface. It's a little like saying that a car's interface has memory aids because there's a manual in the glove compartment (ignoring, for the moment, the real inherent aids such as the markings on the gear shift).
Of course, the whole speeder bike thing was total nonsense. Pilots aren't particles, and they don't decide to go in a particular direction then just move around obstacles. Look around an open forest like that (unlike the nasty brush around here), and you'll be able to see in many directions for hundreds of meters (and with a speeder bike, if you can see straight, you can drive straight). As long as the pilot chooses his path carefully, he could get around fairly safely.
I doubt Neal Stephenson would argue against the value of a GUI for a 3D-modeling program, or for a web-browser. I imagine he uses X all the time. Rather, he argues against having just a GUI, particularly for system management and development.
In a sense, every control in a GUI is a menu: you are presented options of what to do and you pick one. You don't need much experience but you are limited to those options which are presented. The interface does the work of your memory, but less efficiently. In a command line, you are given no information about what is possible, but all operations are available instantly if you learn their names and options, all without searching the screen with your eyes.
I do agree with some points in the counter-rant, but some of the metaphors were more appropriate than Stephenson probably intended. You can't drive a tank through town, and while towns and cities are a small percentage of the world they are where most people spend most of their time. Most weekend handymen wouldn't want a hole hawg.
IMHO, the average user won't want Linux until you hide the most powerful tools from him, including the command line. I still think most business users would be better off with a black-box system where the 3-6 applications they regularly run are offered in a menu which is the whole interface to the system, or better yet, integrated into one application that automatically starts when they turn on the computer and saves everything (without overwriting the originals) when they turn it off.
Slashdot Mirror
He's talking about a flaw in the movie "The Matrix", not about anything related to the real world or creationism. In the movie the sky is all blocked off so there's no solar power and no plants grow. Where does the energy needed by the machines come from? It's generated from human body heat. Where does the humans' food come from? From the bodies of the dead humans...
Obviously, this is no way to generate energy. You'd always get less useful energy out than you put in, in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics. However, the only reason the machines keep the humans around (at least as it is explained in the movie) is as power generators.
It's a clear absurdity in the movie, unless you assume that the humans really had no idea what they were being used for, and didn't understand thermodynamics. Some of the web comics explained the humans variously as a kind of cheap memory chip or hard drive, IT workers, and soldiers.
So, you want to talk about stuff that morons are spouting? There's only one here...
I suppose it's new as a mass-produced vehicle, but then again, it isn't mass-produced yet (if it ever is).
Doesn't anybody remember the Avrocar? (waaaaay back...)
Nobody identifies with him and his motives. He wasn't targeting any group, he didn't have anything against the people he shot.
People call him a "good boy" for some reason. Apparently he was a popular kid who's girlfriend broke up with him (or something...) and he went berserk, not to get revenge but just to get attention.
He was a copycat attacker.
This is the kind of thing that is directly attributable to the excessive media coverage, and even more to discussions like this, where people identify with the Columbine killers! I can understand the hatred of the evils of highschool (I was treated rather poorly by my peers and some teachers as well, and felt the same urge to homicidal retaliation), but these guys were sick, evil bastards. They had a history of general nastyness which should have clued people in to the fact that these were not your typical geeks, goths, or whatever. I haven't seen many people stress the importance of the distinction between these demented individuals and the general population of geeks and other "personality" outcasts. It's a damn' rare combination: to be a geek and to put such a low value on human life, including one's own, outside of one's fantasies.
The only thing people can identify with, in this case, is the pain, not the action. Many people have had their heart ripped in two by a bad relationship, very few people thought that going out and shooting people at random would make them feel better.
In any case, better that people ignore these psychopaths than give more media coverage to inspire more copycats.
Remember too that Cmdr. Taco is ever-vigilant listening for and booting moderation abusers.
NT means "no text!"
NT means no text.
Did anyone else think that Yoda screwed up his grammar and spoke in a funny up-and-down voice because he had been alone on a swamp planet for 20 odd years?
Geez, this little green dude was talking to monarchs and ambassadors for centuries, you'd think he'd be a little more polished than the hermit we met in Empire!
I mean of course the Virgin Birth idea.
When I heard "He had no father" it sure sounded to me like "He had no father raising him." As she went on I got more of the idea that she didn't have too firm a grasp on the reproductive process, which is entirely believable in a slave. BTW, she _was_ a slave, and probably looked pretty good in her younger days. I wouldn't be surprised if she was (if you'll excuse the expression) passed around at parties...
While everybody seems to have the feeling that some race's toes have been stepped on, nobody can pin it down to which one! (and have a significant number agree on it)
Yes, there is some stuff there that could be interpreted as racially-biased, but only if you are looking for something to be offended by. I think this is just a case of someone making a movie and not worrying about how such things will be interpreted.
We are getting spoiled by directors who wonder whether there are enough blacks or asians and whether they are stereotyped, or whether this alien species suggests a certain culture too much or casts one in a bad light, or is afraid to give stupid aliens broken English (or Basic, as the case may be) because it might anyone with a (non-English, non-American) accent.
Honestly, seeking the perfect balance (rather than simply ignoring race) is a racist attitude too. Not the mean, spiteful racism that attacks a group ("those niggers ought to learn their place!"), but the cowardly PC racism that fears irrational reactions from a group ("those african americans are so easily offended, we need to make sure there is an appropriate number in sufficient roles, but not so many that it becomes a 'black film' and loses the large white audience, so many of whom are racist that they won't go see a good movie if there are too many african americans in it").
..."The genetic material within these organelles..."
I did not mean to imply that there is nucleus-independent genetic material in other organelles.
Mutual dependence does not preclude control. Your brain controls your muscles, even though it needs them, and even though it must take their state and needs into account when issuing orders.
If you don't define this as control, you're redefining the word in such a way that it is useless. All masters factor in the needs and limitations of their servants, if that invalidates the idea of control then the word is invalidated for all uses.
Mitochondria are enclosed by their host-cells. As a living being it responds to its environment, which is part of the host-cell. The host-cells have evolved to manipulate the mitochondria to perform on command, whether to reproduce during growth or increase output during exertion.
"Mitochondria: Small genetic particles in every cell that govern how it works."
That is not a valid description of mitochondria. Mitochondria are analagous to power generators, they produce the ATP which is used for intra-cellular energy transport. I forget some of the details, but I believe they are responsible for aerobic respiration, using oxygen and glucose as fuel to convert the spent ADP to ATP.
They have their own genetic material which is completely seperate from that of their host. They reproduce asexually (and, incidentally, do everything else) in response to chemical cues from the host cell.
Mitochondria do not govern the cell in which they reside, they are governed by it, and work as an organelle within it.
The genetic material within organelles has been a big deal in the press because it has been used to produce a (IMHO unreliable) estimate of the number of generations since "Eve" (a supposed common direct-line female ancestor of all humans). It was suited to this because, due to its seperate genetic material and asexual reproduction, the only changes throughout its otherwise static genome are due to mutation (unlike the nuclear DNA which is sexually mixed, so you have to isolate genes to find all but the most gross mutations).
NT=No Text
Don't interpret things so broadly. You obviously decided "no one is going to want to share" didn't apply to cookies or the double seats in buses, so why didn't you make the obvious connection that it only applied to things currently protected by current IP laws?
Pure science and mathematics are not protected by IP laws. It's practically impossible to make a profit from keeping a slight advancement in physics secret, so there's no real need to encourage people to give it away. What else would they do with it? If they give it away they get recognition and respect which may lead to jobs or gifts, if they keep it secret it does nobody any good.
As for the "great" Greek literature (IMHO only called great because it's old; I've read a fair bit and find it tedious and silly, if any of it was written today it wouldn't even find a publisher), there's pathetically little of it compared to the vast number of new works available every year these days.
OTOH, without a patent, many truly revolutionary inventions would be kept secret for the business advantage they provide. Without copyrights, serious writing would be a hobby for the idle rich as it was in the bad old days. Movie theatres would have huge security expenses and nothing would ever be released on video. Nobody would develop computer games more complex than MineSweeper.
I agree that there are problems with current IP law, but I don't agree that they are so terrible that the whole concept of IP should be thrown out.
"If everyone were able to knock out cheap ripoffs of other people's works, it would be very hard for people with only a passing knowledge of the work to sort out the originals from the copies."
The changes I described in my original post would require all unauthorized derivative works to be marked as such.
(note: this only concerns copyright)
I'm surprised that I haven't seen anyone mention the importance of distinguishing between the right to produce verbatim copies and the right to produce derivative works.
In short, I think "fair use" should be greatly extended, beyond the needs of reviewers and parody-writers to all derivative works.
Fanfic is copyright violation, but darkfic (extremely twisted parody) is not. Similarly, pornographers freely trample the wholesome images of family entertainment while honest artists are prevented from writing tasteful side-stories relating to events and characters which have become cultural icons. I once came across a parody of The Hobbit which was the most pathetic piece of literary tripe I've ever had the misfortune to glance at, but one of the most beatiful works of animation ever produced is incomplete despite the approval of the copyright owner (because of earlier contracts signed which were only possible due to the excessive powers given to the copyright holder; "enough rope to hang yourself").
Currently, copyright law discourages valid creative, though derivative, works which increase "mindshare" and thus marketability of the original work, and encourages unpleasant mockeries which are used as cheap hooks to attract buyers and reduce the value of the works they are derived from.
I would much rather see a general requirement for products to be labeled "unauthorized derivitive work of X." This would make it clear what is canonical to the storyline, and what is Joe X's take on the story.
Also, the specific exception of parody is not adequate to allow the creation of works that would otherwise never have permission granted (incidentally, I've heard more than one author praise a well-executed parody of his own work). Parody is not the only way to challenge the ideas set in a story. An unauthorized sequel might be the best way to express disagreement over the long-term consequences of the actions of the hero.
Try The Force=Satan to see why.
IMHO, once again the Star Wars stuff is superior.
Minsky uses a functional definition of consciousness/self-awareness (which he seems to use interchangeably): having information about how the object processing the information works.
It is hard to deny that there is something very odd about the human brain, beyond its superficial function. It can't be described in words made to deal with the physical world, or even the emotions. The simple fact of being, and being aware of being, is utterly beyond all attempted explanations. Presumably you can explain human behavior with current physics and neural anatomy, but I've never heard a remotely plausible explanation of why or how the I inside of me is here to hear my thoughts and taste my food and ride along in a body and mind that it only has weak control of.
"Consciousness" is the word commonly used for this phenomenon, but this word has been hijacked by computer scientists and others to mean simply that information is being gathered and processed. "Self-awareness" is commonly, and IMHO more appropriately, applied to creatures whose behavior reflects knowledge that the creature in the mirror is themselves; it doesn't imply anything beyond good information processing capability to me. I prefer to use the word "soul," though I don't mean to imply that it is necessarily eternal; my personal belief (though I sincerely hope otherwise) is that the soul has no existence outside of the brain and ceases to be at death.
I have long thought that it might be possible to create a computer program on a normal serial-execution computer (or synchronous network; I will use the term "serial computer" to apply only to these machines) that would be externally indistinguishable from the mind of a human (passes the Turing test, displays emotion, creates original works of art) but would not have a soul. Anything a serial computer does can be done with gears or by a person working with pencil and paper (speed not being an issue). I think everyone will agree with me when I say that algorithms followed out on paper can't have a soul entirely seperate from that of the person working the pencil.
This is not to say that I accept entirely that serial computers can do everything that brains can. Asynchronous analog systems can physically simulate real-world phenomena that can't be simulated by discrete calculation. Perhaps many of the basic characteristics of human thought are only achieveable by an asynchronous neural net. Perhaps only the actual soul is impossible to create in a computer program, and in such a way that we'll never know the difference. We just don't know.
However, I don't believe that the issue of the soul can simply be ignored. It is real, no human can deny that, no matter how inconveniently unmeasurable it is.
I don't know what a link to this article is doing on /. . It's not news, there's no mention of new information, it's an unprofessional vague blurb on AI from someone who doesn't seem to understand the basic issues.
This is apparent from the examples chosen:
Robodyne Cybernetics is a pathetic joke Joe Michael played on himself. Basically, he heard about "utility fog" and decided it would be a good idea even if the units were the size of bricks rather than the size of animal cells. He's the laughing stock of comp.robotics.misc and only manages to continue to attract interest from the uninformed due to being utterly impervious to logic. He has never answered a challenge intelligently, but rather insists without evidence that a set of blocks held together with electromagnets can do any job better than a specialized robot and tells you to buy his CD-ROM so you can watch his video clip of his "prototype": a block being pulled across other blocks with a string.
The emergent behavior of boids is unsurprising when you think about it. The boids are programmed to avoid running into anything while staying as close to other boids as possible (since the goals contradict each other a bit, they balance out to maintain a certain amount of distance between the boids). Reaching an obstacle, the boids which come close to it steer so they won't hit it and the rest of the flock moves away (in what is nearly a compression wave)
A biplane bot that was programmed to learn learned?! Ooo, get on the wire, this must be a big story!
It's one thing for a program to optimize its performance at a certain task for which it is programmed and given all the relevant data, it's quite another for a general program to be given multiple arbitrary goals or values, prioritize them, choose what data to collect, form a strategy, and make useful progress.
Even worse is the idea of a "general liberal arts education." History, philosophy, languages, et c. are all better learned from an informal private study of books and conversation with other interested people. You get two little bonuses in university: having your professor's ideas crammed down your throat, and being required to do endless amounts of worthless busy work to demonstrate that you swallowed it.
My (technical subject, in class) university experience consisted of incomprehensible lectures, poorly chosen reading materials, and tests that had no relation to one's ability to do real-world work (prime example, calculus: solving many trivial problems in a restricted period of time, rather than eventually solving non-trivial problems).
Worst of all is the cookie-cutter approach to education. This subject will take you X months to learn, then you will either pass it and regardless of how much of it you forget the credit will not be taken away, or you will fail it and no matter how close you were to passing you have to take the whole thing over again. How ridiculous!
I've never met an engineer who could pass a second-year calculus exam if it was dropped in front of him one random afternoon.
Universities are an archaic institution from the days when illiteracy was the norm, books were hideously expensive, and travel was something you did a few times in your life, if you were lucky. Knowledge was rare and people had to gathered around the educated few (professors) if they wanted to learn. Things have changed. Information can be easily and cheaply transported. Travel is inexpensive and common. The factors that made universities necessary are gone.
And if you don't know, there's ls, man -k (or man, if you're looking for particular options), and automatic completion (with e.g. tcsh or 4dos)... So there are definitely memory aids in CLIs as well.
Not inherently. These are commands which you must learn before using, not a fundamental part of the interface. It's a little like saying that a car's interface has memory aids because there's a manual in the glove compartment (ignoring, for the moment, the real inherent aids such as the markings on the gear shift).
Of course, the whole speeder bike thing was total nonsense. Pilots aren't particles, and they don't decide to go in a particular direction then just move around obstacles. Look around an open forest like that (unlike the nasty brush around here), and you'll be able to see in many directions for hundreds of meters (and with a speeder bike, if you can see straight, you can drive straight). As long as the pilot chooses his path carefully, he could get around fairly safely.
Why not? I see it all the time. And print-on-demand book stores could be filled with browsing kiosks which navigate through the local web catalog.
So who needs publishers?
There's no major expense to adding a title to a print-on-demand system, so there's no reason to give sole printing rights to one publisher.
Expect little printing shops to pop up all over the place; there should be plenty of competition.
It won't be long before authors set their per-copy license price, and all the printing shops compete in speed, service, and mark-up.
For mass-printed paper books, the author could negociate lower fees with a particular publisher, similar to the traditional model.
But authors should get involved! Make sure it happens this way and not the way in the message I'm replying to!
I doubt Neal Stephenson would argue against the value of a GUI for a 3D-modeling program, or for a web-browser. I imagine he uses X all the time. Rather, he argues against having just a GUI, particularly for system management and development.
In a sense, every control in a GUI is a menu: you are presented options of what to do and you pick one. You don't need much experience but you are limited to those options which are presented. The interface does the work of your memory, but less efficiently. In a command line, you are given no information about what is possible, but all operations are available instantly if you learn their names and options, all without searching the screen with your eyes.
I do agree with some points in the counter-rant, but some of the metaphors were more appropriate than Stephenson probably intended. You can't drive a tank through town, and while towns and cities are a small percentage of the world they are where most people spend most of their time. Most weekend handymen wouldn't want a hole hawg.
IMHO, the average user won't want Linux until you hide the most powerful tools from him, including the command line. I still think most business users would be better off with a black-box system where the 3-6 applications they regularly run are offered in a menu which is the whole interface to the system, or better yet, integrated into one application that automatically starts when they turn on the computer and saves everything (without overwriting the originals) when they turn it off.