Making certain that your product continues to be the algorithm of choice and that your continued development efforts will be welcomed into the market. Sounds like a heads up play to me. Bravo!!
I never use the word impending. My arguement is that there have been times in the past when sufficiently large technological advances occur which were controlled by suitably small elites that technological freeze points were possible. I mention that one occurs after the development of radio and that this is the most likely civilization for SETI to find.
The advance has to be sufficiently large that it can control, read massacre, the non-equipped and the elite small enough that too few people tinker with it to give fundamental advances. No power on Earth could now freeze technology. Japan did so with guns from about 1600 till the 1850s. Could a planetwide society do the same?
SETI must count on one of two things happening to ET societies. First, the rare one which everyone dwells on. A neighboring civilization arises at very much the same time as ours and we pick up very similar to our radio signals from them.
Much more likely is that a neighboring society arises to a break point in the technological chain and freezes there. This break point is after radio is invented. Where it not for the USA's rapid growth and evolution in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (and Japan's rise in power), Earth could have hit one of these break points. Basic radio would not have advanced without American hobbyists screwing around with it in the first few decades of it's existence. The machine gun and rapid advances in military science could have led to a European dominance and freezing of technology development. If small power elites control technology and the technology is sufficiently advanced then such a breakpoint can be reached. Post radio break point societies is what SETI really looks for.
This assumes that ET societies evolve along similar lines to ours in terms of the balance of technology and ethos. History is full of nations where this is not the case. Israel, the historical kingdom, was far more advanced in theology than it's contemporaries. England frequently in government, Germany repeatedly in science, currently the USA in entreprenership. Why should it be assumed that this would not carry over to whole societies? Could a race like the Firengi exist (as in advanced technology but primitive ethics) ??
Any chance Motorola would sell these to the military's missle defense program to use as targets? I mean the big problem so far with the missle defense so far is hitting a moving target. When I can't do that, I switch to not moving targets. You know, the whole sitting ducks thing.
Two things to point out here:
1) the US election season is a __LOT__ longer than pretty much everyone else's in the world. Some politicians can be accussed of never stopping running. This gives a lot more time.
2) I live in a large city in a frequent battleground state. Every presidential candidate worth mentioning comes to Chicago at least a few times during the campaign. I just make sure I'm able to get to a public event a few times a year. The most I've ever given politically is $100 and that was to hear Forbes speak. '
Is my effort extraordinary? I hope not. Can most citizens do it? Certainly. Both Gore-Illinois and Bush-Illinois will happily tell you when their guy will next be in town and where/when his public events are, at the cost of a phone call. I urge you to try it.
Have you ever gone to see/hear a political candidate speak? I mean really listen to the words, observe the gestures not just hear the soundbites? It is a very different experience from a ten second clip on the television or the net. I do look up what the different candidates say in many speeches on their websites. However, I don't cast my vote until I've actually heard both candidates speak twice, once in front of a positive audiance and once in front of a receptive but not overly positive crowd. The web is a great aid but it doesn't convey the full experience. How many readers can claim to really have observed Clinton so closely? If people had actually listened to Dole, he would have done much better.
Presuming you could get past the security protocols, you'd still have quite a job to turn power plant grade uranium into weapons grade stuff. Iraq hasn't been able to do it after about two decades of trying.
I think the limits of realism in flight sims have been reached within the current technology. I have a friend who uses three monitors for 'complete cockpit effect' but it still doesn't give that much of a flight feel to a flight sim. Once a new technology comes into play, flight sims will be right back.
Correct me if I'm wrong on this but isn't this just changing whom the middleman is? I mean under conventional election systems, the media, advertising companies and those who make, market and deliver political items are the middlemen. Under this new system, a dot com is the middleman. I agree that this is very similar to Richard the First, Mayor of Chicago. His patronage employees dug up the votes in order to guarantee their jobs. The fact that they altered the outcome of a national election, putting Kennedy in over Nixon, probably thus plunging Cuba into forty additional years of communism, was purely accidental.
Also, why is the presidential election the only one for sale. More money (and the franking privledge) is even more important in congressional or state house elections.
Actually, if Microsoft was not a monopoly it would not be taken to court. Thus, even though I've addressed it as a sufficient cause and openly acknowledge that it is only a necessary one, I still stick to my original statement.
The software industry is showing its newness whenever an article like this appears. In the big world competition happens. Anytime I write code thinking to sell it, I'm aware that somebody else is probably capable of writing the same code (and probably better.) A limited number of dollars are being chased so I try to help get my code sold as much as possible. I don't resort to hiring PIs but if the battle got way more intense, I could see it happening. Do I want to know what the competition is up to? You'd better believe I do. Full Stop.
In the US, something like 40% of high school grads go to college. This is an unusually high percentage compared to historical and world numbers. More like 10-12% is normal.
Educating people past age 17 is, from a labor standpoint, for society, a waste. People ready to work are doing something other than work. The US must pay the price for this unusually large number of non-laboring people by paying people less than their output is worth. (See Marx for economic details. All countries do this, the US must do it more so because we have more students, per capita.) We also must justify this individually by paying a larger gradient for educated vs uneducated labor.
All of these factors push the cost of university research up especially for the US.
Should we change this system? High-tech firms are on the cutting edge of such an effort. High school grads are being hired at my company and being paid nearly the same as college grads, sometimes more. Universities, seeing a threat to their existence (i.e. Darwinism) identify this squeeze on their budgets as bad.
Asimov did predict that big government would be, at least ultimately, the only source of funding for university research and at least some of the effects you've described. His basic tenet IMHO was based on economics. The cost of research has gone up and up, beyond the means of most private individuals and is rapidly passing most normal corporate means.
Okay, I'm biased, I studied space physics and planetary science and all but I think this one is a no brainer. WE, and especially NASA, NEED to do some of the hard things when we have a decent chance. A window of opportunity is closing because Jupiter will not be in good slingshot position for an Earth-Pluto route for quite a few years. No Jupiter, add many years to the path. Can we make a decent spacecraft capable of doing this mission with little Earth bound intervention? Sure, its the cost. A couple of hundred million sounds like a lot but the US government blows more than that every day of the year (not just on Christmas.) Pluto is a neat place, I've got a couple of dozen questions we can't answer without going there. The real competition here is between expensive man-in-space and cheap pure science missions. Money is available, we have a chance now and even if the whole thing croaks and dies. We could still try again later, maybe much later.
A relative of mine ran Nixon's 1960 campaign for Illinois (the one stolen by Mayor Daley, as in Richard the First, by cemetary voting.) Given this experience, I should be able to identify the current problem. If it is possible to perform secure credit card transactions over the net and even transfer large sums of money relatively securely then it obviously is possible to accumulate the votes in a relatively secure fashion. The problem write now is in securing the tally computer. Perhaps if we used a special only election operating system so antiquidated and arcane that no one else would bother (insert joke about Apple OS here.) Or instead of bother, just be so easily detectable that it could be firewalled off. This would involve tying the communications protocols into an intelligent system for detecting hacking.
I want to point out, this "cracker boy" was not doing "harmless exploration" by my definition. I appreciate I wasn't very clear on defining that in my original post. Many years ago, I was given a list of systems to crack into as a test. (The prof was fired not long therafter but . ..) Yale amdin was first on the list. Like everyone else, I was able to get in and produce adequate proof (email message.) I then pulled out. I have no ethical qualms about relating this. Other than that I consummed a tiny amount of their resources by sending the email, I was just satisfying my curiosity and class requirement. Had I done what you described as "harmless" that would be very different. Hope that clarifies my position.
The biggest problem right now is politics. It is politically expedient to maintain a marginally successful space shuttle program even though it does not fulfill its requirements. Space science needs two things in orbit, people and stuff. The two have radically different tolerances. People are the hard part. They need to ride in some type of space-plane with more controlled ascent and descent. Stuff needs a cheaper system for lugging it into orbit and a cheap high-efficiency system for moving it from there. Ever hear of a mass acclerator? It would be the cheapest way to get the payloads into orbit but building a new system cost votes of those who run the old one. Ergo, the politics say we won't get efficient about going to space for quite some time.
Cracking may or may not be a bad thing. Like so many other things, it depends on the ethics involved. (That may be overly broad, I can't think of anything that doesn't depend on the ethics.) Cracking can be an innocent act of curiosity, 'can I enter the system'. On the other hand, using the authority of a sys admin for any but legit purposes is at least immoral and should be illegal. It's a pity our laws don't correspond to such simple ethics.
IMHO, this book is saying that our artificial systems are currently limited in their ability to mimic real systems. Apart from a chemical bias, as in "carbon is better than silicon", the other explanation is we haven't reached the technological endpoint (nor can we even see it yet.) Bell didn't seem to believe that the telephone would replace face to face communication only supplement it and possibly enhance it's possibilities. I never would have courted (by visiting and talking to ) my ex-wife if I hadn't talked to her on the phone first (okay bad example). I can now correspond with many more people via email than even a few years ago. I think all this technology is great. Have we reached the end yet, no. Can we still revel in getting there, you bet!!!
IMHO, 'media disgust' is higher than ever and the success of open media is just a symptom of that. CBS News has for decades (at least since the Vietnam War) espoused a "no enemies to the left" viewpoint. Big media has gotten completely out of touch with the populace they supposedly serve. The rise of fly by night open sources (or more specifically, the survival if not thriving of same) need be interpreted as a sign of nothing less. Bill Clinton is incredibly popular with mass media reporters and no other significant group. That CBS News can't keep this slanted view and compete effectively with open source media is merely symptomatic of the problems with big media.
News of a smarter mouse now means that the proverbial ball is back in the proverbial court of the inventors. Human inventors that is simply MUST come up with a better mousetrap to stay ahead in this arms(?, . . . BRAINS) race.
Slashdot Mirror
Making certain that your product continues to be the algorithm of choice and that your continued development efforts will be welcomed into the market. Sounds like a heads up play to me. Bravo!!
I never use the word impending. My arguement is that there have been times in the past when sufficiently large technological advances occur which were controlled by suitably small elites that technological freeze points were possible. I mention that one occurs after the development of radio and that this is the most likely civilization for SETI to find.
The advance has to be sufficiently large that it can control, read massacre, the non-equipped and the elite small enough that too few people tinker with it to give fundamental advances. No power on Earth could now freeze technology. Japan did so with guns from about 1600 till the 1850s. Could a planetwide society do the same?
SETI must count on one of two things happening to ET societies. First, the rare one which everyone dwells on. A neighboring civilization arises at very much the same time as ours and we pick up very similar to our radio signals from them.
Much more likely is that a neighboring society arises to a break point in the technological chain and freezes there. This break point is after radio is invented. Where it not for the USA's rapid growth and evolution in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (and Japan's rise in power), Earth could have hit one of these break points. Basic radio would not have advanced without American hobbyists screwing around with it in the first few decades of it's existence. The machine gun and rapid advances in military science could have led to a European dominance and freezing of technology development. If small power elites control technology and the technology is sufficiently advanced then such a breakpoint can be reached. Post radio break point societies is what SETI really looks for.
This assumes that ET societies evolve along similar lines to ours in terms of the balance of technology and ethos. History is full of nations where this is not the case. Israel, the historical kingdom, was far more advanced in theology than it's contemporaries. England frequently in government, Germany repeatedly in science, currently the USA in entreprenership. Why should it be assumed that this would not carry over to whole societies? Could a race like the Firengi exist (as in advanced technology but primitive ethics) ??
Any chance Motorola would sell these to the military's missle defense program to use as targets? I mean the big problem so far with the missle defense so far is hitting a moving target. When I can't do that, I switch to not moving targets. You know, the whole sitting ducks thing.
Two things to point out here:
1) the US election season is a __LOT__ longer than pretty much everyone else's in the world. Some politicians can be accussed of never stopping running. This gives a lot more time.
2) I live in a large city in a frequent battleground state. Every presidential candidate worth mentioning comes to Chicago at least a few times during the campaign. I just make sure I'm able to get to a public event a few times a year. The most I've ever given politically is $100 and that was to hear Forbes speak. '
Is my effort extraordinary? I hope not. Can most citizens do it? Certainly. Both Gore-Illinois and Bush-Illinois will happily tell you when their guy will next be in town and where/when his public events are, at the cost of a phone call. I urge you to try it.
Have you ever gone to see/hear a political candidate speak? I mean really listen to the words, observe the gestures not just hear the soundbites? It is a very different experience from a ten second clip on the television or the net. I do look up what the different candidates say in many speeches on their websites. However, I don't cast my vote until I've actually heard both candidates speak twice, once in front of a positive audiance and once in front of a receptive but not overly positive crowd. The web is a great aid but it doesn't convey the full experience. How many readers can claim to really have observed Clinton so closely? If people had actually listened to Dole, he would have done much better.
Presuming you could get past the security protocols, you'd still have quite a job to turn power plant grade uranium into weapons grade stuff. Iraq hasn't been able to do it after about two decades of trying.
I think the limits of realism in flight sims have been reached within the current technology. I have a friend who uses three monitors for 'complete cockpit effect' but it still doesn't give that much of a flight feel to a flight sim. Once a new technology comes into play, flight sims will be right back.
Correct me if I'm wrong on this but isn't this just changing whom the middleman is? I mean under conventional election systems, the media, advertising companies and those who make, market and deliver political items are the middlemen. Under this new system, a dot com is the middleman. I agree that this is very similar to Richard the First, Mayor of Chicago. His patronage employees dug up the votes in order to guarantee their jobs. The fact that they altered the outcome of a national election, putting Kennedy in over Nixon, probably thus plunging Cuba into forty additional years of communism, was purely accidental.
Also, why is the presidential election the only one for sale. More money (and the franking privledge) is even more important in congressional or state house elections.
Actually, if Microsoft was not a monopoly it would not be taken to court. Thus, even though I've addressed it as a sufficient cause and openly acknowledge that it is only a necessary one, I still stick to my original statement.
Sounds to me like everyone is finally getting together to beat Microsoft down from it's monopoly status. Will this spell the end of the DOJ's case ?
The software industry is showing its newness whenever an article like this appears. In the big world competition happens. Anytime I write code thinking to sell it, I'm aware that somebody else is probably capable of writing the same code (and probably better.) A limited number of dollars are being chased so I try to help get my code sold as much as possible. I don't resort to hiring PIs but if the battle got way more intense, I could see it happening. Do I want to know what the competition is up to? You'd better believe I do. Full Stop.
In the US, something like 40% of high school grads go to college. This is an unusually high percentage compared to historical and world numbers. More like 10-12% is normal.
Educating people past age 17 is, from a labor standpoint, for society, a waste. People ready to work are doing something other than work. The US must pay the price for this unusually large number of non-laboring people by paying people less than their output is worth. (See Marx for economic details. All countries do this, the US must do it more so because we have more students, per capita.) We also must justify this individually by paying a larger gradient for educated vs uneducated labor.
All of these factors push the cost of university research up especially for the US.
Should we change this system? High-tech firms are on the cutting edge of such an effort. High school grads are being hired at my company and being paid nearly the same as college grads, sometimes more. Universities, seeing a threat to their existence (i.e. Darwinism) identify this squeeze on their budgets as bad.
Asimov did predict that big government would be, at least ultimately, the only source of funding for university research and at least some of the effects you've described. His basic tenet IMHO was based on economics. The cost of research has gone up and up, beyond the means of most private individuals and is rapidly passing most normal corporate means.
Why go to Pluto?
Okay, I'm biased, I studied space physics and planetary science and all but I think this one is a no brainer. WE, and especially NASA, NEED to do some of the hard things when we have a decent chance. A window of opportunity is closing because Jupiter will not be in good slingshot position for an Earth-Pluto route for quite a few years. No Jupiter, add many years to the path. Can we make a decent spacecraft capable of doing this mission with little Earth bound intervention? Sure, its the cost. A couple of hundred million sounds like a lot but the US government blows more than that every day of the year (not just on Christmas.)
Pluto is a neat place, I've got a couple of dozen questions we can't answer without going there. The real competition here is between expensive man-in-space and cheap pure science missions. Money is available, we have a chance now and even if the whole thing croaks and dies. We could still try again later, maybe much later.
A relative of mine ran Nixon's 1960 campaign for Illinois (the one stolen by Mayor Daley, as in Richard the First, by cemetary voting.) Given this experience, I should be able to identify the current problem.
If it is possible to perform secure credit card transactions over the net and even transfer large sums of money relatively securely then it obviously is possible to accumulate the votes in a relatively secure fashion. The problem write now is in securing the tally computer. Perhaps if we used a special only election operating system so antiquidated and arcane that no one else would bother (insert joke about Apple OS here.) Or instead of bother, just be so easily detectable that it could be firewalled off. This would involve tying the communications protocols into an intelligent system for detecting hacking.
I want to point out, this "cracker boy" was not doing "harmless exploration" by my definition. I appreciate I wasn't very clear on defining that in my original post. .) Yale amdin was first on the list. Like everyone else, I was able to get in and produce adequate proof (email message.) I then pulled out. I have no ethical qualms about relating this. Other than that I consummed a tiny amount of their resources by sending the email, I was just satisfying my curiosity and class requirement. Had I done what you described as "harmless" that would be very different. Hope that clarifies my position.
Many years ago, I was given a list of systems to crack into as a test. (The prof was fired not long therafter but . .
The biggest problem right now is politics. It is politically expedient to maintain a marginally successful space shuttle program even though it does not fulfill its requirements. Space science needs two things in orbit, people and stuff. The two have radically different tolerances. People are the hard part. They need to ride in some type of space-plane with more controlled ascent and descent. Stuff needs a cheaper system for lugging it into orbit and a cheap high-efficiency system for moving it from there. Ever hear of a mass acclerator? It would be the cheapest way to get the payloads into orbit but building a new system cost votes of those who run the old one. Ergo, the politics say we won't get efficient about going to space for quite some time.
Cracking may or may not be a bad thing. Like so many other things, it depends on the ethics involved. (That may be overly broad, I can't think of anything that doesn't depend on the ethics.) Cracking can be an innocent act of curiosity, 'can I enter the system'. On the other hand, using the authority of a sys admin for any but legit purposes is at least immoral and should be illegal. It's a pity our laws don't correspond to such simple ethics.
IMHO, this book is saying that our artificial systems are currently limited in their ability to mimic real systems. Apart from a chemical bias, as in "carbon is better than silicon", the other explanation is we haven't reached the technological endpoint (nor can we even see it yet.) Bell didn't seem to believe that the telephone would replace face to face communication only supplement it and possibly enhance it's possibilities. I never would have courted (by visiting and talking to ) my ex-wife if I hadn't talked to her on the phone first (okay bad example). I can now correspond with many more people via email than even a few years ago. I think all this technology is great. Have we reached the end yet, no. Can we still revel in getting there, you bet!!!
Never let your schooling interfere with your education!!!!
IMHO, 'media disgust' is higher than ever and the success of open media is just a symptom of that. CBS News has for decades (at least since the Vietnam War) espoused a "no enemies to the left" viewpoint. Big media has gotten completely out of touch with the populace they supposedly serve. The rise of fly by night open sources (or more specifically, the survival if not thriving of same) need be interpreted as a sign of nothing less.
Bill Clinton is incredibly popular with mass media reporters and no other significant group. That CBS News can't keep this slanted view and compete effectively with open source media is merely symptomatic of the problems with big media.
News of a smarter mouse now means that the proverbial ball is back in the proverbial court of the inventors. Human inventors that is simply MUST come up with a better mousetrap to stay ahead in this arms(?, . . . BRAINS) race.
Given enough legos, I would build a factory for making legos. These could then be used to build a factory for making legos. These could . . .
However, this would require some sort of recursion shut off switch because the process could become viral.