For bunnies sakes, what about 1000, 10000 or 100000 years from now?
If human culture has advanced technologically so much in the last 200 years we can only dream what it be like to be human in 100000 years time (if we don't obliterate ourselves first that is).
Such a time period is small change in biological, geological and astronomical terms....
If a machine can take and process a huge amount of digitalized inputs in an organized way that allows it to take independent decisions, they will be indistinguishable from human intelligence. You don;t really know what is going on in the head of other people, but when you interact with them you don't question it they are intellignet or not, you just recognize that they are.
Intelligence is just delivered by a black box that is our brains, with androids, machines, robots, that would not be any different (what do you care if a computer has recorded a trillion human conversations and can make use of any of them in an instant? You would not notice a difference in most situations and will not care and will trust your interlocutor).
Or perhaps they will be distinguishable, but different, but we will recognize the intelligence there.
The *absolute* value of an entry level PC has been falling.
Introduce corrections for inflation and things are even more dramatic.
A few more iterations of Moore's law and we will have in the palm of our hand a computing device that for practical purposes will do most stuff we will ever need.
Once that limit is reached, mass production will take care of the rest.
People needing massive amounts of computing power will set up, an,er, uhm, Beowulf cluster of those cheap PCs.
If the little boy breaking windows (pun intended) is not your son but your neighbour's that does not change the fact that your personal economy would be one broken window poorer.
Our PSPs (the last fools that believed Sony would wisen up this time) are crippled every month or so ( so we can't run the games we prrogram).
We couldn't play our MP3 files in the first digital musci players made by Sony (that my friend, was a nasty surprise, I still have their nasty piece of shit gathering dust somewhere).
The minidiscs were a tehcnical nightmare full of contrived copy protection.
And the laptop batteries.
You may call the interest of many to see Sony punished "topsy-turvy", but oh man, that fucking sounds like blaming the victim if you check how much Sony is loving us.
We humans improve on things and stop reinventing the wheel when we can learn from the experiences of others.
Human culture is based on the sharing of knowledge.
BSD licenses go against this healthy trend, condemning people to reinvent the wheel forever when they could be doing something more productive, useful or fun.
If you want to kill human culture in the best sense of the term, contribute by releasing software under the BSD license: no code, no questions, no progress.
Red Hat SuSE (Novell) Sun IBM HP DIY (if you want to and can afford it)
and many others.
You can migrate a working solution from one provider to another when you want to, if you want to and you have competition for your custom which drives down costs.
With MS software you upgrade when they tell you to what they tell you in the terms that are most convenient to them because there is nobody out there that can provide an alternative solution (unless it has become a piece of cake to move stuff out of IIS or MS SQL servers, which I venture to say it hasn't).
The formats in Linux based solutions are all open. SO if one company gives you the cold shoulder you take your fully accessible data (including documents, go on, check how OpenOffice stores data) and go and play elsewhere.
If MS would tell you you can't use their software (because perhaps you are fed up with the insecurity and forced upgrade cycles) you would look to all your data in arcane formats that would be unreadeable.
And last but not least, why so many people are absolutley not bothered by doing bussiness with a company that once and again is breaking the law or testing it to its limits? Most sane people don't trade with persons or companies with a doubtful reputation, but MS being a market leader seems to have carved a little place in the hearts of many people no matter how many immoral or illegal actions they commit.
All that "IP" contained in MS products has to be paid for.
When you stop paying for that you pay for local people's skills, not for marketing scams in order to milk the same code for all what is worth it selling it in who know how many unnecessarily diferentiated versions.
Specially if you deduct from this cost the scheduled expenditure during the normal life of a system.
But no, the Windows apologists (I feel tempted to call them appeasers, since it is a nice little dirty word you can throw at your ideological oponents nowadays with marvelous results) never mention that there is a cost to be met there anyway, no matter which infrastructure one uses.
But I guess many US citizens (at least half of them) o no longer understand these finer points of good governance (hint: in a democracy cst is not everything. Cheapest is not always better because there are political ramifications of technological decisions).
Of course if you have a non native English accent you are toast.
Funnily enough some voice recognition applications play nice with me if I fake a US accent! (West or East Coast, LA or NY if you get my drift. My Texan does not seem to fare very well, but that may be politically motivated by politically conscious but overenthusiastic developers...).
The vinylphiles keep insisting in all this nonsense, when in reality the only thing they are attached to is the nostalgia of a bygone era, but they are too afraid to admit it.
My father, a practical man, sold his vinyl collection shortly after listening to his first CD.
To move, change jobs, take public transport to work!
The horror.
Humans have done this and more when economic conditions have required them to do so.
The falacy of infinte supply of clean fossil fuels under which economy operates now is completely unsustainable.
If what it takes to keep polution and global warming at bay is any of the very mild efforts enlisted above. I m all for it.
As a matter of fact, I moved recently and cut my commuting time from 1h 40 min to 20 min (all by public transport, half of it walking). Paltry effort if you ask me. But at least I am not giving excuses.
Including manufacturers of electric vehicles. They would be more expensive, but then people would be finally paying a more realistic price for the privilige of individual long distance travelling (currently motorists don't since the bill for the huge damage done to the environment is not passed to car owners).
But I have to breathe the fumes of all the car drivers produce in vehicles that are a public hazard.
If I had the resources necessary to sue car companies and even car drivers, I would have done it long time ago.
I am forced to breath the polution produced by car drivers, to deal with the consequences, and every time taxation is suggested to curb their enthusiasm for antisocial transport their lobbies and those of the car manufacturers "influence" politicians to turn a blind eye to the issues created by uncontrolled use of cars.
You tell me how I get redress, and if you can't come with a sane answer, look againa a such attemt to sue the companies and tell me it is unreasonable to do so.
My anecdotal experience (to which surely you'll throw yours, but, hey, this is/. ) tells me that all those people that mistook college and university for a 5 year long cheap club the only thing that learned was: SISO (shit in, shit out).
If you spend 5 or more years of your life getting drunk, partying, socializing and in general making an ass of yourself while paying just costumary attention to your education, chances are that you are going to get a job, but a shitty one. You'll get great at working the pub and club culture, but I am warning you, that will get you precious little in general.
The guys that put the hard work, very often graduating ahead of the rest, got the best jobs and now are in positions of influence (both in the public and private sector) have travelled all around the world (ahem, ahem, ahem) , get the best chicks (ahem) and in general fare batter.
Money and influence are great sociallizing facilitators, and the people that are most serious during their education will get those in abundant quantities when it matter with people that matter.
So the choice is yours, socialize during your young years with a bunch of stupid kiddos like you or save it for later, when you could have the means to appreciate en really enjoy the socializing (like if socializing stopped outside the college or uni campus...).
All that theory is good and dandy when people are taking the right decisitions, when people are acting in the best interest of all around them.
In reality there are many people that have no concept of personal responsibility and for whom accountability for their action is a completely alien concept.
Well, soory to rain in your parade, but I don't want the antisocial tendencies of thos individuals reinforced unnecessarily, if that means restricting access to violent games, so be it.
I am not talking about banning, but age limits that are shut down in US courts so merrily are absolutely necessary.
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For bunnies sakes, what about 1000, 10000 or 100000 years from now?
If human culture has advanced technologically so much in the last 200 years we can only dream what it be like to be human in 100000 years time (if we don't obliterate ourselves first that is).
Such a time period is small change in biological, geological and astronomical terms....
If a machine can take and process a huge amount of digitalized inputs in an organized way that allows it to take independent decisions, they will be indistinguishable from human intelligence. You don;t really know what is going on in the head of other people, but when you interact with them you don't question it they are intellignet or not, you just recognize that they are.
Intelligence is just delivered by a black box that is our brains, with androids, machines, robots, that would not be any different (what do you care if a computer has recorded a trillion human conversations and can make use of any of them in an instant? You would not notice a difference in most situations and will not care and will trust your interlocutor).
Or perhaps they will be distinguishable, but different, but we will recognize the intelligence there.
They put that futurology to good use.
Some of that is bullshit but some other stuff has practical applications.
The *absolute* value of an entry level PC has been falling.
,er, uhm, Beowulf cluster of those cheap PCs.
Introduce corrections for inflation and things are even more dramatic.
A few more iterations of Moore's law and we will have in the palm of our hand a computing device that for practical purposes will do most stuff we will ever need.
Once that limit is reached, mass production will take care of the rest.
People needing massive amounts of computing power will set up, an
If the little boy breaking windows (pun intended) is not your son but your neighbour's that does not change the fact that your personal economy would be one broken window poorer.
Such preposterous claim can't go unchallenged.
We have been rootkitted.
Our PSPs (the last fools that believed Sony would wisen up this time) are crippled every month or so ( so we can't run the games we prrogram).
We couldn't play our MP3 files in the first digital musci players made by Sony (that my friend, was a nasty surprise, I still have their nasty piece of shit gathering dust somewhere).
The minidiscs were a tehcnical nightmare full of contrived copy protection.
And the laptop batteries.
You may call the interest of many to see Sony punished "topsy-turvy", but oh man, that fucking sounds like blaming the victim if you check how much Sony is loving us.
Don't dress your prejudices as opinions.
If you don't know what the difference is, well, bad for you.
We humans improve on things and stop reinventing the wheel when we can learn from the experiences of others.
Human culture is based on the sharing of knowledge.
BSD licenses go against this healthy trend, condemning people to reinvent the wheel forever when they could be doing something more productive, useful or fun.
If you want to kill human culture in the best sense of the term, contribute by releasing software under the BSD license: no code, no questions, no progress.
A few ingrates would benefit from other people's efforts, all the rest would lose access to the improvements.
Been there, no thanks.
Red Hat
SuSE (Novell)
Sun
IBM
HP
DIY (if you want to and can afford it)
and many others.
You can migrate a working solution from one provider to another when you want to, if you want to and you have competition for your custom which drives down costs.
With MS software you upgrade when they tell you to what they tell you in the terms that are most convenient to them because there is nobody out there that can provide an alternative solution (unless it has become a piece of cake to move stuff out of IIS or MS SQL servers, which I venture to say it hasn't).
The formats in Linux based solutions are all open. SO if one company gives you the cold shoulder you take your fully accessible data (including documents, go on, check how OpenOffice stores data) and go and play elsewhere.
If MS would tell you you can't use their software (because perhaps you are fed up with the insecurity and forced upgrade cycles) you would look to all your data in arcane formats that would be unreadeable.
And last but not least, why so many people are absolutley not bothered by doing bussiness with a company that once and again is breaking the law or testing it to its limits? Most sane people don't trade with persons or companies with a doubtful reputation, but MS being a market leader seems to have carved a little place in the hearts of many people no matter how many immoral or illegal actions they commit.
All that "IP" contained in MS products has to be paid for.
When you stop paying for that you pay for local people's skills, not for marketing scams in order to milk the same code for all what is worth it selling it in who know how many unnecessarily diferentiated versions.
Specially if you deduct from this cost the scheduled expenditure during the normal life of a system.
But no, the Windows apologists (I feel tempted to call them appeasers, since it is a nice little dirty word you can throw at your ideological oponents nowadays with marvelous results) never mention that there is a cost to be met there anyway, no matter which infrastructure one uses.
But I guess many US citizens (at least half of them) o no longer understand these finer points of good governance (hint: in a democracy cst is not everything. Cheapest is not always better because there are political ramifications of technological decisions).
Of course if you have a non native English accent you are toast.
Funnily enough some voice recognition applications play nice with me if I fake a US accent! (West or East Coast, LA or NY if you get my drift. My Texan does not seem to fare very well, but that may be politically motivated by politically conscious but overenthusiastic developers...).
The vinylphiles keep insisting in all this nonsense, when in reality the only thing they are attached to is the nostalgia of a bygone era, but they are too afraid to admit it.
My father, a practical man, sold his vinyl collection shortly after listening to his first CD.
.... releasing a CD in a vinyl sized sleeve?
One make you a music snob.
To move, change jobs, take public transport to work!
The horror.
Humans have done this and more when economic conditions have required them to do so.
The falacy of infinte supply of clean fossil fuels under which economy operates now is completely unsustainable.
If what it takes to keep polution and global warming at bay is any of the very mild efforts enlisted above. I m all for it.
As a matter of fact, I moved recently and cut my commuting time from 1h 40 min to 20 min (all by public transport, half of it walking). Paltry effort if you ask me. But at least I am not giving excuses.
If it is socially irresponsible, I see no problem with it.
Including manufacturers of electric vehicles. They would be more expensive, but then people would be finally paying a more realistic price for the privilige of individual long distance travelling (currently motorists don't since the bill for the huge damage done to the environment is not passed to car owners).
But I have to breathe the fumes of all the car drivers produce in vehicles that are a public hazard.
If I had the resources necessary to sue car companies and even car drivers, I would have done it long time ago.
I am forced to breath the polution produced by car drivers, to deal with the consequences, and every time taxation is suggested to curb their enthusiasm for antisocial transport their lobbies and those of the car manufacturers "influence" politicians to turn a blind eye to the issues created by uncontrolled use of cars.
You tell me how I get redress, and if you can't come with a sane answer, look againa a such attemt to sue the companies and tell me it is unreasonable to do so.
Guys, stop it frankly.
/. ) tells me that all those people that mistook college and university for a 5 year long cheap club the only thing that learned was: SISO (shit in, shit out).
My anecdotal experience (to which surely you'll throw yours, but, hey, this is
If you spend 5 or more years of your life getting drunk, partying, socializing and in general making an ass of yourself while paying just costumary attention to your education, chances are that you are going to get a job, but a shitty one. You'll get great at working the pub and club culture, but I am warning you, that will get you precious little in general.
The guys that put the hard work, very often graduating ahead of the rest, got the best jobs and now are in positions of influence (both in the public and private sector) have travelled all around the world (ahem, ahem, ahem) , get the best chicks (ahem) and in general fare batter.
Money and influence are great sociallizing facilitators, and the people that are most serious during their education will get those in abundant quantities when it matter with people that matter.
So the choice is yours, socialize during your young years with a bunch of stupid kiddos like you or save it for later, when you could have the means to appreciate en really enjoy the socializing (like if socializing stopped outside the college or uni campus...).
That is a very common line used by people that were crap at stusying.
If you want social interaction joing a knitting club.
College is ther to provide an academic education, everything else is a nice to have but by no means essential.
I can't think of many more vile ways of earning a living.
Drug trafficker, jihadist and US President are the few that come to mind.
All that theory is good and dandy when people are taking the right decisitions, when people are acting in the best interest of all around them.
In reality there are many people that have no concept of personal responsibility and for whom accountability for their action is a completely alien concept.
Well, soory to rain in your parade, but I don't want the antisocial tendencies of thos individuals reinforced unnecessarily, if that means restricting access to violent games, so be it.
I am not talking about banning, but age limits that are shut down in US courts so merrily are absolutely necessary.