Janitors have the most access - I wonder what the policy is. Are they bonded? Does insurance cover theft?
One of the most valuable things per kilogram is information media like documents, disks, tapes. They can be copied or taken so easily.
Perhaps the easiest test is to leave temptation lying around and see what happens. Little cameras can be used to ferret out the schemers.
Then again, a bit of education may be the best course. Everyone should be made aware they are all together for the common good, that best place for all the expensive things has already been planned and it would only be suboptimal to diverge from this. If someone is in sudden need of liquid wealth or a toy, the employer should try to be as accommodating as possible. Things that cannot be lost should be locked up.
1500 W is about the same power as my hair dryer. That's quite a heater on a desk.
This reminds me, two years ago I met an insurance broker who ran his cube server beside his desk. It sounded like a hair dryer on full blast but it never fazed him to work all day like that.
* shortage of trades workers * unemployed programmers
The picture I'm getting is development of general purpose robots. It's not an easy goal but programmers have a pretty soft life pushing a mouse and tapping on a keyboard all day
I could speak of the propensity for people to enter relaxed programming jobs far from smelly toilets, loud jackhammers, freeway drivers, etc. and then additionally to work with a marked lack of vigor, but I'd rather say that it is only the natural order for endeavors of the mind to finally triumph over mere brute force. Work that we detest will ultimately be done by machines.
Indeed there is a technological gap. In the near future we will benefit from virtual reality and nanotechnology. It's just a matter of time.
Right now, there are many signs that we are not quite ready, at least for widespread affordable virtual reality. Tablet PCs are clunky - otherwise they would be marketed ad nauseum. Consider the digital camera - it can take pictures that rival vision, but it's field of view is quite narrow, the LCD preview is too small, and the weight is still much more than the eyes.
There are signs we are getting closer to a real time experience in a virtual world. - Internet bandwidth is going higher. - Supercomputers are speeding up. - Dual core processors are available for home use. - Google appears intent on digitizing mankind's knowledge.
For sure a virtual world will need real-life rules and it may be that Google will be a source of such knowledge.
It's possible that an expert system with enough knowledge will pass a Turing test. The system would not be the be-all of intelligence but could rival Cyc and perhaps 50% of the human population in one-on-one competition. Such a system can grow more intelligent with the addition of computing power although it may not fully understand intelligence itself. Interesting results are anticipated with the investment of many petaflops.
Beyond basic VR will come intelligent systems. With all the hindsight how quick would it have been to go from the vacuum tube to AI?
VR in a way is all about hindsight. Star Trek holodecks were used to experience something without the expense of errors made in reality. Thus all the incredible gains in knowledge in the computer industry over the last 100+ years ought to be available in digital format. If one can track such the path of experience in the development of computer technology (what is more accessible to digitization than knowledge about machines used for digitization, right?), even at a snail's pace, it would only be a matter of scaling to arrive to a real-time track, which is equivalent to virtual reality.
Simply put, the 'baby bootstrap' would empower a computing device to learn like a child with a very good memory.... No sensors, servos or video input - it only needed terminal I/O to be effective.
The input stream at a terminal would hardly appeal to a child so how can a proper evaluation of the learning be done?
Suppose the input is a sequence of zeros and ones. Could the AI come to any kind of understanding? Perhaps a prediction whether the next input might be a 0 or a 1, eh? But no! Let's fool the AI now by telling it who is the real boss. The AI has no idea that it is being spoken to by a terminal. The next input is the letter "g". How unpredictable!
Garbage in, garbage out - let's look carefully. A child plays and experiments. A great deal of a child's theories are garbage. The world in a child's eyes is a set of samples. Like the Mars rovers a child could follow a path that seems fairly limited in character, then bingo, something new comes up.
Intelligent behavior in a child emerges when different theories are assembled towards a goal. First the child realizes that s/he has some ability to either influence the environment or to manipulate information (which may be stored as symbols or images, as far as a computer is concerned). If the child conceives of particular classes of objects, the child can begin to reason. Several concepts such as self, ability, action, time, place, class, possession, etc. would be regarded as fundamental or at the very least useful. As a child accumulates and refines these concepts in the mind, the child can reason more and more correctly or effectively.
An simple artificial world can be represented as a set of strings that are transmitted to a baby bootstrap. The simple strings would be a simple bootstrap for priming the learning mechanism by letting it realize a number of essential concepts. Then more complex worlds as well as more arcane representations (such as natural language) can be used in order for the AI to interact with the greatest possible group of users.
Still, the limited input feed is bound to cause the most ridiculous problems. Pointing out that the learning system has a big memory doesn't give me any idea what the machine will achieve.
Was he a wiley sea captain with knowledge of the Americas (before Vespucci named it after himself), or was he a fool who bet his life and the lives of his crew that he was correct, lost the bet, but then lucked out?
He can lay the blame at the feet of plate techtonics.
It was well known that the earth was round in the times of Columbus and for many MANY years before then too. How? There's a horizon. Once you see that the visible world seems to end at a line, and that where that line is moves when you do, it doesn't take long to conclude that the world is round (or, at the very least, not flat)
So you say, but the prerequisite statement "light travels in a straight line" needs to be proven. Even if this is easily accepted, flatness is kind of relative. People in ancient times could see hills and mountains. The horizon argument would be disputed as an artifact of hilliness. If you walk down a hill that sharply declines after a certain point you would see an edge as you approach this point from a faraway height. However once you pass this point you might find a valley. To anyone with a pessimistic view of the statistics the elevations of all points averages out to a plane going uphill both ways.
If you want to disprove the existence of black holes you have to examine every object in the universe, provided you have successfully proven all the objects analyzed so far are not black holes. It's easier to write a proof for the existence of a black hole once you find one.
Come now. Don't you think having fans inspires supercomputer builders?
One of the reasons there has been such a hiatus on moon trips is the lack of public interest. Results in research may be marginal, so patience is required. Enthusiasm is always useful.
Thank you for helping raise OS prices. I guess you don't mind paying higher taxes as well as more for everything.
Let's turn the coin over. As people rely more on machines to do the work and computers to control the machines, the number of different attack points on a PC is a little scary.
But who can say? If the OS is more or less secure, people will still open the gates of Troy and tow in the free horse. Naturally, OS security is still a priority. It's just that people need their computers to do more and more just to keep up with the rest of the world, and they can't write all their own code, nor will open source satisfy everyone.
One solution may be to use an audit trail in order to minimize/bound the impact of any security problem. I keep backups and spot check my files and data for any weird changes. This can help me to see if any attack happened or if hardware failed/glitched.
Ethical or not there is a technical problem. Recall, if you will, the problem of the Betazoids. They can read anyone's mind so they don't even bother to hide their thoughts.
Word of advice: allow someone the chance to change his/her mind. If someone says their decision is not in effect until such time, what you see on the Internet may not really make sense until the particular threshold time has passed. Who knows what the information on the Internet really means? It may be just test data or intermediate data that is inadvertently visible.
Where there's smoke, there's fire. If you interact with a computer and you get a clue how the computer will respond, even if you don't have 100% confidence in your prediction, you still should be able to tweak your input to the computer to gain the most favorable response. The ethics as I see it: - We are humans and are masters of computers. - Life isn't a chess game where each side takes turns. We're allowed to probe and experiment. Clicking Submit does not mean one is submissive. Even on the grounds that one has made a simple mistake one may re-submit with something different. - Speaking of trust, we don't trust computers that much when our future is at stake. Would you be operated on by a robot? Would you let a robot drive your car? Eventually, but not all at once.
Studying computer science in university will help you learn about computers, but you do have to do a huge amount of learning by yourself just to be able to make the machines do your bidding. Software is very complex with tons of features and professors do not show you how to do every little thing that make your life easier. They talk about concepts that are difficult to conceive by people who just poke around trying out this button and that button on the screen.
Regardless of what education you attained, once you start doing professional work you realize that you didn't learn things in school that you need to use and you learned things in school that you don't need to use. In some ways it's a mixture of comedy and tragedy, but not to get too emotional, you need to be flexible, knowledgeable, and full of life skills and motivation, especially for learning and achieving.
Being skilled and driven is good for achievement, but I really have to wonder where it's all headed. Software is being invented all the time to simplify computer work, and the distance between classes of computer users may widen. On the one hand computer illiterates may be able to set up major systems or perform complex tasks due to the proliferation of wizards, open source programs, plug and play, etc. The interfaces are just getting easier.
This makes the labor associated with computer work less valuable due to oversupply. On the other hand, computers are looked to for solving bigger and bigger problems.
Right now I don't take my computer skills as seriously any more, and I'm trying to learn more about science and math. It's not as easy to learn compared to programming. For example, what is dark matter?
We are headed for an era where more basic work is mechanized. People are going to have to tackle problems that have more difficult answers just to be able to earn minimum wage.
The study of computer science comes full circle, then. The student learns how to control a computer in order to have it do a task, but the student learned recursion! Surely a computer can be made to do a task that was done by a computer scientist. Twenty years ago, one can learn computer science and practice it for the rest of one's life, but today there is a lot more computer science and a lot more computing power. Perhaps the answer to the question what is required to go along with a computer science degree is nothing. The computer science program ought to develop students that transcend the state of the art, making a computer science degree the ultimate degree rather than a component degree.
Please, each neuron is not independent of each other neuron while each ant is far more independent of the other ants in that you can remove an ant from the collective and it will function on its own. Brain neurons do very little outside the network structure that is established throughout the brain. Neurons have little choice whether they can migrate or operate out of sequence.
The insight is the realizability of potential through cooperation. Little components, when put together properly yield a myriad of different highly complex functions such as converting radio waves into TV media, combusting hydrocarbons, cooling ice in a desert sun, etc. etc.
If you purchase a computer pre-installed with Windows XP from a major vendor (re: Dell, Gateway, HP, etc. etc.), Windows XP will come already activated. Your Windows XP key is in the BIOS (as it already is in most Dell PCs), letting you reinstall Windows XP without activation over and over again as many times as you want.
Beautiful! When you upgrade Windows you are compelled to buy a new PC.
Sure, some people will put up with it because the average moron doesn't need to reinstall every 15 days like I do.
Did you realize you referred to yourself as an average moron? When you compare yourself to a class but provide no evidence you don't belong to the class, you are believed to be a member of the class. That's just the safest assumption to make.
Folk wisdom time. Might makes right and birds of a feather flock together.
It's not surprising that the rich countries would tend to look askance at the Godless and unwashed communists, as well as trade heavily with each other. The upshot - classify by economic status or by political ideals if you want but you still end up with the same classes. What makes me wonder is whether countries with potentially self destablizing governments can really prosper.
So what now? Do we forget about the thinking of the Cold War and use the terminology Nth World to refer to economics? Or better yet, do we remember not to trust commies? There is a semblance of war in the world, but now along the lines of terrorism. Now what are the members of Nth World?
No small business owner I met had been in the country for more than 5 years, and every one of them had become millionaires (USD) in that time with their restaurants, hostels, construction companies, computer companies, etc.
5 * 365 * 12 = 21900
Oh. Hi. I was just doing some math there. Did you know that 5 multiplied by 365 multiplied by 12 is 21900?
I never studied accounting but somehow I figure that if any business owner could easily earn millions of US dollars couldn't they pay people $12/hour?
Is Costa Rica supposed to be first world? The first world is who makes the business people there rich since the local population couldn't really do that. The answer, then, is the first world cannot afford to pay Costa Ricans $12 per hour. Is there some kind of reduction to the absurd when Costa Rica is laballed "first world"?
Slashdot Mirror
Janitors have the most access - I wonder what the policy is. Are they bonded? Does insurance cover theft?
One of the most valuable things per kilogram is information media like documents, disks, tapes. They can be copied or taken so easily.
Perhaps the easiest test is to leave temptation lying around and see what happens. Little cameras can be used to ferret out the schemers.
Then again, a bit of education may be the best course. Everyone should be made aware they are all together for the common good, that best place for all the expensive things has already been planned and it would only be suboptimal to diverge from this. If someone is in sudden need of liquid wealth or a toy, the employer should try to be as accommodating as possible. Things that cannot be lost should be locked up.
1500 W is about the same power as my hair dryer. That's quite a heater on a desk.
This reminds me, two years ago I met an insurance broker who ran his cube server beside his desk. It sounded like a hair dryer on full blast but it never fazed him to work all day like that.
I see some dots and maybe we can connect them.
* shortage of trades workers
* unemployed programmers
The picture I'm getting is development of general purpose robots. It's not an easy goal but programmers have a pretty soft life pushing a mouse and tapping on a keyboard all day
I could speak of the propensity for people to enter relaxed programming jobs far from smelly toilets, loud jackhammers, freeway drivers, etc. and then additionally to work with a marked lack of vigor, but I'd rather say that it is only the natural order for endeavors of the mind to finally triumph over mere brute force. Work that we detest will ultimately be done by machines.
Indeed there is a technological gap. In the near future we will benefit from virtual reality and nanotechnology. It's just a matter of time.
Right now, there are many signs that we are not quite ready, at least for widespread affordable virtual reality. Tablet PCs are clunky - otherwise they would be marketed ad nauseum. Consider the digital camera - it can take pictures that rival vision, but it's field of view is quite narrow, the LCD preview is too small, and the weight is still much more than the eyes.
There are signs we are getting closer to a real time experience in a virtual world.
- Internet bandwidth is going higher.
- Supercomputers are speeding up.
- Dual core processors are available for home use.
- Google appears intent on digitizing mankind's knowledge.
For sure a virtual world will need real-life rules and it may be that Google will be a source of such knowledge.
It's possible that an expert system with enough knowledge will pass a Turing test. The system would not be the be-all of intelligence but could rival Cyc and perhaps 50% of the human population in one-on-one competition. Such a system can grow more intelligent with the addition of computing power although it may not fully understand intelligence itself. Interesting results are anticipated with the investment of many petaflops.
Beyond basic VR will come intelligent systems. With all the hindsight how quick would it have been to go from the vacuum tube to AI?
VR in a way is all about hindsight. Star Trek holodecks were used to experience something without the expense of errors made in reality. Thus all the incredible gains in knowledge in the computer industry over the last 100+ years ought to be available in digital format. If one can track such the path of experience in the development of computer technology (what is more accessible to digitization than knowledge about machines used for digitization, right?), even at a snail's pace, it would only be a matter of scaling to arrive to a real-time track, which is equivalent to virtual reality.
It figures why credit cards are accepted for fast food.
Simply put, the 'baby bootstrap' would empower a computing device to learn like a child with a very good memory. ... No sensors, servos or video input - it only needed terminal I/O to be effective.
The input stream at a terminal would hardly appeal to a child so how can a proper evaluation of the learning be done?
Suppose the input is a sequence of zeros and ones. Could the AI come to any kind of understanding? Perhaps a prediction whether the next input might be a 0 or a 1, eh? But no! Let's fool the AI now by telling it who is the real boss. The AI has no idea that it is being spoken to by a terminal. The next input is the letter "g". How unpredictable!
Garbage in, garbage out - let's look carefully. A child plays and experiments. A great deal of a child's theories are garbage. The world in a child's eyes is a set of samples. Like the Mars rovers a child could follow a path that seems fairly limited in character, then bingo, something new comes up.
Intelligent behavior in a child emerges when different theories are assembled towards a goal. First the child realizes that s/he has some ability to either influence the environment or to manipulate information (which may be stored as symbols or images, as far as a computer is concerned). If the child conceives of particular classes of objects, the child can begin to reason. Several concepts such as self, ability, action, time, place, class, possession, etc. would be regarded as fundamental or at the very least useful. As a child accumulates and refines these concepts in the mind, the child can reason more and more correctly or effectively.
An simple artificial world can be represented as a set of strings that are transmitted to a baby bootstrap. The simple strings would be a simple bootstrap for priming the learning mechanism by letting it realize a number of essential concepts. Then more complex worlds as well as more arcane representations (such as natural language) can be used in order for the AI to interact with the greatest possible group of users.
Still, the limited input feed is bound to cause the most ridiculous problems. Pointing out that the learning system has a big memory doesn't give me any idea what the machine will achieve.
Was he a wiley sea captain with knowledge of the Americas (before Vespucci named it after himself), or was he a fool who bet his life and the lives of his crew that he was correct, lost the bet, but then lucked out?
He can lay the blame at the feet of plate techtonics.
It was well known that the earth was round in the times of Columbus and for many MANY years before then too. How? There's a horizon. Once you see that the visible world seems to end at a line, and that where that line is moves when you do, it doesn't take long to conclude that the world is round (or, at the very least, not flat)
So you say, but the prerequisite statement "light travels in a straight line" needs to be proven. Even if this is easily accepted, flatness is kind of relative. People in ancient times could see hills and mountains. The horizon argument would be disputed as an artifact of hilliness. If you walk down a hill that sharply declines after a certain point you would see an edge as you approach this point from a faraway height. However once you pass this point you might find a valley. To anyone with a pessimistic view of the statistics the elevations of all points averages out to a plane going uphill both ways.
If you want to disprove the existence of black holes you have to examine every object in the universe, provided you have successfully proven all the objects analyzed so far are not black holes. It's easier to write a proof for the existence of a black hole once you find one.
You know, if Google decides to host journals the page limit might be increased to 4000.
Come now. Don't you think having fans inspires supercomputer builders?
One of the reasons there has been such a hiatus on moon trips is the lack of public interest. Results in research may be marginal, so patience is required. Enthusiasm is always useful.
If you want to break the rules, run the AC input at 120 Hz. This is overclocking from a declarative programming perspective.
It looks like fun. I've never been too interested in tennis before this.
Aww. I thought you would be nice and let me use your CPU, as I could use some more power for my simulations.
Thank you for helping raise OS prices. I guess you don't mind paying higher taxes as well as more for everything.
Let's turn the coin over. As people rely more on machines to do the work and computers to control the machines, the number of different attack points on a PC is a little scary.
But who can say? If the OS is more or less secure, people will still open the gates of Troy and tow in the free horse. Naturally, OS security is still a priority. It's just that people need their computers to do more and more just to keep up with the rest of the world, and they can't write all their own code, nor will open source satisfy everyone.
One solution may be to use an audit trail in order to minimize/bound the impact of any security problem. I keep backups and spot check my files and data for any weird changes. This can help me to see if any attack happened or if hardware failed/glitched.
But how will you know how it ends??
How could you not know? It happened such a long long time ago.
Ethical or not there is a technical problem. Recall, if you will, the problem of the Betazoids. They can read anyone's mind so they don't even bother to hide their thoughts.
Word of advice: allow someone the chance to change his/her mind. If someone says their decision is not in effect until such time, what you see on the Internet may not really make sense until the particular threshold time has passed. Who knows what the information on the Internet really means? It may be just test data or intermediate data that is inadvertently visible.
Where there's smoke, there's fire. If you interact with a computer and you get a clue how the computer will respond, even if you don't have 100% confidence in your prediction, you still should be able to tweak your input to the computer to gain the most favorable response. The ethics as I see it:
- We are humans and are masters of computers.
- Life isn't a chess game where each side takes turns. We're allowed to probe and experiment. Clicking Submit does not mean one is submissive. Even on the grounds that one has made a simple mistake one may re-submit with something different.
- Speaking of trust, we don't trust computers that much when our future is at stake. Would you be operated on by a robot? Would you let a robot drive your car? Eventually, but not all at once.
BTW, what is Harvard about? See Legally Blonde!
I'll be able to make my case for doing all my work on a cruise ship.
Programs and Professors are only facilitators
Studying computer science in university will help you learn about computers, but you do have to do a huge amount of learning by yourself just to be able to make the machines do your bidding. Software is very complex with tons of features and professors do not show you how to do every little thing that make your life easier. They talk about concepts that are difficult to conceive by people who just poke around trying out this button and that button on the screen.
Regardless of what education you attained, once you start doing professional work you realize that you didn't learn things in school that you need to use and you learned things in school that you don't need to use. In some ways it's a mixture of comedy and tragedy, but not to get too emotional, you need to be flexible, knowledgeable, and full of life skills and motivation, especially for learning and achieving.
Being skilled and driven is good for achievement, but I really have to wonder where it's all headed. Software is being invented all the time to simplify computer work, and the distance between classes of computer users may widen. On the one hand computer illiterates may be able to set up major systems or perform complex tasks due to the proliferation of wizards, open source programs, plug and play, etc. The interfaces are just getting easier.
This makes the labor associated with computer work less valuable due to oversupply. On the other hand, computers are looked to for solving bigger and bigger problems.
Right now I don't take my computer skills as seriously any more, and I'm trying to learn more about science and math. It's not as easy to learn compared to programming. For example, what is dark matter?
We are headed for an era where more basic work is mechanized. People are going to have to tackle problems that have more difficult answers just to be able to earn minimum wage.
The study of computer science comes full circle, then. The student learns how to control a computer in order to have it do a task, but the student learned recursion! Surely a computer can be made to do a task that was done by a computer scientist. Twenty years ago, one can learn computer science and practice it for the rest of one's life, but today there is a lot more computer science and a lot more computing power. Perhaps the answer to the question what is required to go along with a computer science degree is nothing. The computer science program ought to develop students that transcend the state of the art, making a computer science degree the ultimate degree rather than a component degree.
Please, each neuron is not independent of each other neuron while each ant is far more independent of the other ants in that you can remove an ant from the collective and it will function on its own. Brain neurons do very little outside the network structure that is established throughout the brain. Neurons have little choice whether they can migrate or operate out of sequence.
The insight is the realizability of potential through cooperation. Little components, when put together properly yield a myriad of different highly complex functions such as converting radio waves into TV media, combusting hydrocarbons, cooling ice in a desert sun, etc. etc.
It's implementable.
As an analogy consider the P4's lookahead. If the execution will not enter the branch that does an i+=rand(), the value of i must still be unchanged.
If you purchase a computer pre-installed with Windows XP from a major vendor (re: Dell, Gateway, HP, etc. etc.), Windows XP will come already activated. Your Windows XP key is in the BIOS (as it already is in most Dell PCs), letting you reinstall Windows XP without activation over and over again as many times as you want.
Beautiful! When you upgrade Windows you are compelled to buy a new PC.
Sure, some people will put up with it because the average moron doesn't need to reinstall every 15 days like I do.
Did you realize you referred to yourself as an average moron? When you compare yourself to a class but provide no evidence you don't belong to the class, you are believed to be a member of the class. That's just the safest assumption to make.
Folk wisdom time. Might makes right and birds of a feather flock together.
It's not surprising that the rich countries would tend to look askance at the Godless and unwashed communists, as well as trade heavily with each other. The upshot - classify by economic status or by political ideals if you want but you still end up with the same classes. What makes me wonder is whether countries with potentially self destablizing governments can really prosper.
So what now? Do we forget about the thinking of the Cold War and use the terminology Nth World to refer to economics? Or better yet, do we remember not to trust commies? There is a semblance of war in the world, but now along the lines of terrorism. Now what are the members of Nth World?
No small business owner I met had been in the country for more than 5 years, and every one of them had become millionaires (USD) in that time with their restaurants, hostels, construction companies, computer companies, etc.
5 * 365 * 12 = 21900
Oh. Hi. I was just doing some math there. Did you know that 5 multiplied by 365 multiplied by 12 is 21900?
I never studied accounting but somehow I figure that if any business owner could easily earn millions of US dollars couldn't they pay people $12/hour?
Is Costa Rica supposed to be first world? The first world is who makes the business people there rich since the local population couldn't really do that. The answer, then, is the first world cannot afford to pay Costa Ricans $12 per hour. Is there some kind of reduction to the absurd when Costa Rica is laballed "first world"?