OK so I make widgets right and I copyright/patent my widgets. Then another person makes a 100 percent exact copy of my widget and starts giving it away for free. Now less people want to buy my widget, which I have worked long and hard to develop because they can get it for free. This causes me financial loss.
Whose argument is poor? The pot calls the kettle black.
Consider Linux, PC clones, Windows, Internet Explorer, etc. I'm talking about objects that could have been sold with much greater enforcement of copyright, patents, what-have-you, but the market would probably have entered a state with more competition and a much smaller market share for each of these. Instead, people can obtain these things readily and Bill Gates is still richest.
Certainly an inventor or producer deserves to be rewarded and if the inventor/producer can seek to increase his/her revenues by a factor of N slightly larger than 1 by making more people pay, go for it. However, look at it this way - everyone has benefited from inventions throughout history. Isn't there some onus of people to return something back to civilization by way of creativity?
Feeling ambivalent? Then make shareware.
Besides, with all the new fangled things coming out an invention may well become superseded or irrelevant.
The blackouts in California can also be traced to deregulation. About.com has a nice summary of the relationship.
Premise 2
Point is that privatization of shared resources has historically resulted in profits to businesses at the expense of the consumer.
Come to think of it, I don't like overpaying but high prices ought to attract competitive forces to ultimately lower the price. In certain economic sectors, especially utilities, it is not easy to start up a new service. There are so many regulations as well as the need to win customer trust, not to mention the time required to build the physical infrastructure. So in situations like this, the optimal path appears to be aptly described by "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
On the other hand, if consumers were willing to put up with years of outrageous profit taking, better services may emerge. Perhaps the ultimate solution for ordinary folks is to simply move to the place that offers the best standard of living.
I was under the impression that people who want to evade the powers that be would do their dirty work in third world countries. Not that VoIP is dirty, but if all kinds of blatant Internet craziness is happening via servers located outside the reach of the law, you would think VoIP would fall under the proverbial radar.
Of course, the debate probably centres over the billability of long distance over the Internet. To this I say get a life - technology is supposed to make us poor consumers happier. High speed Internet is not cheap. I've paid for the infrastructure and I want it to mean more than downloading/. fast.
I advocate economic sanctions against any country that oppressively regulates basic harmless technology.
As I recall phrases I have heard of in all probability the expression headmouse is a typographical error. Why, I've never heard of anything like this before! The check spelling algorithm suggests "Gaming with a Head Louse?"
Why would they, exactly? Because the grandois nature of hte universe makes them realize there's a God?
So they want to live up to the expectations of a higher power? Or they are motivated by love for a higher being?
But why is God necessary? Amoebas living in a drop of tap water could realize their own insignficance and simply desire to live out their lives according to their own tastes, but a long time ago single-celled organisms banded together to form more powerful life forms capable of breaking away from their confines.
We have minds that can contemplate infinity. All I'm saying is that this is a source of motivation.
dunno if that's how it works - some kind of quota of how many stories get posted per (where is time, or n-submitted, or what). If they're just posting the "good ones" as fast as they come thru the submission queue, then the dup posts confirm some kind of consistency in the submission vetting process
Much of my wisdom comes from movies. They're so graphic and poignant. Let me share something I saw in Kill Bill that may explain dupes:
"How is he ever going to see you again?" - Esteban Vihaio
Of course this doesn't accurately describe the reason. It is striking how broad the topics are of interest to us all. After reading n topics, it's hard to be motivated to look at n + 1. Another thing is the odd lack of immediate relevance to my life most of the topics have due to the sheer number of topics. Also amazing, the sheer number of things of immediate interest that do not appear as topics! It makes Slashdot a bit distracting though still fun.
So what can anyone say about people who will still look at a duplicated story?
Meanwhile, there was a drive-by shooting 5 blocks from my house two weeks ago, a hostage situation with a woman armed with a knife two blocks from here this week, and the shooting and stabbing murders and a suicide just on the edge of town two days ago.
If some people were to be aware of the wonders of the universe and their own self insignificance they would turn away from violence and seek greater ends. This sounds good, though it may be falser than you think. Perhaps the problem is cultural.
Generic culture does not really encourage average people to invent or risk. Many inventors and researchers believe they are in a do-or-die mode and must achieve their ends with any means.
The conclusion may be that the complexities of the universe just make people cranky.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. - Robert A. Heinlein
If computer intelligence is realized, it can improve itself by writing programs. Now strip away all the baggage like butcher a hog and cook a tasty meal, and reduce the idea to a computer that can program a computer. This is a basic element of intelligence: a being that can formulate and execute a virtually unlimited number of sequences of instructions that take advantage of a fairly powerful machinery or computational mechanism, including the ability to control with some precision and accuracty the being's output of such sequences.
A neural net can be built to exhibit this behavior. With enough nodes the network can produce instructions from an instruction set. Add more neurons and tweak to acquire a machine that outputs a certain useful programs for certain inputs. Use a neural net to perform a feedback function by evaluating programs according to goal achievement, resource usage, timeliness, etc.
Neural networks are useful for handling large inputs such as sensory data as well as information written in a language. So build a feedforward contraption of neural nets that produce programs and a feedback set of neural nets to evaluate programs. This network can be scaled up and adjusted. Add CPUs to execute the programs. Furthermore, allow the programs to access the neural nets via the inputs and the adjustable weights. This is a readily achievable plan for a neural net that has the potential to improve itself via computer programming.
Word is quite flexible about printers. Some files can be envelopes. Some can be cards. Some can be letter paper and others can be combinations of envelopes, letter size, book formatting, etc.
After that you can create headers, footers, margins, etc. Add that up into a single document, and you may have a document that prints partly on one printer used for glossy paper and partly on another printer loaded with plain paper while being able to print multiple copies with one click on the print button. Very good for automated jobs in a printing company.
There are so many features I get scared that with the next version I may find that an obscure feature I use quite often may become mangled or uncontrollable with other programs. So far I have to hand it to Microsoft - all the old versions of Word I use work as well as I need them to on the newest Windows that I have.
Someone thought you were pretty funny but someone needs to explain that to me.
BUT you illustrate the point with the call to lseek. Why did you not put the SEEK_CUR parameter at the beginning? Because the parameters need to be in order. Probably for the sake of backward compatibility Word docs have a bunch of data structures that must occur in a specific order much like parameters of a function call regardless of whether the items were in use.
The other thing about lseek followed by write -- I suspect that Word docs may contain gaps of significant size so that people can edit the middle of a large doc without having to re-save large quantities of non-edited data to the disk. Thus, there would be quite a bit of lseeking. Breaking a doc into a linked list (can be stored out of order on the disk) would facilitate insertion/deletion but would require quite a bit of disk seeking if the file was searched or scrolled.
One thing to be said for automation - we store a lot of info about basic walking in our nervous system. It's too much work to think about walking when there's nothing special to watch out for. Being able to replicate basic low-energy walking with a machine is therefore quite useful.
Now, on to awareness. Awareness gives us cause to move ourselves about. We somehow gain awareness that we have legs and that they have some ability to move us. We learn that they are strong and flexible to some degree, that they have some responsiveness, feeling, speed, durability, geometry, control, etc. etc. Even if the robot never attains walking but still reports with some accuracy a discovery of these attributes, it would raise eyebrows.
Probably and even bigger boon for encryption and key-generation. I vote key-generation and not encryption. Otherwise, how would you decrypt it?
Unpredictability really is useful for encryption because random numbers are very important for better encryption.
The second application that comes to mind is the one-time pad. Of course you have to save the random padding data somewhere but you always had to do that. The unpredictability just makes one-time pad that much better.
Random numbers may be used to generate keys that people can't guess. Of course you have to memorize the key.
How much intercommunications do the legs have? Considering locomotion, suppose one leg hits the gas pedal and causes an improvement in propulsion. Is this action learned then and there by the other legs?
So do the legs manifest logic or computation? Such as is there learning, experimentation, memory, etc.? Imagine: a semblance of AI via idealized octopus simulation.
It's like claiming that I can make a light bulb that's hot get hotter and melt-down by turning off the switch
Aha! You can by hooking the bulb in parallel to a big inductive load like a big electric motor. The switch is in series with the power source and this series is in parallel to the bulb and motor. When you turn off the switch, the motor's magnetic field collapses big time and the voltage across the bulb spikes.
1. Load languages from language database into L 2. Load email addresses from spam database into A 3. For a in A 4. For l in L 5. Translate "Hello",l into H 6. Create message M from H 7. Send M to a 8. Next 9. Next
I don't know about you but when I use a faster computer I notice that it is faster.
Some things in Windows don't appear to respond any faster though. However! I hear tell that you can go to the registry and lower the delay times although if you lower them too much you can have suboptimal CPU usage for opening cascading menus.
What I really want to know - how are some complex operations achieved? When I use COM to control MS Word, it seems that Word has to do so much thinking I can't wait for a 50 GHz processor to be available. Hmm. I have an idea though...
Don't forget page formatting, font formatting, paragraph formatting, printer settings, etc. etc.
Go back to Data Structures 101. A lot of data structures have a head node that don't contain useful data but serve as a place to find the structure. With all the objects that can be put into a Word doc, you can expect a lot of head nodes.
Most of the time you don't save a Word doc with just one character. You are working on a massive doc that you save frequently but you don't want to wait for the whole thing to be written every time you save. There has to be some overhead for faster saves.
How do we handle context? If we see something ambiguous out of context we can be in trouble. Fix the context, and the problems go away.
But you might learn to have a few contexts in mind rather than arbitrary contexts. If you're talking to the cashier you don't want to use the same context as you would use with your hairdresser.
Now acquiring the actual meaning may be not so difficult, but what about the appreciation of the meaning? Can the AI respond with anything useful?
I.e., does the AI understand the context, or rather, know many principles involved in the context? The AI doesn't have to know hairdressing to talk to a hairdresser but it would help to know the principles of talking to a hairdresser. Then again, one can consider a hairdresser expert - the AI should contemplate hairdressing.
Come now. AI has always failed because we lack the supercomputers to make AI really work. Does a chess program know that it is playing chess? Not really. It has no appreciation of games in general. It probably does not know how to invent a strategy or understand a strategy from examples though some chess programmers are probably looking this.
If a chess program can learn from chess literature, then look out.
Eventually just by the fact that is has so much data, it can become semi intelligent.
Knowledge may be made useful if it can be transferred from one kind of problem to another. This is quite a fine art requiring much experience rather than merely plugging parameters into a function. In other words, the number of parameters is quite large and you have to really look before you leap - do not proceed without enough parameters.
I guess what im trying to say is, why reinvent the wheel. Why have the AI try to learn everything the way humans have?
I take it your point is what came first, the chicken or the egg? If we have the function I(t) that maps time to inventions, the implementation of Cyc at time T does not include any inventions at time U > T. Why reinvent I(U), but it hasn't been invented yet! Hence Cyc does not have complete knowledge.
Other applicable sayings, teach a man to fish, and putting the cart before the horse. I think Cyc should be implemented with the knowledge of invention regardless of any other knowledge. The big however is that the knowledge feeders of Cyc are probably investing some time to learn how to express information, and what better way to learn than to enter information that is familiar and basic?
Here is an algorithm (very oversimplified due to space constraints) that summarizes intelligence. Its performance depends on the implementation and the hardware. Any implementation of intelligence is likely an elaboration of the algorithm.
declare classes for language of predicate logic, such as predicates, variables, and, or, not, if-then, for-all, there-exists
while true
construct a belief in the form of a logic statement
perform a logical deduction
find a belief or deduction that suggests an action and execute the action end while
Actions may be related to running programs or performing I/O.
Arbitrary implementation of this algorithm will likely yield a very stupid system. Intelligence lies in configuring the way each part runs. Even the human mind does not have instant answers to every problem.
There are many different ways to augment the algorithm to achieve a practical intelligence, especially the areas of instinctive knowledge, sensory input, and force control.
Slashdot Mirror
Are we proposing a "born again" categorization of posts?
OK so I make widgets right and I copyright/patent my widgets. Then another person makes a 100 percent exact copy of my widget and starts giving it away for free. Now less people want to buy my widget, which I have worked long and hard to develop because they can get it for free. This causes me financial loss.
Whose argument is poor? The pot calls the kettle black.
Consider Linux, PC clones, Windows, Internet Explorer, etc. I'm talking about objects that could have been sold with much greater enforcement of copyright, patents, what-have-you, but the market would probably have entered a state with more competition and a much smaller market share for each of these. Instead, people can obtain these things readily and Bill Gates is still richest.
Certainly an inventor or producer deserves to be rewarded and if the inventor/producer can seek to increase his/her revenues by a factor of N slightly larger than 1 by making more people pay, go for it. However, look at it this way - everyone has benefited from inventions throughout history. Isn't there some onus of people to return something back to civilization by way of creativity?
Feeling ambivalent? Then make shareware.
Besides, with all the new fangled things coming out an invention may well become superseded or irrelevant.
Come to think of it, I don't like overpaying but high prices ought to attract competitive forces to ultimately lower the price. In certain economic sectors, especially utilities, it is not easy to start up a new service. There are so many regulations as well as the need to win customer trust, not to mention the time required to build the physical infrastructure. So in situations like this, the optimal path appears to be aptly described by "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
On the other hand, if consumers were willing to put up with years of outrageous profit taking, better services may emerge. Perhaps the ultimate solution for ordinary folks is to simply move to the place that offers the best standard of living.
I was under the impression that people who want to evade the powers that be would do their dirty work in third world countries. Not that VoIP is dirty, but if all kinds of blatant Internet craziness is happening via servers located outside the reach of the law, you would think VoIP would fall under the proverbial radar.
/. fast.
Of course, the debate probably centres over the billability of long distance over the Internet. To this I say get a life - technology is supposed to make us poor consumers happier. High speed Internet is not cheap. I've paid for the infrastructure and I want it to mean more than downloading
I advocate economic sanctions against any country that oppressively regulates basic harmless technology.
As I recall phrases I have heard of in all probability the expression headmouse is a typographical error. Why, I've never heard of anything like this before! The check spelling algorithm suggests "Gaming with a Head Louse?"
Why would they, exactly? Because the grandois nature of hte universe makes them realize there's a God?
So they want to live up to the expectations of a higher power? Or they are motivated by love for a higher being?
But why is God necessary? Amoebas living in a drop of tap water could realize their own insignficance and simply desire to live out their lives according to their own tastes, but a long time ago single-celled organisms banded together to form more powerful life forms capable of breaking away from their confines.
We have minds that can contemplate infinity. All I'm saying is that this is a source of motivation.
dunno if that's how it works - some kind of quota of how many stories get posted per (where is time, or n-submitted, or what). If they're just posting the "good ones" as fast as they come thru the submission queue, then the dup posts confirm some kind of consistency in the submission vetting process
Much of my wisdom comes from movies. They're so graphic and poignant. Let me share something I saw in Kill Bill that may explain dupes:
"How is he ever going to see you again?" - Esteban Vihaio
Of course this doesn't accurately describe the reason. It is striking how broad the topics are of interest to us all. After reading n topics, it's hard to be motivated to look at n + 1. Another thing is the odd lack of immediate relevance to my life most of the topics have due to the sheer number of topics. Also amazing, the sheer number of things of immediate interest that do not appear as topics! It makes Slashdot a bit distracting though still fun.
So what can anyone say about people who will still look at a duplicated story?
Meanwhile, there was a drive-by shooting 5 blocks from my house two weeks ago, a hostage situation with a woman armed with a knife two blocks from here this week, and the shooting and stabbing murders and a suicide just on the edge of town two days ago.
If some people were to be aware of the wonders of the universe and their own self insignificance they would turn away from violence and seek greater ends. This sounds good, though it may be falser than you think. Perhaps the problem is cultural.
Generic culture does not really encourage average people to invent or risk. Many inventors and researchers believe they are in a do-or-die mode and must achieve their ends with any means.
The conclusion may be that the complexities of the universe just make people cranky.
the sky becomes opaque
Concurrently we'll have eliminated our ozone so we'll need the extra sunblock.
You will soon realize as I did that R2D2 moves with little millipede legs rather than wheels.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. - Robert A. Heinlein
If computer intelligence is realized, it can improve itself by writing programs. Now strip away all the baggage like butcher a hog and cook a tasty meal, and reduce the idea to a computer that can program a computer. This is a basic element of intelligence: a being that can formulate and execute a virtually unlimited number of sequences of instructions that take advantage of a fairly powerful machinery or computational mechanism, including the ability to control with some precision and accuracty the being's output of such sequences.
A neural net can be built to exhibit this behavior. With enough nodes the network can produce instructions from an instruction set. Add more neurons and tweak to acquire a machine that outputs a certain useful programs for certain inputs. Use a neural net to perform a feedback function by evaluating programs according to goal achievement, resource usage, timeliness, etc.
Neural networks are useful for handling large inputs such as sensory data as well as information written in a language. So build a feedforward contraption of neural nets that produce programs and a feedback set of neural nets to evaluate programs. This network can be scaled up and adjusted. Add CPUs to execute the programs. Furthermore, allow the programs to access the neural nets via the inputs and the adjustable weights. This is a readily achievable plan for a neural net that has the potential to improve itself via computer programming.
Word is quite flexible about printers. Some files can be envelopes. Some can be cards. Some can be letter paper and others can be combinations of envelopes, letter size, book formatting, etc.
After that you can create headers, footers, margins, etc. Add that up into a single document, and you may have a document that prints partly on one printer used for glossy paper and partly on another printer loaded with plain paper while being able to print multiple copies with one click on the print button. Very good for automated jobs in a printing company.
There are so many features I get scared that with the next version I may find that an obscure feature I use quite often may become mangled or uncontrollable with other programs. So far I have to hand it to Microsoft - all the old versions of Word I use work as well as I need them to on the newest Windows that I have.
Someone thought you were pretty funny but someone needs to explain that to me.
BUT you illustrate the point with the call to lseek. Why did you not put the SEEK_CUR parameter at the beginning? Because the parameters need to be in order. Probably for the sake of backward compatibility Word docs have a bunch of data structures that must occur in a specific order much like parameters of a function call regardless of whether the items were in use.
The other thing about lseek followed by write -- I suspect that Word docs may contain gaps of significant size so that people can edit the middle of a large doc without having to re-save large quantities of non-edited data to the disk. Thus, there would be quite a bit of lseeking. Breaking a doc into a linked list (can be stored out of order on the disk) would facilitate insertion/deletion but would require quite a bit of disk seeking if the file was searched or scrolled.
without so much bloody automation
One thing to be said for automation - we store a lot of info about basic walking in our nervous system. It's too much work to think about walking when there's nothing special to watch out for. Being able to replicate basic low-energy walking with a machine is therefore quite useful.
Now, on to awareness. Awareness gives us cause to move ourselves about. We somehow gain awareness that we have legs and that they have some ability to move us. We learn that they are strong and flexible to some degree, that they have some responsiveness, feeling, speed, durability, geometry, control, etc. etc. Even if the robot never attains walking but still reports with some accuracy a discovery of these attributes, it would raise eyebrows.
Probably and even bigger boon for encryption and key-generation.
I vote key-generation and not encryption. Otherwise, how would you decrypt it?
Unpredictability really is useful for encryption because random numbers are very important for better encryption.
The second application that comes to mind is the one-time pad. Of course you have to save the random padding data somewhere but you always had to do that. The unpredictability just makes one-time pad that much better.
Random numbers may be used to generate keys that people can't guess. Of course you have to memorize the key.
How much intercommunications do the legs have? Considering locomotion, suppose one leg hits the gas pedal and causes an improvement in propulsion. Is this action learned then and there by the other legs?
So do the legs manifest logic or computation? Such as is there learning, experimentation, memory, etc.? Imagine: a semblance of AI via idealized octopus simulation.
It's like claiming that I can make a light bulb that's hot get hotter and melt-down by turning off the switch
Aha! You can by hooking the bulb in parallel to a big inductive load like a big electric motor. The switch is in series with the power source and this series is in parallel to the bulb and motor. When you turn off the switch, the motor's magnetic field collapses big time and the voltage across the bulb spikes.
I don't know about you but when I use a faster computer I notice that it is faster.
...
Some things in Windows don't appear to respond any faster though. However! I hear tell that you can go to the registry and lower the delay times although if you lower them too much you can have suboptimal CPU usage for opening cascading menus.
What I really want to know - how are some complex operations achieved? When I use COM to control MS Word, it seems that Word has to do so much thinking I can't wait for a 50 GHz processor to be available. Hmm. I have an idea though
Don't forget page formatting, font formatting, paragraph formatting, printer settings, etc. etc.
Go back to Data Structures 101. A lot of data structures have a head node that don't contain useful data but serve as a place to find the structure. With all the objects that can be put into a Word doc, you can expect a lot of head nodes.
Most of the time you don't save a Word doc with just one character. You are working on a massive doc that you save frequently but you don't want to wait for the whole thing to be written every time you save. There has to be some overhead for faster saves.
How do we handle context? If we see something ambiguous out of context we can be in trouble. Fix the context, and the problems go away.
But you might learn to have a few contexts in mind rather than arbitrary contexts. If you're talking to the cashier you don't want to use the same context as you would use with your hairdresser.
Now acquiring the actual meaning may be not so difficult, but what about the appreciation of the meaning? Can the AI respond with anything useful?
I.e., does the AI understand the context, or rather, know many principles involved in the context? The AI doesn't have to know hairdressing to talk to a hairdresser but it would help to know the principles of talking to a hairdresser. Then again, one can consider a hairdresser expert - the AI should contemplate hairdressing.
Come now. AI has always failed because we lack the supercomputers to make AI really work. Does a chess program know that it is playing chess? Not really. It has no appreciation of games in general. It probably does not know how to invent a strategy or understand a strategy from examples though some chess programmers are probably looking this.
If a chess program can learn from chess literature, then look out.
Eventually just by the fact that is has so much data, it can become semi intelligent.
Knowledge may be made useful if it can be transferred from one kind of problem to another. This is quite a fine art requiring much experience rather than merely plugging parameters into a function. In other words, the number of parameters is quite large and you have to really look before you leap - do not proceed without enough parameters.
I guess what im trying to say is, why reinvent the wheel. Why have the AI try to learn everything the way humans have?
I take it your point is what came first, the chicken or the egg? If we have the function I(t) that maps time to inventions, the implementation of Cyc at time T does not include any inventions at time U > T. Why reinvent I(U), but it hasn't been invented yet! Hence Cyc does not have complete knowledge.
Other applicable sayings, teach a man to fish, and putting the cart before the horse. I think Cyc should be implemented with the knowledge of invention regardless of any other knowledge. The big however is that the knowledge feeders of Cyc are probably investing some time to learn how to express information, and what better way to learn than to enter information that is familiar and basic?
Arbitrary implementation of this algorithm will likely yield a very stupid system. Intelligence lies in configuring the way each part runs. Even the human mind does not have instant answers to every problem.
There are many different ways to augment the algorithm to achieve a practical intelligence, especially the areas of instinctive knowledge, sensory input, and force control.
Finite problem, finite solution.