I think Marvin Minsky is an idiot too, but you took that subject line.
AI needs to have both a mind and a body before it can have behavior that can be recognized as intelligent. Subsumption architecture and old fashioned symbolic logic/expert system AI techniques need to be combined. Another problem is that while microprocessor hardware is optimized to execute serial instruction streams, neurons are a distributed (kind of parallel) execution system. The hardware we wish to emulate does not map elegantly to the hardware we use to compute, thus the problems with using simulators.
Some emphasize the mind or soul as the most important thing, others the body. Both are needed. If currently the AI field is making real progress with those "damn little robot insects" then that is good, someday the pendulum will swing back and what has been learned will find broader applications in other aspects of AI, pushing the whole field forward.
First off, the free market is only good for determining how much money something is worth, not for determining how much society will benefit from something.
The is where the 'invisible hand' comes in. Though not identical, there is a remarkable congruence between monetary worth and value to society. This occurs because the same individual human beings who comprise society are also economic participants in the market.
Free societies are good, therefore so are free markets.
I got a big 300W unit, its been great for months now. Of course my PC doesn't need a lot of airflow through the case (333 P2), so I didn't care about that.
Technology made the fast food industry possible, and without any real national discussion and consideration, retailing, health, work and the ability of individuals to operate farms or small businesses was altered for good.
How was this national discussion to take place? Who would participate? How would anyone participating know what the hell they were talking about until after it happened? Who gets to decide what the discussion results were? If it was decided that fast food was a bad thing, how precisely could the industry be discouraged without violating basic economic and political freedoms?
What is so holy about the small farms and businesses that could not compete, that I should miss them? I don't hang out at malls exclusively, in urban areas there are plenty of small businesses and restaurants.
The whole idea of a national discussion as posited by Katz is inherently collectivist. The only appropriate national discussion is the one fomented by the book length critiques of the anti-fastfood industry authors. The only result should be individuals decided on their own to continue to patronize fast food or not.
Katz can keep his communist nannny state locked away in his private fantasy, I'll have no part of it and will vote against it at every opportunity.
You asked: "When did it become acceptable to lie about EVERYTHING ?"
That would have been 20 Jan 1993 when Bill Clinton took office as president of the U.S. Bill's leadership by example had set the tone for the decade of lies.
I agree with you that the author of the linked article uses Libertarian vocabulary and thoughts, but it is just inconceivable that Rand, author of the Fountainhead, would ever be against intellectual property.
The GPL is not sacred, it was created as a piece of legal ju-jitsu against the copyright system. I'm sure RMS and the anti-IP bandwagon would be happy to dispense with the GPL right after the abolishment of the copyright system. I would rather keep both, and I don't see either position as contradictory.
Gov't intervention is the legal basis of property rights, not of just the temporary monopolies of patents and copyrights. Not all government intervention is evil therefore it doesn't make sense to object to copyrights, patents, and trademarks as wrong because they depend on the government to exist.
Property right is the power to control or dispose. Any right which is undefended, i.e. the gov't won't intervene to protect, is no right at all. You really have no right to your house if you come home from work and find a poor family of squatters occupying it, and you have no legal means to expel them.
The ideal of a free market is to have a system that operates without government intervention, is it not?
It is not. The error of your formulation is that it is negative. The 'free' is free market is not a 'freedom from' but a 'freedom to', a positive exercise of power by the participants. None of the participants will have much power unless they live in a society that acknowledges and defends property rights. It is difficult to trade that which one does not own.
I disagree on the second point. Machines do really save time, which is then spent on other activities. What, you want spend the day sleeping in bed and enjoying "saved time"? What a waste of time.
And slaves are expensive. The southern states of the U.S. confederacy were all industrially backward and committed to their slaves because that was where all their money was wrapped up. A free man operating a capital investment in machinery is far more productive than a slave. Pre-industrial revolution societies are the only instances you will find of slaves being economical for a slave holder.
Showing how information is discarded and which information is discarded is the point. If you are a big fan of classical you will have an opinion on _which_ parts of the sonic information are expendable differing greatly from somebody collecting Britney Spears mp3s.
Everything from the Renaissance onward which counts as progress correlates tightly with the presence of capitalism (peace, property, rule of law).
>The IMF was created primarly by investors as a means to keep 3rd world nations in debt.
No, do some research next time. It was originally created for sound purposes but has become a crusading humanitarian organization lately.
"Initially, under the Bretton Woods fixed-exchange-rate system, the IMF's loans were largely to the major industrial countries, including the United States. The remedy for a balance-of-payments or liquidity problem was then largely limited to macroeconomic policy changes, that is, changes in fiscal, monetary, and, sometimes, exchange rate policy. Structural reforms were limited to those directly related to macroeconomic policy, for example, tax reform.
Now, with the recent exception of South Korea, the IMF's loans are exclusively to developing countries and to the "transitional" economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union."
....
Above all, in the end, market confidence can only be restored by a political leadership that is willing and able to implement sound and credible economic policies with or without support from the IMF. "
Making loans to places like Uganda where such leadership is lacking is just criminally irresponsible. It is socialist inspired unwarranted generosity which actually causes harm.
>No, this was an example.
Excuse me if I suspect there is more to the story than you prefer to tell here.
>Does the IMF/Worldbank benefit Cuba? No.
Of course not, Fidel was unwise enough to eliminate all his fat cats, he has no one else to squeeze. Having no money, he has limited power to do harm in the world, which is a good thing.
Professional socialists hang out in capitalist societies because that is where the money is.
>And for your final remark, it's not hard to miss the single capitalist ideal, the persuit of capital
A superficial answer, as would be expected from a socialist. What is capital? What is the value of capital and how is it valued? What conditions allow capitalism to exist and what are the consequences? I'm sure every answer you could give would differ from mine.
American farmers have faced the same problem for almost 2 centuries now, that being increased productivity. Overproduction of crops drives the price down on the commodities markets. The revenue per acre planted is therefore reduced and it becomes a struggle for a small farmer to reduce his costs to be less than his income. A large farm with many acres can more easily be profitable.
If all the agri-businesses were destroyed tomorrow, they would be reinvented in time because of the nature of the economics of farming.
Price fixing occurs whenever you decide what price you will sell at. Mysteriously, sometimes it is illegal to raise prices, but never to drop prices. Hmm, I wonder if this could have any relation at all to the chronic problems of farmers, who are forbidden to organize and coordinate their production?
As to the computer analogy, you pay a premium for the IBM name and service, which the shop down the street doesn't have. Don't forget, if it weren't for IBM there would be no computer shop down the street.
Social mobility makes the whole idea of class war fallacious.
Joe Blow at the 50th percentile of income most likely is not going remain there his entire life. Indeed, he aspires to become part of the investing class.
At the top, commonly the spoiled children of the rich mismanage their fortune and lose it.
As the players are constantly changing sides, the idea of a war between them is absurd.
That 90% portion of wealth didn't exist before capitalist systems created it.
>71% of Uganada's GNP going to the IMF
I didn't know that the IMF had anything at all to do with capitalism. The IMF is a liberal-socialist inspired idea to spread some money around in the form of loans. It makes bad loans because it is a primarily political entity. The IMF exists because no normal bank would lend money to places like Uganda. Socialists are screwing the Ugandans and trying to foist the blame on the capitalist system. Ain't gonna work buddy, at least not here, not today.
>the privatized water supply in Belize (which has already killed 50 people)
Out of all the privately run water systems in the world, this is the only one that is bad? How many of the gov't run facilities are killing people? Then of course one must ask what does "privatize" mean in Belize, it could just be another scheme of a corrupt government official to set up his son-in-law for life.
>and global warming increasing at an exponential rate.
This is raw, lame eco-hype. Even if it could be proven that there was such a thing a global warming, it still remains to be shown that things such as solar radiation variances and volcanic eruptions are overrpowered by the influence of the US interstate highway system. If think these phenomena are of equal scale and power, you have no sense of actual numbers involved.
>Yes, as long as those damn socialists don't take over, these problems will fix themselves.
If we could get rid of socialism the IMF could be disbanded.
>Why don't you open your eyes a little bit to the world around, instead of getting tangled up in flawed capitalist ideals?
This sentence really means is: capitalist ideals are flawed and you are a fool not to see it.
Please point out a single capitalist ideal, I wonder if you even know what capitalism is. Then you can point out flaws with particular ideas.
>It's amusing how people think requiring corporations to buy emissions space is compatible with a 'free market,' and then use it as a weapon against others' social beliefs.
Capitalism depends on the existence of a goverment which defends private property and enforces contract law. Land surveyors and deeds divide up the scarce resource of land. The FCC and its licenses divide up the right to transmit in scarce radio spectrum. It is perfectly traditional to have the government divide up the right to use scarce atmosphere (scarce in SoCal anyway).
Design Patents are a legal backwater because of the seeming overlap with trademarks and copyrights. If the Supreme Court has truly done away with "look and feel" legal crap, then only the design patent remains as a protection for the superficial aspects of a product design.
I think Apple actually lost their "look and feel" lawsuit years ago, so this likely won't affect much in the software industry anyway.
"[The patent] has made our lives a lot simpler," said Luke Stewart, Media Fusion's chairman and the inventor of the technology. "This lets people know the government recognizes the value of the science and the veracity of the technology."
This is not how a patent should be interpreted. Totally worthless patents are granted all the time. The USPTO does not have a lab, nor do they posess supeona power to gather evidence. USPTO is then necessarily restricted to searching prior art to ensure that "no one has done this before" i.e. novelty. Consumers and investors should always regard a statement such as Luke Stewart's quoted above as a red flag on his credibility.
Slashdot Mirror
just felt the need to contribute that
I think Marvin Minsky is an idiot too, but you took that subject line.
AI needs to have both a mind and a body before it can have behavior that can be recognized as intelligent. Subsumption architecture and old fashioned symbolic logic/expert system AI techniques need to be combined. Another problem is that while microprocessor hardware is optimized to execute serial instruction streams, neurons are a distributed (kind of parallel) execution system. The hardware we wish to emulate does not map elegantly to the hardware we use to compute, thus the problems with using simulators.
Some emphasize the mind or soul as the most important thing, others the body. Both are needed. If currently the AI field is making real progress with those "damn little robot insects" then that is good, someday the pendulum will swing back and what has been learned will find broader applications in other aspects of AI, pushing the whole field forward.
Patience, patience...
First off, the free market is only good for determining how much money something is worth, not for determining how much society will benefit from something.
The is where the 'invisible hand' comes in. Though not identical, there is a remarkable congruence between monetary worth and value to society. This occurs because the same individual human beings who comprise society are also economic participants in the market.
Free societies are good, therefore so are free markets.
I got a big 300W unit, its been great for months now. Of course my PC doesn't need a lot of airflow through the case (333 P2), so I didn't care about that.
How was this national discussion to take place? Who would participate? How would anyone participating know what the hell they were talking about until after it happened? Who gets to decide what the discussion results were? If it was decided that fast food was a bad thing, how precisely could the industry be discouraged without violating basic economic and political freedoms?
What is so holy about the small farms and businesses that could not compete, that I should miss them? I don't hang out at malls exclusively, in urban areas there are plenty of small businesses and restaurants.
The whole idea of a national discussion as posited by Katz is inherently collectivist. The only appropriate national discussion is the one fomented by the book length critiques of the anti-fastfood industry authors. The only result should be individuals decided on their own to continue to patronize fast food or not.
Katz can keep his communist nannny state locked away in his private fantasy, I'll have no part of it and will vote against it at every opportunity.
Growlerpshaw#
You asked: "When did it become acceptable to lie about EVERYTHING ?"
That would have been 20 Jan 1993 when Bill Clinton took office as president of the U.S. Bill's leadership by example had set the tone for the decade of lies.
"Martian Ecosystem," my ass!
I agree with you that the author of the linked article uses Libertarian vocabulary and thoughts, but it is just inconceivable that Rand, author of the Fountainhead, would ever be against intellectual property.
The GPL is not sacred, it was created as a piece of legal ju-jitsu against the copyright system. I'm sure RMS and the anti-IP bandwagon would be happy to dispense with the GPL right after the abolishment of the copyright system. I would rather keep both, and I don't see either position as contradictory.
Property right is the power to control or dispose. Any right which is undefended, i.e. the gov't won't intervene to protect, is no right at all. You really have no right to your house if you come home from work and find a poor family of squatters occupying it, and you have no legal means to expel them.
It is not. The error of your formulation is that it is negative. The 'free' is free market is not a 'freedom from' but a 'freedom to', a positive exercise of power by the participants. None of the participants will have much power unless they live in a society that acknowledges and defends property rights. It is difficult to trade that which one does not own.
I disagree on the second point. Machines do really save time, which is then spent on other activities. What, you want spend the day sleeping in bed and enjoying "saved time"? What a waste of time.
And slaves are expensive. The southern states of the U.S. confederacy were all industrially backward and committed to their slaves because that was where all their money was wrapped up. A free man operating a capital investment in machinery is far more productive than a slave. Pre-industrial revolution societies are the only instances you will find of slaves being economical for a slave holder.
Growler
Its Christmas and responsible people have better things to do than moderate Slashdot.
Ang-Lee is about 40-ish. His boyhood fantasies would have ttaken place in the 1960's.
Jackie Chan has not intellectually or stylistically influenced the content of CTHD.
You don't know as much as you think you do.
"Now, there are sometimes problems with classical music, but that's because it's often hard to predict exactly what you can and can't hear."
Um, right. Which is why I wrote what I wrote.
Showing how information is discarded and which information is discarded is the point. If you are a big fan of classical you will have an opinion on _which_ parts of the sonic information are expendable differing greatly from somebody collecting Britney Spears mp3s.
>Capitalism does not equate to progress.
- 56
Everything from the Renaissance onward which counts as progress correlates tightly with the presence of capitalism (peace, property, rule of law).
>The IMF was created primarly by investors as a means to keep 3rd world nations in debt.
No, do some research next time. It was originally created for sound purposes but has become a crusading humanitarian organization lately.
"Initially, under the Bretton Woods fixed-exchange-rate system, the IMF's loans were largely to the major industrial countries, including the United States. The remedy for a balance-of-payments or liquidity problem was then largely limited to macroeconomic policy changes, that is, changes in fiscal, monetary, and, sometimes, exchange rate policy. Structural reforms were limited to those directly related to macroeconomic policy, for example, tax reform.
Now, with the recent exception of South Korea, the IMF's loans are exclusively to developing countries and to the "transitional" economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union."
....
Above all, in the end, market confidence can only be restored by a political leadership that is willing and able to implement sound and credible economic policies with or without support from the IMF. "
http://www.senate.gov/~dpc/crs/reports/ascii/98
Making loans to places like Uganda where such leadership is lacking is just criminally irresponsible. It is socialist inspired unwarranted generosity which actually causes harm.
>No, this was an example.
Excuse me if I suspect there is more to the story than you prefer to tell here.
>Does the IMF/Worldbank benefit Cuba? No.
Of course not, Fidel was unwise enough to eliminate all his fat cats, he has no one else to squeeze. Having no money, he has limited power to do harm in the world, which is a good thing.
Professional socialists hang out in capitalist societies because that is where the money is.
>And for your final remark, it's not hard to miss the single capitalist ideal, the persuit of capital
A superficial answer, as would be expected from a socialist. What is capital? What is the value of capital and how is it valued? What conditions allow capitalism to exist and what are the consequences? I'm sure every answer you could give would differ from mine.
and the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Some designs are unimplementable.
American farmers have faced the same problem for almost 2 centuries now, that being increased productivity. Overproduction of crops drives the price down on the commodities markets. The revenue per acre planted is therefore reduced and it becomes a struggle for a small farmer to reduce his costs to be less than his income. A large farm with many acres can more easily be profitable.
If all the agri-businesses were destroyed tomorrow, they would be reinvented in time because of the nature of the economics of farming.
Price fixing occurs whenever you decide what price you will sell at. Mysteriously, sometimes it is illegal to raise prices, but never to drop prices. Hmm, I wonder if this could have any relation at all to the chronic problems of farmers, who are forbidden to organize and coordinate their production?
As to the computer analogy, you pay a premium for the IBM name and service, which the shop down the street doesn't have. Don't forget, if it weren't for IBM there would be no computer shop down the street.
Social mobility makes the whole idea of class war fallacious.
Joe Blow at the 50th percentile of income most likely is not going remain there his entire life. Indeed, he aspires to become part of the investing class.
At the top, commonly the spoiled children of the rich mismanage their fortune and lose it.
As the players are constantly changing sides, the idea of a war between them is absurd.
>What with 10% holding 90% of the wealth
That 90% portion of wealth didn't exist before capitalist systems created it.
>71% of Uganada's GNP going to the IMF
I didn't know that the IMF had anything at all to do with capitalism. The IMF is a liberal-socialist inspired idea to spread some money around in the form of loans. It makes bad loans because it is a primarily political entity. The IMF exists because no normal bank would lend money to places like Uganda. Socialists are screwing the Ugandans and trying to foist the blame on the capitalist system. Ain't gonna work buddy, at least not here, not today.
>the privatized water supply in Belize (which has already killed 50 people)
Out of all the privately run water systems in the world, this is the only one that is bad? How many of the gov't run facilities are killing people? Then of course one must ask what does "privatize" mean in Belize, it could just be another scheme of a corrupt government official to set up his son-in-law for life.
>and global warming increasing at an exponential rate.
This is raw, lame eco-hype. Even if it could be proven that there was such a thing a global warming, it still remains to be shown that things such as solar radiation variances and volcanic eruptions are overrpowered by the influence of the US interstate highway system. If think these phenomena are of equal scale and power, you have no sense of actual numbers involved.
>Yes, as long as those damn socialists don't take over, these problems will fix themselves.
If we could get rid of socialism the IMF could be disbanded.
>Why don't you open your eyes a little bit to the world around, instead of getting tangled up in flawed capitalist ideals?
This sentence really means is: capitalist ideals are flawed and you are a fool not to see it.
Please point out a single capitalist ideal, I wonder if you even know what capitalism is. Then you can point out flaws with particular ideas.
>It's amusing how people think requiring corporations to buy emissions space is compatible with a 'free market,' and then use it as a weapon against others' social beliefs.
Capitalism depends on the existence of a goverment which defends private property and enforces contract law. Land surveyors and deeds divide up the scarce resource of land. The FCC and its licenses divide up the right to transmit in scarce radio spectrum. It is perfectly traditional to have the government divide up the right to use scarce atmosphere (scarce in SoCal anyway).
Design Patents are a legal backwater because of the seeming overlap with trademarks and copyrights. If the Supreme Court has truly done away with "look and feel" legal crap, then only the design patent remains as a protection for the superficial aspects of a product design.
I think Apple actually lost their "look and feel" lawsuit years ago, so this likely won't affect much in the software industry anyway.
The reaction time of a person inside is better than a remote control, allowing tricky navigation and other performances.
Just one thing wrong with your little plan. I'm not giving you my invention. You need me to make your scheme work, and I'm not cooperating.
Good day.
"[The patent] has made our lives a lot simpler," said Luke Stewart, Media Fusion's chairman and the inventor of the technology. "This lets people know the government recognizes the value of the science and the veracity of the technology."
This is not how a patent should be interpreted. Totally worthless patents are granted all the time. The USPTO does not have a lab, nor do they posess supeona power to gather evidence. USPTO is then necessarily restricted to searching prior art to ensure that "no one has done this before" i.e. novelty. Consumers and investors should always regard a statement such as Luke Stewart's quoted above as a red flag on his credibility.
Growler