If you actually read the article, you'd see that the stuff being outsourced is 'glamourous' stuff like migration guides and testing tools - nothing relating to the kernel or even Avalon/UI
Actually, the article is somewhat more complicated. Microsoft says that they're not oursourcing any core technology work. But Microsoft has a development center in India as well. If the Indians are Microsoft employees, they are not 'outsourcing'. What is curious is how Microsoft's Indian R&D center operates. Maybe they have a lot of hired consultants - like Redmond, WA has. In that case, Microsoft may not really know how many outsourced workers there are.
Like it or not - America is losing technology jobs. It would be prudent for the US to invest in education and support new technology so that it can lead. Instead it spends $400B plus on securing oil. Here in Seattle, there's only one real University and they're way over admitted and need to reduce the number of students to come back into line with their budget. That means all those young people who'd like to get trained as scientists and engineers end up working at Mickey D's and Wall-ofdeath-Mart.
I hate to preach doom - but America is really loosing its edge fast.
Your morals are incredible. I wish what you expouse could be true. But honorable soldiers will lose a war. What really happens is that soldiers do terrible things. They kill as many soft targets as possible - like children and families. They burn farms. They poison water. They destroy and subjegate civilizations. That's their job. War isn't pretty and the only way to win is to be a complete asshole. Of course, the propaganda machine always tries to paint the other side as cold blooded ruthless animals and our side as good people making a tough decision. What ever side loses the war is tried as war criminals. The ultimate crime is to lose. There is the Geneva convention and there is some honor amoung soldiers. But soldiers only follow those rules when there's some benefit to them. You might treat your POW's well if the other side has some of your soldiers. You might not kill civilians if the other side could do the same to you. But when you get the upper hand, you crush the enemy. Witness what America did to Japan in WW2. Watch a movie called "The Fog of War". Its mostly about Vietnam but has some good stuff about war in general.
War is the ultimate evil. One should try to avoid it at all costs if you have any compassion for humanity. If you can't avoid it, say because, you're being invaded, I believe its justified.
Ever hear the expression "Alls fair in love and war"
Soldiers are taught that there are morals to war because they need to believe that there is some goodness to what they are doing. I know I would, or I'd go insane.
Environmentally this is a real savings. The biggest electrical power consumer in a computer is typically the processor. While you won't save 75% on the electricity you probably would save about 50%. And that's a big deal in a lot of places. Especially places where you have to install backup generators because the power grid is so unreliable.
The maintenance is also a lot easier. 1/4 the software installs and upgrades. And another big cost saving is desk space. Desk space is one of the most expensive types of real estate and one CPU is a lot better than 4.
The biggest downside would be if anyone wanted to futz with the machine. Turning it off would affect 4 people. I'd say that's the biggest weakness of Windows in this situation - install/reboot cycling wouldn't work at all with multiple users.
Missionary Man asks: "I'm an electronics teacher......Ideally I'd like something with a bandwidth of up to 40MHz and 2 channels.
The bitscope only has a 40MS/s data aquisition rate. Assuming that that's for both channels - 20MS/s each, then your left with a nyquist of 10Mhz. And you really need to oversample a waveform a lot more than x2 to see what it looks like. The analog bandwidth of the bitscope is high, but the A/D conversion will result in a lot of aliasing. That said. Its a really impressive unit for $400.00. I didn't think you could find something nearly that fast for under $700. Not exactly what you're looking for.
The software for a scope is pretty important - but without the raw A/D speed and resolution you won't get very far.
(arg!)Styopa wrote: > Some of the most blindingly leftist people I know are otherwise quite bright...
You said it. Perhaps there's a connection you have overlooked. Maybe 'leftists' realize that for humanity to move forward we're all going to have to work together. The 'everyman for himself' point of view will commit humanity to the destiny of the dinosaurs.
I've seen science being made and its like sausages. I wish in some ways I didn't know. That said - I still eat sausages. Science is imperfect. Its made terrible mistakes. But atleast there's progress. Ignoring scienctific evidence or distorting it is extremely costly.
Like article says: "Its like changing the weather forcast to say that the hurricane isn't coming. The hurricane is still coming but it doesn't let anyone prepare for it and a lot more people will die."
Just like weather forcasting - scientific evidence isn't perfect and one can distort the evidence and lie to the public. But the public will eventually pay a huge cost.
I'm amazed at the number of posts on Slashdot that argue against evolution. I guess our society is going into the dark ages faster than I thought. Maybe we'll start burning witches and running things on astrology. And all businesses can start using Enron style book keeping.
What I like best about computers is that they are super miniature machines. And unlike mechanical machines, they can do the same thing over and over again - not millions - but 10^20 or so times over and over. And they do this really really fast.
Assembly allows you to get a little closer to the mechanism. And its really nice if your want to know how hardware works. Its especially good if you want to develop robots or gadgets that interface to computers. It's nice to learn about interrupts and flags and such.
That said - if I can use C, Java, Pascal, Basic or anything higher - I will. Because it'll take 1/10th the time. Plus all those wonderful libraries are a lot easier to interface to. Even for programming the little micro controller's, its really nice to be able to do it in C.
I started out as a computer programmer and have found myself branching in both the mechanical and electrical realms. Learning assembly:
"Peter Norton's assembly language guide for the IBM PC" I wrote a disk editor. It took forever - actually - I didn't quite finish. Got about 85% of the way done. Nowadays - I think a microcontroller would be a lot more gratifying.
Hear hear! I'm busy at work using someone elses source as a base to let me extend upon it and do my job. Its incredible! This is efficiency. That's what the internet and open source models make possible.
To detail: I needed to make an obscure piece of hardware (analog data collection card) do some gymnastics on the PC. I could've bought into the Microsoft model ($$), or I could get the same thing under Linux and modify the driver a little. I did the latter. And now I can send back the changes to the maintainer. Everyone else can now do what I did.
Its called efficiency. Its not about politics for me. Its just about what works. Its about turning everyone who works with a computer into a programmer that has control over their machine. In the end its about being able to do what you want with the machine. With closed source, I have to wait for the company to make the change. With open source I can do it, or hire someone to do it for me. Centralized vs. decentralized.
You're right that the processor muscle is better on a PDA - but what a good calculator does is provide you with a great interface to do math. Having all the buttons right in front of you really does matter. Once you learn where the buttons are you can fly through calculations. Hunting through menus on a PDA or pecking a fake keyboard with a mouse on a screen isn't nearly as nice.
HP's 15C, 42S, and 48G are great. The neat thing about this new one is that you could probably power a sophisticated robot. You could even do the inverse kinematics on the fly.
Something we all know. The next big improvement in technology will be semi-smart machines that can move around in the world.
Someday we'll all have cool robots to assist us in our work. A robot to help us do our job would be really cool. Personally, I could use a robot to help me do the 1/2mm pitch soldering I do for the protoboards. Or it'd be cool if I could ask the robot to go and get me my lunch. Robots to inspect factories and be a telepresence are neat too.
The problem will become and already partly is what to do with all the people who loose their paying job to a robot. Our current society more or less only values a person if they have a job. This should probably be rethought.
From my internet research of high energy lasers, it appears that the longest range that a laser will have in the forseable future is 6 miles through the atmosphere. In space a laser can go forever, but in the air thermal blooming, atmostpheric turbulence and normal attenuation make it impossible to blast things farther.
Thermal blooming is a big problem. A laser heats up the atmosphere around it which causes the index of refraction of the air to change which changes the direction and focus of the beam. And this is a non-linear chaotic system. You can't aim a beam a long way through the atmosphere. So that mean you can't use laser beams to shoot down incoming missiles unless you station the laser really close to the targets. And even if you do that, you can only start shooting when the missile is within 6 miles or so of the target. And even then if its bad weather - no go.
Laser weapons have some fundamental physics problems to overcome. It would be good if the US goverment told the tax payers about this before spending tons of money on them.
Its easy - but it involves implementing a database for your email addresses. This is how it works:
- data base maintains two lists: 1. your list of valid sent to addresses - much like your current address book. But these addresses are much longer and cannot be guessed. I thinking something like a 100 byte random email address.
2. the list of valid email addresses people use to send you email.
Your mail reader gets a valid email address either from your local database - and should validate it with the send to mail host - or the mail reader retrieves a CAPTCHA for the person to solve from the destination's database server.
The mail daemon on the receiving end checks with its local database for a valid send to address. Remember its really long so spammers cannot search this space. If the address is valid the user gets the mail. If its not valid, then the maildaemon checks the return address to see if its valid. If its not - then no action is taken - if it is valid then the sender of the mail gets a response from the mail daemon explaining how to get a valid email address via a CAPTCHA test.
If you get spam on a valid email address - you tell your database to cancel that address. Voila! No more spam on that address. Now if someone wants to send you spam they can get a valid send to address but it takes a few seconds of actual human time to get it (the CAPTCHA). But its only good until the receiver cancels the address.
This system is completely workable with existing internet mail. Now I need to learn how to write an RFC and submit it.
This would require that people store the actual valid send to email addresses inside some sort of address book - unless they want to go through a CAPTCHA for every email they send.
This would also allow people to determine where spammers are getting their email addresses from.
A user could generate a valid sent to address for him/her-self without going through a CAPTCHA for places that require an email - like your bank.
Note: this would not stop those nasty email viruses from sending themselves. That's a separate problem of people running attachments that are sent to them via email. Though this would probably slow down those virii a little.
I've been told that NASA lost the plans to the Saturn V. So even if we wanted to, we couldn't go to the moon again. The era of trips to the moon is gone. Our society has begun its long plunge into the dark ages.
The problem is that analog stations pay 6-12 cents per song (more for classical or long works) - regardless of the number of users. Here's a link to BMI's rates. But the RIAA wants internet radio people to pay.07 cents / song / user. For 1000 listeners - 0.70 cents per song. For 10000 listeners (about the size of a popular FM station )- $7.00 per song.
I used to copy songs off analog radio all the time - I think a lot of people did. The argument that you're giving people a copy of the song on digital radio but not analog is silly. The price should be the same. The reason it isn't is because the RIAA (or whoever is backing them) doesn't want independent internet radio. They probably want a monopoly on that. Maybe Clear Channel is backing them. Maybe BMI wants to make their own internet radio. Just speculation.
Regardless. Internet radio shouldn't have to pay anymore than regular radio.
Looks like the puppetry is really good. Looks like there's a giant mass of batteries in the cart. Sounds like the motors are really noisy - atleast when the head turns.
For a real walking robot dinosaur take a look at Troody.
Sounds like you and your co-workers have started a union. So do what unions do. Stick together and bargain collectively. Walking out and calling it quits won't get anyone what they want. But working to "rule" would probably help you and your colleagues a lot. The company cannot fire all of you for doing your job well; but without free overtime and on-call BS.
I recommend that you and your colleagues keep your job but work as you think your job should be done. If they fire you, then you can sue the pants off the company. But if only one employee does it, its not very effective. You've got to stick up for each other.
I might recommend that you and your coworkers save a few dollars for a rainy day too.
but robot are the real goal
on
AI Going Nowhere?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
OK... Maybe smart robots are the real goal, but without a machine to embody the "intelligence", what is it supposed to do? AI needs a purpose and robots fit that bill really well.
We already have lots of smart people all over the place - what we need is smart robots that can do things that people can't.
Imagine if you could get a whole slew of robots to sort a landfill into elementary components. Imagine if you could get robots to put out fires and rescue people. Imagine if you could get robots to sew any garment you wanted at the download of the latest fashion trend. Just Imagine!
Without extremely advanced senses and mechanisms and the all important control of those things robots will never be able to do these things. Marvin Minsky is right in that those graduate students shouldn't be spending 3 years just getting the machine to work. They should buy the robot and spend 3 years programming it and outfitting it with new sensors. Robot companies should be more common. But the robot market is still in its infancy. Once it gets jump started, it'll be brilliant.
As I understand it, you can have a whitelist from online services that send out mail from robots. But spammers will just forge mail from these whitelisted email addresses.
What we need is similiar to this solution. Multiple send-to addresses generated either on the fly by a secure interface that the owner of the email account can use. Or you could have a Challenge/Response system to generate a send-to address.
Unfortunately, because there will be lots of send-to addresses and they will have to be kept track of, it will be necessary to incorporate this information into the mail reader/address manager. Not my idea of fun, but SPAM sucks more.
This way if some online retailer sells your address, you will know who did it and you can cancel that email address.
This could be a separate header in the mail too, and in that case this could be entirely done in the mail reader and code generator and wouldn't require any modification of the current internet mail system. But the senders of mail would have to add the headers to their mail.
This relates to something I've been wondering for a while. How much carbon do we (humans) bury in the ground compared to how much we pull out of the ground in fossil fuels?
By stipulating that 60% of our oil could be reduced by using biodiesel, it sounds like there's a lot of carbon being buried.
Does anyone know?
Wouldn't it be funny if thowing away your trash into a landfill was saving the earth from global warming?
The intonations of spoken language and body language are some of the most powerful ways of communicating. Add that to the possibilities of mixing media along with your commentary and you get some very powerful communication tools.
Emergency Broadcast Network never would've worked in a text only medium. Guerrilla News Network has the ability to really get their point accross as well as the giant network studios.
Soon bandwidth will be even cheaper. And whether its text, audio, pictures, or video will be just a matter of choice.
Blog away. The internet isn't just for porn anymore.
Putting a price on sending mail will make it difficult to get email from peoples who don't have similiar economies. It'll stratify the net based on the dollar value of the people. That's not a good thing.
White lists would require a spammer to spend a small amount of his or her time to get a valid send-to address. But it wouldn't cost a penny. Just time. And if you don't send spam on that valid email, it'll be good for a long long time.
ISP's who host an email server provide multiple unique email addresses for each user. Something like foo-xxxxxxxxxx@theworld.com. If spam comes in on the unique address, you tell the smtp server to block it forever.
People who would like to send an email to a user, but don't have a unique address, can apply for one by visiting a web page like the ones that ISP's use for setting up accounts. It would have some sort of human readable code to break. You could also send a request for an email address to the user (maybe not).
The only problem I see with this is that it ties email into the world wide web. And it doesn't have a good solution for blind people. Other than that - its useable immediately.
Slashdot Mirror
Fear of being road pizza'd by an H2 is a reasonable feeling on a bike. But there are people trying to do something about it.
Critical Mass is a pro-bike social movement that tries to empower bicyclists. Check it out:
http://www.critical-mass.org
Actually, the article is somewhat more complicated. Microsoft says that they're not oursourcing any core technology work. But Microsoft has a development center in India as well. If the Indians are Microsoft employees, they are not 'outsourcing'. What is curious is how Microsoft's Indian R&D center operates. Maybe they have a lot of hired consultants - like Redmond, WA has. In that case, Microsoft may not really know how many outsourced workers there are.
Like it or not - America is losing technology jobs. It would be prudent for the US to invest in education and support new technology so that it can lead. Instead it spends $400B plus on securing oil. Here in Seattle, there's only one real University and they're way over admitted and need to reduce the number of students to come back into line with their budget. That means all those young people who'd like to get trained as scientists and engineers end up working at Mickey D's and Wall-ofdeath-Mart.
I hate to preach doom - but America is really loosing its edge fast.Your morals are incredible. I wish what you expouse could be true. But honorable soldiers will lose a war. What really happens is that soldiers do terrible things. They kill as many soft targets as possible - like children and families. They burn farms. They poison water. They destroy and subjegate civilizations. That's their job. War isn't pretty and the only way to win is to be a complete asshole. Of course, the propaganda machine always tries to paint the other side as cold blooded ruthless animals and our side as good people making a tough decision. What ever side loses the war is tried as war criminals. The ultimate crime is to lose. There is the Geneva convention and there is some honor amoung soldiers. But soldiers only follow those rules when there's some benefit to them. You might treat your POW's well if the other side has some of your soldiers. You might not kill civilians if the other side could do the same to you. But when you get the upper hand, you crush the enemy. Witness what America did to Japan in WW2. Watch a movie called "The Fog of War". Its mostly about Vietnam but has some good stuff about war in general.
War is the ultimate evil. One should try to avoid it at all costs if you have any compassion for humanity. If you can't avoid it, say because, you're being invaded, I believe its justified.
Ever hear the expression "Alls fair in love and war"
Soldiers are taught that there are morals to war because they need to believe that there is some goodness to what they are doing. I know I would, or I'd go insane.
Environmentally this is a real savings. The biggest electrical power consumer in a computer is typically the processor. While you won't save 75% on the electricity you probably would save about 50%. And that's a big deal in a lot of places. Especially places where you have to install backup generators because the power grid is so unreliable.
The maintenance is also a lot easier. 1/4 the software installs and upgrades. And another big cost saving is desk space. Desk space is one of the most expensive types of real estate and one CPU is a lot better than 4.
The biggest downside would be if anyone wanted to futz with the machine. Turning it off would affect 4 people. I'd say that's the biggest weakness of Windows in this situation - install/reboot cycling wouldn't work at all with multiple users.
The bitscope only has a 40MS/s data aquisition rate. Assuming that that's for both channels - 20MS/s each, then your left with a nyquist of 10Mhz. And you really need to oversample a waveform a lot more than x2 to see what it looks like. The analog bandwidth of the bitscope is high, but the A/D conversion will result in a lot of aliasing. That said. Its a really impressive unit for $400.00. I didn't think you could find something nearly that fast for under $700. Not exactly what you're looking for.
The software for a scope is pretty important - but without the raw A/D speed and resolution you won't get very far.
(arg!)Styopa wrote:
> Some of the most blindingly leftist people I know are otherwise quite bright...
You said it. Perhaps there's a connection you have overlooked. Maybe 'leftists' realize that for humanity to move forward we're all going to have to work together. The 'everyman for himself' point of view will commit humanity to the destiny of the dinosaurs.
I've seen science being made and its like sausages. I wish in some ways I didn't know. That said - I still eat sausages. Science is imperfect. Its made terrible mistakes. But atleast there's progress. Ignoring scienctific evidence or distorting it is extremely costly.
Like article says: "Its like changing the weather forcast to say that the hurricane isn't coming. The hurricane is still coming but it doesn't let anyone prepare for it and a lot more people will die."
Just like weather forcasting - scientific evidence isn't perfect and one can distort the evidence and lie to the public. But the public will eventually pay a huge cost.
I'm amazed at the number of posts on Slashdot that argue against evolution. I guess our society is going into the dark ages faster than I thought. Maybe we'll start burning witches and running things on astrology. And all businesses can start using Enron style book keeping.
"In God we trust" - that could be a problem.
What I like best about computers is that they are super miniature machines. And unlike mechanical machines, they can do the same thing over and over again - not millions - but 10^20 or so times over and over. And they do this really really fast.
Assembly allows you to get a little closer to the mechanism. And its really nice if your want to know how hardware works. Its especially good if you want to develop robots or gadgets that interface to computers. It's nice to learn about interrupts and flags and such.
That said - if I can use C, Java, Pascal, Basic or anything higher - I will. Because it'll take 1/10th the time. Plus all those wonderful libraries are a lot easier to interface to. Even for programming the little micro controller's, its really nice to be able to do it in C.
I started out as a computer programmer and have found myself branching in both the mechanical and electrical realms. Learning assembly:
"Peter Norton's assembly language guide for the IBM PC" I wrote a disk editor. It took forever - actually - I didn't quite finish. Got about 85% of the way done. Nowadays - I think a microcontroller would be a lot more gratifying.
I can't tell you how many times I've called a company and they direct me to a lame ass digital receptionist.
Voice recognition was supposed to be the next big thing, but it doesn't work.
Hear hear! I'm busy at work using someone elses source as a base to let me extend upon it and do my job. Its incredible! This is efficiency. That's what the internet and open source models make possible.
To detail: I needed to make an obscure piece of hardware (analog data collection card) do some gymnastics on the PC. I could've bought into the Microsoft model ($$), or I could get the same thing under Linux and modify the driver a little. I did the latter. And now I can send back the changes to the maintainer. Everyone else can now do what I did.
Its called efficiency. Its not about politics for me. Its just about what works. Its about turning everyone who works with a computer into a programmer that has control over their machine. In the end its about being able to do what you want with the machine. With closed source, I have to wait for the company to make the change. With open source I can do it, or hire someone to do it for me. Centralized vs. decentralized.
You're right that the processor muscle is better on a PDA - but what a good calculator does is provide you with a great interface to do math. Having all the buttons right in front of you really does matter. Once you learn where the buttons are you can fly through calculations. Hunting through menus on a PDA or pecking a fake keyboard with a mouse on a screen isn't nearly as nice.
HP's 15C, 42S, and 48G are great. The neat thing about this new one is that you could probably power a sophisticated robot. You could even do the inverse kinematics on the fly.
Something we all know. The next big improvement in technology will be semi-smart machines that can move around in the world.
Someday we'll all have cool robots to assist us in our work. A robot to help us do our job would be really cool. Personally, I could use a robot to help me do the 1/2mm pitch soldering I do for the protoboards. Or it'd be cool if I could ask the robot to go and get me my lunch. Robots to inspect factories and be a telepresence are neat too.
The problem will become and already partly is what to do with all the people who loose their paying job to a robot. Our current society more or less only values a person if they have a job. This should probably be rethought.
From my internet research of high energy lasers, it appears that the longest range that a laser will have in the forseable future is 6 miles through the atmosphere. In space a laser can go forever, but in the air thermal blooming, atmostpheric turbulence and normal attenuation make it impossible to blast things farther.
Thermal blooming is a big problem. A laser heats up the atmosphere around it which causes the index of refraction of the air to change which changes the direction and focus of the beam. And this is a non-linear chaotic system. You can't aim a beam a long way through the atmosphere. So that mean you can't use laser beams to shoot down incoming missiles unless you station the laser really close to the targets. And even if you do that, you can only start shooting when the missile is within 6 miles or so of the target. And even then if its bad weather - no go.
Laser weapons have some fundamental physics problems to overcome. It would be good if the US goverment told the tax payers about this before spending tons of money on them.
Its easy - but it involves implementing a database for your email addresses. This is how it works:
- data base maintains two lists:
1. your list of valid sent to addresses - much like your current address book. But these addresses are much longer and cannot be guessed. I thinking something like a 100 byte random email address.
2. the list of valid email addresses people use to send you email.
Your mail reader gets a valid email address either from your local database - and should validate it with the send to mail host - or the mail reader retrieves a CAPTCHA for the person to solve from the destination's database server.
The mail daemon on the receiving end checks with its local database for a valid send to address. Remember its really long so spammers cannot search this space. If the address is valid the user gets the mail. If its not valid, then the maildaemon checks the return address to see if its valid. If its not - then no action is taken - if it is valid then the sender of the mail gets a response from the mail daemon explaining how to get a valid email address via a CAPTCHA test.
If you get spam on a valid email address - you tell your database to cancel that address. Voila! No more spam on that address. Now if someone wants to send you spam they can get a valid send to address but it takes a few seconds of actual human time to get it (the CAPTCHA). But its only good until the receiver cancels the address.
This system is completely workable with existing internet mail. Now I need to learn how to write an RFC and submit it.
This would require that people store the actual valid send to email addresses inside some sort of address book - unless they want to go through a CAPTCHA for every email they send.
This would also allow people to determine where spammers are getting their email addresses from.
A user could generate a valid sent to address for him/her-self without going through a CAPTCHA for places that require an email - like your bank.
Note: this would not stop those nasty email viruses from sending themselves. That's a separate problem of people running attachments that are sent to them via email. Though this would probably slow down those virii a little.
CAPTCHA: see http://www.captcha.net/ for more info on this curious acronym
I've been told that NASA lost the plans to the Saturn V. So even if we wanted to, we couldn't go to the moon again. The era of trips to the moon is gone. Our society has begun its long plunge into the dark ages.
More or less I agree.
.07 cents / song / user. For 1000 listeners - 0.70 cents per song. For 10000 listeners (about the size of a popular FM station )- $7.00 per song.
The problem is that analog stations pay 6-12 cents per song (more for classical or long works) - regardless of the number of users. Here's a link to BMI's rates. But the RIAA wants internet radio people to pay
I used to copy songs off analog radio all the time - I think a lot of people did. The argument that you're giving people a copy of the song on digital radio but not analog is silly. The price should be the same. The reason it isn't is because the RIAA (or whoever is backing them) doesn't want independent internet radio. They probably want a monopoly on that. Maybe Clear Channel is backing them. Maybe BMI wants to make their own internet radio. Just speculation.
Regardless. Internet radio shouldn't have to pay anymore than regular radio.
Looks like the puppetry is really good. Looks like there's a giant mass of batteries in the cart. Sounds like the motors are really noisy - atleast when the head turns.
For a real walking robot dinosaur take a look at Troody.
>> I hope they find the person involved and perform medical experiments on him.
I guess that would be Bill Gates
Sounds like you and your co-workers have started a union. So do what unions do. Stick together and bargain collectively. Walking out and calling it quits won't get anyone what they want. But working to "rule" would probably help you and your colleagues a lot. The company cannot fire all of you for doing your job well; but without free overtime and on-call BS.
I recommend that you and your colleagues keep your job but work as you think your job should be done.
If they fire you, then you can sue the pants off the company. But if only one employee does it, its not very effective. You've got to stick up for each other.
I might recommend that you and your coworkers save a few dollars for a rainy day too.
OK... Maybe smart robots are the real goal, but without a machine to embody the "intelligence", what is it supposed to do? AI needs a purpose and robots fit that bill really well.
We already have lots of smart people all over the place - what we need is smart robots that can do things that people can't.
Imagine if you could get a whole slew of robots to sort a landfill into elementary components. Imagine if you could get robots to put out fires and rescue people. Imagine if you could get robots to sew any garment you wanted at the download of the latest fashion trend. Just Imagine!
Without extremely advanced senses and mechanisms and the all important control of those things robots will never be able to do these things. Marvin Minsky is right in that those graduate students shouldn't be spending 3 years just getting the machine to work. They should buy the robot and spend 3 years programming it and outfitting it with new sensors. Robot companies should be more common. But the robot market is still in its infancy. Once it gets jump started, it'll be brilliant.
As I understand it, you can have a whitelist from online services that send out mail from robots. But spammers will just forge mail from these whitelisted email addresses.
What we need is similiar to this solution. Multiple send-to addresses generated either on the fly by a secure interface that the owner of the email account can use. Or you could have a Challenge/Response system to generate a send-to address.
Unfortunately, because there will be lots of send-to addresses and they will have to be kept track of, it will be necessary to incorporate this information into the mail reader/address manager. Not my idea of fun, but SPAM sucks more.
This way if some online retailer sells your address, you will know who did it and you can cancel that email address.
This could be a separate header in the mail too, and in that case this could be entirely done in the mail reader and code generator and wouldn't require any modification of the current internet mail system. But the senders of mail would have to add the headers to their mail.
Just think. It could be awesome!
Could we hook up pressurized air and make a complex web of pneumatic tubes? We could send actual packets of stuff all over the computer.
But if you got a virus on such a device (like SARS), your computer might start coughing.
This relates to something I've been wondering for a while. How much carbon do we (humans) bury in the ground compared to how much we pull out of the ground in fossil fuels?
By stipulating that 60% of our oil could be reduced by using biodiesel, it sounds like there's a lot of carbon being buried.
Does anyone know?
Wouldn't it be funny if thowing away your trash into a landfill was saving the earth from global warming?
The intonations of spoken language and body language are some of the most powerful ways of communicating. Add that to the possibilities of mixing media along with your commentary and you get some very powerful communication tools.
Emergency Broadcast Network never would've worked in a text only medium. Guerrilla News Network has the ability to really get their point accross as well as the giant network studios.
Soon bandwidth will be even cheaper. And whether its text, audio, pictures, or video will be just a matter of choice.
Blog away. The internet isn't just for porn anymore.
Putting a price on sending mail will make it difficult to get email from peoples who don't have similiar economies. It'll stratify the net based on the dollar value of the people. That's not a good thing.
White lists would require a spammer to spend a small amount of his or her time to get a valid send-to address. But it wouldn't cost a penny. Just time. And if you don't send spam on that valid email, it'll be good for a long long time.
Come on - Isn't this a good solution?
How about this?
ISP's who host an email server provide multiple unique email addresses for each user. Something like foo-xxxxxxxxxx@theworld.com. If spam comes in on the unique address, you tell the smtp server to block it forever.
People who would like to send an email to a user, but don't have a unique address, can apply for one by visiting a web page like the ones that ISP's use for setting up accounts. It would have some sort of human readable code to break. You could also send a request for an email address to the user (maybe not).
The only problem I see with this is that it ties email into the world wide web. And it doesn't have a good solution for blind people. Other than that - its useable immediately.
Software Tool and Die rocks!