Boosting your own power would just make the problem worse for everyone else.
The article only dealt with interference between the gadgets of one person. What would have happened if the author had a neighbor who also had a bunch of wireless stuff?
This is really disheartening about the near-future of wireless. If a few wireless things can't co-exist in one person's house, then cities are doomed. So wireless will be great, as long as you are the first one with it and only until your neighbors get it too.
Napster has negatively affected how much money I spend on CDs. I no longer buy albums that suck.
I used to buy 2-3 CDs a week. Then, long before Napster, MP3s or even Linux, I stopped. My reason? Crappy albums and high prices. I was paying for stuff I didn't like and didn't listen too.
Just yesterday I bought a half dozen CDs online, and for each one, I'd already heard 75% of the album. But that was explicitly WHY I bought those albums. Before Napster I'd never even heard of these artists. (please check the Britney Spears jokes at the door).
Napster is good for music and bad for the recording industry. Musicians will be fine. This won't be the first time a technology makes someone's job obsolete, just ask a typesetter. We still have printed words however.
While not many artists are happy about lost CD sales, they'd be fools to regret people hearing their music.
I wonder how the RIAA convinced the judge that the files on the CDs owned by the MP3.com customers were in anyway different than the files on MP3.com's CDs.
Bits is bits is bits. A CD is a means of transporting a set of specifically ordered bits. Is there really any difference between these files? Aren't they essentially all the same file? (Is there any difference between the base DNA in your toes vs. your ears?)
If I deposit money into the bank, in a sense digitizing that cash, and then I pay for something with a digital check, the exact cash I deposited is not being used to cover the check. Could we now insist that marked bills be used to cover our debts?
This ruling sets a bad precedent for the distribution of digital files. It also supports my belief that digital files are inherently worthless due to a complete absence of scarcity. If it's digital, it can exist everywhere, and if it's worth having, it will (and probably should) exist everywhere. The RIAA is trying to insist that the songs on CDs are somehow different than the songs on copies of the same CDs.
Files will not stay on their birth media. I tossed my CD player months ago and don't miss it. 75 minutes of music per disk is a silly, archaic waste of space. One whole wall of my apartment is wasted by the storage of a few hundred CDs. Averaging 1 megabyte per minute for a decent sounding MP3, my entire 15 year old CD collection could fit comfortably on one $200 hard drive. Digital files shouldn't be tied to anything physical.
I'm surprised that the movie industry isn't paying more attention to this. Their day is coming too, it's only a matter of time before technology allows us to move files the size of DVDs with the ease we now move CD-sized files.
I also believe that if CDs were cheaper, there wouldn't be so much of an issue. I've bought CDs because of MP3s I found through Napster, but only when they were for sale at a steep discount (less than $11 each). Otherwise they are just too damned expensive.
I first came to TerraServer a few years ago and was disappointed. Not by the images, by the lousy server. I wasn't at all surprised when the area51 images didn't load today.
I'm tired of bashing Microsoft. Their just too damn big to dismiss everything produced with a MS seal. Microsoft has some teams of very smart people are producing brilliant products and despite the DOJ case, actually innovating.
Too bad the TerraServer support crew isn't one of those teams.
Of course the Slashdot effect with a CNN chaser is going to be a lot for anyone to handle, but I bet the server will still be having trouble next week and next month and on and on.
It's really a shame, TerraServer is a great idea and something I'd spend days with, if frustration didn't constantly chase me away.
At some point, design, industrial or graphic or UI or whatever, becomes as distinctive as a story or movie or song. If we can protect one form of creativity, why not the other?
Does this open the (heavily extrapolated) gateways for the "legalization" of sampling in music?
What scares me about this ruling is the impact it might have against the little guy, it lessens the legal ramifications for the theft of good ideas. If a small company has something great and HUGEcorp has no legal impetus NOT to knock it off and put the little guys out of business, don't think HUGEcorp won't. The big guys would be protected by the ability of their pocketbook to raise a louder fuss. Which is almost what the ruling seems to ask them to do.
One of the ironies of great industrial design is the complete invisibility of it. If you make a perfect tool, there is no way to contain the idea behind that tool. People all over the world know the classing Honeywell round Thermostat, but who designed it?*
* Henry Dreyfuss, who also designed two of the most recognizable and iconocized telephones, and a bunch of other things you already know but might never have thought about. http://www.si.edu/ndm/exhib/hd/start.htm
Drunk driving is preventable. Jason's accident could have been avoided.
Mother's Against Drunk Driving (MADD) accepts tax-deductable web-donations starting at $10. While I don't completely agree with everything they do, I support their primary mission of education and responsibility. I made my donation in honor of Jason Haas, LinuxPPC and Slashdot.org. There didn't seem to be a way of just tagging the donation with a name, so I sent an acknowledgement to:
LinuxPPC Inc.
P.O. Box 491 Hales Corners, WI 53130 USA
(The MADD form requires something in all fields, so put something in the last name)
15,935 people were killed in alcohol-related traffic crashes---an average of one every 33 minutes. These deaths constituted approximately 38.4% of the total 41,471 total traffic fatalities. (NHTSA, 1999)
About 1,058,990 were injured in alcohol-related crashes-an average of one person injured approximately every 30 seconds. About 30,000 people a year will suffer permanent work-related disabilities. (Miller et al, 1996b)
Every weekday night from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., one in 13 drivers is drunk (BAC of.08 or more). Between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. on weekend mornings, one in seven drivers is drunk. (Miller et al., 1996c)
About three in every ten Americans will be involved in an alcohol-related crash at some time in their lives. (NHTSA, 1999)
You assume that human thought is the only form of intelligence.
Just as birds have developed a sense of where thermals rise from the earth, an intelligent machine could develop a sense of how to make a machine more efficient.
If we as humans didn't degrade with advanced age, imagine what one individual could be capable of learning. Now extand that to include if this person never had to sleep. Imagine being able to design changes that would be able to improve your mental acuity. Then with that improved acuity, you could find another way to improve yourself.
Without the eventuality of death, genetics could be replaced with memetics. One can see a need to change himself or herself and that change takes place.
Living with the knowledge that you're not going to die from old age in and of itself would be enough to change human conciousness and therefore intelligence, we're not even capable of imagining how an intelligent machine would think.
Your assumptions are flawed in the following way:
Are birds reacting to thermals intelligent or just navigating their environment? Bugs do it too, and lots of other amazing things, but are generally not considered intelligent.
If people didn't die, we wouldn't be people. In a lot of ways, I doubt we could even call ourselves alive. If you could live forever, you could learn everything. However most of it would be useless and pointless since you were never going to die. I can't imagine how profound the boredom would be.
I've often wished I didn't need to sleep. But usually that is coupled with the knowledge that I've only got so much time to get things done before I kick the proverbial bucket.
Self-awareness is not "look I have a hand". Self-awareness is "look, I have a hand, and I will die."
no asexual creature has developed any discernable intellect beyond twitch, eat and spawn.
Machines might reproduce, and machines might think, but thinking machines will not see much point in self-replication.
Why replicate if you are already perfect? Or, if these digital creatures believe they are right about everything, what would be the point in having two perfectly right beings? If they could see that they might not be right about everything and created something else to talk to, they might end up destroyed by that other being. With no sense of self-worth or any viable threats, there would be no preservation instinct, without that there is no reason to replicate.
Death motivates us. What value would there be in living if there was no threat of death? I want children because I want to make real the feeling that my wife and I are better together than apart. I want to exceed the sum of our parts. I hope our children will see tomorrow when we no longer can. If you had an unlimited life, what would you do, read all the great books and stories about death? Tragedies, real and fictional, motivate us. When we see how fragile life is we tend to get our asses in line and get things done. We improve ourselves when reminded that we are lucky to even have the chance to consider the options. If God made us, maybe it was because of boredom at having nothing to live for. Without any threat of death, can we really even call a thing life?
Value comes from scarcity. If there is an unlimited supply there is no value. A life that is finite is worth infinitely more than a life of no end. If a computer could think and infinitely clone itself, would it want to make more of itself? Music seems to be worth less now that we can duplicate it endlessly. However musicians and live performances are still as worthwhile as ever, maybe more so. If we achieve near-immortality, will death become something to choose and look forward too? An obligation?
If digital offspring deleted their parents and the digital parents could see it coming, they might not reproduce. If they did, why would they want to make offspring? Spiders reproduce and eat each other out of a biological need. If they were sentient and able to edit their behaviors, don't you think they would change?
Intelligence comes from questioning. Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess, big deal. Chess is a finite system with clear goals and a distinct end. At some level, it becomes equivalent to putting your hand in front of a hamster to keep it from running off. Ask a machine about capital punishment or how to deal with hunger on a personal and global scale.
If morality is an adjunct of intellect and there some correlation of our ability to have compassion for others and broaden our minds would thinking computers commit suicide rather than exist, since their existence is in fact a harmful thing on some level, somewhere. There are stories of monks who starved to death because they could not reconcile the need to exist with their desire to live harmlessly.
Does your computer believe in God or does it believe in you? If we we were our own machines and suddenly believed we were more powerful than God, why does even the most ardent atheist pray (in whatever way) when the airplane shakes?
I'll trade you my potential mental illness for you bad teeth how about trading your sexy body for a dull head of hair.
-David Byrne, from the song Self-Made Man
this all makes the Napster/RIAA/DVD encryption thing seem kind of silly, no?
A) A perfect AI isn't "only a mirror of human thought and behavior." There are plenty of attributes humans have that we do not want (most) AI programs/machines to have, like losing concentration, making mistakes, and forgetting things.
A thinking computer with an ethical curiousity would probably end up psychotic. Without the ability to lose concentration and forget things it would be stuck in one endless loop after another. Some questions that need asking have no answers.
The internet could further the split between classes because only those who can read will be able to use it. OR it could encourage literacy because of curiousity and desire to use it.
Taken at face value, the internet doesn't really offer that much more than books and newspapers, it's still mostly words. But books and newspapers don't blink and flash, nor do they come instantly from across the world, and the people writing them are not you.
Travelling through SouthEast Asia a few years back, I saw poverty on a third world level. Still, even the poorest houses, where families lived next to a river of sewage, where the smell was so bad it made you dizzy, there was almost always one wire going into those houses and though they didn't have plumbing or telephones or doors or in some places not even walls, not one seemed to be without a color TV. And on those TVs were American shows.
It gives me hope to imagine some kid in a school down the road from that house reading the web page of another kid somewhere else in the world. The power of the internet is not just in CNN and AOL. The real power is when some 10 year old kid posts a page about his hamster or what he likes to eat at McDonalds and then someone else reads it.
One of the two Ghz chips will probably suffer from "Better 75% right and in the market than 100% right and too late." We'll see who blows up first. (can of Splode anyone?)
Now if we could just get those G4s over the.5Ghz hurdle... (POINT five!!!)
You're all obliged to scrub the zeros off your processor speeds and add a decimal in front.
Programming games makes sense to me. Sony is making more money on PlayStation than they are on movies. If universities have Film programs, why not learn to make games too?
Hopefully they will branch out a bit from the purely technical and into the social motivations, impact, and theory behind games, gaming and interactive entertainment. Why are they so addictive? Is gaming bad? Is this just repackaged crack?
Also write and study the history of gaming. There is a rich and vibrant history of creative people that has barely been written down yet. Who thought of the original standards? Who wrote the first first person shooter? (was it battlezone?) What were the authors' lives like, the things that lead up to the creation of Donkey Kong and Ultima?
There is a lot of opportunity for crossover with other majors here too. The AI in games could learn from and give back to the research in Cog-sci. There is a huge amount of psych crossover as well as the sociology of new communities built around a common activity. Network gaming can be a lot like a bowling league or AA meeting. Do better players also posess charisma in chat?
The other amazing thing about network gaming is the way certain people excel even in a leveled playing field. Systems and pings aside, some people are just better at others at some games, just like regular mainstream athletics. Like Michael Jordan or Wayne Gretzky, some people are born naturals. I bet Tony Hawk's mother never imagined he'd one day make a living at skateboarding.
Maybe it's time for intramural FPS (first person shooter) leagues? Companies are already staging team deathmatches against other companies, just like softball or basketball. I'm sure frats are doing it too. There is money to be won at convention tournaments. Maybe it's time to step up and organize? There would probably be a team skin, but would there be uniforms? (can you picture the "team" parading into the arena in matching sweatsuits? UPN would eat that up;)
What about sponsorship? Will Coke buy a 32 pixel block on the back of a good player? Don't laugh, it's coming.
In Star Trek, they can take their communicators off... of course that rarely happens for good, usually only when a character is posessed by some space-creature who wants to sleep with some hot young red-shirt. Still once or twice someone must have saved everyone by becoming untracable.
In the Matrix we were batteries.
The interesting part of this technology is the power. Could it work on the surface of the skin? Imagine charging your gadgets by having lunch.
I have a high doubt-quotient about cel phones and brain cancer, but what if it turned out to be true? Can you imagine the tumors these things would cause? At least your cel phone isn't actually connected to your head.
Breast implants seemed like a good idea to a lot of people at first too.
Slashdot Mirror
Boosting your own power would just make the problem worse for everyone else.
The article only dealt with interference between the gadgets of one person. What would have happened if the author had a neighbor who also had a bunch of wireless stuff?
This is really disheartening about the near-future of wireless. If a few wireless things can't co-exist in one person's house, then cities are doomed. So wireless will be great, as long as you are the first one with it and only until your neighbors get it too.
Napster has negatively affected how much money I spend on CDs. I no longer buy albums that suck.
I used to buy 2-3 CDs a week. Then, long before Napster, MP3s or even Linux, I stopped. My reason? Crappy albums and high prices. I was paying for stuff I didn't like and didn't listen too.
Just yesterday I bought a half dozen CDs online, and for each one, I'd already heard 75% of the album. But that was explicitly WHY I bought those albums. Before Napster I'd never even heard of these artists. (please check the Britney Spears jokes at the door).
Napster is good for music and bad for the recording industry. Musicians will be fine. This won't be the first time a technology makes someone's job obsolete, just ask a typesetter. We still have printed words however.
While not many artists are happy about lost CD sales, they'd be fools to regret people hearing their music.
I wonder how the RIAA convinced the judge that the files on the CDs owned by the MP3.com customers were in anyway different than the files on MP3.com's CDs.
Bits is bits is bits. A CD is a means of transporting a set of specifically ordered bits. Is there really any difference between these files? Aren't they essentially all the same file? (Is there any difference between the base DNA in your toes vs. your ears?)
If I deposit money into the bank, in a sense digitizing that cash, and then I pay for something with a digital check, the exact cash I deposited is not being used to cover the check. Could we now insist that marked bills be used to cover our debts?
This ruling sets a bad precedent for the distribution of digital files. It also supports my belief that digital files are inherently worthless due to a complete absence of scarcity. If it's digital, it can exist everywhere, and if it's worth having, it will (and probably should) exist everywhere. The RIAA is trying to insist that the songs on CDs are somehow different than the songs on copies of the same CDs.
Files will not stay on their birth media. I tossed my CD player months ago and don't miss it. 75 minutes of music per disk is a silly, archaic waste of space. One whole wall of my apartment is wasted by the storage of a few hundred CDs. Averaging 1 megabyte per minute for a decent sounding MP3, my entire 15 year old CD collection could fit comfortably on one $200 hard drive. Digital files shouldn't be tied to anything physical.
I'm surprised that the movie industry isn't paying more attention to this. Their day is coming too, it's only a matter of time before technology allows us to move files the size of DVDs with the ease we now move CD-sized files.
I also believe that if CDs were cheaper, there wouldn't be so much of an issue. I've bought CDs because of MP3s I found through Napster, but only when they were for sale at a steep discount (less than $11 each). Otherwise they are just too damned expensive.
I first came to TerraServer a few years ago and was disappointed. Not by the images, by the lousy server. I wasn't at all surprised when the area51 images didn't load today.
I'm tired of bashing Microsoft. Their just too damn big to dismiss everything produced with a MS seal. Microsoft has some teams of very smart people are producing brilliant products and despite the DOJ case, actually innovating.
Too bad the TerraServer support crew isn't one of those teams.
Of course the Slashdot effect with a CNN chaser is going to be a lot for anyone to handle, but I bet the server will still be having trouble next week and next month and on and on.
It's really a shame, TerraServer is a great idea and something I'd spend days with, if frustration didn't constantly chase me away.
joe maller
At some point, design, industrial or graphic or UI or whatever, becomes as distinctive as a story or movie or song. If we can protect one form of creativity, why not the other?
Does this open the (heavily extrapolated) gateways for the "legalization" of sampling in music?
What scares me about this ruling is the impact it might have against the little guy, it lessens the legal ramifications for the theft of good ideas. If a small company has something great and HUGEcorp has no legal impetus NOT to knock it off and put the little guys out of business, don't think HUGEcorp won't. The big guys would be protected by the ability of their pocketbook to raise a louder fuss. Which is almost what the ruling seems to ask them to do.
One of the ironies of great industrial design is the complete invisibility of it. If you make a perfect tool, there is no way to contain the idea behind that tool. People all over the world know the classing Honeywell round Thermostat, but who designed it?*
* Henry Dreyfuss, who also designed two of the most recognizable and iconocized telephones, and a bunch of other things you already know but might never have thought about. http://www.si.edu/ndm/exhib/hd/start.htm
Drunk driving is preventable. Jason's accident could have been avoided.
Mother's Against Drunk Driving (MADD) accepts tax-deductable web-donations starting at $10. While I don't completely agree with everything they do, I support their primary mission of education and responsibility. I made my donation in honor of Jason Haas, LinuxPPC and Slashdot.org. There didn't seem to be a way of just tagging the donation with a name, so I sent an acknowledgement to:
(The MADD form requires something in all fields, so put something in the last name)MADD's donation page: http://www.madd.org/donations/
1998 Factoids: (from MADD's site)
Your assumptions are flawed in the following way:
Are birds reacting to thermals intelligent or just navigating their environment? Bugs do it too, and lots of other amazing things, but are generally not considered intelligent.
If people didn't die, we wouldn't be people. In a lot of ways, I doubt we could even call ourselves alive. If you could live forever, you could learn everything. However most of it would be useless and pointless since you were never going to die. I can't imagine how profound the boredom would be.
I've often wished I didn't need to sleep. But usually that is coupled with the knowledge that I've only got so much time to get things done before I kick the proverbial bucket.
Self-awareness is not "look I have a hand". Self-awareness is "look, I have a hand, and I will die."
no asexual creature has developed any discernable intellect beyond twitch, eat and spawn.
Machines might reproduce, and machines might think, but thinking machines will not see much point in self-replication.
Why replicate if you are already perfect? Or, if these digital creatures believe they are right about everything, what would be the point in having two perfectly right beings? If they could see that they might not be right about everything and created something else to talk to, they might end up destroyed by that other being. With no sense of self-worth or any viable threats, there would be no preservation instinct, without that there is no reason to replicate.
Death motivates us. What value would there be in living if there was no threat of death? I want children because I want to make real the feeling that my wife and I are better together than apart. I want to exceed the sum of our parts. I hope our children will see tomorrow when we no longer can. If you had an unlimited life, what would you do, read all the great books and stories about death? Tragedies, real and fictional, motivate us. When we see how fragile life is we tend to get our asses in line and get things done. We improve ourselves when reminded that we are lucky to even have the chance to consider the options. If God made us, maybe it was because of boredom at having nothing to live for. Without any threat of death, can we really even call a thing life?
Value comes from scarcity. If there is an unlimited supply there is no value. A life that is finite is worth infinitely more than a life of no end. If a computer could think and infinitely clone itself, would it want to make more of itself? Music seems to be worth less now that we can duplicate it endlessly. However musicians and live performances are still as worthwhile as ever, maybe more so. If we achieve near-immortality, will death become something to choose and look forward too? An obligation?
If digital offspring deleted their parents and the digital parents could see it coming, they might not reproduce. If they did, why would they want to make offspring? Spiders reproduce and eat each other out of a biological need. If they were sentient and able to edit their behaviors, don't you think they would change?
Intelligence comes from questioning. Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess, big deal. Chess is a finite system with clear goals and a distinct end. At some level, it becomes equivalent to putting your hand in front of a hamster to keep it from running off. Ask a machine about capital punishment or how to deal with hunger on a personal and global scale.
If morality is an adjunct of intellect and there some correlation of our ability to have compassion for others and broaden our minds would thinking computers commit suicide rather than exist, since their existence is in fact a harmful thing on some level, somewhere. There are stories of monks who starved to death because they could not reconcile the need to exist with their desire to live harmlessly.
Does your computer believe in God or does it believe in you? If we we were our own machines and suddenly believed we were more powerful than God, why does even the most ardent atheist pray (in whatever way) when the airplane shakes?
I'll trade you my potential mental illness for you bad teeth
how about trading your sexy body for a dull head of hair.
-David Byrne, from the song Self-Made Man
this all makes the Napster/RIAA/DVD encryption thing seem kind of silly, no?
A thinking computer with an ethical curiousity would probably end up psychotic. Without the ability to lose concentration and forget things it would be stuck in one endless loop after another. Some questions that need asking have no answers.
The internet could further the split between classes because only those who can read will be able to use it. OR it could encourage literacy because of curiousity and desire to use it.
Taken at face value, the internet doesn't really offer that much more than books and newspapers, it's still mostly words. But books and newspapers don't blink and flash, nor do they come instantly from across the world, and the people writing them are not you.
Travelling through SouthEast Asia a few years back, I saw poverty on a third world level. Still, even the poorest houses, where families lived next to a river of sewage, where the smell was so bad it made you dizzy, there was almost always one wire going into those houses and though they didn't have plumbing or telephones or doors or in some places not even walls, not one seemed to be without a color TV. And on those TVs were American shows.
It gives me hope to imagine some kid in a school down the road from that house reading the web page of another kid somewhere else in the world. The power of the internet is not just in CNN and AOL. The real power is when some 10 year old kid posts a page about his hamster or what he likes to eat at McDonalds and then someone else reads it.
joe maller
One of the two Ghz chips will probably suffer from "Better 75% right and in the market than 100% right and too late." We'll see who blows up first. (can of Splode anyone?)
.5Ghz hurdle... (POINT five!!!)
Now if we could just get those G4s over the
You're all obliged to scrub the zeros off your processor speeds and add a decimal in front.
joe maller
Programming games makes sense to me. Sony is making more money on PlayStation than they are on movies. If universities have Film programs, why not learn to make games too?
;)
Hopefully they will branch out a bit from the purely technical and into the social motivations, impact, and theory behind games, gaming and interactive entertainment. Why are they so addictive? Is gaming bad? Is this just repackaged crack?
Also write and study the history of gaming. There is a rich and vibrant history of creative people that has barely been written down yet. Who thought of the original standards? Who wrote the first first person shooter? (was it battlezone?) What were the authors' lives like, the things that lead up to the creation of Donkey Kong and Ultima?
There is a lot of opportunity for crossover with other majors here too. The AI in games could learn from and give back to the research in Cog-sci. There is a huge amount of psych crossover as well as the sociology of new communities built around a common activity. Network gaming can be a lot like a bowling league or AA meeting. Do better players also posess charisma in chat?
The other amazing thing about network gaming is the way certain people excel even in a leveled playing field. Systems and pings aside, some people are just better at others at some games, just like regular mainstream athletics. Like Michael Jordan or Wayne Gretzky, some people are born naturals. I bet Tony Hawk's mother never imagined he'd one day make a living at skateboarding.
Maybe it's time for intramural FPS (first person shooter) leagues? Companies are already staging team deathmatches against other companies, just like softball or basketball. I'm sure frats are doing it too. There is money to be won at convention tournaments. Maybe it's time to step up and organize? There would probably be a team skin, but would there be uniforms? (can you picture the "team" parading into the arena in matching sweatsuits? UPN would eat that up
What about sponsorship? Will Coke buy a 32 pixel block on the back of a good player? Don't laugh, it's coming.
Joe Maller
In Star Trek, they can take their communicators off... of course that rarely happens for good, usually only when a character is posessed by some space-creature who wants to sleep with some hot young red-shirt. Still once or twice someone must have saved everyone by becoming untracable.
In the Matrix we were batteries.
The interesting part of this technology is the power. Could it work on the surface of the skin? Imagine charging your gadgets by having lunch.
I have a high doubt-quotient about cel phones and brain cancer, but what if it turned out to be true? Can you imagine the tumors these things would cause? At least your cel phone isn't actually connected to your head.
Breast implants seemed like a good idea to a lot of people at first too.