I will assume gOCR can do a better job than this (but not by default it seems):
$ time ( curl "www2.cityofseattle.net/fire/realTime911/sfdIncide ntList.jpg" 2>/dev/null | djpeg -pnm -gray | gocr - | tee sfdIncidentList.txt | head )
Date/Time: Incident #: Level: Units: Location: Type:
lO/l5/2OO6 l5:l5 FO6OlOl624 l E38 6563 Ne Windermere Rd _id Response Yellow
lO/l5/2OO6 l5:l4 FO6OlOl623 l E29 M32 l7O3 California Av Sw Medic Response
lO/l5/2OO6 l5:l2 FO6OlOl622 l E39 l2O5l 32nd _v Ne Wires Down
lO/l5/2OO6 l5:O8 FO6OlOl62l l L3 23OO E _esler Way Aid Response
lO/l5/2OO6 l4:58 FO6OlOl62O l A2 l6Ol 4th Av Aid Response
lO/l5/2OO6 l4:4l FO6OlOl6l7 l E3l lOO49 College Way N Aid Response
lO/l5/2OO6 l4:4O FO6OlOl6l6 l El7 43l8 lst Av Ne Aid Response
lO/l5/2OO6 l4:22 FO6OlOl6l4 l A2 2O3O 3rd Av Aid Response
lO/l5/2OO6 l3:47 FO6OlOl6O8 l L5 l47Ol Dayton Av N Rescue EIevator
You're forgetting various local dark ages. EG, the decline of the Egyptian empire from Saharan desertification, for an easy example. Progress was on a downturn for a while.
The various darkages amounted to very slight S-curve speedbumps on the overall exponential curve.
Some elements would remain intrisincally scarce & valuable, but I don't think I'd classify energy as one of the last remaining scarcities, at least on a scale of normal human consumption. You could essentially bootstrap your own solar collection and storage hardware depending on level of need.
Moleculary disassembling/assembling objects' bonds shouldn't take much more energy than a potato needs from the sun to grow naturally (though much more slowly), and for objects that wouldn't need to be assembled with atomic perfection, there could be a "lego" building-block version to further reduce energy & time requirements.
(As for Kurzweil's weird diet - he just wants to live long enough to see it, and he probably will.)
Sure, nobody can know for certain what the future will bring specifically, but one incontrovertable observation is that since the beginning of time overall progress has been accelerating exponentially.
The closest real-world parallel to Hari Seldon's "Future History" would be Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns (a generalized "Moore's Law"), which makes the point that all evolutionary processes building on past progress accelerate exponentially, and it's only towards the knee-end of the curve -- like now -- that you notice the most change.
Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics/AI (GNR) will play a huge part in the coming decades; the only question is how well we'll be able to guide how it all unfolds. Take for example just one implication of advanced nanotech: The Molecular Manufacturing "replicator" in every home -- at the same time such a device creates vast "wealth without money" for the poorest of people, it also removes concentrated power from the former elite, which in of itself isn't a bad thing except that we're... only human, so the primitive-reaction could be bad.
It's my opinion that it's actually in our best interest to make sure that we either merge with AI, or that benevolent AI "take over" before our selfish monkey-brain fucks everything up with the increasingly powerful tech at our disposal.
That was my takeaway message as well -- not the expected frauds, but that Samsung managed to get the video pulled so easily.
It's not suprising in the least that lame stealth marketing will eventually worm its influence wherever it can. The only real fix for the "unauthentic slimeball problem" is a reputation system that works.
Tor's not a real hassle to use, but it is slow (just like FreeNet is), and always will be.
To use Tor, simply install it, then tell your browser (or privoxy proxy) to use the socks proxy on port 9050 (or wherever). Nothing much can be done about the sluggish latency and low bandwidth, though, because for true anonymity to work you just HAVE to relay through a certain random number of random nodes of various quality. So instead of taking 15 fast intra-country hops to reach Google, it might take 100+ hops all over the globe and back, with each hop being another weak link in the chain.
Speed is the #1 reason I don't use Tor much... except for the rare occasion when I need to upload beheading videos^W^W^W send ransom notes^W^W^W troll IRC^W^W hide p2p downloads^W^W^W research something privately.
Let us count thee ways that a notification sticker MUST be removed before the router can be used:
Print a EULA on the sticker that reads: "By removing (or even not removing) this sticker, you agree to provide your neighbors with free wifi because you're a nice person; not because you're stupid."
Make the sticker conductive and place it over a waste-of-money-one-time-use-short-circuit.
Make it from a faraday cage-type material that's in the shape of a tube and initially installed over the antenna; market it as a security feature for tinfoil hat wearers.
or... the boring alternative: place it over the DC power input and ethernet ports (if any)
What I don't understand is why people feel they have this sense of entitlement to copyrighted commercial content, just because it can be easily copied.
You answered your own question in that sentence.
If something is not (artificially) scarce, then it's only natural for the grabbing hands to grab all they can, because it doesn't "feel" wrong to dip in and share the abundance. Consideration of initial/future production costs (which isn't so abundant) of something with zero reproduction costs only factors in when the relationship between consumer and producer gets more personal.
Here's an unworkable idea: A red/yellow/green "health meter" associated with each work which gets updated to show how much more money is needed to break even on initial costs, and another meter to show how much more profit is needed to satisfy the producers greed.
"... secretary-day is more broadly celebrated. Other odd thing: my wife is a nurse, and there exists a nurse-day here."
Hmm. I wonder if it has anything to do with secretaries and nurses generally being women? And maybe something to do with blowjobs? How many sysadmins give BJs? There's your answer right there.
I don't expect the AC who posted this to ever read my reply, but...
whoa... you totally remind me of this dude on the futurehi.net blog I used to visit (until it got too overly hippy-druggy-spiritual and shit). Very trippy.:-)
A much better site to compare CMS's is OpenSourceCMS.com. They're all OpenSource and PHP-based, which is many, but you won't find Plone and some others there. At least you can do a live demo of them all without having to localinstall it first, and you can view the popularity ratings.
I've been back to the site a few times to check out the state of the CMS-space, but I still rank Drupal, Xoops, Joomla/Mambo, and MODx at the top.
Since when have futurists have gotten anything right? If we believe them we would all be enjoying our flying cars, that can interact with us using voice control.
Yet another wheres-my-flying-car-cynic eh?:)
You see, Bad futurists attempt to predict specific inventions at specific far-future dates while 1) ignoring the facts; 2) forgetting to ask whether anyone *wants* the projected product or situation; 3) ignoring the costs; 4) and trying to predict which company or technology will win. These are the type of futurists that sell the most books and most people have their hope-bubbles bursted by.
Accurate futurists, like Ray Kurzweil, extrapolate more general trends into the future based on the very predictable history of exponential technological acceleration. e.g. I can say with certainty that I'll be able to buy a 1 Terabyte HD in 2007 for under $0.50 per GB, but I can't tell you if someone will have invented the next tech to begin the paradigm shift to the medium with a better price/performance ratio than spinning platters.
... what our goals will become past the singularity, does anyone have any guesses?
A: MAXIMIZE HAPPINESS.
It's exactly what we do today, but material scarcity and the nastier remnants of our evolutionary psychology make it difficult. (i.e. "ugh! kill THEM! get stuff. be alpha-male! get pretty women! have kids.")
I guess if that doesn't work out, we can use our tech to hit the "reset button" on all matter we've added order to and start over at the ignorance is bliss stage. Effectively suicide without a trace.
The past "singularities" you cite (e.g. agricultural revolution) were actually punctuated S-curve periods of progress that happened at a rate slow enough for the human mind to adapt to.
*THE* Singularity -- that Vinge, Kurzweil, Moravec, Yudkowski, and many others smart enough to extrapolate the evidence can't "shut up" about -- is where the exponential curve is near vertical. It's where the primitive bio-human brain can no longer keep up with the accelerating change; hence the need to transcend or die at that point (2030 - 2050).
It's nothing to be afraid of. Either most of us living today will get to see The Singularity, or our primitive-brain VS. accelerating-tech will finally fuck it all up and none of us will see it. Maybe the brewing "WW3" in the middle east is how we'll join the club of "missing" alien races of Fermi's Paradox?
I'd rather live free and live with the vry remote possiblity of dying in a terrorist attach than having my Government take my rights away to protect my Freedom!
Haven't you been watching 24? You need to get a proper dose of conditioning.
Government heros like Jack Bauer NEED total information awareness, and they need the authority to shoot then decapitate your uncle in order to save us all from a nuke. A NUKE!!! Ahhhgg! You're panicked too, right?!
Yet the snow-plow driver was forced on me, in this case, against my will. My town has no public-paid snow plow: each block pays for its own company.
Sounds just like you'd also like to bring back to the days of the private fire deparments where no badge on your door meant they'd let your house burn to the ground since you hadn't payed up.
Get a grip, Mr. Ultra-Freemarket nutjob... *hiccup*
You're one of the few people on slashdot whose nick I recognize by virtue of the sheer volume of your posts that get modded up to 5. When I see your dada nick I immediately think to myself "ah man... high probability of some well-written bullshit. And I wonder if he's going to take yet another opportunity to yack about his businesses.":)
So, something like a Experts-exchange Q&A forum, except... over IM?:)
The only real way it could work (well) in realtime would be with a VERY LARGE pool of people, and/or with better AI expert agents down the road. You're right about the database having to be freely available though.
As for incentive: done right, micropayment BS money isn't it - reputation and "altruism" is. e.g. If you want some live help now on opensource subjects, you can join an IRC server like FreeNode, then pick the topic/#channel, and ask away.
Add 5X Seagate 320GB SATA2 drives @ $100 each, which comes to $773 total for a 1,280GB RAID5 NAS box. Not too shabby. Could get the drives even cheaper than $0.31/GB by waiting for a better with-rebate-hassle deal.
Biggest downsides to this kinda of thing: 1) setup time for h/w and s/w 2) no easy hotswap bays with blinken LEDs to tell you "THIS DRIVE IS DEAD/DYING; REPLACE ME!", so you have to rely on mdadm alert emails and SMART monitoring, then crack the case open and KNOW the sata order so you replace the RIGHT sdX drive. 3) ugly and bigger than it needs to be
When some company comes along and sells a 5-6 drive raid5 box like this for $150-$250 (instead of triple that) I bet it'll be a HUGE hit.
Ads don't have to dominate. And not everything has to be or even wants to be monetized.
Ultimately, I don't think the post-advertising/non-subscription business model has been discovered yet.
Oh I think it's been discovered, but both technology and people aren't quite ready for it yet. Namely: accelerating GNR (genetics, nanotech, robotics (AI)) tech will allow for an economy of abundance (of the immaterial AND material) which will make conventional business-trade and incentives for doing/producing obsolete. Once the mass of humanity is freed from the need to scramble for scarce necessities, the world changes for the better (as long as we can keep the ol' Will To Power in check).
Slashdot Mirror
The various darkages amounted to very slight S-curve speedbumps on the overall exponential curve.
Some elements would remain intrisincally scarce & valuable, but I don't think I'd classify energy as one of the last remaining scarcities, at least on a scale of normal human consumption. You could essentially bootstrap your own solar collection and storage hardware depending on level of need.
Moleculary disassembling/assembling objects' bonds shouldn't take much more energy than a potato needs from the sun to grow naturally (though much more slowly), and for objects that wouldn't need to be assembled with atomic perfection, there could be a "lego" building-block version to further reduce energy & time requirements.
(As for Kurzweil's weird diet - he just wants to live long enough to see it, and he probably will.)
Sure, nobody can know for certain what the future will bring specifically, but one incontrovertable observation is that since the beginning of time overall progress has been accelerating exponentially.
The closest real-world parallel to Hari Seldon's "Future History" would be Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns (a generalized "Moore's Law"), which makes the point that all evolutionary processes building on past progress accelerate exponentially, and it's only towards the knee-end of the curve -- like now -- that you notice the most change.
Genetics, Nanotechnology, and Robotics/AI (GNR) will play a huge part in the coming decades; the only question is how well we'll be able to guide how it all unfolds. Take for example just one implication of advanced nanotech: The Molecular Manufacturing "replicator" in every home -- at the same time such a device creates vast "wealth without money" for the poorest of people, it also removes concentrated power from the former elite, which in of itself isn't a bad thing except that we're... only human, so the primitive-reaction could be bad.
It's my opinion that it's actually in our best interest to make sure that we either merge with AI, or that benevolent AI "take over" before our selfish monkey-brain fucks everything up with the increasingly powerful tech at our disposal.
So please, ad people, continue bringing us your Wazzaaaaaa's and your Geico Gekkos and your dancing transforming cars
All obvious ads. It's different when the ad is lie. i.e. faked word of mouth opinion.
That was my takeaway message as well -- not the expected frauds, but that Samsung managed to get the video pulled so easily.
It's not suprising in the least that lame stealth marketing will eventually worm its influence wherever it can. The only real fix for the "unauthentic slimeball problem" is a reputation system that works.
Tor's not a real hassle to use, but it is slow (just like FreeNet is), and always will be.
To use Tor, simply install it, then tell your browser (or privoxy proxy) to use the socks proxy on port 9050 (or wherever). Nothing much can be done about the sluggish latency and low bandwidth, though, because for true anonymity to work you just HAVE to relay through a certain random number of random nodes of various quality. So instead of taking 15 fast intra-country hops to reach Google, it might take 100+ hops all over the globe and back, with each hop being another weak link in the chain.
Speed is the #1 reason I don't use Tor much... except for the rare occasion when I need to upload beheading videos^W^W^W send ransom notes^W^W^W troll IRC^W^W hide p2p downloads^W^W^W research something privately.
Perfectly safe for work; there's nothing to see except for 1 tiny dot that might (*gasp*) be a cartoon nipple.
The fuckin' prudes banned it over that?
My money's on #1.
You answered your own question in that sentence.
If something is not (artificially) scarce, then it's only natural for the grabbing hands to grab all they can, because it doesn't "feel" wrong to dip in and share the abundance. Consideration of initial/future production costs (which isn't so abundant) of something with zero reproduction costs only factors in when the relationship between consumer and producer gets more personal.
Here's an unworkable idea:
A red/yellow/green "health meter" associated with each work which gets updated to show how much more money is needed to break even on initial costs, and another meter to show how much more profit is needed to satisfy the producers greed.
That's subclassified under "1a) Theory." :)
#3 == a carrot for weak minds && a stick for the church.
You misspelled "hypocrite" || "gay".
Hmm. I wonder if it has anything to do with secretaries and nurses generally being women? And maybe something to do with blowjobs? How many sysadmins give BJs? There's your answer right there.
whoa... you totally remind me of this dude on the futurehi.net blog I used to visit (until it got too overly hippy-druggy-spiritual and shit). Very trippy.
A much better site to compare CMS's is OpenSourceCMS.com. They're all OpenSource and PHP-based, which is many, but you won't find Plone and some others there. At least you can do a live demo of them all without having to localinstall it first, and you can view the popularity ratings.
I've been back to the site a few times to check out the state of the CMS-space, but I still rank Drupal, Xoops, Joomla/Mambo, and MODx at the top.
Yet another wheres-my-flying-car-cynic eh?
You see, Bad futurists attempt to predict specific inventions at specific far-future dates while 1) ignoring the facts; 2) forgetting to ask whether anyone *wants* the projected product or situation; 3) ignoring the costs; 4) and trying to predict which company or technology will win. These are the type of futurists that sell the most books and most people have their hope-bubbles bursted by.
Accurate futurists, like Ray Kurzweil, extrapolate more general trends into the future based on the very predictable history of exponential technological acceleration. e.g. I can say with certainty that I'll be able to buy a 1 Terabyte HD in 2007 for under $0.50 per GB, but I can't tell you if someone will have invented the next tech to begin the paradigm shift to the medium with a better price/performance ratio than spinning platters.
A: MAXIMIZE HAPPINESS.
It's exactly what we do today, but material scarcity and the nastier remnants of our evolutionary psychology make it difficult. (i.e. "ugh! kill THEM! get stuff. be alpha-male! get pretty women! have kids.")
At some point we will have to engineer the innate "evil" out of our primate/reptilian brain in order to continue MAXIMIZATION OF OVERALL HAPPINESS. Post-human > human.
I guess if that doesn't work out, we can use our tech to hit the "reset button" on all matter we've added order to and start over at the ignorance is bliss stage. Effectively suicide without a trace.
The past "singularities" you cite (e.g. agricultural revolution) were actually punctuated S-curve periods of progress that happened at a rate slow enough for the human mind to adapt to.
*THE* Singularity -- that Vinge, Kurzweil, Moravec, Yudkowski, and many others smart enough to extrapolate the evidence can't "shut up" about -- is where the exponential curve is near vertical. It's where the primitive bio-human brain can no longer keep up with the accelerating change; hence the need to transcend or die at that point (2030 - 2050).
It's nothing to be afraid of. Either most of us living today will get to see The Singularity, or our primitive-brain VS. accelerating-tech will finally fuck it all up and none of us will see it. Maybe the brewing "WW3" in the middle east is how we'll join the club of "missing" alien races of Fermi's Paradox?
Haven't you been watching 24? You need to get a proper dose of conditioning.
Government heros like Jack Bauer NEED total information awareness, and they need the authority to shoot then decapitate your uncle in order to save us all from a nuke. A NUKE!!! Ahhhgg! You're panicked too, right?!
The exception is the rule. 24/7.
Yet the snow-plow driver was forced on me, in this case, against my will. My town has no public-paid snow plow: each block pays for its own company.
:)
Sounds just like you'd also like to bring back to the days of the private fire deparments where no badge on your door meant they'd let your house burn to the ground since you hadn't payed up.
Get a grip, Mr. Ultra-Freemarket nutjob... *hiccup*
You're one of the few people on slashdot whose nick I recognize by virtue of the sheer volume of your posts that get modded up to 5. When I see your dada nick I immediately think to myself "ah man... high probability of some well-written bullshit. And I wonder if he's going to take yet another opportunity to yack about his businesses."
The only real way it could work (well) in realtime would be with a VERY LARGE pool of people, and/or with better AI expert agents down the road. You're right about the database having to be freely available though.
As for incentive: done right, micropayment BS money isn't it - reputation and "altruism" is. e.g. If you want some live help now on opensource subjects, you can join an IRC server like FreeNode, then pick the topic/#channel, and ask away.
Just to see how reasonably low I could go, I spec'd out an even cheaper do-it-yourself Micro-ATX software raid5 box:
$34-44 - MicroATX MINI-tower case w/ 300-400W PSU, 4x int 3.5" bays + 1-2x ext 3.5" (or 5.25" bays w/ brackets)
$79 - MicroATX Asus Socket 939 MB w/ 4x SATA2, 2x PATA, pci-e, gigabit, integrated vid&audio
$92 - AMD Athlon64 3000+ (cheapest socket 939 cpu)
$22-$40 - 256MB DDR400 (or $40 for 512)
$25 - 1GB CompactFlash (80X)
$12 - IDE-CF Adapter
$14 - 1x SATA PCI-e controller (1 + 4 onboard = 5x sata and no PATA crap); micro-atx MBs with more than 4x sata aren't common. Would like 6x for a hotspare option.
$0 - FreeNAS, or roll your own.
= $278 - $306
Add 5X Seagate 320GB SATA2 drives @ $100 each, which comes to $773 total for a 1,280GB RAID5 NAS box. Not too shabby. Could get the drives even cheaper than $0.31/GB by waiting for a better with-rebate-hassle deal.
Biggest downsides to this kinda of thing:
1) setup time for h/w and s/w
2) no easy hotswap bays with blinken LEDs to tell you "THIS DRIVE IS DEAD/DYING; REPLACE ME!", so you have to rely on mdadm alert emails and SMART monitoring, then crack the case open and KNOW the sata order so you replace the RIGHT sdX drive.
3) ugly and bigger than it needs to be
When some company comes along and sells a 5-6 drive raid5 box like this for $150-$250 (instead of triple that) I bet it'll be a HUGE hit.
Why so much wasted effort just to hide some pr0n from mommy & daddy | a roomate?
Stick it in ~/pr0n, or MAYBE ~/.pr0n, and quit being a sneaky hypocrite.
Quite a few actually - you've probably just never heard of them:
Ads don't have to dominate. And not everything has to be or even wants to be monetized.
Ultimately, I don't think the post-advertising/non-subscription business model has been discovered yet.
Oh I think it's been discovered, but both technology and people aren't quite ready for it yet. Namely: accelerating GNR (genetics, nanotech, robotics (AI)) tech will allow for an economy of abundance (of the immaterial AND material) which will make conventional business-trade and incentives for doing/producing obsolete. Once the mass of humanity is freed from the need to scramble for scarce necessities, the world changes for the better (as long as we can keep the ol' Will To Power in check).