you give away the infinite goods, not the scarce goods. Your time is a scarce good.
This works well if you are a consulting house. But the danger is that you are so scarce
that you cannot replicate yourself fast enough for support, so you will not support what
you do either. Someone else will, and you'll risk having nothing because you've given away
the only thing that you truly owned, which was the part you contributed.
This also takes a dim view of what you are contributing, as if the only part of coding was
implementation. Good design is, alas, not copyrightable, and so is difficult to protect.
But that doesn't mean it wasn't scarce. It just means there isn't good protection for that
kind of scarcity. And since many participants in the discussion are predisposed to think that
protection of any kind of intellectual property is bad just because they've seen some things
in intellectual property that it was demonstrably bad to protect, the possibility of
adding intellectual property protection of one kind or another doesn't occur.
I actually think a lot of the problems of IP protection are due to the duration of the protection
and not the fact of it (though I do agree there are also things that are protected foolishly).
My point is that if they expired quickly, it wouldn't matter much if there were mistakes made
favoring creators, but it would give the creator time to negotiate before the fact that he created
something was irrelevant because everyone else had it and was exploiting it to their advantage,
not to his.
You leave out literary devices like sarcasm, hyperbole, and irony which require neither of those.
Your response fits into none of those categories.
I couldn't remember the name of the formal category name of the speech.
Another poster suggested the term "tongue in cheek", which works for me.
But I don't have to be able to name the construct in order to be allowed to use it.
A construct I can name is a simile, though. That's where one uses the word "like".
Like in the text I wrote that you quoted.
When saying "like x", I'm not
saying "literally x". Those are just examples, but extensions not included in that enumeration
which are of similar character are implied.
Hence, saying that something isn't literally x is not a refutation of "like x".
I don't plan to respond further in this subthread to this level of silliness.
(I've voluntarily removed my own karma bonus on this one since I already imagine most people are not interested.)
I thought I was gracious in quietly skipping past the ad hominem accusations in one of the parent posts
and still trying to speak to the substance. It's fine with me if you remain unconvinced. It only underscores
my point about the fact that it's hard to get world-wide consensus on anything, and hence that any plan that
relies on world-wide even-handedness in policy application is not likely to be a success.
Well, if you "absolutely understand that", then statements like "David Brin should be thrilled [about China's surveillance society]" are either deliberate misrepresentation or unacceptable carelessness.
You leave out literary devices like sarcasm, hyperbole, and irony which require neither of those.
I didn't misrepresent what Brin says, I didn't say that much about it, other than that I don't think
it's a practical situation one can get to. And if he thinks otherwise, I was suggesting the burden is
on him to show why.
Maybe he merely believes that it is already useful to point out that there is a possibility for a solution that people hadn't considered before.
Well, of course, the question of whether others had considered and merely discarded it is hard to measure.
But more than that, he seems to be advocating at level that says more than "this is an idea" but more at
the level of "this is a good idea". I happen to have an aversion to ideas that are potentially
good if implemented
completely and almost certainly bad right up until the moment of total completion...especially if failing to finish completely is what
I percieve as the most likely outcome.
I think this is what's behind people's clinging to the US Second Amendment,
by the way. Giving away your gun if you knew for sure everyone else was going to might almost make sense,
but if you thought anyone would be left who didn't, it explains why you'd be nervous.
But cameras and guns are a lot similar in this regard.
To some degree, the US Second Amendment protects the right of the people to maintain enough power that if a government ran out of control, the people could fix it. But no
one talks about that any more because that would mean admitting private citizens have a constitutional right to
own nuclear weapons, for parity. So now citizens can own deer hunting rifles and the government can own nukes. That doesn't achieve parity. Likewise with cameras, we're all allowed a pocket camera and the government is allowed
a ubiquitous network of surveillance cameras. That's not the vision Brin is offering, but it is the more likely
practical effect if you roll this out. Even if the government promised to allow parity, it wouldn't happen.
Exceptions would be made and anyone who tried to find those exceptions would be rounded up more quickly than they
could rouse rabble.
Just saying it should happen right on its own and it's
people's own fault if they don't just all decide to do it is vacuous. Like saying that the problem with crime
prevention is that people don't all decide one day to be on the same side of the law.
The beauty of language, and the joy of books of fantasy,
is that it's possible to construct descriptions of things that cannot be.
The burden of the citizenry in a democracy is to somehow discern plans for what can be from those that cannot.
I'm not criticizing Brin's ability to spin a good yarn, I'm suggesting he isn't the right person to lead
the real world to Utopia.
Brin doesn't advocate a surveillance state. In Brin's vision, information is available about everyone to everyone, including government officials.
Oh, I absolutely understand that. I saw him at a Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference a few years back and chatted with him a little about this in the after-talk mingle, so
I don't think I'm too confused about what his position is. At least I had a chance, while standing there incredulous, to ask him if he really believed that.
(Those are great conferences, by the way, and there's one coming up in New Haven next week. I don't
have any clue if Brin will go, and don't much care,
but there's always something good on the agenda in my experience, and I wanted to slip in a plug.)
But my point is that it has to be at least a presupposition of his (or anyone's) if you're going to entertain
this as other than a philosophical exercise to say that you have to "get there from here". So they've done part
of Brin's vision--my point is: How do we get them to do the rest? Because I think the problem with Brin's vision
is that you can't ever under any forseeable circumstances get everyone to do the rest. The world is always going
to be full of power imbalances, and there will always be someone wanting to keep it that way. So it's just a
fantasy to say it could be done. That's why I pointed to this article in my prior post.
If Brin believes it's possible to motivate people to
all at the same time do something in the public interest that way, first of all, his energy is better spent on
getting people to all believe in Global Climate Change, because that's a much more pressing problem and affects
us all and yet we can't get people to agree on that either. But either way, it's time for him to put his
money where his mouth is, so to speak, and say what the next step is toward Utopia because I'm as tired of his
proposed non-solution as I am of some of hearing of some of the non-solutions being pursued for Climate Change.
Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed
Well, who can blame them really?
They've got to be preparing to do something with all that
high tech manufacturing capacity they've got
once the economic bottom falls out of the US purchasing market.
I can hardly wait to find out how the analogous situation in the robot
manufacturing area plays out.
Fortunately, with all those 200,000 cameras, I should have no trouble
sitting back and watching it on TV. Robots can't move across water
can they? No, probably only in science fiction.
Ok, that's silly. No one would ever do anything bad with robots.
Let's just stick to the issue of cameras and overcapacity...
Is this project at least "green"?
Have they at least planned for environmentally friendly ways of disposing of this
many cameras when version 2.0 comes along? Well, maybe the US can by them second-hand
as part of some sort of secret arms deal when it hasn't the money to buy them nor
the factories to make them. Reduce, reuse, recycle... It's a grand
tradition in the international weapons market, which in some ways seems to have pioneered the whole
"green" movement now that I think about it. But, oh, that's right. Cameras aren't weapons.
Never mind.
In other words, we can find every political activist, dissident and extremist in China,
using only five percent of our security/monitoring capacity.
Governments, including ours, "sell" these societal strategies to their citizens as crime-fighting tools.
The citizens like low-cost tools because they have fantasies about their taxes going down, etc.
But also, J.Q.Public probably often assumes crimes are things like stolen purses or
muggers. But such uses are very "small fry" and no serious government is
going to build a whole societal surveillance system for so limited a purpose.
Long ago, I had my car broken into in a major US city. When the police arrived,
I asked them if they were going to fingerprint it, etc. It seemed plausible they would
get some good prints. They just laughed.
Only for capital crimes, they explained. It just isn't worth the time and trouble otherwise.
And probably it's only used for capital crimes because they get public exposure.
That probably accounts for why there are racial disparities in which capital crimes get followed up.
Even there, it is (sadly) probably not really about the severity of the crime, it is more
likely about its political impact.
The real crimes, the ones that motivate a government,
are those of disagreeing with who's in power in that government or what that power is being used for.
When finished, it will dwarf London's surveillance system.
David Brin
should be thrilled. Maybe we can nominate him as our ambassador to ask
them if perhaps they might not mind filling in the missing details required to make this a true Utopia
under his model. I'm sure he has lots of ideas for how that's supposed
to work.
hardburn:
The average success rates for most businesses is also about 1 in 10.
Anonymous Coward: [citation needed]
Well, your mileage may vary, but I didn't take the point of hardburn's post to to be that
he was offering precise data to be taken to the bank, nor do I think the absence of a citation
invalidates the point. I took the statement to be a
stylized way of asking
"is it clear that this failure rate is special to the business domain?"
Or, put another way, "is the choice of business domain driving these businesses
down artificially, or is it the same thing that drives all businesses down: failure
to keep an eye on the business need?" Even in the summary, the statement:
From the article: Realistic graphics and physical behavior count for little unless the presence is valued by and engaging to a large audience.
highlights an issue that seems certain to bring down plenty
of companies (who cares the precise number?) if they fail to attend to a material customer need for which
people will be willing to pay.
After the so-called dot-com bust, for example,
there seemed to be a sense that investing
in things named ".com" was risky or bad. Surely people had lost money investing in this or that dot com. But not because of the name ".com". That was just smokescreen designed by some skillful person interested in face-saving
to say "It's ok you lost money here. Don't be embarrassed. It wasn't something you could have forseen. It was due to the nature of the market." But in quite a lot of cases it wasn't. It was due to the
idea of investing in something you didn't understand and that never had a clearly articulated plan for making
money in the first place. And learning that the absence of such a plan is going to lead to problems wasn't
news... or shouldn't have been.
So whether the poster can back that specific pseudo-statistic with a citation or not,
I still think the apparent point seems valid.
WindBourne: Do you really want us to go the way of the dinosaurs when it is in our powers to place us on mars?
Uh, actually, if you go back and re-read what I wrote, you'll see I made a specific exception for that. From my post:
Netsettler: Then again, if we were going to make a near-term intensive effort to establish a permanent self-sustaining base off-planet, I'd be all for it even with Climate Change dollars. It would seem prudent both as a backup/insurance plan in case we mess up this planet...
Much though I love the research involved, the parts of the NASA budget that I just can't see justifying
with near-term dollars given the other problems we have to solve on earth are things to do with deep space
exploration like Hubble. I'm not saying give up on space. I'm just say concentrate on the stuff that makes
sense in the short term, and make it a goal to get civilization back to where it has a long-term worth
caring about.
As much as I would love the idea of Space Exploration, I'd trade away the budget for serious
efforts on Climate Change, since a number of the things we might learn in Space will
be irrelevant if we don't solve Climate Change so that we survive at all.
Then again, if we were going to make a near-term
intensive effort to establish a permanent self-sustaining base off-planet, I'd be all for it
even with Climate Change dollars.
It would seem prudent
both as a backup/insurance plan in case we mess up this planet
(eliminating some of the "single point of failure" problem we have looming now)
and also as a way of
gaining data about how to live in inhospitable places (like the Earth is on track to be).
Just about any dollars spent on how to manage atmospheres, grow food in artificially controlled ways,
etc. seems money well spent. I think the key to making Space palatable for the nearterm is to
keep the expenses targeted to those with direct applicability.
I've recently started to shift my views on the ethics of Terraforming Mars, as Earth's habitability
hangs in the balance, and to start to question the ethics of not doing so.
It would be fun to discover Life there, but if the price is preserving a few potential microbes there
at the expense of possibly losing valuable data that could help to preserve our own planet,
that seems a steep and selfish price. Mars is a resource, not to be exploited commercially (which is
somewhat how we got into the Climate Change mess), but that might be used strategically. So is the Moon, for that matter, to the extent we can make anything useful of that.
Sadly, I doubt that either Space or Climate will get attention. Instead, we'll get
gas tax holidays so we can keep burning oil until we're like Venus and can't even see the sky.
A list of cooking instructions is not a computer program. It's a People Program.;)
A couple of decades ago, I was writing the installation instructions for a product. (This was back before
there were packaged installers that handled commonplace installation events, incidentally.) There were a lot of steps, and most involved testing for some situation and then taking some conditional action of a detailed technical nature critical to the correct installation of the product. It was clear
that the company I was working for perceived it as ordinary and proper that people should do this. But it
struck me as I was doing this that I was basically just writing a computer program using one of the world's most ambiguous programming languages (English) which would then be run on one of the world's most unreliable processors (a randomly selected person at a customer site--perhaps a technical person, perhaps not). And I suddenly saw installation in a wholly different light and started pushing for automating as much of the process as much as possible for quality assurance reasons. All of the things which are common practice in C.S. now had to be invented at one point in time or another--they didn't just start out that way.
So no, I don't agree there is a bright line between people programs and computer programs. I think there are just more and less clear programs executed by more and less reliable processors. People continue to fill gaps on things we haven't programmed up yet or haven't found processors to execute. But it's a moving line.
I fear a little for the day when we have programmed them up, about what people will be left for. That isn't to say there will be AI at that point. There might be only just one big company and one last big layoff. Or there might be something pretending to be AI that isn't really smart enough to be on its own but is powerful enough to compute utility functions for humans and allocate them less resource now that they're no longer necessary. Or who knows.
But there's no evidence that people are computationally different than programs. They may use neural net technology, but then, so do some programs. So it's not really surprising that people want to view programs as something that's different than what people do because it preserves a sense of dignity and a sense that there are some things that each (human and computer) can't do, and so perhaps we can live symbiotically. I hope that turns out to be so. But the trends so far are not encouraging.
As for recipes, while the algorithm for making tea is simple, that doesn't make it not an algorithm any more than the algorithm for adding two binary numbers is not an algorithm because it is likewise simple. Certainly
there are recipes that are more complicated, as there are algorithms that are more complicated. I still bet the food recipes are older. And I bet there are, or will in the future be, ways for robots to execute the alleged "people programs". Will that not then make them computer programs? And if the program is unchanged when this happens from what it has always been, will that not mean it was a computer program all along?
Of course, it depends on what you count as code and what you count as running.
People have already mentioned DNA, and I guess I'd give that high marks.
But maybe we mean things invented by man.
An abacus is a hardware program that is programmable with data and will yield numeric results.
So is a sliderule. And there are others like the card sorters for punch cards, which predate
programmable computers by several decades and yet performed very useful computation long before
general purpose computers. And there are analog computers for predicting the motions of planets
or for controlling the locks of the Panama Canal. But maybe we meant code implemented in software.
The Babbage Machine is mechanical so if it stops, does that mean the machine has crashed or does
it just have a long cycle time? People have mentioned that, and that's certainly a worthwhile
contender.
Mathematics also codes up algorithms, some of which are extremely old, and some of which you might regard as code, and so there might be
something there that's competitive. But in a forum like this, full of nerds,
I think "math" is too easy an
answer and isn't provocative enough to get people thinking, so I'll go with this one:
My personal favorite is just something done in human language. Human language has codified
the execution structure of organizations and processes for quite a long time. The US Constitution
defines an engine that runs the United States, for example. Roberts Rules of Order is a program that is an interrupt-driven system that runs meetings. Contract law in the US (and perhaps world-wide) reminds me a lot of the structure of bootstrapping TCP (reliable transport of packets under a contract) from unreliable pieces (the contract terms and offers); the whole business of how you can send an offer and what constitutes acceptance in the face of data loss and things arriving in the wrong order is very much analogous to what you see in modern networking systems, but just used to work via pony express instead. So I'd put my vote on one of those. I just don't have the time to
work out the timelines to figure out which one came first... probably something in English Common Law. It also depends on whether you want a "framework" or a "packaged application" or whatever, because some of these I've mentioned are in different categories in that regard.
These may not be quite as old as some mathematical algorithms, but I bet they're more overlooked.
Now that I think of it, though, I bet food recipes (which are algorithmic in nature)
predate even the earliest work of mathematicians, and it wouldn't surprise me
if the recipe for making hot tea is the oldest, even if it's been upgraded a few times for changes
in available hardware.
I know that I start to lose focus on the road when I am doing NOTHING ELSE
I started to write a post on a similar topic and my draft was blown away by browser lossage, so
I'm glad someone made this point in the interim.
This is probably a complicated optimization space involving multiple variables, of which this research only explores one, and one should be wary of premature conclusions because they will likely lead to overly political effects... like someone claiming we would be safer if we all rode motorcycles because there will be fewer passengers to distract us and it will be harder to comb our hair while driving.
For example, I totally agree that they need to control this experiment
against research on drivers falling asleep at the wheel, since it seems unlikely that those
who choose to have someone along to talk to in order to keep them awake are making it more
likely they will crash. Now you might wish they wouldn't be driving at all in that state, but
it's an imperfect world, and if we only allowed people to drive under optimal conditions, so
few people would be able to drive that they'd probably just outlaw it as a frivolous extravagance.
For example, global warming will probably mean a lot more carpooling, and hence a lot more
conversation, and we aren't going to make it more likely that people do that if we tell them they
can't talk while they ride along.
Also, the study mentions people 18-25, which car rental places won't even rent to, probably not just
because they're more prone to have friends along, but maybe the entire way they think about driving,
being new to it, is different. I found (just speaking about intuitions here, so not scientific,
but maybe suggesting an area of continued investigation) over the decades I've been driving that
it's become more automatic in some ways, not that it doesn't require judgment, but that I'm more
aware of more things without having to try hard. I can look in the mirror and just directly understand the scene without having to interpret it. I think "I should slow" and my foot slows without me having to say "which is the brake". And many other more subtle things. Newell and Simon in studies decades ago made observations about the progression from short term to long term memory, and I suspect there are (and probably even documented in research) analogous effects related to the wiring of neural pathways for efficient use over time, so that what starts out as a cognitive process becomes a wired-in wetware and mechanical subroutine, freeing the brain for other tasks as one gets better. And there's been recent research (though I couldn't find a pointer on a quick web search) that I think was talking about the idea that people perceive certain kinds of interfaces as if they were extensions of their bodies--actual limbs--which I can imagine is how cars come to feel to experienced drivers. But anyone in the 18-25 range may not have been driving long enough to exhibit that... I seem to recall it took me a number of years before I felt those responses were truly automatic.
It's hard to tell if the research took issues like this into account from this news article because, although it cites the underlying research paper by name, it doesn't make the research paper clickable--it may not be web accessible.
It may just be that it is physically impossible to have privacy in the future. If that's the case, then we should accept it and
First of all, whether this is inevitable or not, it doesn't mean that the lack of it will make
things better or happier. Global climate change is likely inevitable, but that doesn't mean we're
obliged to put up a Mission Accomplished banner and say "bring it on". Even if something is inevitable, I'm not sure society is enhanced by racing to embrace it without regard to its goodness.
Bad government may be inevitable, but the voting booth is still a tool for deciding which bad or
how bad...
I think Blank Reg
in the Max Headroom series
is a better example of how "the inevitable" is likely to play out. Surveillance can be both ubiquitous
and uneven at the same time, and it's a fantasy to think "happens all over" should be confused with
"homogenous deployment" or "uniform access".
There are many reasons this.
One is that access is not the same as focus; just because you have access to things doesn't mean
you are continually focused on it. People on the internet now have access to all manner of information
but they aren't any better educated. Power still resides with people who can afford to pay for
the complex sifting and harvesting and re-combining and consolidation and countering that needs to
happen with information, so that scenario has already been playing out and we already know the
outcome: some positives, some negatives, but not Utopia by any means.
But on top of all of that, we're entering a time of a likely energy crisis that may affect more than just driving but also how much power people can pay for in their houses.
And the US (at least) is entering into a financial crisis that may keep the average
household person from being able to afford many luxuries they're used to, so I'm not sure that
banking on people to rush out and buy gadgets to monitor
the government is a sane bet either, even if it turns out that such gadgets run on little enough
power that they'd be willing to pay for it on top of other utility costs.
I'm all for doing the thing of having transparent government, by the way. But I'm not so naive as
I sometimes think Brin to be as to say that that will make it ok. It's a very weak form of protection,
but better than nothing. So I don't mind pursuing such strategies, I just mind saying that Brin's
rationales are the reason for doing so.
Oh, and if ubiquitous does come to be something we'll just have to live with, couldn't it at least be something cuter than spiders or snakes? Why not butterflies?
By having some top-notch creative talent (never mind which color hat they're wearing) take a stab at creating new styles of malware under controlled conditions, they're giving the antivirus vendors a great opportunity to study these creations -- and therefore to be better able to protect against them.
But what if what the antivirus vendors need is not time to study but time to come up with cures?
I've worked on plenty of software where the problem was well-understood, but you could be so pestered
to death by people trying to tell you there was a problem that you had no time left to work on a cure.
I don't follow this community closely, but speaking from general knowledge of software projects over
several decades...
It seems likely that these competitions do not teach the antivirus vendors what they don't know.
It probably creates a firedrill internally where a long-range effort to do a substantive upgrade
that would do what people wish for is side-tracked by a short-term need to make sure that people's
machines are not broken into by a new stupid trick today, thanks to additional resources provided by
well-meaning but "mal-informed" volunteers.
Resources are always in short supply in companies, and there's a constant need to triage between short-term
and long-term planning. Events like this increase the stress on short-term projects, causing them to
draw precious resources away from long-term projects.
The claim that this provides valuable data to the vendors sounds like spin created by malware vendors
who are chuckling all the way to the bank because they get free help from a community
of people who I suspect don't realize the harm they are doing.
What they should be having is competitive
events to come up with cool public-domain techniques for recognizing and stopping such malware in the general cases, thus reducing short-term strain on anti-virus vendors.
"Access to a waiting list is not access to health care", Canadian Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin
I've often wondered if this is true, or if the real bug is that people can get around such
a system. I've often suggested that the single smallest thing you could do for health care
is to legislate that Congress must have the health care entitlement enjoyed by the citizen
with the least good care. That isn't a direct fix to the problem, but it would motivate
them to make sure the least good care is good enough.
I think the Canadian system is hurt because it's easy enough for people in Canada to come to
the US and get treatment. I've not studied their system in any depth, but I'm guessing
based on general principles that this
means they split into two groups: a powerful group that can go elsewhere for health
care and so doesn't worry that the baseline is too low, and a powerless group who have to
live with a baseline that's set wrong because they can't figure out how to change things.
If everyone had to play by the same rules, I would expect the baseline to suddenly not be seen
as satisfactory.
So it's not that I doubt that there can be something that is "too expensive"; I just doubt
the will of the people making the rules to really get it right unless they are in the same
game. In the US, with Congress having its own cushy health care, we have exactly the wrong
set of incentives. A few go out of their way to say "Everyone should have the health care I get", but for some reason those words don't come out of all Congressfolks' mouths. And maybe the nation couldn't even afford that. But what's the motivation for them to truly care since their health care is just fine.
It's for similar reasons that I favor a return to the draft. I don't want more people
going to war. I want everyone in the game of thinking that the war matters. It's too easy
to think of people as disposable when we talk about an "all-volunteer army". When suddenly
it's the people we care about, who might not want to be there, we start to value the
lives differently, I think.
It's not about who's stuck in the system, it's everything about who can get out of it.
Well, wouldn't the information on a scientific wiki/collaboration be covered under a GPL? That would prevent someone from using your contributions for profit.
Copyright protects the form of an expression, not the content of the expression.
You can't copyright an idea or a fact. You can only copyright the words you used to express it.
If you have a brilliant idea, patenting can get you some rights, but patenting rewards the first to submit an application.
You could propose that the global science/wiki-thing should be the patent office, and propose that the first to
edit an idea in would always get the money. But the next day the wiki would be full of random junk put there by speculators,
and you'd be sued for removing a single word of it. So since it wouldn't work for this to be the patent office, you'd either
still have the patent office (and someone watching for edits would be submitting patent applications) or else you'd have to get rid of patents
as an obsolete thing--eliminating another source of funding.
By the way,
I absolutely don't believe the goal should be to keep people from profiting. I'm totally for the idea of profit. I just think that the people
who contribute the work must be among those who profit!
Even if copyright would work for this, the GPL is a terrible model. In practice, you're forbidden from charging if you
built your work on anyone else's--and it's just plain too administratively complicated to actually pay all those underlying people. So everyone throws
up their hands and just gives it all away and that's that.
I'm not saying it's impossible to make money under GPL, I'm just saying I doubt any claim that the contributors will be routinely well taken care of.
I don't want Scientists to have to have jobs as cooks, janitors, etc. just to earn a living wage. I want them to spend as much of their time doing what they do best,
and I want us to reward them for it directly, not make them have to spend their free time (or even their full time) chasing money so they can squeeze
in a little time doing Science if there's any time left at the end of chasing money.
Nor do I think it would be good for them to resort to "applied science" for their money. Science and its applications are different things. Basic research is not the same as product development, and the two should not be confused.
I don't even think it would be bad to have a few millionaire scientists.
Money runs the world, and no amount of giving stuff away will fix that.
The people who are a threat to Science have plenty of money; if Science doesn't find ways to enrich some of its own,
it won't have the power to hold the forces of anti-Science at bay.
Thorough analysis of a page can clearly show who did what. A scientist may have made only one edit, but that edit may have been the missing component of a crucial piece of research. The records would clearly show this (as anyone who has ever checked through the backlogs of a wiki article can attest to).
True. But no one would care. Once the information was out, people would argue it wasn't valuable, or that it was obvious. Or that they were
about to come out with the same thing. People pay for what is scarce, and the moment you publish something world-wide, it is not scarce.
I'm not saying I want scientific research to be scarce. I'm saying I want scientists not to be scarce.
And asking them to give up any financial incentive for doing their work doesn't sound like a recipe for motivating people to contribute to science.
If you're imagining a promise up-front that you'd be paid if you just contributed something, even something "important", I'd like to see the wording of that promise before I'd bother to
discuss it, because I doubt any such promise is forthcoming.
Like what the internet was originally developed for by those physics chaps - before all the advertisers found out they could make money off it?
Precisely.
I assume the funding will also be equally shared among all the people
documented to have contributed?
No, I didn't think so...
So much for Utopia.
The reason people withhold such information isn't that they
are evil and trying to abuse their own work. It's that they know that others
are happy to use up the value they've poured into the work and offer nothing in return.
As with free software and a lot of other such ideas, the problem isn't that this won't
benefit a lot of people, the problem is that it's not looking out for the good people
who have created the value.
When the world is going out of its way to make sure researchers are well taken care of
without the need for money, of course researchers will be happy to share this kind of thing
without asking for recompense.
Making sure one has a way to pay one's own way in the world is not evil,
it's pragmatically necessary and socially required.
Charity is only possible when necessity is taken care of.
Perhaps my assumption that you were actually *watching* that show for fodder to write your parodies is wrong though.
It's drifting slightly off-topic, so I removed my own karma bonus to respond, but since you asked:
I got hooked on Y&R about 10 years earlier because a friend was watching it and watched it pretty faithfully
for about 10 years before I started writing the parodies.
In fact, I think soap operas have a lot of
(often unfulfilled) potential as an artform, exactly because they have the screen time needed to tell a story in the
kind of detail that other kinds of shows don't.
At their best, such dramas offer real chances to inform people about subtle effects of one person's actions on another
in ways that packaged one or two hour dramas often can't do. Admittedly, they don't do that every time.
But as with all of life's endeavors, it's what you make of the opportunity.
And the Y&R writers were fully capable of delivering on the
promise of the medium, they just often seemed not to care to on a regular basis. When they were "on", they were very
good. But they seemed to slack a lot. My parodies, in what I like to believe is the best tradition of social
commentary, were intended to remind them that more was possible if they were willing to work harder.
Each "episode" was accompanied by a
"moral" (a rationale for writing it, based on what was happening
on the show).
So no, I wasn't reading to get fodder for the writing.
I was part of the loyal fanbase that wanted to see the characters have a proper life of their own,
and who did not want to see the characters as a mere platform for the delivery of products.
We all had no doubt they wanted to sell us products, but that was mostly an issue of demographics, and it didn't
creep much into the moment-to-moment of the show itself... except in the way plots were stretched to make certain
plotlines peak during sweeps week, etc.
For myself,
I have never been short of things to write about.
If anything, my reason for eventually stopping was that I couldn't afford so much time spent on such a frivolous end.
Especially if it wasn't making me any money--which comes back to the point about money as a risk to establishing priority.
I'm not saying money shouldn't be involved, of course. I'm just saying it's hard to ignore its power, and so you have
to acknowledge its power and confront it directly.
they are entitled to the latest versions of the products. Once they stop paying, they lose the right to use any version."
Ah, so when you lose your job and you need to rely on your computer to write resumes or even to build a business
that might bring you revenue again, and you can least afford to pay for it, they can't be gracious.
Kind of the "fairweather friend" approach. Mmmmm. Good.
I wonder how long it will be before you can buy a more expensive subscription during the good times (when you can spare
the extra dough) in order to get the special extra added bonus feature that if you can
prove you've lost your job, you'll not be brutally cut off as long as you e-mail once a week offering digitally signed
proof that you've been out faithfully
looking for a job so you can pay for more subscription soon... and, of course,
promising you won't even consider those freeware alternatives.
I can understand how shows like Night Court (in which Harry Anderson, playing Judge Harry Stone, always had a Macintosh in his office) could feature a product without having it get in the way of a show. And certainly there are car
companies that have had cars featured on shows or in movies, such as James Bond. But those were never central to the plot, so they didn't manage
to drag things down like the proposed sponsor-centric content promises to. Even the show-within-a-show of
The Truman Show didn't seem to have the nasty property they're
talking about, since the plot focused on the character... the ads were just incidental ways to add revenue, kind of like
hyperlinked ads in and around web articles or the hypertext-captioning of the Interstellar News Network on Babylon 5.
The significant point, however, is that the show comes first. By reversing the creative process and using product promotion as a starting point, not only is the quality of content likely to suffer, but the effectiveness of the advertising along with it.
Your putting it this way made me realize--it's not just the creation but the ongoing generation of new episodes, not
to please a fan-base but to exploit a fan-base.
Moreover, as the product evolves, the show has to evolve to match... not just as the starting point of the series
but for each episode.
This means they can't take it where the show wants to go,
they have to take it where the product wants to go, and that's going to reach a divergence. It also means that
if the product is upgraded or sold or someone wants a "fresh angle", the show is going to be canceled on a dime
without any regard for what the public wants. Because shows are about "what viewers want" and ads are about
"what we want viewers to want".
This divergence of purpose bodes ill.
I used to write regular parodies of The Young and the Restless
(out of irritation for where the writers were taking the show). In the process, I
found that writing for characters that viewers understand is something where you can't "lie" in the writing.
If you do, you lose the viewers. I'd start to write something trying to make it go a certain way and the voice of the
characters would tell me "No, you have to go another direction. That direction is not true to my character." And it
worked best to just roll with it and see where the characters would naturally take me. I came to a belief that what
makes good writing is when the characters are alive like that in your mind, and the characters are writing a "true" story--not in the sense of non-fiction, but in the sense of following how life would really go. Sort of like method acting but for writing... (Ah, I see. There are no new
ideas in the world. Google tells me that the term method writing I just made up is an already elaborated theory. But yes, like that. Count me an instant believer that there is merit in this line of thinking.) Anyway, my point is that the kind of cynical "we can make it go where it needs to
go" writing is quite suspect...
The article seems to have undergone the/. effect, so I can't tell if this treadmill will do things for elevation change. Steps might be too much at this point, but what about hills?
It looked pretty flat in the one vague picture it showed when I finally got through.
From what I've heard of some of these VR systems and their typical uses, it would seem like they couldn't
get away without emulating, at minimum, the one or two foot elevation shift onto a soft platform (say, a bed)
and then the arbitrarily varied directions one might find oneself rolling from there...
The picture gave the impression the technology was a ways off from that.
If done well enough, there would be no difference than if you were in person. Handshake aside, do you often make physical contact with the people you meet with?
For just the reason you allude to, is it obvious this needs to be done by VR? I mean, I'd think a mere camera would
be fine for that. How often do you need to see the people you're meeting (or have them see you)
other than from some particular angle? People use this information in meetings mostly to judge attention, focus, and
interest. Most of that will come across in flat display. Indeed, if you're seeing someone focused at you in VR, you
can't be sure they're seeing you. You might think they're looking at their notes, but it might be a virtual crossword puzzle
so reading excess information into what you see is of marginal value, and might even deceive you. I think it's a mistake
to think the business world needs this per se; the telephone is still adequate for many things, and where it's not, a realtime
video display, even flat and in black&white, would cover most of the rest of the need.
I'm not saying there aren't reasons to want to move in and out of data and other presentation material you see in meetings.
I'm just saying the membership of the meetings having to move with you in a VR way attaches an additional constraint that will
work against that. Either the person can or can't move freely among the data; if they can, then if they take others with them,
then those people are moving not of their own will but at the will of someone else (which is not VR). If the others move of their
own will, then they are not synchronized as to what they're looking at and have no common frame of reference in a meeting.
The situation is easily overconstrained and not to any good end by focusing on the people rather than the data in a meeting,
at least without a very definite (and in this forum unarticulated) theory of why you'd be worrying about VR.
Nor am I saying there aren't gaming reasons for wanting to be able to peruse and physically engage people you're with. I'm just saying I'm not sure they generalize to business,
except as a luxury. Among other things, it will be additional years before the general populace can have this, so the only
businesses who can use this are those that don't mind losing the business of anyone who can't afford this...
No dinner afterwards, unfortunately.
That's the one actual reason for VR--to engage in a social venues, where the rules of interaction might be more complicated.
And still the one actual reason to travel. The meeting could take place in email or online most of the time.
Personal relationships are hard to build up in meetings, but not because of the technology--because of the rules of
engagement. Building trust has to involve risking trust and testing it. Conventional meeting protocol is designed to
avoid that issue to the best degree possible.
I've been programming in C for a while now, and might release a GPL'd Linux app soon. With this self-taught programming experience, academic merit, and plenty of extra curricular activities, are there any FOSS supporting organizations who might grant me a scholarship for my contributions?
I'm probably picking the wrong forum to be making this remark, but it is on-topic and no one
else seems to have raised it in the numerous messages I scanned...
Am I the only one who finds any irony in the notion of someone committed to giving away,
rather than selling, his work then turning around and saying "now where does the money come
from?"
This entire thread seems side-tracked on the issue of what is a good school, and seems to
be ignoring the main thrust of the question, which is that an industry founded on giving away
value instead of selling it is getting money in, but that money is not going back to the people
that are supplying the value. If it were, there would be a way to contribute and get paid. Instead, there is this mass illusion that if you do well for the community, it will
do well by you. And yet the fact that people have to ask questions like this and get no really
good answer seems to show the fallacy in that.
I want to find scholarships from FOSS organizations because I want to support the community and working for a FOSS company would be a dream come true. I love Linux and free software, and would be proud to put some time into the cause.
Why does asking them for their money support them? Wouldn't it make more sense to support
them by not asking for their money? I must be missing something here. If you can't see where
the money is in the system, maybe that's your first clue that this isn't a movement to
be viewing as a career choice.
cayenne8: Frankly, I'm more concerned with the financial situation in the US than climate change...I'll likely be long dead before any climate related Armageddon occurs....but, I do want my $$ safe for retirement.
The thought that the entire future of life on the planet could come down
to whether there are enough people like you, professing to be concerned only with their short-term enrichment and comfort, is stunning and scary.
cayenne8: Besides...it sure doesn't seem to be warming very much the past couple years....which I thought I heard, had been cooler rather than warmer overall?
Your impression is not supported by scientific measurement. In fact, it has gotten warmer.
You weren't imagining things, 2007 really was an unseasonably hot year. In fact, it was tied with 1998 for the second hottest year on record. All in all, the 8 warmest years have all occurred since 1998, and the 14 warmest years since 1990. This mini-record was announced by NASA climatologists this week.
Moreover, there is substantial speculation based on various models that the process may be accelerating,
indicating that urgent action sooner rather than later is essential.
Relating back to the topic of
the article upon which we are commenting, this emphasizes the importance not just of science but of math.
One reason people have trouble absorbing the science of things is that they may lack the necessary
appreciation of math to understand why the word "acceleration" in this context should make them
very concerned. People think very linearly, and probably aren't aware of why linear vs non-linear is
even an issue, so it's hard for them to realize they should be tuning in more. Words like
"non-linear" or "accelerative" don't have the kind of punch that other words do. And meanwhile, the
scientists are working hard to separate fact from conjecture, which means they're really only talking
about what they can prove... but what some suspect is actually much worse.
The National Geographic Channel recently ran a very good story explaining why even a tiny number of
degrees change can be fatal for the earth, not to mention potentially intruding on the comfort of your retirement.
See their page for information; you can click on the various degrees (one degree, two degrees, etc.) to see the effects of that much
change. It is not pretty.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled, science free, "reality" show.
Slashdot Mirror
This works well if you are a consulting house. But the danger is that you are so scarce that you cannot replicate yourself fast enough for support, so you will not support what you do either. Someone else will, and you'll risk having nothing because you've given away the only thing that you truly owned, which was the part you contributed.
This also takes a dim view of what you are contributing, as if the only part of coding was implementation. Good design is, alas, not copyrightable, and so is difficult to protect. But that doesn't mean it wasn't scarce. It just means there isn't good protection for that kind of scarcity. And since many participants in the discussion are predisposed to think that protection of any kind of intellectual property is bad just because they've seen some things in intellectual property that it was demonstrably bad to protect, the possibility of adding intellectual property protection of one kind or another doesn't occur.
I actually think a lot of the problems of IP protection are due to the duration of the protection and not the fact of it (though I do agree there are also things that are protected foolishly). My point is that if they expired quickly, it wouldn't matter much if there were mistakes made favoring creators, but it would give the creator time to negotiate before the fact that he created something was irrelevant because everyone else had it and was exploiting it to their advantage, not to his.
I couldn't remember the name of the formal category name of the speech. Another poster suggested the term "tongue in cheek", which works for me. But I don't have to be able to name the construct in order to be allowed to use it.
A construct I can name is a simile, though. That's where one uses the word "like". Like in the text I wrote that you quoted. When saying "like x", I'm not saying "literally x". Those are just examples, but extensions not included in that enumeration which are of similar character are implied. Hence, saying that something isn't literally x is not a refutation of "like x".
I don't plan to respond further in this subthread to this level of silliness. (I've voluntarily removed my own karma bonus on this one since I already imagine most people are not interested.) I thought I was gracious in quietly skipping past the ad hominem accusations in one of the parent posts and still trying to speak to the substance. It's fine with me if you remain unconvinced. It only underscores my point about the fact that it's hard to get world-wide consensus on anything, and hence that any plan that relies on world-wide even-handedness in policy application is not likely to be a success.
You leave out literary devices like sarcasm, hyperbole, and irony which require neither of those.
I didn't misrepresent what Brin says, I didn't say that much about it, other than that I don't think it's a practical situation one can get to. And if he thinks otherwise, I was suggesting the burden is on him to show why.
Well, of course, the question of whether others had considered and merely discarded it is hard to measure. But more than that, he seems to be advocating at level that says more than "this is an idea" but more at the level of "this is a good idea". I happen to have an aversion to ideas that are potentially good if implemented completely and almost certainly bad right up until the moment of total completion...especially if failing to finish completely is what I percieve as the most likely outcome.
I think this is what's behind people's clinging to the US Second Amendment, by the way. Giving away your gun if you knew for sure everyone else was going to might almost make sense, but if you thought anyone would be left who didn't, it explains why you'd be nervous. But cameras and guns are a lot similar in this regard.
To some degree, the US Second Amendment protects the right of the people to maintain enough power that if a government ran out of control, the people could fix it. But no one talks about that any more because that would mean admitting private citizens have a constitutional right to own nuclear weapons, for parity. So now citizens can own deer hunting rifles and the government can own nukes. That doesn't achieve parity. Likewise with cameras, we're all allowed a pocket camera and the government is allowed a ubiquitous network of surveillance cameras. That's not the vision Brin is offering, but it is the more likely practical effect if you roll this out. Even if the government promised to allow parity, it wouldn't happen. Exceptions would be made and anyone who tried to find those exceptions would be rounded up more quickly than they could rouse rabble.
Just saying it should happen right on its own and it's people's own fault if they don't just all decide to do it is vacuous. Like saying that the problem with crime prevention is that people don't all decide one day to be on the same side of the law.
The beauty of language, and the joy of books of fantasy, is that it's possible to construct descriptions of things that cannot be. The burden of the citizenry in a democracy is to somehow discern plans for what can be from those that cannot. I'm not criticizing Brin's ability to spin a good yarn, I'm suggesting he isn't the right person to lead the real world to Utopia.
Oh, I absolutely understand that. I saw him at a Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference a few years back and chatted with him a little about this in the after-talk mingle, so I don't think I'm too confused about what his position is. At least I had a chance, while standing there incredulous, to ask him if he really believed that. (Those are great conferences, by the way, and there's one coming up in New Haven next week. I don't have any clue if Brin will go, and don't much care, but there's always something good on the agenda in my experience, and I wanted to slip in a plug.)
But my point is that it has to be at least a presupposition of his (or anyone's) if you're going to entertain this as other than a philosophical exercise to say that you have to "get there from here". So they've done part of Brin's vision--my point is: How do we get them to do the rest? Because I think the problem with Brin's vision is that you can't ever under any forseeable circumstances get everyone to do the rest. The world is always going to be full of power imbalances, and there will always be someone wanting to keep it that way. So it's just a fantasy to say it could be done. That's why I pointed to this article in my prior post.
If Brin believes it's possible to motivate people to all at the same time do something in the public interest that way, first of all, his energy is better spent on getting people to all believe in Global Climate Change, because that's a much more pressing problem and affects us all and yet we can't get people to agree on that either. But either way, it's time for him to put his money where his mouth is, so to speak, and say what the next step is toward Utopia because I'm as tired of his proposed non-solution as I am of some of hearing of some of the non-solutions being pursued for Climate Change.
Well, who can blame them really? They've got to be preparing to do something with all that high tech manufacturing capacity they've got once the economic bottom falls out of the US purchasing market.
I can hardly wait to find out how the analogous situation in the robot manufacturing area plays out. Fortunately, with all those 200,000 cameras, I should have no trouble sitting back and watching it on TV. Robots can't move across water can they? No, probably only in science fiction.
Ok, that's silly. No one would ever do anything bad with robots. Let's just stick to the issue of cameras and overcapacity...
Is this project at least "green"? Have they at least planned for environmentally friendly ways of disposing of this many cameras when version 2.0 comes along? Well, maybe the US can by them second-hand as part of some sort of secret arms deal when it hasn't the money to buy them nor the factories to make them. Reduce, reuse, recycle... It's a grand tradition in the international weapons market, which in some ways seems to have pioneered the whole "green" movement now that I think about it. But, oh, that's right. Cameras aren't weapons. Never mind.
Governments, including ours, "sell" these societal strategies to their citizens as crime-fighting tools. The citizens like low-cost tools because they have fantasies about their taxes going down, etc. But also, J.Q.Public probably often assumes crimes are things like stolen purses or muggers. But such uses are very "small fry" and no serious government is going to build a whole societal surveillance system for so limited a purpose.
Long ago, I had my car broken into in a major US city. When the police arrived, I asked them if they were going to fingerprint it, etc. It seemed plausible they would get some good prints. They just laughed. Only for capital crimes, they explained. It just isn't worth the time and trouble otherwise.
And probably it's only used for capital crimes because they get public exposure. That probably accounts for why there are racial disparities in which capital crimes get followed up. Even there, it is (sadly) probably not really about the severity of the crime, it is more likely about its political impact.
The real crimes, the ones that motivate a government, are those of disagreeing with who's in power in that government or what that power is being used for.
David Brin should be thrilled. Maybe we can nominate him as our ambassador to ask them if perhaps they might not mind filling in the missing details required to make this a true Utopia under his model. I'm sure he has lots of ideas for how that's supposed to work.
Well, your mileage may vary, but I didn't take the point of hardburn's post to to be that he was offering precise data to be taken to the bank, nor do I think the absence of a citation invalidates the point. I took the statement to be a stylized way of asking "is it clear that this failure rate is special to the business domain?" Or, put another way, "is the choice of business domain driving these businesses down artificially, or is it the same thing that drives all businesses down: failure to keep an eye on the business need?" Even in the summary, the statement:
highlights an issue that seems certain to bring down plenty of companies (who cares the precise number?) if they fail to attend to a material customer need for which people will be willing to pay.
After the so-called dot-com bust, for example, there seemed to be a sense that investing in things named ".com" was risky or bad. Surely people had lost money investing in this or that dot com. But not because of the name ".com". That was just smokescreen designed by some skillful person interested in face-saving to say "It's ok you lost money here. Don't be embarrassed. It wasn't something you could have forseen. It was due to the nature of the market." But in quite a lot of cases it wasn't. It was due to the idea of investing in something you didn't understand and that never had a clearly articulated plan for making money in the first place. And learning that the absence of such a plan is going to lead to problems wasn't news ... or shouldn't have been.
So whether the poster can back that specific pseudo-statistic with a citation or not, I still think the apparent point seems valid.
Exactly. Mod parent up to 5 and let's just declare this thread successfully finished. What more really needs saying?
Uh, actually, if you go back and re-read what I wrote, you'll see I made a specific exception for that. From my post:
Much though I love the research involved, the parts of the NASA budget that I just can't see justifying with near-term dollars given the other problems we have to solve on earth are things to do with deep space exploration like Hubble. I'm not saying give up on space. I'm just say concentrate on the stuff that makes sense in the short term, and make it a goal to get civilization back to where it has a long-term worth caring about.
As much as I would love the idea of Space Exploration, I'd trade away the budget for serious efforts on Climate Change, since a number of the things we might learn in Space will be irrelevant if we don't solve Climate Change so that we survive at all.
Then again, if we were going to make a near-term intensive effort to establish a permanent self-sustaining base off-planet, I'd be all for it even with Climate Change dollars. It would seem prudent both as a backup/insurance plan in case we mess up this planet (eliminating some of the "single point of failure" problem we have looming now) and also as a way of gaining data about how to live in inhospitable places (like the Earth is on track to be). Just about any dollars spent on how to manage atmospheres, grow food in artificially controlled ways, etc. seems money well spent. I think the key to making Space palatable for the nearterm is to keep the expenses targeted to those with direct applicability.
I've recently started to shift my views on the ethics of Terraforming Mars, as Earth's habitability hangs in the balance, and to start to question the ethics of not doing so. It would be fun to discover Life there, but if the price is preserving a few potential microbes there at the expense of possibly losing valuable data that could help to preserve our own planet, that seems a steep and selfish price. Mars is a resource, not to be exploited commercially (which is somewhat how we got into the Climate Change mess), but that might be used strategically. So is the Moon, for that matter, to the extent we can make anything useful of that.
Sadly, I doubt that either Space or Climate will get attention. Instead, we'll get gas tax holidays so we can keep burning oil until we're like Venus and can't even see the sky.
A couple of decades ago, I was writing the installation instructions for a product. (This was back before there were packaged installers that handled commonplace installation events, incidentally.) There were a lot of steps, and most involved testing for some situation and then taking some conditional action of a detailed technical nature critical to the correct installation of the product. It was clear that the company I was working for perceived it as ordinary and proper that people should do this. But it struck me as I was doing this that I was basically just writing a computer program using one of the world's most ambiguous programming languages (English) which would then be run on one of the world's most unreliable processors (a randomly selected person at a customer site--perhaps a technical person, perhaps not). And I suddenly saw installation in a wholly different light and started pushing for automating as much of the process as much as possible for quality assurance reasons. All of the things which are common practice in C.S. now had to be invented at one point in time or another--they didn't just start out that way.
So no, I don't agree there is a bright line between people programs and computer programs. I think there are just more and less clear programs executed by more and less reliable processors. People continue to fill gaps on things we haven't programmed up yet or haven't found processors to execute. But it's a moving line.
I fear a little for the day when we have programmed them up, about what people will be left for. That isn't to say there will be AI at that point. There might be only just one big company and one last big layoff. Or there might be something pretending to be AI that isn't really smart enough to be on its own but is powerful enough to compute utility functions for humans and allocate them less resource now that they're no longer necessary. Or who knows.
But there's no evidence that people are computationally different than programs. They may use neural net technology, but then, so do some programs. So it's not really surprising that people want to view programs as something that's different than what people do because it preserves a sense of dignity and a sense that there are some things that each (human and computer) can't do, and so perhaps we can live symbiotically. I hope that turns out to be so. But the trends so far are not encouraging.
As for recipes, while the algorithm for making tea is simple, that doesn't make it not an algorithm any more than the algorithm for adding two binary numbers is not an algorithm because it is likewise simple. Certainly there are recipes that are more complicated, as there are algorithms that are more complicated. I still bet the food recipes are older. And I bet there are, or will in the future be, ways for robots to execute the alleged "people programs". Will that not then make them computer programs? And if the program is unchanged when this happens from what it has always been, will that not mean it was a computer program all along?
Of course, it depends on what you count as code and what you count as running.
People have already mentioned DNA, and I guess I'd give that high marks. But maybe we mean things invented by man.
An abacus is a hardware program that is programmable with data and will yield numeric results. So is a sliderule. And there are others like the card sorters for punch cards, which predate programmable computers by several decades and yet performed very useful computation long before general purpose computers. And there are analog computers for predicting the motions of planets or for controlling the locks of the Panama Canal. But maybe we meant code implemented in software.
The Babbage Machine is mechanical so if it stops, does that mean the machine has crashed or does it just have a long cycle time? People have mentioned that, and that's certainly a worthwhile contender.
Mathematics also codes up algorithms, some of which are extremely old, and some of which you might regard as code, and so there might be something there that's competitive. But in a forum like this, full of nerds, I think "math" is too easy an answer and isn't provocative enough to get people thinking, so I'll go with this one:
My personal favorite is just something done in human language. Human language has codified the execution structure of organizations and processes for quite a long time. The US Constitution defines an engine that runs the United States, for example. Roberts Rules of Order is a program that is an interrupt-driven system that runs meetings. Contract law in the US (and perhaps world-wide) reminds me a lot of the structure of bootstrapping TCP (reliable transport of packets under a contract) from unreliable pieces (the contract terms and offers); the whole business of how you can send an offer and what constitutes acceptance in the face of data loss and things arriving in the wrong order is very much analogous to what you see in modern networking systems, but just used to work via pony express instead. So I'd put my vote on one of those. I just don't have the time to work out the timelines to figure out which one came first... probably something in English Common Law. It also depends on whether you want a "framework" or a "packaged application" or whatever, because some of these I've mentioned are in different categories in that regard. These may not be quite as old as some mathematical algorithms, but I bet they're more overlooked.
Now that I think of it, though, I bet food recipes (which are algorithmic in nature) predate even the earliest work of mathematicians, and it wouldn't surprise me if the recipe for making hot tea is the oldest, even if it's been upgraded a few times for changes in available hardware.
I started to write a post on a similar topic and my draft was blown away by browser lossage, so I'm glad someone made this point in the interim.
This is probably a complicated optimization space involving multiple variables, of which this research only explores one, and one should be wary of premature conclusions because they will likely lead to overly political effects ... like someone claiming we would be safer if we all rode motorcycles because there will be fewer passengers to distract us and it will be harder to comb our hair while driving.
For example, I totally agree that they need to control this experiment against research on drivers falling asleep at the wheel, since it seems unlikely that those who choose to have someone along to talk to in order to keep them awake are making it more likely they will crash. Now you might wish they wouldn't be driving at all in that state, but it's an imperfect world, and if we only allowed people to drive under optimal conditions, so few people would be able to drive that they'd probably just outlaw it as a frivolous extravagance. For example, global warming will probably mean a lot more carpooling, and hence a lot more conversation, and we aren't going to make it more likely that people do that if we tell them they can't talk while they ride along.
Also, the study mentions people 18-25, which car rental places won't even rent to, probably not just because they're more prone to have friends along, but maybe the entire way they think about driving, being new to it, is different. I found (just speaking about intuitions here, so not scientific, but maybe suggesting an area of continued investigation) over the decades I've been driving that it's become more automatic in some ways, not that it doesn't require judgment, but that I'm more aware of more things without having to try hard. I can look in the mirror and just directly understand the scene without having to interpret it. I think "I should slow" and my foot slows without me having to say "which is the brake". And many other more subtle things. Newell and Simon in studies decades ago made observations about the progression from short term to long term memory, and I suspect there are (and probably even documented in research) analogous effects related to the wiring of neural pathways for efficient use over time, so that what starts out as a cognitive process becomes a wired-in wetware and mechanical subroutine, freeing the brain for other tasks as one gets better. And there's been recent research (though I couldn't find a pointer on a quick web search) that I think was talking about the idea that people perceive certain kinds of interfaces as if they were extensions of their bodies--actual limbs--which I can imagine is how cars come to feel to experienced drivers. But anyone in the 18-25 range may not have been driving long enough to exhibit that... I seem to recall it took me a number of years before I felt those responses were truly automatic.
It's hard to tell if the research took issues like this into account from this news article because, although it cites the underlying research paper by name, it doesn't make the research paper clickable--it may not be web accessible.
First of all, whether this is inevitable or not, it doesn't mean that the lack of it will make things better or happier. Global climate change is likely inevitable, but that doesn't mean we're obliged to put up a Mission Accomplished banner and say "bring it on". Even if something is inevitable, I'm not sure society is enhanced by racing to embrace it without regard to its goodness. Bad government may be inevitable, but the voting booth is still a tool for deciding which bad or how bad...
I think Blank Reg in the Max Headroom series is a better example of how "the inevitable" is likely to play out. Surveillance can be both ubiquitous and uneven at the same time, and it's a fantasy to think "happens all over" should be confused with "homogenous deployment" or "uniform access".
There are many reasons this. One is that access is not the same as focus; just because you have access to things doesn't mean you are continually focused on it. People on the internet now have access to all manner of information but they aren't any better educated. Power still resides with people who can afford to pay for the complex sifting and harvesting and re-combining and consolidation and countering that needs to happen with information, so that scenario has already been playing out and we already know the outcome: some positives, some negatives, but not Utopia by any means.
But on top of all of that, we're entering a time of a likely energy crisis that may affect more than just driving but also how much power people can pay for in their houses. And the US (at least) is entering into a financial crisis that may keep the average household person from being able to afford many luxuries they're used to, so I'm not sure that banking on people to rush out and buy gadgets to monitor the government is a sane bet either, even if it turns out that such gadgets run on little enough power that they'd be willing to pay for it on top of other utility costs.
I'm all for doing the thing of having transparent government, by the way. But I'm not so naive as I sometimes think Brin to be as to say that that will make it ok. It's a very weak form of protection, but better than nothing. So I don't mind pursuing such strategies, I just mind saying that Brin's rationales are the reason for doing so.
Oh, and if ubiquitous does come to be something we'll just have to live with, couldn't it at least be something cuter than spiders or snakes? Why not butterflies?
But what if what the antivirus vendors need is not time to study but time to come up with cures? I've worked on plenty of software where the problem was well-understood, but you could be so pestered to death by people trying to tell you there was a problem that you had no time left to work on a cure.
I don't follow this community closely, but speaking from general knowledge of software projects over several decades ...
It seems likely that these competitions do not teach the antivirus vendors what they don't know. It probably creates a firedrill internally where a long-range effort to do a substantive upgrade that would do what people wish for is side-tracked by a short-term need to make sure that people's machines are not broken into by a new stupid trick today, thanks to additional resources provided by well-meaning but "mal-informed" volunteers.
Resources are always in short supply in companies, and there's a constant need to triage between short-term and long-term planning. Events like this increase the stress on short-term projects, causing them to draw precious resources away from long-term projects. The claim that this provides valuable data to the vendors sounds like spin created by malware vendors who are chuckling all the way to the bank because they get free help from a community of people who I suspect don't realize the harm they are doing.
What they should be having is competitive events to come up with cool public-domain techniques for recognizing and stopping such malware in the general cases, thus reducing short-term strain on anti-virus vendors.
I've often wondered if this is true, or if the real bug is that people can get around such a system. I've often suggested that the single smallest thing you could do for health care is to legislate that Congress must have the health care entitlement enjoyed by the citizen with the least good care. That isn't a direct fix to the problem, but it would motivate them to make sure the least good care is good enough.
I think the Canadian system is hurt because it's easy enough for people in Canada to come to the US and get treatment. I've not studied their system in any depth, but I'm guessing based on general principles that this means they split into two groups: a powerful group that can go elsewhere for health care and so doesn't worry that the baseline is too low, and a powerless group who have to live with a baseline that's set wrong because they can't figure out how to change things. If everyone had to play by the same rules, I would expect the baseline to suddenly not be seen as satisfactory.
So it's not that I doubt that there can be something that is "too expensive"; I just doubt the will of the people making the rules to really get it right unless they are in the same game. In the US, with Congress having its own cushy health care, we have exactly the wrong set of incentives. A few go out of their way to say "Everyone should have the health care I get", but for some reason those words don't come out of all Congressfolks' mouths. And maybe the nation couldn't even afford that. But what's the motivation for them to truly care since their health care is just fine.
It's for similar reasons that I favor a return to the draft. I don't want more people going to war. I want everyone in the game of thinking that the war matters. It's too easy to think of people as disposable when we talk about an "all-volunteer army". When suddenly it's the people we care about, who might not want to be there, we start to value the lives differently, I think.
It's not about who's stuck in the system, it's everything about who can get out of it.
Copyright protects the form of an expression, not the content of the expression. You can't copyright an idea or a fact. You can only copyright the words you used to express it.
If you have a brilliant idea, patenting can get you some rights, but patenting rewards the first to submit an application. You could propose that the global science/wiki-thing should be the patent office, and propose that the first to edit an idea in would always get the money. But the next day the wiki would be full of random junk put there by speculators, and you'd be sued for removing a single word of it. So since it wouldn't work for this to be the patent office, you'd either still have the patent office (and someone watching for edits would be submitting patent applications) or else you'd have to get rid of patents as an obsolete thing--eliminating another source of funding.
By the way, I absolutely don't believe the goal should be to keep people from profiting. I'm totally for the idea of profit. I just think that the people who contribute the work must be among those who profit!
Even if copyright would work for this, the GPL is a terrible model. In practice, you're forbidden from charging if you built your work on anyone else's--and it's just plain too administratively complicated to actually pay all those underlying people. So everyone throws up their hands and just gives it all away and that's that. I'm not saying it's impossible to make money under GPL, I'm just saying I doubt any claim that the contributors will be routinely well taken care of.
I don't want Scientists to have to have jobs as cooks, janitors, etc. just to earn a living wage. I want them to spend as much of their time doing what they do best, and I want us to reward them for it directly, not make them have to spend their free time (or even their full time) chasing money so they can squeeze in a little time doing Science if there's any time left at the end of chasing money.
Nor do I think it would be good for them to resort to "applied science" for their money. Science and its applications are different things. Basic research is not the same as product development, and the two should not be confused.
I don't even think it would be bad to have a few millionaire scientists. Money runs the world, and no amount of giving stuff away will fix that. The people who are a threat to Science have plenty of money; if Science doesn't find ways to enrich some of its own, it won't have the power to hold the forces of anti-Science at bay.
True. But no one would care. Once the information was out, people would argue it wasn't valuable, or that it was obvious. Or that they were about to come out with the same thing. People pay for what is scarce, and the moment you publish something world-wide, it is not scarce.
I'm not saying I want scientific research to be scarce. I'm saying I want scientists not to be scarce. And asking them to give up any financial incentive for doing their work doesn't sound like a recipe for motivating people to contribute to science.
If you're imagining a promise up-front that you'd be paid if you just contributed something, even something "important", I'd like to see the wording of that promise before I'd bother to discuss it, because I doubt any such promise is forthcoming.
Precisely.
I assume the funding will also be equally shared among all the people documented to have contributed?
No, I didn't think so...
So much for Utopia.
The reason people withhold such information isn't that they are evil and trying to abuse their own work. It's that they know that others are happy to use up the value they've poured into the work and offer nothing in return.
As with free software and a lot of other such ideas, the problem isn't that this won't benefit a lot of people, the problem is that it's not looking out for the good people who have created the value. When the world is going out of its way to make sure researchers are well taken care of without the need for money, of course researchers will be happy to share this kind of thing without asking for recompense.
Making sure one has a way to pay one's own way in the world is not evil, it's pragmatically necessary and socially required. Charity is only possible when necessity is taken care of.
It's drifting slightly off-topic, so I removed my own karma bonus to respond, but since you asked: I got hooked on Y&R about 10 years earlier because a friend was watching it and watched it pretty faithfully for about 10 years before I started writing the parodies.
In fact, I think soap operas have a lot of (often unfulfilled) potential as an artform, exactly because they have the screen time needed to tell a story in the kind of detail that other kinds of shows don't. At their best, such dramas offer real chances to inform people about subtle effects of one person's actions on another in ways that packaged one or two hour dramas often can't do. Admittedly, they don't do that every time. But as with all of life's endeavors, it's what you make of the opportunity. And the Y&R writers were fully capable of delivering on the promise of the medium, they just often seemed not to care to on a regular basis. When they were "on", they were very good. But they seemed to slack a lot. My parodies, in what I like to believe is the best tradition of social commentary, were intended to remind them that more was possible if they were willing to work harder. Each "episode" was accompanied by a "moral" (a rationale for writing it, based on what was happening on the show).
So no, I wasn't reading to get fodder for the writing. I was part of the loyal fanbase that wanted to see the characters have a proper life of their own, and who did not want to see the characters as a mere platform for the delivery of products. We all had no doubt they wanted to sell us products, but that was mostly an issue of demographics, and it didn't creep much into the moment-to-moment of the show itself... except in the way plots were stretched to make certain plotlines peak during sweeps week, etc.
For myself, I have never been short of things to write about. If anything, my reason for eventually stopping was that I couldn't afford so much time spent on such a frivolous end. Especially if it wasn't making me any money--which comes back to the point about money as a risk to establishing priority. I'm not saying money shouldn't be involved, of course. I'm just saying it's hard to ignore its power, and so you have to acknowledge its power and confront it directly.
Ah, so when you lose your job and you need to rely on your computer to write resumes or even to build a business that might bring you revenue again, and you can least afford to pay for it, they can't be gracious. Kind of the "fairweather friend" approach. Mmmmm. Good.
I wonder how long it will be before you can buy a more expensive subscription during the good times (when you can spare the extra dough) in order to get the special extra added bonus feature that if you can prove you've lost your job, you'll not be brutally cut off as long as you e-mail once a week offering digitally signed proof that you've been out faithfully looking for a job so you can pay for more subscription soon... and, of course, promising you won't even consider those freeware alternatives.
I can understand how shows like Night Court (in which Harry Anderson, playing Judge Harry Stone, always had a Macintosh in his office) could feature a product without having it get in the way of a show. And certainly there are car companies that have had cars featured on shows or in movies, such as James Bond. But those were never central to the plot, so they didn't manage to drag things down like the proposed sponsor-centric content promises to. Even the show-within-a-show of The Truman Show didn't seem to have the nasty property they're talking about, since the plot focused on the character... the ads were just incidental ways to add revenue, kind of like hyperlinked ads in and around web articles or the hypertext-captioning of the Interstellar News Network on Babylon 5.
Your putting it this way made me realize--it's not just the creation but the ongoing generation of new episodes, not to please a fan-base but to exploit a fan-base. Moreover, as the product evolves, the show has to evolve to match... not just as the starting point of the series but for each episode. This means they can't take it where the show wants to go, they have to take it where the product wants to go, and that's going to reach a divergence. It also means that if the product is upgraded or sold or someone wants a "fresh angle", the show is going to be canceled on a dime without any regard for what the public wants. Because shows are about "what viewers want" and ads are about "what we want viewers to want".
This divergence of purpose bodes ill.
I used to write regular parodies of The Young and the Restless (out of irritation for where the writers were taking the show). In the process, I found that writing for characters that viewers understand is something where you can't "lie" in the writing. If you do, you lose the viewers. I'd start to write something trying to make it go a certain way and the voice of the characters would tell me "No, you have to go another direction. That direction is not true to my character." And it worked best to just roll with it and see where the characters would naturally take me. I came to a belief that what makes good writing is when the characters are alive like that in your mind, and the characters are writing a "true" story--not in the sense of non-fiction, but in the sense of following how life would really go. Sort of like method acting but for writing... (Ah, I see. There are no new ideas in the world. Google tells me that the term method writing I just made up is an already elaborated theory. But yes, like that. Count me an instant believer that there is merit in this line of thinking.) Anyway, my point is that the kind of cynical "we can make it go where it needs to go" writing is quite suspect...
It looked pretty flat in the one vague picture it showed when I finally got through.
From what I've heard of some of these VR systems and their typical uses, it would seem like they couldn't get away without emulating, at minimum, the one or two foot elevation shift onto a soft platform (say, a bed) and then the arbitrarily varied directions one might find oneself rolling from there... The picture gave the impression the technology was a ways off from that.
For just the reason you allude to, is it obvious this needs to be done by VR? I mean, I'd think a mere camera would be fine for that. How often do you need to see the people you're meeting (or have them see you) other than from some particular angle? People use this information in meetings mostly to judge attention, focus, and interest. Most of that will come across in flat display. Indeed, if you're seeing someone focused at you in VR, you can't be sure they're seeing you. You might think they're looking at their notes, but it might be a virtual crossword puzzle so reading excess information into what you see is of marginal value, and might even deceive you. I think it's a mistake to think the business world needs this per se; the telephone is still adequate for many things, and where it's not, a realtime video display, even flat and in black&white, would cover most of the rest of the need.
I'm not saying there aren't reasons to want to move in and out of data and other presentation material you see in meetings. I'm just saying the membership of the meetings having to move with you in a VR way attaches an additional constraint that will work against that. Either the person can or can't move freely among the data; if they can, then if they take others with them, then those people are moving not of their own will but at the will of someone else (which is not VR). If the others move of their own will, then they are not synchronized as to what they're looking at and have no common frame of reference in a meeting. The situation is easily overconstrained and not to any good end by focusing on the people rather than the data in a meeting, at least without a very definite (and in this forum unarticulated) theory of why you'd be worrying about VR.
Nor am I saying there aren't gaming reasons for wanting to be able to peruse and physically engage people you're with. I'm just saying I'm not sure they generalize to business, except as a luxury. Among other things, it will be additional years before the general populace can have this, so the only businesses who can use this are those that don't mind losing the business of anyone who can't afford this...
That's the one actual reason for VR--to engage in a social venues, where the rules of interaction might be more complicated. And still the one actual reason to travel. The meeting could take place in email or online most of the time. Personal relationships are hard to build up in meetings, but not because of the technology--because of the rules of engagement. Building trust has to involve risking trust and testing it. Conventional meeting protocol is designed to avoid that issue to the best degree possible.
I'm probably picking the wrong forum to be making this remark, but it is on-topic and no one else seems to have raised it in the numerous messages I scanned...
Am I the only one who finds any irony in the notion of someone committed to giving away, rather than selling, his work then turning around and saying "now where does the money come from?"
This entire thread seems side-tracked on the issue of what is a good school, and seems to be ignoring the main thrust of the question, which is that an industry founded on giving away value instead of selling it is getting money in, but that money is not going back to the people that are supplying the value. If it were, there would be a way to contribute and get paid. Instead, there is this mass illusion that if you do well for the community, it will do well by you. And yet the fact that people have to ask questions like this and get no really good answer seems to show the fallacy in that.
From a post in the comments on his own article:
Why does asking them for their money support them? Wouldn't it make more sense to support them by not asking for their money? I must be missing something here. If you can't see where the money is in the system, maybe that's your first clue that this isn't a movement to be viewing as a career choice.
The thought that the entire future of life on the planet could come down to whether there are enough people like you, professing to be concerned only with their short-term enrichment and comfort, is stunning and scary.
Your impression is not supported by scientific measurement. In fact, it has gotten warmer.
Moreover, there is substantial speculation based on various models that the process may be accelerating, indicating that urgent action sooner rather than later is essential.
Relating back to the topic of the article upon which we are commenting, this emphasizes the importance not just of science but of math. One reason people have trouble absorbing the science of things is that they may lack the necessary appreciation of math to understand why the word "acceleration" in this context should make them very concerned. People think very linearly, and probably aren't aware of why linear vs non-linear is even an issue, so it's hard for them to realize they should be tuning in more. Words like "non-linear" or "accelerative" don't have the kind of punch that other words do. And meanwhile, the scientists are working hard to separate fact from conjecture, which means they're really only talking about what they can prove... but what some suspect is actually much worse.
The National Geographic Channel recently ran a very good story explaining why even a tiny number of degrees change can be fatal for the earth, not to mention potentially intruding on the comfort of your retirement. See their page for information; you can click on the various degrees (one degree, two degrees, etc.) to see the effects of that much change. It is not pretty.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled, science free, "reality" show.