No. A law that tries to control the right to copy makes no sense in a world where everyone has every day access to copying machines. The direct social benefits of copying cannot be denied by the naive backwards belief that restriction of that copying is the best way to encourage the creation of new works. We now know that is wrong. We now know that, in fact, the exact opposite is true - people create more new works when they have free access to the work of others. Some of us have known this for centuries, but we tolerated the nonsense of the singers and song-writers because there really wasn't much harm being done. Now this absurd conspiracy against the public interest must be stopped.
Freedom of speech. Freedom of association. Fucking hell.
Come try this shit in Australia
on
UK P2P Fight Brewing
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· Score: -1, Flamebait
You chicken shit motherfuckers. Bring it on. We'll sue your ass for breach of contract and then we'll take down your conspiracy. Get it through your thick heads, the days of your draconian control over the distribution of our culture is over.
Go read about machine learning. There's plenty of things that we *can* do. It's not hard to sort the bunk from the legitimate results. Just don't look for anyone saying what we *can't* do. That's a little too pessimistic for the compsci crowd and is considered dangerous to the math crowd (who have a habit of not saying anything they can't prove).
Of course, at a certain level of abstraction, everything is easy.
Intelligence really is that simple.. except there's one little detail you're ignoring.
Any biological intelligence does exactly the same as described: gather data (try to assess external universe model using limited computational resources), find correlations (build internal universe model using limited computational resources), act according to internal needs (act upon internal universe model using limited computational resources) and repeat.
That's the hard part. If you have infinite computational resources it's really trivial to act intelligently. All you need do is enumerate all possible outcomes of all possible actions with an idealized model of the world (Godel not withstanding) and pick whichever maximizes your expected reward. You can write nice long mathematical papers on this.. or even a whole book. The question is, how do you do it with a sensible amount of processing power and memory?
All the geeks have a great laugh when Matt Groening causes Bender to become transparent and we see a 6502 inside. The joke is that Bender has about the same processing power of a C64 from the early 80s. The show is littered with additional Commodore jokes which I'm sure 90% of the viewers just don't get. But that's not what really makes it funny. What really makes it funny is that all us geeks know that you need a lot more processing power than a 6502 to do the complex things that Bender does in the complex environment he does them in. But how is that? We don't know how to do AI. We don't even have the slightest clue. For all we know, there is a tight little algorithm for AI that could run on a 6502 and produce all those crazy behaviors that Bender gets away with.
And that's the problem with AI. The allure is that some short little algorithm exists that will magically evolve into a super-human intelligence if you just could find it and hook it up to the world. After all, nature figured out, how hard could it be? This has led many a would be mad scientist to code up a genetic algorithms implementation. In fact, most every programmer I know has given it a go. The mystery of what you'll find if you give it the right fitness function is a powerful motivator - with a little magical thinking, it could be anything!
For the same reason we should care about what Christians believe - cause they are delusional and accepting irrational belief as "ok" is bad for all of us in the long run.
Steve Jobs is a charismatic guy.. I get it. But everything he and his spin doctors say is not true. When he lies, we should call him on it. When people repeat his lies, we should call *them* on it.
all "magical thinking" in the field of artificial intelligence was reserved for fiction.
There's so much rigorous mathematically described hooey in AI that its hard to tell the naive geniuses from the crackpot morons. Consider this paper by Solomonoff. Brilliant stuff! A fantastic read. Then, at the end, it says:
In our view, however, the most interesting situation in machine learning, arises when we do not know ahead of time what program will solve a given problem and where the machine discovers the program itself. It seems to be very hard to find out much about this by theory alone. Running experiments is crucial.
This is Solomonoff's way of reminding us that he is a mathematician and hasn't actually run any experiments. His other papers make similar pronouncements in the footnotes about the uncomputability of his math or acknowledge the requirement of perfect (aka impractical) training data, etc. He makes it abundantly clear that is work is purely theoretical and unimplementable, but does this stop enthusiastic amateurs from reading his papers and declaring that AI is "solved"? Well no, of course not.
Re:But what comes next?
on
NASA Turns 50
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· Score: 2, Interesting
NASA has always had this mentality of trailblazing.. the assumption has always been there that someone else will follow once they lead the way. This is lost on many people who look for NASA to build cities on the Moon or whatever.
I *challenge* you to take a person who has never used a Mac to the Apple store and ask them to use a Mac to do any standard task. Actually listen to what they say. If they don't mutter "how the hell do I..?" in the first 5 minutes you've found a genius. It is not intuitive. You're told it is intuitive and you believe it, but have you actually tested it?
We're not talking about the people who "just like it", we're talking about the people who claim it "just works". It doesn't just work! The fact is that for the vast majority of people who get on a Mac for the first, second, or even 20th time, they damn thing doesn't "just work" it doesn't even "just kinda work". What it does is anything but. So stop speaking shit. I challenge everyone who has never used a Mac to go to the Apple Store and try to perform the most basic of tasks.. hell, try to switch from one maximized application to another. Enjoy the learning curve. They don't.. just.. work..
People try them because they are told they "just work" and they pay highly for the privilege. When they discover that they have been lied to they are assured to "stick with it" and once they are heavily invested they are afraid to pull out because they don't want to lose that investment. Then they try to enlist other people so they don't feel so abnormal.
In other words, it's a cult. And if you find that too hard to believe, keep in mind that the leader of this cult is Steve Jobs. If you can't see that he is a cult leader then you're already lost.
Slashdot Mirror
No. A law that tries to control the right to copy makes no sense in a world where everyone has every day access to copying machines. The direct social benefits of copying cannot be denied by the naive backwards belief that restriction of that copying is the best way to encourage the creation of new works. We now know that is wrong. We now know that, in fact, the exact opposite is true - people create more new works when they have free access to the work of others. Some of us have known this for centuries, but we tolerated the nonsense of the singers and song-writers because there really wasn't much harm being done. Now this absurd conspiracy against the public interest must be stopped.
Agreed. End copyright. We'll get along without it.
The real danger is iPods. Hard drives are basically just spinning magnets.
Freedom of speech. Freedom of association. Fucking hell.
You chicken shit motherfuckers. Bring it on. We'll sue your ass for breach of contract and then we'll take down your conspiracy. Get it through your thick heads, the days of your draconian control over the distribution of our culture is over.
Semantic word games do not an argument make.
Go read about machine learning. There's plenty of things that we *can* do. It's not hard to sort the bunk from the legitimate results. Just don't look for anyone saying what we *can't* do. That's a little too pessimistic for the compsci crowd and is considered dangerous to the math crowd (who have a habit of not saying anything they can't prove).
You make it sound so easy!
Of course, at a certain level of abstraction, everything is easy.
Intelligence really is that simple.. except there's one little detail you're ignoring.
Any biological intelligence does exactly the same as described: gather data (try to assess external universe model using limited computational resources), find correlations (build internal universe model using limited computational resources), act according to internal needs (act upon internal universe model using limited computational resources) and repeat.
That's the hard part. If you have infinite computational resources it's really trivial to act intelligently. All you need do is enumerate all possible outcomes of all possible actions with an idealized model of the world (Godel not withstanding) and pick whichever maximizes your expected reward. You can write nice long mathematical papers on this.. or even a whole book. The question is, how do you do it with a sensible amount of processing power and memory?
All the geeks have a great laugh when Matt Groening causes Bender to become transparent and we see a 6502 inside. The joke is that Bender has about the same processing power of a C64 from the early 80s. The show is littered with additional Commodore jokes which I'm sure 90% of the viewers just don't get. But that's not what really makes it funny. What really makes it funny is that all us geeks know that you need a lot more processing power than a 6502 to do the complex things that Bender does in the complex environment he does them in. But how is that? We don't know how to do AI. We don't even have the slightest clue. For all we know, there is a tight little algorithm for AI that could run on a 6502 and produce all those crazy behaviors that Bender gets away with.
And that's the problem with AI. The allure is that some short little algorithm exists that will magically evolve into a super-human intelligence if you just could find it and hook it up to the world. After all, nature figured out, how hard could it be? This has led many a would be mad scientist to code up a genetic algorithms implementation. In fact, most every programmer I know has given it a go. The mystery of what you'll find if you give it the right fitness function is a powerful motivator - with a little magical thinking, it could be anything!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDHJ4ztnldQ
For the same reason we should care about what Christians believe - cause they are delusional and accepting irrational belief as "ok" is bad for all of us in the long run.
Steve Jobs is a charismatic guy.. I get it. But everything he and his spin doctors say is not true. When he lies, we should call him on it. When people repeat his lies, we should call *them* on it.
Yes.. it *is* that George Dyson.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/speakers/george_dyson.html
Freeman Dyson's son. Both the TED talks he's given are awesome.
all "magical thinking" in the field of artificial intelligence was reserved for fiction.
There's so much rigorous mathematically described hooey in AI that its hard to tell the naive geniuses from the crackpot morons. Consider this paper by Solomonoff. Brilliant stuff! A fantastic read. Then, at the end, it says:
In our view, however, the most interesting situation in machine learning, arises when we do not know ahead of time what program will solve a given problem and where the machine discovers the program itself. It seems to be very hard to find out much about this by theory alone. Running experiments is crucial.
This is Solomonoff's way of reminding us that he is a mathematician and hasn't actually run any experiments. His other papers make similar pronouncements in the footnotes about the uncomputability of his math or acknowledge the requirement of perfect (aka impractical) training data, etc. He makes it abundantly clear that is work is purely theoretical and unimplementable, but does this stop enthusiastic amateurs from reading his papers and declaring that AI is "solved"? Well no, of course not.
NASA has always had this mentality of trailblazing.. the assumption has always been there that someone else will follow once they lead the way. This is lost on many people who look for NASA to build cities on the Moon or whatever.
Yes, good point, thank you.
No.. I'd be happy to say that no OS "just works". It's not a question of Apple-vs-Whatever.. it's a matter of Apple lying.
"it just works" mean things just work (and this is generally true). It does *not* mean "I don't have to learn how to use it".
Control the language and you control the debate, eh? I see you are still drinking the Koolaid.
Took me a couple of days to understand the whole thing.
What? So it didn't "just work"? Huh?
I would disagree, while there is a (shallow) learning curve, when I plug in a printer it "just works".
then you do agree with me.
I *challenge* you to take a person who has never used a Mac to the Apple store and ask them to use a Mac to do any standard task. Actually listen to what they say. If they don't mutter "how the hell do I..?" in the first 5 minutes you've found a genius. It is not intuitive. You're told it is intuitive and you believe it, but have you actually tested it?
We're not talking about the people who "just like it", we're talking about the people who claim it "just works". It doesn't just work! The fact is that for the vast majority of people who get on a Mac for the first, second, or even 20th time, they damn thing doesn't "just work" it doesn't even "just kinda work". What it does is anything but. So stop speaking shit. I challenge everyone who has never used a Mac to go to the Apple Store and try to perform the most basic of tasks.. hell, try to switch from one maximized application to another. Enjoy the learning curve. They don't.. just.. work..
Macs don't "just work".
People try them because they are told they "just work" and they pay highly for the privilege. When they discover that they have been lied to they are assured to "stick with it" and once they are heavily invested they are afraid to pull out because they don't want to lose that investment. Then they try to enlist other people so they don't feel so abnormal.
In other words, it's a cult. And if you find that too hard to believe, keep in mind that the leader of this cult is Steve Jobs. If you can't see that he is a cult leader then you're already lost.
It's a gray beard technology.
You need to be a master of the arcane to understand it.
It's called typesetting and, unfortunately, LaTeX is still the freakin' best.
I always used Lyx as an interface to LaTeX.. until it broke, and then I had to hack the LaTeX manually.
is that everyone wants to roll their own.
Did you even read the article? Heh, who am I kidding. Of course you didn't.
He's talking about the far future.. of course, you probably think human-kind doesn't have a far future.
RTFA genius.