... would seem to be a much more likely implanted medical device than pacemakers to use this technology. Having a pair of fully-implanted, self-powered devices that independently provide sound to each ear would seem to be a huge step forward, and readily achievable with this sort of technology.
And with a generation rapidly driving themselves deaf via iPods, a technological solution like this would seem to be appropriate and is arriving just in time.
While I don't know what kind of voltages and currents a pacemaker uses to regulate heart activity, it would seem a lot more likely that a cochlear implant would use less. Plus, there's a lot less downside risk if the device malfunctions.
I think that extremists intent on pushing their conceptual frameworks into the lives of others, have to rank near the top. People like Islamic radicals, Christian fundamentalists, neocon politicians and socialist extremists.
Any kind of monster that isn't a human being isn't really scary at all. Just ask Stephen King what scares him -- odds are, it's other people.
Aside from the observation that one should treat EVERY publicly accessible computer as if it were packed to the gills with keystroke loggers and viruses (and that is, of course, why you recommended using your own external USB drive (flash or spinning), never accessing the suspect internal storage of the Internet Cafe's machine), there is also the problem that you are unlikely to find an Internet Cafe or Business Center located where you are meeting and have need of your data.
So some sort of portable computer is required.
One wonders just how long before something like a smartphone on steroids will be available.
Something with a processor capable of managing spreadsheet crunching (e.g., Intel's Silverthorne), a display big enough to be usable (the iPhone's display is marginal in that respect, but if one made it about an inch ('scuse me, rest-of-world, I mean 4 cm) larger in height and width it would be quite useful), and had a camera capable of capturing 720i HDV (or 1280x720 still images), with a real GPS (the iPhone's wifi/celltower triangulation is a neat trick, but only a trick, and not really useful once one is away from both celltowers and wifi hotspots) capability, and at least 32GB of storage -- and you would have something capable of replacing a notebook for a very wide range of situations.
It would still fit into a shirt pocket, and could replace a notebook, digital camera, camcorder, and cellphone -- significantly reducing the amount of hardware one needs to manage and keep track of while traveling.
What would REALLY be nice is if it were not chained to a larcenous phone company service contract, and one were able to purchase short-term local cellphone contracts to obtain reasonable phone service anywhere in the world. Or just use Skype.
Really? I would have thought that being somewhat isolated, utilities might cost more in a deprecated missile silo than in an area with abundant connectivity to various utility grids, and the expense of running pumps to keep the silo dry (underground facilities like this tend to collect a lot of water, and would rapidly fill up without substantial pumping facilities), not to mention the additional expense of back-up pumps and additional maintenance thereof.
Does anyone have any actual hard numbers on what it costs to lease space in an underground "secure" facility, vs leasing space in a typical industrial park? Assuming that utilities are included in the lease, of course.
I am highly suspicious of the actual truth behind this story, as Brit newspapers (as well as those in the colonies) are notorious for spinning a story to sell more papers, with little regard for the actual facts of the matter.
... engine, would anyone mistake it for "artificial intelligence"?
Hell, YES -- it would be all over the news, especially if it included one of those animatronic faces and projected some pseudo emotions.
But it you took a random selection of humanity and ran a Turing test between the two, how long would it take a typical human to tell the difference and correctly identify the "real intelligence"? And how often would they get it wrong?
The fact is that most of humanity fails the test if reasoning or logic forms any substantial part of it. Tell me, what part of "intelligence" is it that allows an entity to stand firm in their beliefs in almost mechanical defiance to reason and logic, when they cannot muster any response to an argument, and even admit that they are unable to do so.
Are humans, as a species, "intelligent"?
Examples:
* The universe is only 6000 years old. (never mind that they also believe in the things that make nuclear power possible)
* We are fighting the terrorists in Iraq to keep them from attacking us here. (never mind the fact that they acknowledge that the terrorists who attacked us had no connection to Iraq and that Iraq posed no threat to us)
You can add your own candidates to this list. They should be things that are widely believed, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
... an asymptote in high-energy-density computing, with subsequent development progressing along the lines of a ubiquitous omnipresent space of interconnected processors.
Or maybe quantum computing will emerge from the laboratory and make all these giant data centers nothing more than 21st century buggy whip factories. Microsoft will be buying up all of them, cornering the market, as it were.
One of the flaws in the human neural engine is the inability to imagine/estimate/project a probable future (via virtualization or any other model you want to employ) that is based on a compounding of change, wherein the rate of change increases over time.
In the Real World, a chaotic behavior is achieved via a rate of change that changes, increasing exponentially for a time, with an eventual turn downward that leads to a chaotic collapse. But people seem locked into the use of a model that projects a future based on a linear projection of current trends, which works in a broad range of situations, but only for a brief time.
Time and time again people "project" their image of the future, whether a localized, short-term future involving the interaction of a few elements over a brief period of time (where this simple technique works fairly well), or a distant, global future involving many many elements interacting (where it doesn't work at all), continually underestimating the likely future that will unfold.
Yet this is exactly the way that most events progress.
We see this pattern of weak expectations in all kinds of areas whenever disruptive technologies enter the picture, from financial analysis to science fiction. And the people most afflicted by their inability to see the chain reaction of events multiplying to produce radical change in a shorter period of time than anyone would have believed -- those are the experts. And the exponential changes always seem obvious in hindsight.
Hopefully, whatever higher form of intelligence emerges in the decades to come, it will not fall victim to this fundamental flaw that persists in human intelligence. If so, it will have to re-invent itself to get around the problem, which may be an extremely intractable one.
One would have expected natural selection to have produced at least a few minds capable of projecting an exponential future, as a more accurate estimation of the future in the medium term would offer a profound advantage. But we have not yet seen such an anticipatory genius emerge yet, at least not from any history I am aware of.
... until they catch one of the hundreds of thousands of deep cover terrorists (that's why we have hundreds of thousands of "persons of interest" on the TSA watchlist, right?) smuggling terrorist plans stored as song lyrics in iPods. Or steganographic hidden messages in cellphone photos.
But you know, THIS IS CLEARLY WORKING, as no Saudi terrorists have flown airliners into buildings since 9-11.
Or perhaps the credit is due to the tens of thousands of American soldiers putting their lives on the line every day in Iraq and Afghanistan to prevent the terrorists from swimming the Atlantic and do serious harm to us back home.
Perhaps in only a few generations, the thousands of years of Islamic history and culture will be overturned and the Islamics will see the wisdom in the separation of church and state.
Of course, in a few generations it's entirely likely that we will have abandoned the separation of church and state, driven to extremist craziness by decades of ideological fools shouting over the TV and radio.
Actually, it's entirely likely that the reporter's address was *NOT* in the lawyer's address book. Dunno how this works with Outlook, but with OS X's Mail application, there is a "Previous Recipients..." list (check the Window menu, or query Mail's Help menu for more info) that contains the addresses of anyone who has sent an email to that person, and the default action for auto-completion is to include those addresses as well as the ones in the Address Book.
So a scenario like this is possible: *) reporter sends and email to the lawyer requesting an interview or information -- the reporter's address goes into the lawyer's Previous Recipients list, lurking in wait... no existence of the reporter's address is necessary in the lawyer's Address Book.
*) lawyer fires off an email to the similarly-named colleague, and in typical rapid-fire ("time is money") lawyer fashion, does not scrutinize the outgoing email sufficiently -- perhaps there was only a single address in his Address Book for that name.
Yes, ultimately it was the lawyer's responsibility to inspect the outgoing email, but it is awfully easy to fool oneself into believing that you know how the software works when you do not, and fall victim to an unjustified assumption. It happens all the time in all kinds of situations, not just those involving software.
In virtually every review of any computer, with few exceptions, the reviewer treats the product as if it is intended to be of general use by all computer users. The truth is that no computer is of general use for everyone. People don't complain that the OLPC is underpowered, or lacks a DVD burner -- it is obviously targeted at a specific market segment. A Macbook Pro is also targeted at a different market segment -- one that attempts to replace a desktop machine, while sacrificing little along the way. The Macbook targets the cost-conscious portable computer user, who needs a machine that does a bit of everything, sacrificing perfection for cost. It's a heck of a bargain, and sells accordingly. The MBA targets a different market segment.
The MBA targets the upscale mobile user who needs a notebook for traveling, that sacrifices little in the uses one encounters while traveling. This would seem to hit the mark. How many people carry stacks of DVDs to watch while traveling? Especially when so much content is downloadable and with Apple pushing iTMS video rentals. I can easily see airport wifi video rental franchises catering to this market. Does it run Office? Yes -- either the OS X version of Office, or Windows via a variety of ways. Corporate email platforms supported? check.
The horsepower seems perfectly adequate to me, as I surf the web and am typing this on a 1 GHZ iBook G4 (my desktop machine is a venerable Powermac G5 dual 2 GHz machine, something that is pretty close the the MBA in horsepower). The 1.6/1.8 GHz Core Duo seems admirably powered to me, perhaps not to a full-time gamer, but THAT'S NOT THE MARKET THIS IS TARGETING.
If we compare the competition in this marketplace, the MBA seems very robust, with more horsepower, a better display, better keyboard, and a price that is comparable to its ultralite competitors as well. For a traveling business person, especially one with a corporate-supplied notebook, this would be a VERY desirable machine. Gotta have the corporate-approved Windows install? Install it via Boot Camp and run Windows, Apple is still happy to make the sale and get an entry into the corporate markets.
Watch and see if these machines don't start showing up at business conferences, or accompanying CEOs on weekend golfing boondoggles via the corporate jet. Or with journalists (broadcast and print) who travel a lot. Heck, a significant amount of production feature film editing has been done using less capable notebooks than this in the not-too-distant past -- although no one would use a machine of this performance level today, when others are better suited to the task (it's a DIFFERENT MARKET).
The biggest failure I can see, given the targeted market segment, is the lack of a cellular connection capability. And given that such a feature would lock one into a particular cellular network, I can understand the omission -- but a space to add such a card at a later time would have been nice.
Fer the FSM's sake, pull yer heads out and quitcher moanin about it not being the machine made personally for YOU. That machine does not exist, and likely never will. It's why we look at what's available and choose what best suits our needs. Just because I have no use for an OLPC or a high-end GPU, does not mean that those things are doomed to failure, it only means that I have no use for them. Nothing more.
If a given product satifies nobody's needs, or has a competitor that is superior in either price or fit, then it is in danger of failure. The Macbook Air is not.
... is that the high level of spam will make it difficult to distinguish a certain style of cipher from the noise words inserted into spam to sneak it past the spam filters.
Somebody needs to get cracking to devise a cipher that looks just like these spam noise words... something along the lines of a one-time pad
... particularly hospitals is not generally comprehended.
People fail to understand the difference between capital expenses and operational expenses.
Cheaper hardware and software only save capital expense, at the cost of the need for a more sophisticated staff and a reduction in the number of big name expensive software application packages available.
Bigger capital expenses mean bigger budgets, and justify larger compensation packages for senior management. A more sophisticated staff generally means greater responsibility and performance, and that's NOT something that senior management wants anything to do with. Better to kick the problems back to an outside vendor or consultant -- someone who the manager is not directly responsible for the performance of. It's important to leave wiggle room for finger-pointing.
None of this appeals to hospital senior management -- they want the big name spiffy stuff, but don't want to pay for (and worse yet, to manage and be responsible for) a talented staff to keep things running smoothly -- that's the vendor's job.
Impressive names on the software and equipment, and plug & play people -- that's what hospitals (and companies of all stripes, but more-so in hospitals) want.
The way that pandemics spread is through communication of the disease via personal contact. Thanks to the internet, we now have -- at least in prototype form -- the means of carrying on many of the activities of society without physically bringing large groups of people together.
For instance, schools could in principle be carried out via the net, as there are several college degree programs and webcam-based systems for including shut-ins in classroom activities today. I can purchase just about anything I need over the web, and incur only the risk of dealing with the manufacturing and shipping personnel, and not an entire store full of people in addition. Most businesses can operate fairly effectively using people working from home -- the exception being manufacturing, but then we don't do much manufacturing here in the USofA any more, do we? I admit that there might be a problem importing goods from China, where manufacturing involves gathering LOTs of people together under one roof.
But foodstuffs are largely produced by a highly efficient force of a very few people, so if we can avoid grocery stores and purchase our groceries over the web, to be delivered by a team in biohazard suits... well, you get the idea.
I'm sure that Exxon would suffer a bit, without millions of people driving to work, but by and large, I think that a workable economy would be possible with greatly reduced person-to-person interactions. I guess I'll just have to live with the thought of a reduced income for ExxonMobil.
A variation of this same phenomenon has held US elections in its grip for many decades, witness the continuous decline in the fraction of potentially eligible voters who actually vote.
If you limit that again by the fraction of those who go to the polls and have a clue about who the people are they're voting for (usually, they're voting against someone, and don't much care who gets in, so long as it's not candidate X), and are not merely blindly pulling the party lever, then the fraction of intelligent voters in our own system is effectively zero.
It's the death of democracy. As noted by others, if there is no provision to deny eligibility to vote for non-performance on the part of the voters, the system will die. And even if voters do go to the polls but are disgusted by the lack of choice, due to the major parties exercising duopoly control over every aspect of the process, the system dies then too.
It's just a matter of time before some lunatic figures out a way to game the system, either by destroying their opponents (physically, as Hitler and the Brown Shirts did in pre-WWII Germany, or via character smears and lies, as is the tradition in our nation (and several other "democratic" nations)) or wrapping themselves in some demagogic issue and making the election revolve about a single issue. In such circumstances, the aggregate "wisdom of the crowd" is transformed into the lunacy of the mob -- think the French Revolution and Robespierre's Reign of Terror (or our own War on Terror, for that matter).
Once you manage to turn away thoughtful discussion/argument/debate, and limit the process to a small number of controllable groups, democracy dies.
This is the cancer of democratic systems, and the reason why there are no long-running democracies.
So far as I am able to tell, it means constructing a set of neural pathways -- connections within the brain -- that provide the wetware necessary to be able to perform specific modalities of what we call "thinking". This means that physical changes MUST occur for learning to take place, it's not quite as simple as recording a stream of bits, despite what you may have inferred from The Matrix.
The ease with which skills are "learned" depends upon the existing framework of neural connections, and the plasticity of the brain, i/e. the ease with which new connections are developed. I've read somewhere that it takes about 28 days for new neural pathways to be grown -- so much for the myth of last-minute cramming for tests. The best way to learn formulaic information (like math) is to repeatedly exercise those developing pathways over several months of time.
That's right -- boring drill work. Crank through 30-40 minutes of math problems every day (not sure whether morning or evening is better) and after a month or two, you WILL see improvement.
The younger you are, the more plasticity your brain has, and the easier it is to learn things.
But expecting to be able to read a text or observe a lecture, and pick up significant skills is simply deluding yourself. It doesn't work that way.
... where it matters -- in the voting booth. Vote out ALL incumbents, year after year, regardless of party, and after a while, the idiots that run the country would begin to get a clue.
... for sticking their collective heads in the oven, repeatedly.
This is the divergent point in IT -- one gets paid well for having a substantial capacity for problem solving, and then using that capacity to put oneself into miserable no-win situations.
Or not.
Sometimes (more often than not), one gets paid poorly for having a substantial capacity for problem solving and not using it -- which is how it should be, when you think about it.
If all those who could think did so, and got up and left,...... we would see a situation where clueless managers move all the work offshore, where they get cheaper competent labor that understands the problem space much less, but is willing to continue to follow idiotic direction merely for a continued paycheck. Oh, wait...
"Google is the #1 company that has been fighting AGAINST government intrusion into search."
Isn't that rather the point of Cory's story? back up a step or two, and put your mind toward other corporate entities that have not a shred of hesitation about getting in bed with government intrusion. Count the number of them that you certainly wouldn't want to see in this line of work. Now think about how difficult it is to put together search engines and data-mining operations, even if they're not quite as efficient as Google or Yahoo.
Google is the PERFECT stalking horse to frame this sort of story around.
... I think that if a true AI were ever to be constructed, we would be unable to communicate with it, as its internal processes would be operating tens/hundreds of thousands of times faster than ours, and it would simply become too bored waiting for us to respond for any interaction to take place. This is in addition to the possibility that such a conversation would be like trying to communicate between a person and a dog (or cat) -- and with the lesser end of the conversation running ten thousand times slower than the person.
What is the set of messages you can send to a housefly? What can it communicate to you?
Of course, one could slow down an AI, to operate in the realm of "human speed", but it would lose all the advantages of superior thought in the process. To continue my earlier analogy, it might become a case of a dog trying to communicate with a human infant, or a drunk. Not a terribly wide channel of communications.
Probably the best hope that people have for boosting their capabilities is the construction of superior organizations to amplify the abilities of individuals. Better societies, better governments, better corporations. Become better Borg. Plenty of room for improvement.
Then you might see a reasonable possibility for the kind of utopia that Kurzweil sees. His notions for improvement of individual humans are just ridiculous. You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear. We don't have that kind of potential within us. Just try reading and listening to a podcast concurrently, and getting in-depth comprehension from either channel of information -- let alone both. Try and figure out what kind of changes would have to occur to allow this kind of parallelism of thought, and whether the end result could be considered in any way/shape/form to be "human", or the likelihood that such a being would not be susceptible to catatonic lockups on a daily basis.
Silk purse != sow's ear. You can't get there from here.
... until you can snatch the pebble from my palm, you will be pursued by lawyers and other creatures of the night.
I wonder what kind of process server Shaolin monks would use to serve notice to a ninja? I seems this might be the basis for a TV sitcom, with each episode having the hapless process server falling back to devise a new approach to sneak up on the ninja and serve the papers.
... for Universal, using NBC as a sock puppet, to spring this on Apple just before Apple rolls out their new video iPods next week.
Kinda makes one think that this is a personal vendetta on the part of Universal (for their inability to force Apple to do their bidding on music download pricing) to stick it to Apple and twist the knife a bit.
NBC's been on the road to the corporate dumpster for quite a while now, so I guess that Universal sees them as expendable.
"free college tuition" -- I think that it would be better stated as a taxpayer-supported scholarship program.
If we really did tax everyone -- and that IS where the money to fund this should come from, I don't favor borrowing it from the Chinese and thus shifting the payment burden to subsequent generations -- to pay for this, I would think that we at least want to ensure that we are not funding a bumper crop of math, engineering and science doofuses. The Slashdot audience is big enough as it is.
Some level of demonstrated ability should be a requirement to qualify for such a scholarship.
I'm waiting for Senator Baucus to be trumped by some other senatorial bozo with a "free beer" program.
"Free" has always been a touchstone word with our elected bozos. They should be horsewhipped every time they use the word.
... the health care insurance available to Clarian Health Partners is provided by M-Plan, a Clarian subsidiary.
Clearly, in the 21st century the notion of an insurance company -- especially a corporate health insurance company -- providing insurance for a population consisting of an employer's employees, and spreading the risk across that employee population, has gone by the wayside in favor of milking not only the customers, but the employees for profits to support the corporate owners.
And Clarian Health Partners is not a publicly-owned company.
Three assertions (points 1, 3 and 4), and one opinion (point 2).
No substantiating data whatsoever.
I suggest that you read "Plows, Plagues and Petroleum", a book that makes a strong stab at constructing an explanation that fits the observed data (this is called a "theory" in scientific circles), and offers lots of supporting references. At least make a feeble attempt to become educated before you go spewing your biases and opinions -- because without supporting data, that's all you have.
Slashdot Mirror
... would seem to be a much more likely implanted medical device than pacemakers to use this technology. Having a pair of fully-implanted, self-powered devices that independently provide sound to each ear would seem to be a huge step forward, and readily achievable with this sort of technology.
And with a generation rapidly driving themselves deaf via iPods, a technological solution like this would seem to be appropriate and is arriving just in time.
While I don't know what kind of voltages and currents a pacemaker uses to regulate heart activity, it would seem a lot more likely that a cochlear implant would use less. Plus, there's a lot less downside risk if the device malfunctions.
I think that extremists intent on pushing their conceptual frameworks into the lives of others, have to rank near the top. People like Islamic radicals, Christian fundamentalists, neocon politicians and socialist extremists.
Any kind of monster that isn't a human being isn't really scary at all. Just ask Stephen King what scares him -- odds are, it's other people.
Aside from the observation that one should treat EVERY publicly accessible computer as if it were packed to the gills with keystroke loggers and viruses (and that is, of course, why you recommended using your own external USB drive (flash or spinning), never accessing the suspect internal storage of the Internet Cafe's machine), there is also the problem that you are unlikely to find an Internet Cafe or Business Center located where you are meeting and have need of your data.
So some sort of portable computer is required.
One wonders just how long before something like a smartphone on steroids will be available.
Something with a processor capable of managing spreadsheet crunching (e.g., Intel's Silverthorne), a display big enough to be usable (the iPhone's display is marginal in that respect, but if one made it about an inch ('scuse me, rest-of-world, I mean 4 cm) larger in height and width it would be quite useful), and had a camera capable of capturing 720i HDV (or 1280x720 still images), with a real GPS (the iPhone's wifi/celltower triangulation is a neat trick, but only a trick, and not really useful once one is away from both celltowers and wifi hotspots) capability, and at least 32GB of storage -- and you would have something capable of replacing a notebook for a very wide range of situations.
It would still fit into a shirt pocket, and could replace a notebook, digital camera, camcorder, and cellphone -- significantly reducing the amount of hardware one needs to manage and keep track of while traveling.
What would REALLY be nice is if it were not chained to a larcenous phone company service contract, and one were able to purchase short-term local cellphone contracts to obtain reasonable phone service anywhere in the world. Or just use Skype.
"relatively cheap"
Really? I would have thought that being somewhat isolated, utilities might cost more in a deprecated missile silo than in an area with abundant connectivity to various utility grids, and the expense of running pumps to keep the silo dry (underground facilities like this tend to collect a lot of water, and would rapidly fill up without substantial pumping facilities), not to mention the additional expense of back-up pumps and additional maintenance thereof.
Does anyone have any actual hard numbers on what it costs to lease space in an underground "secure" facility, vs leasing space in a typical industrial park? Assuming that utilities are included in the lease, of course.
I am highly suspicious of the actual truth behind this story, as Brit newspapers (as well as those in the colonies) are notorious for spinning a story to sell more papers, with little regard for the actual facts of the matter.
If they don't get it after you explain that, walk away, as you are never going to convince them.
... engine, would anyone mistake it for "artificial intelligence"?
Hell, YES -- it would be all over the news, especially if it included one of those animatronic faces and projected some pseudo emotions.
But it you took a random selection of humanity and ran a Turing test between the two, how long would it take a typical human to tell the difference and correctly identify the "real intelligence"? And how often would they get it wrong?
The fact is that most of humanity fails the test if reasoning or logic forms any substantial part of it. Tell me, what part of "intelligence" is it that allows an entity to stand firm in their beliefs in almost mechanical defiance to reason and logic, when they cannot muster any response to an argument, and even admit that they are unable to do so.
Are humans, as a species, "intelligent"?
Examples:
* The universe is only 6000 years old. (never mind that they also believe in the things that make nuclear power possible)
* We are fighting the terrorists in Iraq to keep them from attacking us here. (never mind the fact that they acknowledge that the terrorists who attacked us had no connection to Iraq and that Iraq posed no threat to us)
You can add your own candidates to this list. They should be things that are widely believed, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
... an asymptote in high-energy-density computing, with subsequent development progressing along the lines of a ubiquitous omnipresent space of interconnected processors.
Or maybe quantum computing will emerge from the laboratory and make all these giant data centers nothing more than 21st century buggy whip factories. Microsoft will be buying up all of them, cornering the market, as it were.
Which yesterday do you want to go to today?
One of the flaws in the human neural engine is the inability to imagine/estimate/project a probable future (via virtualization or any other model you want to employ) that is based on a compounding of change, wherein the rate of change increases over time.
In the Real World, a chaotic behavior is achieved via a rate of change that changes, increasing exponentially for a time, with an eventual turn downward that leads to a chaotic collapse. But people seem locked into the use of a model that projects a future based on a linear projection of current trends, which works in a broad range of situations, but only for a brief time.
Time and time again people "project" their image of the future, whether a localized, short-term future involving the interaction of a few elements over a brief period of time (where this simple technique works fairly well), or a distant, global future involving many many elements interacting (where it doesn't work at all), continually underestimating the likely future that will unfold.
Yet this is exactly the way that most events progress.
We see this pattern of weak expectations in all kinds of areas whenever disruptive technologies enter the picture, from financial analysis to science fiction. And the people most afflicted by their inability to see the chain reaction of events multiplying to produce radical change in a shorter period of time than anyone would have believed -- those are the experts. And the exponential changes always seem obvious in hindsight.
Hopefully, whatever higher form of intelligence emerges in the decades to come, it will not fall victim to this fundamental flaw that persists in human intelligence. If so, it will have to re-invent itself to get around the problem, which may be an extremely intractable one.
One would have expected natural selection to have produced at least a few minds capable of projecting an exponential future, as a more accurate estimation of the future in the medium term would offer a profound advantage. But we have not yet seen such an anticipatory genius emerge yet, at least not from any history I am aware of.
... until they catch one of the hundreds of thousands of deep cover terrorists (that's why we have hundreds of thousands of "persons of interest" on the TSA watchlist, right?) smuggling terrorist plans stored as song lyrics in iPods. Or steganographic hidden messages in cellphone photos.
But you know, THIS IS CLEARLY WORKING, as no Saudi terrorists have flown airliners into buildings since 9-11.
Or perhaps the credit is due to the tens of thousands of American soldiers putting their lives on the line every day in Iraq and Afghanistan to prevent the terrorists from swimming the Atlantic and do serious harm to us back home.
Perhaps in only a few generations, the thousands of years of Islamic history and culture will be overturned and the Islamics will see the wisdom in the separation of church and state.
Of course, in a few generations it's entirely likely that we will have abandoned the separation of church and state, driven to extremist craziness by decades of ideological fools shouting over the TV and radio.
--------------------
Yes, this IS a rant.
Actually, it's entirely likely that the reporter's address was *NOT* in the lawyer's address book. Dunno how this works with Outlook, but with OS X's Mail application, there is a "Previous Recipients..." list (check the Window menu, or query Mail's Help menu for more info) that contains the addresses of anyone who has sent an email to that person, and the default action for auto-completion is to include those addresses as well as the ones in the Address Book.
... no existence of the reporter's address is necessary in the lawyer's Address Book.
So a scenario like this is possible:
*) reporter sends and email to the lawyer requesting an interview or information -- the reporter's address goes into the lawyer's Previous Recipients list, lurking in wait
*) lawyer fires off an email to the similarly-named colleague, and in typical rapid-fire ("time is money") lawyer fashion, does not scrutinize the outgoing email sufficiently -- perhaps there was only a single address in his Address Book for that name.
Yes, ultimately it was the lawyer's responsibility to inspect the outgoing email, but it is awfully easy to fool oneself into believing that you know how the software works when you do not, and fall victim to an unjustified assumption. It happens all the time in all kinds of situations, not just those involving software.
The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
In virtually every review of any computer, with few exceptions, the reviewer treats the product as if it is intended to be of general use by all computer users. The truth is that no computer is of general use for everyone. People don't complain that the OLPC is underpowered, or lacks a DVD burner -- it is obviously targeted at a specific market segment. A Macbook Pro is also targeted at a different market segment -- one that attempts to replace a desktop machine, while sacrificing little along the way. The Macbook targets the cost-conscious portable computer user, who needs a machine that does a bit of everything, sacrificing perfection for cost. It's a heck of a bargain, and sells accordingly. The MBA targets a different market segment.
The MBA targets the upscale mobile user who needs a notebook for traveling, that sacrifices little in the uses one encounters while traveling. This would seem to hit the mark. How many people carry stacks of DVDs to watch while traveling? Especially when so much content is downloadable and with Apple pushing iTMS video rentals. I can easily see airport wifi video rental franchises catering to this market. Does it run Office? Yes -- either the OS X version of Office, or Windows via a variety of ways. Corporate email platforms supported? check.
The horsepower seems perfectly adequate to me, as I surf the web and am typing this on a 1 GHZ iBook G4 (my desktop machine is a venerable Powermac G5 dual 2 GHz machine, something that is pretty close the the MBA in horsepower). The 1.6/1.8 GHz Core Duo seems admirably powered to me, perhaps not to a full-time gamer, but THAT'S NOT THE MARKET THIS IS TARGETING.
If we compare the competition in this marketplace, the MBA seems very robust, with more horsepower, a better display, better keyboard, and a price that is comparable to its ultralite competitors as well. For a traveling business person, especially one with a corporate-supplied notebook, this would be a VERY desirable machine. Gotta have the corporate-approved Windows install? Install it via Boot Camp and run Windows, Apple is still happy to make the sale and get an entry into the corporate markets.
Watch and see if these machines don't start showing up at business conferences, or accompanying CEOs on weekend golfing boondoggles via the corporate jet. Or with journalists (broadcast and print) who travel a lot. Heck, a significant amount of production feature film editing has been done using less capable notebooks than this in the not-too-distant past -- although no one would use a machine of this performance level today, when others are better suited to the task (it's a DIFFERENT MARKET).
The biggest failure I can see, given the targeted market segment, is the lack of a cellular connection capability. And given that such a feature would lock one into a particular cellular network, I can understand the omission -- but a space to add such a card at a later time would have been nice.
Fer the FSM's sake, pull yer heads out and quitcher moanin about it not being the machine made personally for YOU. That machine does not exist, and likely never will. It's why we look at what's available and choose what best suits our needs. Just because I have no use for an OLPC or a high-end GPU, does not mean that those things are doomed to failure, it only means that I have no use for them. Nothing more.
If a given product satifies nobody's needs, or has a competitor that is superior in either price or fit, then it is in danger of failure. The Macbook Air is not.
Somebody needs to get cracking to devise a cipher that looks just like these spam noise words... something along the lines of a one-time pad
... particularly hospitals is not generally comprehended.
People fail to understand the difference between capital expenses and operational expenses.
Cheaper hardware and software only save capital expense, at the cost of the need for a more sophisticated staff and a reduction in the number of big name expensive software application packages available.
Bigger capital expenses mean bigger budgets, and justify larger compensation packages for senior management. A more sophisticated staff generally means greater responsibility and performance, and that's NOT something that senior management wants anything to do with. Better to kick the problems back to an outside vendor or consultant -- someone who the manager is not directly responsible for the performance of. It's important to leave wiggle room for finger-pointing.
None of this appeals to hospital senior management -- they want the big name spiffy stuff, but don't want to pay for (and worse yet, to manage and be responsible for) a talented staff to keep things running smoothly -- that's the vendor's job.
Impressive names on the software and equipment, and plug & play people -- that's what hospitals (and companies of all stripes, but more-so in hospitals) want.
The way that pandemics spread is through communication of the disease via personal contact. Thanks to the internet, we now have -- at least in prototype form -- the means of carrying on many of the activities of society without physically bringing large groups of people together.
... well, you get the idea.
For instance, schools could in principle be carried out via the net, as there are several college degree programs and webcam-based systems for including shut-ins in classroom activities today. I can purchase just about anything I need over the web, and incur only the risk of dealing with the manufacturing and shipping personnel, and not an entire store full of people in addition. Most businesses can operate fairly effectively using people working from home -- the exception being manufacturing, but then we don't do much manufacturing here in the USofA any more, do we? I admit that there might be a problem importing goods from China, where manufacturing involves gathering LOTs of people together under one roof.
But foodstuffs are largely produced by a highly efficient force of a very few people, so if we can avoid grocery stores and purchase our groceries over the web, to be delivered by a team in biohazard suits
I'm sure that Exxon would suffer a bit, without millions of people driving to work, but by and large, I think that a workable economy would be possible with greatly reduced person-to-person interactions. I guess I'll just have to live with the thought of a reduced income for ExxonMobil.
A variation of this same phenomenon has held US elections in its grip for many decades, witness the continuous decline in the fraction of potentially eligible voters who actually vote.
If you limit that again by the fraction of those who go to the polls and have a clue about who the people are they're voting for (usually, they're voting against someone, and don't much care who gets in, so long as it's not candidate X), and are not merely blindly pulling the party lever, then the fraction of intelligent voters in our own system is effectively zero.
It's the death of democracy. As noted by others, if there is no provision to deny eligibility to vote for non-performance on the part of the voters, the system will die. And even if voters do go to the polls but are disgusted by the lack of choice, due to the major parties exercising duopoly control over every aspect of the process, the system dies then too.
It's just a matter of time before some lunatic figures out a way to game the system, either by destroying their opponents (physically, as Hitler and the Brown Shirts did in pre-WWII Germany, or via character smears and lies, as is the tradition in our nation (and several other "democratic" nations)) or wrapping themselves in some demagogic issue and making the election revolve about a single issue. In such circumstances, the aggregate "wisdom of the crowd" is transformed into the lunacy of the mob -- think the French Revolution and Robespierre's Reign of Terror (or our own War on Terror, for that matter).
Once you manage to turn away thoughtful discussion/argument/debate, and limit the process to a small number of controllable groups, democracy dies.
This is the cancer of democratic systems, and the reason why there are no long-running democracies.
... to "learn" a skill?
So far as I am able to tell, it means constructing a set of neural pathways -- connections within the brain -- that provide the wetware necessary to be able to perform specific modalities of what we call "thinking". This means that physical changes MUST occur for learning to take place, it's not quite as simple as recording a stream of bits, despite what you may have inferred from The Matrix.
The ease with which skills are "learned" depends upon the existing framework of neural connections, and the plasticity of the brain, i/e. the ease with which new connections are developed. I've read somewhere that it takes about 28 days for new neural pathways to be grown -- so much for the myth of last-minute cramming for tests. The best way to learn formulaic information (like math) is to repeatedly exercise those developing pathways over several months of time.
That's right -- boring drill work. Crank through 30-40 minutes of math problems every day (not sure whether morning or evening is better) and after a month or two, you WILL see improvement.
The younger you are, the more plasticity your brain has, and the easier it is to learn things.
But expecting to be able to read a text or observe a lecture, and pick up significant skills is simply deluding yourself. It doesn't work that way.
... where it matters -- in the voting booth. Vote out ALL incumbents, year after year, regardless of party, and after a while, the idiots that run the country would begin to get a clue.
... for sticking their collective heads in the oven, repeatedly.
... ... we would see a situation where clueless managers move all the work offshore, where they get cheaper competent labor that understands the problem space much less, but is willing to continue to follow idiotic direction merely for a continued paycheck. Oh, wait ...
This is the divergent point in IT -- one gets paid well for having a substantial capacity for problem solving, and then using that capacity to put oneself into miserable no-win situations.
Or not.
Sometimes (more often than not), one gets paid poorly for having a substantial capacity for problem solving and not using it -- which is how it should be, when you think about it.
If all those who could think did so, and got up and left,
So IT goes.
"Google is the #1 company that has been fighting AGAINST government intrusion into search."
Isn't that rather the point of Cory's story? back up a step or two, and put your mind toward other corporate entities that have not a shred of hesitation about getting in bed with government intrusion. Count the number of them that you certainly wouldn't want to see in this line of work. Now think about how difficult it is to put together search engines and data-mining operations, even if they're not quite as efficient as Google or Yahoo.
Google is the PERFECT stalking horse to frame this sort of story around.
...
I think that if a true AI were ever to be constructed, we would be unable to communicate with it, as its internal processes would be operating tens/hundreds of thousands of times faster than ours, and it would simply become too bored waiting for us to respond for any interaction to take place. This is in addition to the possibility that such a conversation would be like trying to communicate between a person and a dog (or cat) -- and with the lesser end of the conversation running ten thousand times slower than the person.
What is the set of messages you can send to a housefly? What can it communicate to you?
Of course, one could slow down an AI, to operate in the realm of "human speed", but it would lose all the advantages of superior thought in the process. To continue my earlier analogy, it might become a case of a dog trying to communicate with a human infant, or a drunk. Not a terribly wide channel of communications.
Probably the best hope that people have for boosting their capabilities is the construction of superior organizations to amplify the abilities of individuals. Better societies, better governments, better corporations. Become better Borg. Plenty of room for improvement.
Then you might see a reasonable possibility for the kind of utopia that Kurzweil sees. His notions for improvement of individual humans are just ridiculous. You can't make a silk purse from a sow's ear. We don't have that kind of potential within us. Just try reading and listening to a podcast concurrently, and getting in-depth comprehension from either channel of information -- let alone both. Try and figure out what kind of changes would have to occur to allow this kind of parallelism of thought, and whether the end result could be considered in any way/shape/form to be "human", or the likelihood that such a being would not be susceptible to catatonic lockups on a daily basis.
Silk purse != sow's ear. You can't get there from here.
... until you can snatch the pebble from my palm, you will be pursued by lawyers and other creatures of the night.
I wonder what kind of process server Shaolin monks would use to serve notice to a ninja? I seems this might be the basis for a TV sitcom, with each episode having the hapless process server falling back to devise a new approach to sneak up on the ninja and serve the papers.
... for Universal, using NBC as a sock puppet, to spring this on Apple just before Apple rolls out their new video iPods next week.
Kinda makes one think that this is a personal vendetta on the part of Universal (for their inability to force Apple to do their bidding on music download pricing) to stick it to Apple and twist the knife a bit.
NBC's been on the road to the corporate dumpster for quite a while now, so I guess that Universal sees them as expendable.
"free college tuition" -- I think that it would be better stated as a taxpayer-supported scholarship program.
If we really did tax everyone -- and that IS where the money to fund this should come from, I don't favor borrowing it from the Chinese and thus shifting the payment burden to subsequent generations -- to pay for this, I would think that we at least want to ensure that we are not funding a bumper crop of math, engineering and science doofuses. The Slashdot audience is big enough as it is.
Some level of demonstrated ability should be a requirement to qualify for such a scholarship.
I'm waiting for Senator Baucus to be trumped by some other senatorial bozo with a "free beer" program.
"Free" has always been a touchstone word with our elected bozos. They should be horsewhipped every time they use the word.
... the health care insurance available to Clarian Health Partners is provided by M-Plan, a Clarian subsidiary.
Clearly, in the 21st century the notion of an insurance company -- especially a corporate health insurance company -- providing insurance for a population consisting of an employer's employees, and spreading the risk across that employee population, has gone by the wayside in favor of milking not only the customers, but the employees for profits to support the corporate owners.
And Clarian Health Partners is not a publicly-owned company.
No substantiating data whatsoever.
I suggest that you read "Plows, Plagues and Petroleum", a book that makes a strong stab at constructing an explanation that fits the observed data (this is called a "theory" in scientific circles), and offers lots of supporting references. At least make a feeble attempt to become educated before you go spewing your biases and opinions -- because without supporting data, that's all you have.