Surely there must be a way for you to vote for "none of the above" as Per Abrahamsen says. For example in Mexico you can cross out the whole ballot to make your vote null. It is still counted but it's not alloted to anybody. And it is usually a good measure of protest. High intentionally nullified vote count is always given a lot of air time and puts pressure on the government to take some corrective actions.
The problem I see with this is that they just know you are not happy, but there is no other mechanism to provide feedback as to what are you actually upset about. Best way is always to get involved. Support those that most closely resemble our values (in the real world nobody will ever match our values 100%), or if they are truly appalling, start our own, join one and change it from inside, etc. Inaction only gives the fascists currently in power to continue turning the US in a police state and that is bad for you and bad for the rest of the world given the USA's power and penchant for meddling in other people's affairs:P
I'm not trolling, if somebody disagrees please reply, don't just mod me down =P
What I find interesting is that they found these results ahead of what was expected./.er always whine that many stories presented here are about things that are "3 to 5 years into the future" (and they seem to be "Microsoft years", you know, like when you are installing something on Win* and it keeps telling you '5 minutes left to finish' for about 30 minutes =P ) so it's nice to hear this is the other way around for a change!
how about *drumroll* mechanical pencil! clicky-clicky and presto, you have more.05 or.07mm graphite to scribble away to your underworked and low-g hart's content.
=)
If they managed to store this energy in batteries, they could wear the suits indoors generating power for later use and thus avoiding that extra workout that others have complained about. I mean, since this is all vaporware sci-fi...
I've worked in DW for a time, and I can tell you that it's not easy to "get it right" because so far it's not something that can be packaged. You can get the data models and fancy machinery, but you will most definitely need an architect to tailor it to the particular organization because all companies work differently on the inside. And that architect will have a dickens of a time understanding how the company works because the bigger they are, the more likely not even their own employees do. As long as there isn't an official structural model imposed on them like it happens with accounting, corporations will grow and be structured however best suits them (or sometimes they just "grow" like wild weeds, unruly and chaotic). And a Data Warehouse is an attempt to code this internal structure and its dealings in a central repository that will serve a number of goals like Business Intelligence, Trend Analysis, etc... So you won't find a product or solution that will fit your company out of the box. It's pretty much like with self-help books. The general idea works in general terms, but you have to adjust it to your own reality and quirks for it to be of any value to you in particular.
Still "100X faster" is a big claim. Lots of smart people have been working on DMBSes for many years, a two order of magnitude improvement is a "I will have to see it to believe it" type claim
And yet 28% of Americans still support him. What does that say about us?
That finally 72% of the population wised up? I just wonder whether they would actually act out on it. Disagreeing is easy. Doing something about what you dislike requires effort, resources. Doing nothing requires nothing. The US has gone out of its way since I've been alive to portray a model of living in which everything should be nice, easy and comfortable. Would such a culture react in time to curb a threat that is by definition something that may happen at some point in the future when right now they are mostly contented?
That is a very debated issue in many places. For example Mexican revolution in 1910 was about fighting perpetual reelection (which is of course different from what the US has) and as a result all functionaries are elected for exactly one term on a given position only. This has lead to some other problems such as continuity of state programs, since every new mayor, governor and president come with their own agendas and generally dismiss anything the previous administration was doing. So with short time frames to do their work they can't follow through the few worthwhile projects that they come up with. Roughly they spend one third of the term learning how to handle the office, building relationships, developing programs and such. Then they spend the second third on the proper administration and the last third they are mostly concerned to with loading the scales in favor of their cronies that would replace them in office and/or campaigning for other positions.
I like US system more in that regard. What I think should be changed is the financing of campaigns. I think the Mexicans have figured it better. All parties regardless of political leaning are granted funding by the government to run their campaigns, with the amounts tied to their size of their vote turnout. The bigger the voter base, the more financing they get up to a maximum legal amount which they must not exceed. If the party doesn't get a minimum vote percentage of 5% (IIRC) they lose they registration. Private funding is limited to a maximum that is the same for all and generally doesn't account for the greater part of the campaign budget. Also scum like lobbyists are not possible because they have no carrot to wave in front of the legislators. The only way to sway them is to show that you can actually lead some percentage of the voters in their favor because that is a direct-vote representation where every single vote counts, not the broken system of representative democracy that they have in the US now. A combination of the two would probably be the best and swing things back in favor of the common guy.
Anyone can hack into your brain right this day. It can take the form of social engineering, indoctrination, culture, advertisement. People are constantly trying to break into your mind and place ideas there with the explicit intent of "programming you" to do something they want you to do, and I'd wager that's a more real concern that some physical tampering. Heck, I am doing it now by introducing this idea that wasn't there before. Are you aware of the the things you "know"? Do you have any idea of how much of that "knowledge" is belief rather than fact? (you don't need to answer me, these are rhetorical questions).
On the other hand, since we are speculating about something not even remotely feasible for the foreseeable next 10 to 20 years (this is one of my beliefs, not a fact) I'd bet that any wetware interfaces would have to be regulated under the same category that critical systems are. One would not, and legally can't use plain vanilla Linux, Windows or OSX for certain applications where the failure to operate properly may result in injuries or loss of human life, such as in some medical and military settings. One needs specially certified systems, so in all likelihood any computational devices that they placed in your brain should operate under those standards and not under shrink-wrap commercial software with guarantees that disclaim suitability for any particular purpose.
You can go and get elective surgery like lasik at discount prices (I did!) but even then they have to perform very thorough studies lest you walk out blind. And you should strive to get informed when undergoing any such process, which are fundamentally different from purchasing consumer electronics (which you should also ideally research at least a little, but if you blow it buying a cheap Chinese knock-off gadget, the most you usually stand to lose is money [and even Brand companies sell exploding batteries sometimes, don't they?]).
Remeber kids, [meme]You don't get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate for[/meme]. So it stands to reason that anyone considering stuffing electronics and software inside their skulls should research the risks it entails, and to protect the Darwin Award would-be-candidates from themselves there would be medical regulations in place at least similar to those that exist for other elective surgery procedures. And that's assuming it would ever attain the status of elective. I think that the world is drifting towards 1984 rather than Neuromancer, so extrapolating from where we stand now it seems unlikely that anyone could purchase brain implants in back alley shops that wouldn't be regulated leaving them exposed to unauthorized tampering.
You just reminded me of Neal Stepehnson's Diamond Age, where they mention that one character committed suicide after his brain was hacked to show adverts in some Arabic language in the lower side of his sight 24/7.
Also in one other novel I think it was by William Gibson —but I'm fuzzy on the details, maybe I'm mixing it up with Strange Days— they talk about how in the early days of brain interfaces they tried to watch the others recorded dreams but the experience was so bizarre that some of the relationship were broken as a result.
I agree with you in that practice keeps the brain "fit", but I just wanted to point out that once you truly become bilingual then the translation process stops and you switch to full-on thinking-in-x-language mode. I am bilingual in this sense as I am fluent both in English and Spanish, but when I speak French I have to go back to translating as I'm not yet fully proficient with the language yet. I expect this is the reason why the study says that the same area of the brain lights up for either language, there is no constructing sentences in one language and then moving them to the other (as I'd be forced to do to translate from French to English or Spanish).
This also is the same principle behind the games like Brain Age. Not long ago there was at least one article here on/. about how some scientist discovered that adults do produce more neurons contrary to what was previously believed, but they die within days if no new synapses are formed, so learning new stuff actually does help rejuvenate and maintain your brain. I owe you the link, i'm at work so I should at least pretend to do some:P
I wonder if this would spur the USA and Russia to speed up their space programs. I'm not sure about Russia anymore but at least the US has stated that they want to go back to the moon and put some dude up in Mars sometime on this half of the century if memory serves.
It's great that this band has made it to the top on their own, but how many other homebrew bands will be able to do this? I will go out on a limb here and say that no more than 40 bands will be able to make it:P
+R
Anybody who has been working in the field of NLP (natural language processing) can do little more than snear at this story. Along with the title, that is one of the most useless comments one finds in/.
It is news to many of us —the great majority of readers I dare say— because we are nerds that come from different fields. I bet I could come up with common knowledge from cellular telephony that you haven't heard about and it would be news to you. If it was sufficiently interesting, it would even be newsworthy even if it's been kicked around base stations for 4 years.
You make it sound like you have deeper knowledge of the subject and it would serve us much better (us being both you and we the aliens to the field) if you expanded with insider comments rather than saying "phew, I knew this all along".
And to try to get back on topic, I would be very interested in hearing about how are they going to use the general knowledge of the wiki to filter out advertisement. For instance, let's say that an email that contains B12 is talking about a plane and not the vitamin, what other elements should the program take into account to distinguish this? And what if a B12 vitamin mail is not an advertisement but rather a general-interest article that one of my co-workers is mailing to me and I don't have him on a white list because he hasn't mailed me before? Would a program be aware today (not in 4 to 35 years) that the content is informative rather than commercial in nature? Are they even aiming for that?
I used to live in a part of the world where the steering wheel was on the left-hand side of the vehicle, and now I live in a place where it's on the right-hand side. You have no idea how far reaching is that change and all that it entails, even if the user interface is mostly the same. I even drive the same model of car and make, yet the world works differently. If I screw up, I can kill myself or others.
Learning a new office suite where everything is different, like when I switched from Office 2000 to Open Office is just a nuisance even though ALMOST ALL works in another way. And if I screw up the worst that can happen are minutes of lost productivity.
I had a Peugeot 206 and one day all the indicators in the panel went dead. Nothing worked, no radio, no lights, no nothing. In panic I called the agency (I now so little about cars that my knowledge is in negative numbers, and it was night) and after a series of questions the guy told me I didn't need to have it towed. "Just switch the engine off, wait a minute and then start the car again", he said, "the onboard computer must have frozen". I did and it worked. I swear to you I had to reboot my car:O
Despite de title, someone that disclaims IANABiologist will reply anyway, oh well...
What I would like to know is what did they test to make sure it was safe. I am disconnected from all this cloning issues so the last I read was that clones had shorter lifespans than the originals. Some claimed it was because the base genetic material that they used might have transmitted it's "age state" to the new egg. Programmed cell suicide and all that. I also read that cloning of higher vertebrates was a really complex matter and with a very low success rate, though I'm not sure that matters because they don't seem to be aiming to produce a Clone Army (tm) of cows, rather than trying to clone the best specimens and have those breed so we can eat their offspring.
Eek, put like that makes me see better those crazy vegetarians' point. Anyway, another doubt that I have is how on earth can they be certain that swine and cow are ok but don't know about sheep? Maybe they simply didn't test them but might there be any other reason? After all, sheep were the first really complex vertebrates to be cloned...
Would somebody with actual knowledge clue me in please?
I don't think they will spontaneously develop fear or any other emotion because those are reactions that have been hard-coded by evolution in our hardware. Recognition of danger triggers our adrenaline, raises our blood pressure, does some other biochemical changes designed to help you flee or fight that danger. That is the reason office stress is so extenuating, you are recognizing intellectual dangers (Shit! I will get fired!) and your body responds as if they were physical because that's the mechanism that it has. The exact same mechanism triggers your stomach butterflies and sweaty palms when trying to talk to The Girl. Machines have no such mechanism.
Even more, independent machines will have self-preservation built in by design for sure, but this mechanisms will be under the direct control of the same overall intelligence that will be running the show. There may be independent subsystems devoted to motion control, to energy maintenance, but there is no reason for the Strong AI to be unaware of this changes and the way they affect it as we are cut of from our sympathic (sp?) system. Unless you are a Yogi or some such, a regular human doesn't know how his body works internally and how those biochemical processes affect their psyche. A computer (so far) does. So a Strong AI may be intellectually aware, and yet remain detached and evaluate everything in cold logic without anthropomorphizing things. Is it in danger of being destructed by that meteor shower on Mars? Take evasive action, backup whatever it can. It can't avoid the destruction? Inform of the situation to its human controllers/partners and attempt to continue performing useful work until termination time. No emotion whatsoever.
Seems like a recipe for disaster - a bunch of uneducated, ill-informed, substandard humans running around. I take issue with this statement. Lack of education and information does not make anyone substandard humans, but thinking that there is such a thing as "substandard humans" quite possibly qualifies you to be one (and me for implying so, oh well..)
I agree with you on part of the core issue you bring up: if educated and well informed people are overrun by does who "ain't" it certainly poses the risk of running things into the ground. But we should ask ourselves how well educated we are, assuming we are including ourselves in the category. Maybe you didn't even realize this, but your statement reveals a whole subset of assumptions.
Poor people are by default uneducated.
Succesful people are people with material wealth.
Succesful people are by default better educated.
Poor people are not fully human.
Some people say that one of the many reasons that allow one to kill another is that they don't view the victim as fully human. I don't imply that you will soon start a killing spree, but I do wonder how prevalent is this point of view amongst those that are "Successful" and how does this influence their behavior towards others. Could it be that this bias even helps maintain the status quo? After all, poor and stupid people are not really humans, why bother helping them?
And to get at least slightly back on topic, in my opinion even if some day an AI becomes sentient it is highly unlikely that it will have any kind of emotion. It would be a purely cognitive intelligence, devoid of those human traits simply because it won't be a biological entity subject to aging, chemistry and hormonal changes, hunger, and it wont have hard-coded in its hardware the survival mechanisms that make it aware of danger and interested in survival. And as it has been pointed, it would be of no commercial use. Although it may help test psychological theories and experiments, but mass-producin Marvins to swipe the floors is a waste of resources. The intelligence required to avoid obstacles and recognize an uneven terrain is not the same as needed to understand a poem and it isn't needed for said task.
I think this is a much better attempt than the horrible BadVista site from yesterday. While the tone of this one may not appeal to everybody, there is absolutely no single approach to anything what will work for everyone under the sun =)
Perhaps sites like this would be most effective after somebody has been experiencing problems with their PC. Try to talk somebody with a perfectly working computer about it and the whole "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality takes over.
I was thinking the same. The design sucks, it has NO SUBSTANCE whatsoever. It is sad that they are so incredibly lame at communicating their idea.
I went in wanting to be convinced, but instead it comes across as a Fanboi site like many others pointed out. The main page should have the juice straight away. You get in and you read the bulletpoints: Windoze is teh sux because a) It will take away your freedom to copy your legally owned music (insert link)
b) It will spy on you, reporting your every move back to the corporations (insert link)
And so on. They really don't have a clue how to present the information, they are overly verbose for the intended audience which it is very clear they don't understand, the design is so ugly that it takes away much credibility, their claims are not backed up by concise facts, they constantly appeal to emotion, and they don't offer clear-cut instrucions for the alternative.
Also their choice of gNewSense as an alternative OS is weak because it lacks in the same departments: null communication skills, poor design, ZERO instructions. They could at least have picked Ubuntu, which looks much more professional and at least would make an unexperienced user that the thing may actually work.
Why the FSF and other antimicrosofites can't get it through their heads that the average windows user is not stupid but they are also utterly unconcerned with the technical side. From the few distros that I've seen, only Red Hat and Ubuntu seem to have picked up on this fact. If it looks ugly it breeds distrust, and if it is complicated it's deemed not worth it. Free as in Gratis is not enough. In fact, it's no different from a cheap knockoff in their minds. Don't take my word for it. Talk about it to people around you that are not tech fans and you will see, they are not idiots, they simply have different interest and this is a very, very bad attempt at interesting them and it will backfire.
Unless they completely revamp the site and make it look as serious and well presented as the marketing sites for Vista are/will be, offer sensible, to-the-point arguments, and a clear and easy guide to upgrade they would appear to the uninformed like a National Enquirer next to a Wall Street Journal.
I'm registering at the site to tell them this now, if many of us do the same maybe they will listen.
For all the good it will do. Last year I went on a trip to USA from Mexico and I chose to cross at Colombia because it's a faster point than any of the other Texan international points.
A few years back, the USA introduced a change in its visas, so mine is now embedded with biometric information —including the unflattering photo— that can be checked against a central database of Evil Terr'ists. But on that day the link was down, so the border officer just asked me what the hell was I doing in that middle-of-nowhere part of both countries and I told him that I was on my way to Houston, which I was. So he just wrote down my details and allowed me to cross without having been able to verify the authenticity of my id.
At a different date I flew into the USA and they didn't even bother trying to scan the visa. They tried to do it with my passport which also stores biometric information, but I guess it's in a different format or something because they couldn't read it either. Canadians didn't have trouble with it tho'. Anyway, the point is, if the people in charge aren't able to use it properly, there is little point in the expenses. Maybe I just look utterly harmless.
You beat me to the GPS example =) But I thought of a couple more... I recently bought some bluetooth stereo earphones to listen to mp3s on my mobile. Imagine if you could also conect this 'designer glasses' to a cell phone and be able to read your sms =)
It would be really neat to have the small envelope icon pop up in a corner of your vision as another mean of informing you. Of course, this is not for everybody and I'm already anticipating the reaction of the I-don't-want-that-therefore-it-sucks crowd. It would also take some good design to make it so that it doesn't block your field of vision, I wouldn't want to be driving in the middle of a busy road and have a giant sms envelope popping right in front of my eyes. Yet, done well it would absolutely kick ass.
Since I'm day-dreaming, how about coupling that with those keyboards made of light ala Final Fantasy Movie that came out for the Palm. You could see the keyboard in your glasses and type in thin air a reply. And don't forget a cyberpunk favorite, the digital watch.
The future in the mirror is closer than it appears.
Throw in these marvelous MSLives and Googlearths on their mobiles and iPods (don't tell me they aren't salivating over the possibility!) and all face-to-face human communication on city streets will cease:P
Slashdot Mirror
Surely there must be a way for you to vote for "none of the above" as Per Abrahamsen says. For example in Mexico you can cross out the whole ballot to make your vote null. It is still counted but it's not alloted to anybody. And it is usually a good measure of protest. High intentionally nullified vote count is always given a lot of air time and puts pressure on the government to take some corrective actions.
The problem I see with this is that they just know you are not happy, but there is no other mechanism to provide feedback as to what are you actually upset about. Best way is always to get involved. Support those that most closely resemble our values (in the real world nobody will ever match our values 100%), or if they are truly appalling, start our own, join one and change it from inside, etc. Inaction only gives the fascists currently in power to continue turning the US in a police state and that is bad for you and bad for the rest of the world given the USA's power and penchant for meddling in other people's affairs :P
I'm not trolling, if somebody disagrees please reply, don't just mod me down =P
What I find interesting is that they found these results ahead of what was expected. /.er always whine that many stories presented here are about things that are "3 to 5 years into the future" (and they seem to be "Microsoft years", you know, like when you are installing something on Win* and it keeps telling you '5 minutes left to finish' for about 30 minutes =P ) so it's nice to hear this is the other way around for a change!
how about *drumroll* mechanical pencil! clicky-clicky and presto, you have more .05 or .07mm graphite to scribble away to your underworked and low-g hart's content.
=)If they managed to store this energy in batteries, they could wear the suits indoors generating power for later use and thus avoiding that extra workout that others have complained about. I mean, since this is all vaporware sci-fi...
I've worked in DW for a time, and I can tell you that it's not easy to "get it right" because so far it's not something that can be packaged. You can get the data models and fancy machinery, but you will most definitely need an architect to tailor it to the particular organization because all companies work differently on the inside. And that architect will have a dickens of a time understanding how the company works because the bigger they are, the more likely not even their own employees do. As long as there isn't an official structural model imposed on them like it happens with accounting, corporations will grow and be structured however best suits them (or sometimes they just "grow" like wild weeds, unruly and chaotic). And a Data Warehouse is an attempt to code this internal structure and its dealings in a central repository that will serve a number of goals like Business Intelligence, Trend Analysis, etc... So you won't find a product or solution that will fit your company out of the box. It's pretty much like with self-help books. The general idea works in general terms, but you have to adjust it to your own reality and quirks for it to be of any value to you in particular.
Oh ye of little faith, here i present thee with The Facts. Or a paper at the very least: One size fits all? a Benchmark
And people say windows doesn't have good preemptive mutitasking =P
That finally 72% of the population wised up? I just wonder whether they would actually act out on it. Disagreeing is easy. Doing something about what you dislike requires effort, resources. Doing nothing requires nothing. The US has gone out of its way since I've been alive to portray a model of living in which everything should be nice, easy and comfortable. Would such a culture react in time to curb a threat that is by definition something that may happen at some point in the future when right now they are mostly contented?
Just asking...
That is a very debated issue in many places. For example Mexican revolution in 1910 was about fighting perpetual reelection (which is of course different from what the US has) and as a result all functionaries are elected for exactly one term on a given position only. This has lead to some other problems such as continuity of state programs, since every new mayor, governor and president come with their own agendas and generally dismiss anything the previous administration was doing. So with short time frames to do their work they can't follow through the few worthwhile projects that they come up with. Roughly they spend one third of the term learning how to handle the office, building relationships, developing programs and such. Then they spend the second third on the proper administration and the last third they are mostly concerned to with loading the scales in favor of their cronies that would replace them in office and/or campaigning for other positions.
I like US system more in that regard. What I think should be changed is the financing of campaigns. I think the Mexicans have figured it better. All parties regardless of political leaning are granted funding by the government to run their campaigns, with the amounts tied to their size of their vote turnout. The bigger the voter base, the more financing they get up to a maximum legal amount which they must not exceed. If the party doesn't get a minimum vote percentage of 5% (IIRC) they lose they registration. Private funding is limited to a maximum that is the same for all and generally doesn't account for the greater part of the campaign budget. Also scum like lobbyists are not possible because they have no carrot to wave in front of the legislators. The only way to sway them is to show that you can actually lead some percentage of the voters in their favor because that is a direct-vote representation where every single vote counts, not the broken system of representative democracy that they have in the US now. A combination of the two would probably be the best and swing things back in favor of the common guy.
Anyone can hack into your brain right this day. It can take the form of social engineering, indoctrination, culture, advertisement. People are constantly trying to break into your mind and place ideas there with the explicit intent of "programming you" to do something they want you to do, and I'd wager that's a more real concern that some physical tampering. Heck, I am doing it now by introducing this idea that wasn't there before. Are you aware of the the things you "know"? Do you have any idea of how much of that "knowledge" is belief rather than fact? (you don't need to answer me, these are rhetorical questions).
On the other hand, since we are speculating about something not even remotely feasible for the foreseeable next 10 to 20 years (this is one of my beliefs, not a fact) I'd bet that any wetware interfaces would have to be regulated under the same category that critical systems are. One would not, and legally can't use plain vanilla Linux, Windows or OSX for certain applications where the failure to operate properly may result in injuries or loss of human life, such as in some medical and military settings. One needs specially certified systems, so in all likelihood any computational devices that they placed in your brain should operate under those standards and not under shrink-wrap commercial software with guarantees that disclaim suitability for any particular purpose.
You can go and get elective surgery like lasik at discount prices (I did!) but even then they have to perform very thorough studies lest you walk out blind. And you should strive to get informed when undergoing any such process, which are fundamentally different from purchasing consumer electronics (which you should also ideally research at least a little, but if you blow it buying a cheap Chinese knock-off gadget, the most you usually stand to lose is money [and even Brand companies sell exploding batteries sometimes, don't they?]).
Remeber kids, [meme]You don't get what you deserve, you get what you negotiate for[/meme]. So it stands to reason that anyone considering stuffing electronics and software inside their skulls should research the risks it entails, and to protect the Darwin Award would-be-candidates from themselves there would be medical regulations in place at least similar to those that exist for other elective surgery procedures. And that's assuming it would ever attain the status of elective. I think that the world is drifting towards 1984 rather than Neuromancer, so extrapolating from where we stand now it seems unlikely that anyone could purchase brain implants in back alley shops that wouldn't be regulated leaving them exposed to unauthorized tampering.
Also in one other novel I think it was by William Gibson —but I'm fuzzy on the details, maybe I'm mixing it up with Strange Days— they talk about how in the early days of brain interfaces they tried to watch the others recorded dreams but the experience was so bizarre that some of the relationship were broken as a result.
Not everything may be as cool as it sounds...
This also is the same principle behind the games like Brain Age. Not long ago there was at least one article here on /. about how some scientist discovered that adults do produce more neurons contrary to what was previously believed, but they die within days if no new synapses are formed, so learning new stuff actually does help rejuvenate and maintain your brain. I owe you the link, i'm at work so I should at least pretend to do some :P
I wonder if this would spur the USA and Russia to speed up their space programs. I'm not sure about Russia anymore but at least the US has stated that they want to go back to the moon and put some dude up in Mars sometime on this half of the century if memory serves.
I'm sorry!! I couldn't resist I swear!
It is news to many of us —the great majority of readers I dare say— because we are nerds that come from different fields. I bet I could come up with common knowledge from cellular telephony that you haven't heard about and it would be news to you. If it was sufficiently interesting, it would even be newsworthy even if it's been kicked around base stations for 4 years.
You make it sound like you have deeper knowledge of the subject and it would serve us much better (us being both you and we the aliens to the field) if you expanded with insider comments rather than saying "phew, I knew this all along".
And to try to get back on topic, I would be very interested in hearing about how are they going to use the general knowledge of the wiki to filter out advertisement. For instance, let's say that an email that contains B12 is talking about a plane and not the vitamin, what other elements should the program take into account to distinguish this? And what if a B12 vitamin mail is not an advertisement but rather a general-interest article that one of my co-workers is mailing to me and I don't have him on a white list because he hasn't mailed me before? Would a program be aware today (not in 4 to 35 years) that the content is informative rather than commercial in nature? Are they even aiming for that?
Learning a new office suite where everything is different, like when I switched from Office 2000 to Open Office is just a nuisance even though ALMOST ALL works in another way. And if I screw up the worst that can happen are minutes of lost productivity.
So no, car analogies do not work here.
I had a Peugeot 206 and one day all the indicators in the panel went dead. Nothing worked, no radio, no lights, no nothing. In panic I called the agency (I now so little about cars that my knowledge is in negative numbers, and it was night) and after a series of questions the guy told me I didn't need to have it towed. "Just switch the engine off, wait a minute and then start the car again", he said, "the onboard computer must have frozen". I did and it worked. I swear to you I had to reboot my car :O
What I would like to know is what did they test to make sure it was safe. I am disconnected from all this cloning issues so the last I read was that clones had shorter lifespans than the originals. Some claimed it was because the base genetic material that they used might have transmitted it's "age state" to the new egg. Programmed cell suicide and all that. I also read that cloning of higher vertebrates was a really complex matter and with a very low success rate, though I'm not sure that matters because they don't seem to be aiming to produce a Clone Army (tm) of cows, rather than trying to clone the best specimens and have those breed so we can eat their offspring.
Eek, put like that makes me see better those crazy vegetarians' point. Anyway, another doubt that I have is how on earth can they be certain that swine and cow are ok but don't know about sheep? Maybe they simply didn't test them but might there be any other reason? After all, sheep were the first really complex vertebrates to be cloned...
Would somebody with actual knowledge clue me in please?
Even more, independent machines will have self-preservation built in by design for sure, but this mechanisms will be under the direct control of the same overall intelligence that will be running the show. There may be independent subsystems devoted to motion control, to energy maintenance, but there is no reason for the Strong AI to be unaware of this changes and the way they affect it as we are cut of from our sympathic (sp?) system. Unless you are a Yogi or some such, a regular human doesn't know how his body works internally and how those biochemical processes affect their psyche. A computer (so far) does. So a Strong AI may be intellectually aware, and yet remain detached and evaluate everything in cold logic without anthropomorphizing things. Is it in danger of being destructed by that meteor shower on Mars? Take evasive action, backup whatever it can. It can't avoid the destruction? Inform of the situation to its human controllers/partners and attempt to continue performing useful work until termination time. No emotion whatsoever.
I agree with you on part of the core issue you bring up: if educated and well informed people are overrun by does who "ain't" it certainly poses the risk of running things into the ground. But we should ask ourselves how well educated we are, assuming we are including ourselves in the category. Maybe you didn't even realize this, but your statement reveals a whole subset of assumptions.
Some people say that one of the many reasons that allow one to kill another is that they don't view the victim as fully human. I don't imply that you will soon start a killing spree, but I do wonder how prevalent is this point of view amongst those that are "Successful" and how does this influence their behavior towards others. Could it be that this bias even helps maintain the status quo? After all, poor and stupid people are not really humans, why bother helping them?
And to get at least slightly back on topic, in my opinion even if some day an AI becomes sentient it is highly unlikely that it will have any kind of emotion. It would be a purely cognitive intelligence, devoid of those human traits simply because it won't be a biological entity subject to aging, chemistry and hormonal changes, hunger, and it wont have hard-coded in its hardware the survival mechanisms that make it aware of danger and interested in survival. And as it has been pointed, it would be of no commercial use. Although it may help test psychological theories and experiments, but mass-producin Marvins to swipe the floors is a waste of resources. The intelligence required to avoid obstacles and recognize an uneven terrain is not the same as needed to understand a poem and it isn't needed for said task.
Perhaps sites like this would be most effective after somebody has been experiencing problems with their PC. Try to talk somebody with a perfectly working computer about it and the whole "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mentality takes over.
I went in wanting to be convinced, but instead it comes across as a Fanboi site like many others pointed out. The main page should have the juice straight away. You get in and you read the bulletpoints: Windoze is teh sux because a) It will take away your freedom to copy your legally owned music (insert link)
b) It will spy on you, reporting your every move back to the corporations (insert link)
And so on. They really don't have a clue how to present the information, they are overly verbose for the intended audience which it is very clear they don't understand, the design is so ugly that it takes away much credibility, their claims are not backed up by concise facts, they constantly appeal to emotion, and they don't offer clear-cut instrucions for the alternative.
Also their choice of gNewSense as an alternative OS is weak because it lacks in the same departments: null communication skills, poor design, ZERO instructions. They could at least have picked Ubuntu, which looks much more professional and at least would make an unexperienced user that the thing may actually work.
Why the FSF and other antimicrosofites can't get it through their heads that the average windows user is not stupid but they are also utterly unconcerned with the technical side. From the few distros that I've seen, only Red Hat and Ubuntu seem to have picked up on this fact. If it looks ugly it breeds distrust, and if it is complicated it's deemed not worth it. Free as in Gratis is not enough. In fact, it's no different from a cheap knockoff in their minds. Don't take my word for it. Talk about it to people around you that are not tech fans and you will see, they are not idiots, they simply have different interest and this is a very, very bad attempt at interesting them and it will backfire.
Unless they completely revamp the site and make it look as serious and well presented as the marketing sites for Vista are/will be, offer sensible, to-the-point arguments, and a clear and easy guide to upgrade they would appear to the uninformed like a National Enquirer next to a Wall Street Journal.
I'm registering at the site to tell them this now, if many of us do the same maybe they will listen.
A few years back, the USA introduced a change in its visas, so mine is now embedded with biometric information —including the unflattering photo— that can be checked against a central database of Evil Terr'ists. But on that day the link was down, so the border officer just asked me what the hell was I doing in that middle-of-nowhere part of both countries and I told him that I was on my way to Houston, which I was. So he just wrote down my details and allowed me to cross without having been able to verify the authenticity of my id.
At a different date I flew into the USA and they didn't even bother trying to scan the visa. They tried to do it with my passport which also stores biometric information, but I guess it's in a different format or something because they couldn't read it either. Canadians didn't have trouble with it tho'. Anyway, the point is, if the people in charge aren't able to use it properly, there is little point in the expenses. Maybe I just look utterly harmless.
Bigots: please spare the wetback comments.
It would be really neat to have the small envelope icon pop up in a corner of your vision as another mean of informing you. Of course, this is not for everybody and I'm already anticipating the reaction of the I-don't-want-that-therefore-it-sucks crowd. It would also take some good design to make it so that it doesn't block your field of vision, I wouldn't want to be driving in the middle of a busy road and have a giant sms envelope popping right in front of my eyes. Yet, done well it would absolutely kick ass.
Since I'm day-dreaming, how about coupling that with those keyboards made of light ala Final Fantasy Movie that came out for the Palm. You could see the keyboard in your glasses and type in thin air a reply. And don't forget a cyberpunk favorite, the digital watch.
The future in the mirror is closer than it appears.
Of course, I might be grossly exaggerating :P