I still was interested with reading the writeup! So even if I have no skill as a writer, he does and being interested in the topic (semi-reformed Trekkie here:) really made this an enjoyable read for a quiet Wednesday morning on Slashdot. Most/. stories are informative but this one for me was interesting.
Also attributed:
It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster. - Voltaire
Bigotry in the form of not tolerating those who don't belong to "your group" are fundamentally expressing differences of opinion with say - me.
Voltaire in his time covered a lot of ground so I guess we should cut him a bit of slack when it comes to the finer nuances of reconciling wisdom attributed to him.
This is kind of an aside; just recollecting what's been floating though my mind for the last few days. It seems to me that the leadership of the United States of America is losing it's way. As a frightening parallel in history, in Germany the Nazis rose to power by gradually placing more and more control into the hands of selected capitalists. We called it Fascism then. The same can be seen in the USA today, war profiteering is being funneled into the wealth of those who made the decision to war in the first place! An old-boys network such as this sadly is a fact of life but what strengthens the parallel between the Nazis and the current USA is that the leadership is also paying less heed to the wishes of the people they claim to represent. I hope that those who are ignorant of history don't drag the rest of us through it. Again.
If you read a book called Earth by David Brin, he describes his vision of the near future as basically including a war where the bankers and anyone on their records are shot - cleansing the parasitism from societies fabric.
What do you think? Because in the age of Information you can make a difference!
It's as simple as this: "they" do not think like "us". Our goals and interpretations of the world in general may not be compatible with each other. So pragmatically, don't give someone you don't fully trust the means to hurt you.
Oooooh, here come the liberals:)
As an aside, announcements of technologies such as this are becoming more frequent. As Alvin Toffler was talking about many years ago, we have entered the period of "Future Shock". Development and change in general is undergoing a period doubling. Not only are these new technologies amazing, but also the technologies they enable will also be amazing. So it begs the question: what do we - as a species - want to do? Because unless a mass extinction occurs we will probably be able to choose from an unimaginable menu of options about fifty years from now.
Yup. We agree with each other, I did say that it would be magic (ai in spaceships) and also "If we as a species decide that our form should be replicated to the stars" meaning that we may not decide to reproduce the human form of intelligence instead "spawning" artificial forms into the universe while letting the human form on Earth go to a natural conclusion.
Expanding into space is not a trivial thing. To paraphrase Douglas Adams: "Interstellar distances do not fit into the human imagination." Not only does it take a long time to get anywhere, but when you get there you are unlikely to have enough resources left to survive there or even get back home. So if biological organisms are too resource intensive (food, air, etc) for the timescales involved and it is not feasible to store/produce/mine resources to sustain them along the way then we must consider alternate forms of intelligence to handle the logistics of human space settlement. When, not if, we develop machine intelligence then those having much simpler resource needs - ideally just electricity - the intelligence could travel between the stars exploring and seeding planets as it goes and generally carrying on the human lineage for millenniums to come. If we as a species decide that our form should be replicated to the stars then we can include on our ships the human genetic code stored and when a suitable world in chanced upon reproduce the genetic code back into a human (grow them in a tank) and raise the humans on-board until maturity teaching them out of human knowledge also stored on the ship (robot nannies for the first generation). Once you get up to large scales such as galaxies and clusters the facts of how long and resource intensive it is to operate on those scales almost requires something like what I've written above.
Isn't MS' OOXML relatively complex when compared with ODF? I've read that MS' xml is filled with tags specific to their current and past versions of office formatting. Now ODF isn't loaded with that kind of cruft; its much more streamlined in it's tags. With this in mind, which xml format should be adopted as a starting-base - keeping in mind that whatever is chosen will be extended as time passes leading to even more complexity?
Puritanism (v.): The overwhelming fear that someone, somewhere, is having a good time.
Really, just because they feel guilty over any pleasure (because we were bad and got kicked out of the garden of eden so we don't deserve them in the eyes of god or something like that) doesn't mean that every pleasure should be struck from acceptable social behavior especially when they really are a vocal minority.
...If it's so good why would you give it away for free?...
With physical economies items manufactured use money all along the way to the consumer so it's final cost reflects to a degree the qualities of its manufacture. Information economies are different. With Information the costs change in one fundamental way: moving bits is so cheap that the cost factor gets removed out of the equation right off the bat. This enables what ESR called 'The Magic Cauldron' and I relate to the Stone Soup Parable. In the Stone Soup Parable everybody contributes their little bit and in the end they all enjoy a nice pot of stew. So when you decide to use some Free program someone gave you and you release your modifications back then the parables description of the mutual benefit applies. Open-source is a co-operative development process that implements the Stone Soup Parable.
Not being willing to fall on a worthwhile sword every once in a while makes you a sheep.
I'm saying I believe I have the freedom to write everything in that above post without fear that the secret police might show up in the middle of the night to take me to an education centre. So when I see people cringing in their expressions whether they be online or in real-life I am saddened because they're conforming to a shape that benefits not themselves but others.
Ballot box, Soap box, Jury box, Ammo box. I think the US is in the soap box right now. Of course as the saying goes 'In order to sustain Freedom use these boxes in this order.'
I wish George Bush was dead and would be delighted if anyone out there sent me scenarios of how it could happen! It's a fundamental human right to have an opinion such as that so let secret service goons pay me a 'visit' if they want to. Fuck 'em. Intimidation for the use of control is the same as spying for control. What they both have in common is that they are forms of control. What I see happening is the rise of newspeak in the good Ol' USA. Just another level of control and when they get around to removing the word 'fuck' from our collective speak then we will have subtly lost the ability to say 'fuck the government'. So seriously, don't play by the goons rules. Make noise. Go to court over your noise if necessary then obtain a gun when you eventually get out of the gulag and I know where I would go from there.
Did any of them have well developed economies and information infrastructure with the programming talent to make it all go? I'm not talking about throwing capitalism away for physical systems - banana's still need to be shipped to the grocery store. What I was talking about was Intellectual Property. Information is so cheap to throw around the world that when applying the ultimate extension of open ideals to something that benefits from an economy of scale - information dissemination costs are ultra-cheap with bits - then kill all expectations of profit from creative endeavors and submit to the logic that what you get back be it a free operating system or a game or a utility - whatever - will greatly outweigh your minuscule contribution to human civilization. Get over it and start downloading.
We need to ditch money soon. Money just represents unused energy or resources and capitalism is a method for allocating the surplus under conditions of scarcity dependent on goal(s). We not developing countries anymore in the West. We live in the land of plenty and our primary activities are trending into knowledge applications. Abolish copyrights in favor of a cooperative creative commons let everyone use everything and be amazed at what the stone-soup parable has to teach. Spare resources would still need to be managed so give the logistical planning functions to computers while a human sets the goals it evolves against. Capitalism has served its purpose here so stop treating it like religious dogma and envision a better way.
I'm more of a stone-soup kind of guy. I believe that people shouldn't necessarily expect to get paid for content they create instead I believe in a fundamental viewpoint-shift where people realize that what they get back is worth more than what they are giving away. So basically the destruction of a profit system for content and a shift towards cooperative cottage type content creation with permissive licensing.
So yes, I would share.
Copyright was fundamentally broken by the emergence of cheap, efficient, and world-wide broadband information networks. I don't even know where the best place would be to start reforming it. By my own preference I'd like to see a start with the restoration of fair-use rights including the right to modify something I've purchased. Moving your content among your own personal devices, lending your content to others for short periods, and other things such as removing copy protection from your software so you don't have to wear out your media were all legal when I was younger but now many of these actions are restricted or outright banned by legislation such as the DMCA.
See: here. Representation or modeling defines everything. How easy it is to code logic depends directly on how you represent your data within memory. Not only in AI but in other areas such as how the philosophy behind Object Orientated Programming simplifies logic for programmers.
Yup. You're completely right. Using characters as the base unit is arbitrary. Trying to keep it simple however; I should have explained binary trees better too.
See: Explanation. Basically the smallest unit of information in a computer is a bit. Eight bits make a byte and with text it takes one byte to represent one character. Generally, with Huffman coding you count the frequency of characters in a file and sort the frequency from largest to smallest. Then instead of using the full eight bits to represent a character you build a binary tree from the frequency table. Each possible branching code or going "left" or "right" down the branches is associated with a particular sequence of bits. You give the most frequent characters the shortest sequence of bits which "tokenizes" the information to be compressed. Reversing the process you run through the bit stream converting tokens back into a stream of characters.
Compression is searching for a minimal representation of information. Along with representation of knowledge you add other things such as learning strategies, inference systems, and planning systems to round-out your AI. One of the best introductions to AI is Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.
Slashdot Mirror
I still was interested with reading the writeup! So even if I have no skill as a writer, he does and being interested in the topic (semi-reformed Trekkie here :) really made this an enjoyable read for a quiet Wednesday morning on Slashdot. Most /. stories are informative but this one for me was interesting.
Give me a break ;) I'm trying to get a +5 Troll. Hasn't happened yet! Besides this is Slashdot, we're all pundits here.
Also attributed:
It is clear that the individual who persecutes a man, his brother, because he is not of the same opinion, is a monster. - Voltaire
Bigotry in the form of not tolerating those who don't belong to "your group" are fundamentally expressing differences of opinion with say - me.
Voltaire in his time covered a lot of ground so I guess we should cut him a bit of slack when it comes to the finer nuances of reconciling wisdom attributed to him.
This is kind of an aside; just recollecting what's been floating though my mind for the last few days. It seems to me that the leadership of the United States of America is losing it's way. As a frightening parallel in history, in Germany the Nazis rose to power by gradually placing more and more control into the hands of selected capitalists. We called it Fascism then. The same can be seen in the USA today, war profiteering is being funneled into the wealth of those who made the decision to war in the first place! An old-boys network such as this sadly is a fact of life but what strengthens the parallel between the Nazis and the current USA is that the leadership is also paying less heed to the wishes of the people they claim to represent. I hope that those who are ignorant of history don't drag the rest of us through it. Again.
If you read a book called Earth by David Brin, he describes his vision of the near future as basically including a war where the bankers and anyone on their records are shot - cleansing the parasitism from societies fabric.
What do you think? Because in the age of Information you can make a difference!
It's as simple as this: "they" do not think like "us". Our goals and interpretations of the world in general may not be compatible with each other. So pragmatically, don't give someone you don't fully trust the means to hurt you. :)
Oooooh, here come the liberals
I meant doubling as the amount of technology at any given time, instead of halving as the time between development.
As an aside, announcements of technologies such as this are becoming more frequent. As Alvin Toffler was talking about many years ago, we have entered the period of "Future Shock". Development and change in general is undergoing a period doubling. Not only are these new technologies amazing, but also the technologies they enable will also be amazing. So it begs the question: what do we - as a species - want to do? Because unless a mass extinction occurs we will probably be able to choose from an unimaginable menu of options about fifty years from now.
Yup. We agree with each other, I did say that it would be magic (ai in spaceships) and also "If we as a species decide that our form should be replicated to the stars" meaning that we may not decide to reproduce the human form of intelligence instead "spawning" artificial forms into the universe while letting the human form on Earth go to a natural conclusion.
Expanding into space is not a trivial thing. To paraphrase Douglas Adams: "Interstellar distances do not fit into the human imagination." Not only does it take a long time to get anywhere, but when you get there you are unlikely to have enough resources left to survive there or even get back home. So if biological organisms are too resource intensive (food, air, etc) for the timescales involved and it is not feasible to store/produce/mine resources to sustain them along the way then we must consider alternate forms of intelligence to handle the logistics of human space settlement. When, not if, we develop machine intelligence then those having much simpler resource needs - ideally just electricity - the intelligence could travel between the stars exploring and seeding planets as it goes and generally carrying on the human lineage for millenniums to come. If we as a species decide that our form should be replicated to the stars then we can include on our ships the human genetic code stored and when a suitable world in chanced upon reproduce the genetic code back into a human (grow them in a tank) and raise the humans on-board until maturity teaching them out of human knowledge also stored on the ship (robot nannies for the first generation). Once you get up to large scales such as galaxies and clusters the facts of how long and resource intensive it is to operate on those scales almost requires something like what I've written above.
Isn't MS' OOXML relatively complex when compared with ODF? I've read that MS' xml is filled with tags specific to their current and past versions of office formatting. Now ODF isn't loaded with that kind of cruft; its much more streamlined in it's tags. With this in mind, which xml format should be adopted as a starting-base - keeping in mind that whatever is chosen will be extended as time passes leading to even more complexity?
Puritanism (v.): The overwhelming fear that someone, somewhere, is having a good time.
Really, just because they feel guilty over any pleasure (because we were bad and got kicked out of the garden of eden so we don't deserve them in the eyes of god or something like that) doesn't mean that every pleasure should be struck from acceptable social behavior especially when they really are a vocal minority.
...If it's so good why would you give it away for free?...
With physical economies items manufactured use money all along the way to the consumer so it's final cost reflects to a degree the qualities of its manufacture. Information economies are different. With Information the costs change in one fundamental way: moving bits is so cheap that the cost factor gets removed out of the equation right off the bat. This enables what ESR called 'The Magic Cauldron' and I relate to the Stone Soup Parable. In the Stone Soup Parable everybody contributes their little bit and in the end they all enjoy a nice pot of stew. So when you decide to use some Free program someone gave you and you release your modifications back then the parables description of the mutual benefit applies. Open-source is a co-operative development process that implements the Stone Soup Parable.
I was more thinking we should build giant-space-based-lasers and fry the whole eastern-seaboard just to make sure. But your ideas are good too! ;) :)
Not being willing to fall on a worthwhile sword every once in a while makes you a sheep.
I'm saying I believe I have the freedom to write everything in that above post without fear that the secret police might show up in the middle of the night to take me to an education centre. So when I see people cringing in their expressions whether they be online or in real-life I am saddened because they're conforming to a shape that benefits not themselves but others.
Ballot box, Soap box, Jury box, Ammo box. I think the US is in the soap box right now. Of course as the saying goes 'In order to sustain Freedom use these boxes in this order.'
I wish George Bush was dead and would be delighted if anyone out there sent me scenarios of how it could happen! It's a fundamental human right to have an opinion such as that so let secret service goons pay me a 'visit' if they want to. Fuck 'em. Intimidation for the use of control is the same as spying for control. What they both have in common is that they are forms of control. What I see happening is the rise of newspeak in the good Ol' USA. Just another level of control and when they get around to removing the word 'fuck' from our collective speak then we will have subtly lost the ability to say 'fuck the government'. So seriously, don't play by the goons rules. Make noise. Go to court over your noise if necessary then obtain a gun when you eventually get out of the gulag and I know where I would go from there.
I SO wish his name really is Dennis just to reinforce one of those Douglas Adams type moments for the guy :)
Did any of them have well developed economies and information infrastructure with the programming talent to make it all go? I'm not talking about throwing capitalism away for physical systems - banana's still need to be shipped to the grocery store. What I was talking about was Intellectual Property. Information is so cheap to throw around the world that when applying the ultimate extension of open ideals to something that benefits from an economy of scale - information dissemination costs are ultra-cheap with bits - then kill all expectations of profit from creative endeavors and submit to the logic that what you get back be it a free operating system or a game or a utility - whatever - will greatly outweigh your minuscule contribution to human civilization. Get over it and start downloading.
We need to ditch money soon. Money just represents unused energy or resources and capitalism is a method for allocating the surplus under conditions of scarcity dependent on goal(s). We not developing countries anymore in the West. We live in the land of plenty and our primary activities are trending into knowledge applications. Abolish copyrights in favor of a cooperative creative commons let everyone use everything and be amazed at what the stone-soup parable has to teach. Spare resources would still need to be managed so give the logistical planning functions to computers while a human sets the goals it evolves against. Capitalism has served its purpose here so stop treating it like religious dogma and envision a better way.
I'm more of a stone-soup kind of guy. I believe that people shouldn't necessarily expect to get paid for content they create instead I believe in a fundamental viewpoint-shift where people realize that what they get back is worth more than what they are giving away. So basically the destruction of a profit system for content and a shift towards cooperative cottage type content creation with permissive licensing.
So yes, I would share.
Copyright was fundamentally broken by the emergence of cheap, efficient, and world-wide broadband information networks. I don't even know where the best place would be to start reforming it. By my own preference I'd like to see a start with the restoration of fair-use rights including the right to modify something I've purchased. Moving your content among your own personal devices, lending your content to others for short periods, and other things such as removing copy protection from your software so you don't have to wear out your media were all legal when I was younger but now many of these actions are restricted or outright banned by legislation such as the DMCA.
I see [wikipedia.org] after the link on my end....
See: here. Representation or modeling defines everything. How easy it is to code logic depends directly on how you represent your data within memory. Not only in AI but in other areas such as how the philosophy behind Object Orientated Programming simplifies logic for programmers.
Yup. You're completely right. Using characters as the base unit is arbitrary. Trying to keep it simple however; I should have explained binary trees better too.
See: Explanation. Basically the smallest unit of information in a computer is a bit. Eight bits make a byte and with text it takes one byte to represent one character. Generally, with Huffman coding you count the frequency of characters in a file and sort the frequency from largest to smallest. Then instead of using the full eight bits to represent a character you build a binary tree from the frequency table. Each possible branching code or going "left" or "right" down the branches is associated with a particular sequence of bits. You give the most frequent characters the shortest sequence of bits which "tokenizes" the information to be compressed. Reversing the process you run through the bit stream converting tokens back into a stream of characters.
Compression is searching for a minimal representation of information. Along with representation of knowledge you add other things such as learning strategies, inference systems, and planning systems to round-out your AI. One of the best introductions to AI is Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.