the data Google collected is evidence relevant to the investigation.
So, the investigators should get a subpoena. That's how the system works. If you can't convince a judge to issue a subpoena, you don't have a leg to stand on. I don't think Google -- or any other company -- should just hand out potentially sensitive user information to anyone who asks for it. Maybe that's how it works in China, but that isn't how it works in the USA.
The human visual and auditory systems only have a certain degree of acuity, as defined by our physiology. The optic nerve for example can only carry so much information into the brain each second. The point is, the technical advancement vs. coolness curve must saturate at some point. With music for example, a well-mastered CD produces effectively perfect sound for the typical listener.
Visual effects are beginning to reach a similar point. The pixel resolution and color fidelity are nearly there, and with pixel-perfect control it's only a matter of time before any effect we can dream of becomes possible to create at reasonable cost.
We aren't there yet though. The first filmmaker who produces a simulated human that truly fools me into thinking it's real, will completely blow my mind. I think that will be the end of the line.
I should have been clearer, I was talking about Microsoft's desktop OS. What WP7 and the X-Box demonstrate is that Microsoft can be very innovative when they aren't bogged down by endless platform fragmentation. I think Nexus One/S is Google's bid to avoid a similar fate. An interesting historical what-if is what the PC market would look like today if Microsoft played a more direct role in steering the platform hardware (beyond their peripherals business).
You seriously underestimate the limitations of neural network modeling on current hardware.
You seem to know this well. To be clear, is it the case that this new technology (a) simulates realistic neurons much faster than conventional hardware, and (b) retains enough flexibility to cover the different neural models of interest? If so then it is very interesting indeed. Is there a better writeup of this than the linked article?
The Achilles Heel of analog computing has always been the point about adaptability. You make a machine that simulates X really quickly, but then researchers want to tweak the system slightly and now your hardware is useless for simulating X'. The brittleness of analog computers goes a long way to explain their relative scarcity.
This is not a "bid for a slice of the mobile phone market." Google's purpose is to offer a reference device to the marketplace, to bring order to the Android chaos.
Look at why it's so hard for Microsoft to innovate in operating systems. It's because the hardware vendors went in a million different directions, leaving MS with this huge diversity of configurations to support. And because MS has no hand in the hardware arena, they can't implement simple improvements like fast sleep/unsleep that require HW support.
This phone serves two purposes: (1) it gives Google a direct line to developers and the geek elite (who want OS updates first, and tend not to like the UI "enhancements" offered by the carriers) for testing their latest software, and (2) it signals to other manufacturers the direction of the Android platform and encourages them to support the same features (NFC, etc.) This phone doesn't have to sell millions of units to achieve its objective, most importantly it has to be the phone that developers and the geek elite want to have.
Yeah, that was the same passage that made me double-take. A surprising thing to read on the IEEE site.
I agree that performance can matter. Especially so for brains, which interact with the physical world and have to respond on physical timescales (e.g., within hundreds of milliseconds in order to coordinate walking). If the technology were a lot faster than conventional machines for simulating neurons then that would be a meaningful advance, but this was not demonstrated in the article. The central argument seems to be that conventional computers suck because data is stored too far away from the CPU. (Never mind that signals travel 5 or 6 orders of magnitude faster along a motherboard trace than through an axon.)
I probably sound like I'm trying to pee on someone's campfire. The technology sounds cool and should be developed. I just didn't like the article.
This technology fundamentally mistakes what is the hard part about building brains as adaptable as biological ones. The physical instantiation is not important, if the Church-Turing thesis is true. (And if you're saying Church-Turing is false, that's an enormous claim and you'd better have very compelling evidence to back you up.)
The hard part about building a brain is figuring out the patterns of connectivity between neurons. Biology solves this in some brilliant way, starting from a seed with almost no information (the genome) and implementing some process to incorporate environmental data, self-organizing into a very robust and complex structure with orders of magnitude more information. The great unknown is the process whereby this growth and self-organization occurs. Figure that out, and you'll be able to make any kind of computer you like function as a brain.
No, George Lucas raped my memories of childhood, specifically those related to my impression of him as a great storyteller. It's like I have these really fond memories of eating cake, only now I know the cake is a lie.
Are Uranus jokes shifting research to other planets?!
A similar hypothetical question: Would the New Horizons spacecraft headed toward Pluto have been developed and launched if Pluto had always been designated a dwarf planet? (New Horizons launched in January 2006, and Pluto was demoted in August 2006.) Makes you wonder how much significance people attach to these labels.
It probably has to do with the recent discovery of oxygen on saturn's moon Rhea.
Doubtful, for two reasons: (a) that has already been announced, and (b) the oxygen there has a plausible nonbiological origin (energetic particles in Saturn's magnetic field interacting with water ice on the surface).
The smart money says this press announcement will be disappointing to most people. Not unlike like the whole Apple/Beatles thing.
I wish Kurzweil would give proper credit to others; that he does not do so makes him look insecure. Vernor Vinge wrote about the singularity concept in 1993 (easy Google search), still IMHO the best description of the proposed phenomenon. Kurzweil could have displayed more class if his 2005 book read as, "here's an idea that others invented, which I'm here to explain and lend examples to." The way he wrote (and discussed) it, most people seem to think the singularity was his idea or he had some hand in developing it.
That said, Kurzweil's central message is good, but not especially new: That exponential improvements give rise to qualitative changes in what a technology can do, and it's useful to ponder what those changes might be. I suppose the value he provides is by being thought-provoking and getting the tech industry to think about trends rather than the short-term goals they focus on (the next product release).
What the Wii showed Microsoft, Sony, and everyone else is that polygons per second and screen resolution are not the major determinants of success. The Wii succeeded by having an innovative controller, and well-designed casual games. Equating platform competitiveness with fast hardware is an incorrect association, at least right now.
So Microsoft and Sony are doing the rational thing and investing their R&D into new controllers and good games, rather than a new platform rev. Given the risks they'll probably want to defer a major platform upgrade as long as they can, until performance is borderline painful.
Jack Tramiel should be strung up for crimes against computing.
I wouldn't call them crimes necessarily. Tramiel was just misguided: He thought of computers as an extension of the calculators he made before, which were an extension of the typewriters before that. In this mindset the computer is a widget that is undifferentiated from any other, where price and distribution are all-important and the engineering details don't matter. This fundamental mistake spelled doom for Commodore, but on the other hand it made computing accessible to a huge number of people. Most people who got started with computing in the early-to-mid 1980s got their start on a Commodore computer that was probably 1/5 to 1/3 the price of anything Apple sold.
It is shocking though how little Tramiel actually understood. As when he finally realized he needed a floppy disk drive, then told his team to have the software done in a weekend! No wonder the stock 1541 was so lame.
The bully in the schoolyard tries to shake down another kid to take his lunch money. The other kid rolls up his sleeves and says f*#k off, you're going to have to take it by force. The bully then has a choice: Walk away embarrassed in front of all the other kids, or risk getting his ass handed to him?
Kudos to Google for not rolling over like a lot of other companies would.
Even if it was an accident, they need to be punished for that through fines or something (as other companies have been punished for their privacy breaches)
That's fair enough, although in practice the PR impact of this has hurt Google far more than any fine the government could possibly impose. I'll wager the folks there are taking this very seriously, and that potential fines from regulators have nothing to do with it.
The point of collecting information on wifi hotspots is to do more accurate geospatial targeting. Mapping IPs to lat/long is very coarse, since it maps to your ISP. With a database of wifi hotspot locations you can do much better. And given that they're driving around anyway to take street view photos, it doesn't cost Google anything to collect this data.
Now about recording the text information traversing unprotected hotspots -- which is the part of this that has people concerned -- that apparently was unintended. The explanation given by Google is that they were using some open source library that by default logged this information. Honestly I don't see that it would do them much good to do random packet sniffing like this, so I personally can't see a nefarious motive here although I do know we have some paranoid people in our midst.
The AC I responded to claimed this is a bug, I claim it's a feature. Until authentication improves I would rather there *not* be a way to irreversibly delete my data from Google's servers. If Google supported stronger authentication like a hardware token then I might change my view.
How many gmail accounts get hacked each month because of weak passwords? It happens quite often. Until authentication methods improve on the web, I would rather not be able to irretrievably delete my last 7 years of email with a few clicks. Call me paranoid, but I think my brand of paranoia is more justified than yours.
I wouldn't read Slashdot general sentiment as opposing space research in general, rather the opposite. The question is whether the ISS represents R&D at all. What do we gain from the experience that we didn't get from Skylab, or Mir? To me the ISS represents a failure of imagination. The ISS does not advance human imagination or technology or capability along any dimension. I'm in favor of spending $100B on space exploration, I just think the goals should be worthy.
It's also a cognitive error to say: This program is justified because we got a lot of useful spinoffs from similar projects in the past (microelectronics, Tang,...). That logic could justify *any* space-oriented program, and obviously they can't all be justified.
Yeah, it's just a space station, and that's the problem. We've had space stations since Skylab in the 1970s. They aren't good for very much. They make poor science platforms (all the jostling, noisy humans nearby), and there isn't any interesting exploration to do in low earth orbit. I can think of much better ways to spend the money on space exploration, both manned and unmanned.
The ISS is the result of a long chain of mis-justifications. Various political forces wanted to keep the Shuttle flying for as long as possible, despite its horrible economics. So the Shuttle needed something useful to do, and the ISS was cooked up as the solution for that problem. Now we have the ISS, and we're trying to figure out what IT's good for. These are all solutions in search of a problem. Better to go after some real goal, like sending astronauts to explore a comet.
One resolution to Fermi's paradox is to assume that every spacefaring civilization has some analogue of culture. Information exchange (culture) adds intelligence to the individual, and as technology improves the interconnection becomes faster and richer. People a few hundred years ago were happy getting months-old news about events around the world, whereas now people want web/email/phone connectivity all the time. Play this out another few hundred years and it will be unthinkable to willingly separate oneself by more than a few light-seconds from the rest of humanity. In other words, the Fermi paradox is predicated on a false, 20th century idea, that physical space is the scarce resource.
I bought at $10 and finally sold at $180. The thing that scares me about holding Apple stock long-term is Jobs's pancreatic cancer. Apple management demonstrated clearly that they are not forthcoming about their CEO's health, and let's face it, we've seen what would happen to Apple if Jobs had to dial back his involvement. More than any other company Apple needs its CEO.
They do make great products though, and deserve all their success. I hope my fears are unfounded and that Steve lives a long and healthy life.
There are plenty of coders, and artists for that matter, who do great work but cannot operate in a collaborative environment, where their impact depends on their ability to solve other peoples' problems. Van Gogh was brilliant, but he could never have worked as a commercial artist: He didn't care what other people thought, which was fine, but happened to make him unemployable.
As a manager, the people I try to avoid are those who convey no sense of ownership or curiosity about things. It's as though they expect the world to come to them, and present them with important problems to work on. It doesn't matter how smart you are, if you need this much care and feeding to be productive, it won't be a productive addition to the team.
On the nature of sentience, I believe Einstein said it best:
"The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery--even if mixed with fear--that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate..." (emphasis mine)
Is a dog aware there are things he cannot and will never know? Even the simplest humans are aware of this, if the ubiquity of religion is any guide.
A test of this is straightforward: Give your presumably sentient AIs bodies and some resources, and observe what they do. If you find that some of them, like Einstein or Van Gogh or Pythagoras, devote their lives against all materialistic logic toward an investigation of abstract ideals they will never truly pin down -- well then you have sentience.
I really like Python. It is cross-platform, Open-Source, and has lots of contributed modules.
I really like Python too, but I couldn't recommend it to the OP. Python is still very narrow in the range of problems it can solve. You aren't going to write a performance-intensive app in Python. You aren't going to write embedded code in Python. You aren't going to write a (good) GUI-based app for OS X or Windows using Python. The current runtime, CPython, is pretty badly broken in terms of support for multithreading. All of this is to say, it a fantastic language with great syntax, and good for learning and scripting, but as a tool to make great software? Try as I might I can't recommend it.
For an old-school programmer the biggest delta between the 1980s and today is object-oriented programming. I'd say learn an object-oriented language that you could use to make a great piece of software; depending on platform Objective C, C#, or Java would be good. Then get started on a project, since that's when you really learn. I would stay away from the hairball that is C++, but that's just my personal bias.
Slashdot Mirror
the data Google collected is evidence relevant to the investigation.
So, the investigators should get a subpoena. That's how the system works. If you can't convince a judge to issue a subpoena, you don't have a leg to stand on. I don't think Google -- or any other company -- should just hand out potentially sensitive user information to anyone who asks for it. Maybe that's how it works in China, but that isn't how it works in the USA.
The human visual and auditory systems only have a certain degree of acuity, as defined by our physiology. The optic nerve for example can only carry so much information into the brain each second. The point is, the technical advancement vs. coolness curve must saturate at some point. With music for example, a well-mastered CD produces effectively perfect sound for the typical listener.
Visual effects are beginning to reach a similar point. The pixel resolution and color fidelity are nearly there, and with pixel-perfect control it's only a matter of time before any effect we can dream of becomes possible to create at reasonable cost.
We aren't there yet though. The first filmmaker who produces a simulated human that truly fools me into thinking it's real, will completely blow my mind. I think that will be the end of the line.
That's funny considering the WP7 UI essentially blows Android & iPhone away.
I should have been clearer, I was talking about Microsoft's desktop OS. What WP7 and the X-Box demonstrate is that Microsoft can be very innovative when they aren't bogged down by endless platform fragmentation. I think Nexus One/S is Google's bid to avoid a similar fate. An interesting historical what-if is what the PC market would look like today if Microsoft played a more direct role in steering the platform hardware (beyond their peripherals business).
You seriously underestimate the limitations of neural network modeling on current hardware.
You seem to know this well. To be clear, is it the case that this new technology (a) simulates realistic neurons much faster than conventional hardware, and (b) retains enough flexibility to cover the different neural models of interest? If so then it is very interesting indeed. Is there a better writeup of this than the linked article?
The Achilles Heel of analog computing has always been the point about adaptability. You make a machine that simulates X really quickly, but then researchers want to tweak the system slightly and now your hardware is useless for simulating X'. The brittleness of analog computers goes a long way to explain their relative scarcity.
This is not a "bid for a slice of the mobile phone market." Google's purpose is to offer a reference device to the marketplace, to bring order to the Android chaos.
Look at why it's so hard for Microsoft to innovate in operating systems. It's because the hardware vendors went in a million different directions, leaving MS with this huge diversity of configurations to support. And because MS has no hand in the hardware arena, they can't implement simple improvements like fast sleep/unsleep that require HW support.
This phone serves two purposes: (1) it gives Google a direct line to developers and the geek elite (who want OS updates first, and tend not to like the UI "enhancements" offered by the carriers) for testing their latest software, and (2) it signals to other manufacturers the direction of the Android platform and encourages them to support the same features (NFC, etc.) This phone doesn't have to sell millions of units to achieve its objective, most importantly it has to be the phone that developers and the geek elite want to have.
Yeah, that was the same passage that made me double-take. A surprising thing to read on the IEEE site.
I agree that performance can matter. Especially so for brains, which interact with the physical world and have to respond on physical timescales (e.g., within hundreds of milliseconds in order to coordinate walking). If the technology were a lot faster than conventional machines for simulating neurons then that would be a meaningful advance, but this was not demonstrated in the article. The central argument seems to be that conventional computers suck because data is stored too far away from the CPU. (Never mind that signals travel 5 or 6 orders of magnitude faster along a motherboard trace than through an axon.)
I probably sound like I'm trying to pee on someone's campfire. The technology sounds cool and should be developed. I just didn't like the article.
This technology fundamentally mistakes what is the hard part about building brains as adaptable as biological ones. The physical instantiation is not important, if the Church-Turing thesis is true. (And if you're saying Church-Turing is false, that's an enormous claim and you'd better have very compelling evidence to back you up.)
The hard part about building a brain is figuring out the patterns of connectivity between neurons. Biology solves this in some brilliant way, starting from a seed with almost no information (the genome) and implementing some process to incorporate environmental data, self-organizing into a very robust and complex structure with orders of magnitude more information. The great unknown is the process whereby this growth and self-organization occurs. Figure that out, and you'll be able to make any kind of computer you like function as a brain.
Did George Lucas rape your childhood?
No, George Lucas raped my memories of childhood, specifically those related to my impression of him as a great storyteller. It's like I have these really fond memories of eating cake, only now I know the cake is a lie.
Are Uranus jokes shifting research to other planets?!
A similar hypothetical question: Would the New Horizons spacecraft headed toward Pluto have been developed and launched if Pluto had always been designated a dwarf planet? (New Horizons launched in January 2006, and Pluto was demoted in August 2006.) Makes you wonder how much significance people attach to these labels.
It probably has to do with the recent discovery of oxygen on saturn's moon Rhea.
Doubtful, for two reasons: (a) that has already been announced, and (b) the oxygen there has a plausible nonbiological origin (energetic particles in Saturn's magnetic field interacting with water ice on the surface).
The smart money says this press announcement will be disappointing to most people. Not unlike like the whole Apple/Beatles thing.
I wish Kurzweil would give proper credit to others; that he does not do so makes him look insecure. Vernor Vinge wrote about the singularity concept in 1993 (easy Google search), still IMHO the best description of the proposed phenomenon. Kurzweil could have displayed more class if his 2005 book read as, "here's an idea that others invented, which I'm here to explain and lend examples to." The way he wrote (and discussed) it, most people seem to think the singularity was his idea or he had some hand in developing it.
That said, Kurzweil's central message is good, but not especially new: That exponential improvements give rise to qualitative changes in what a technology can do, and it's useful to ponder what those changes might be. I suppose the value he provides is by being thought-provoking and getting the tech industry to think about trends rather than the short-term goals they focus on (the next product release).
What the Wii showed Microsoft, Sony, and everyone else is that polygons per second and screen resolution are not the major determinants of success. The Wii succeeded by having an innovative controller, and well-designed casual games. Equating platform competitiveness with fast hardware is an incorrect association, at least right now.
So Microsoft and Sony are doing the rational thing and investing their R&D into new controllers and good games, rather than a new platform rev. Given the risks they'll probably want to defer a major platform upgrade as long as they can, until performance is borderline painful.
Jack Tramiel should be strung up for crimes against computing.
I wouldn't call them crimes necessarily. Tramiel was just misguided: He thought of computers as an extension of the calculators he made before, which were an extension of the typewriters before that. In this mindset the computer is a widget that is undifferentiated from any other, where price and distribution are all-important and the engineering details don't matter. This fundamental mistake spelled doom for Commodore, but on the other hand it made computing accessible to a huge number of people. Most people who got started with computing in the early-to-mid 1980s got their start on a Commodore computer that was probably 1/5 to 1/3 the price of anything Apple sold.
It is shocking though how little Tramiel actually understood. As when he finally realized he needed a floppy disk drive, then told his team to have the software done in a weekend! No wonder the stock 1541 was so lame.
The bully in the schoolyard tries to shake down another kid to take his lunch money. The other kid rolls up his sleeves and says f*#k off, you're going to have to take it by force. The bully then has a choice: Walk away embarrassed in front of all the other kids, or risk getting his ass handed to him?
Kudos to Google for not rolling over like a lot of other companies would.
That's fair enough, although in practice the PR impact of this has hurt Google far more than any fine the government could possibly impose. I'll wager the folks there are taking this very seriously, and that potential fines from regulators have nothing to do with it.
The point of collecting information on wifi hotspots is to do more accurate geospatial targeting. Mapping IPs to lat/long is very coarse, since it maps to your ISP. With a database of wifi hotspot locations you can do much better. And given that they're driving around anyway to take street view photos, it doesn't cost Google anything to collect this data.
Now about recording the text information traversing unprotected hotspots -- which is the part of this that has people concerned -- that apparently was unintended. The explanation given by Google is that they were using some open source library that by default logged this information. Honestly I don't see that it would do them much good to do random packet sniffing like this, so I personally can't see a nefarious motive here although I do know we have some paranoid people in our midst.
The AC I responded to claimed this is a bug, I claim it's a feature. Until authentication improves I would rather there *not* be a way to irreversibly delete my data from Google's servers. If Google supported stronger authentication like a hardware token then I might change my view.
How many gmail accounts get hacked each month because of weak passwords? It happens quite often. Until authentication methods improve on the web, I would rather not be able to irretrievably delete my last 7 years of email with a few clicks. Call me paranoid, but I think my brand of paranoia is more justified than yours.
I wouldn't read Slashdot general sentiment as opposing space research in general, rather the opposite. The question is whether the ISS represents R&D at all. What do we gain from the experience that we didn't get from Skylab, or Mir? To me the ISS represents a failure of imagination. The ISS does not advance human imagination or technology or capability along any dimension. I'm in favor of spending $100B on space exploration, I just think the goals should be worthy.
It's also a cognitive error to say: This program is justified because we got a lot of useful spinoffs from similar projects in the past (microelectronics, Tang, ...). That logic could justify *any* space-oriented program, and obviously they can't all be justified.
Yeah, it's just a space station, and that's the problem. We've had space stations since Skylab in the 1970s. They aren't good for very much. They make poor science platforms (all the jostling, noisy humans nearby), and there isn't any interesting exploration to do in low earth orbit. I can think of much better ways to spend the money on space exploration, both manned and unmanned.
The ISS is the result of a long chain of mis-justifications. Various political forces wanted to keep the Shuttle flying for as long as possible, despite its horrible economics. So the Shuttle needed something useful to do, and the ISS was cooked up as the solution for that problem. Now we have the ISS, and we're trying to figure out what IT's good for. These are all solutions in search of a problem. Better to go after some real goal, like sending astronauts to explore a comet.
One resolution to Fermi's paradox is to assume that every spacefaring civilization has some analogue of culture. Information exchange (culture) adds intelligence to the individual, and as technology improves the interconnection becomes faster and richer. People a few hundred years ago were happy getting months-old news about events around the world, whereas now people want web/email/phone connectivity all the time. Play this out another few hundred years and it will be unthinkable to willingly separate oneself by more than a few light-seconds from the rest of humanity. In other words, the Fermi paradox is predicated on a false, 20th century idea, that physical space is the scarce resource.
I bought at $10 and finally sold at $180. The thing that scares me about holding Apple stock long-term is Jobs's pancreatic cancer. Apple management demonstrated clearly that they are not forthcoming about their CEO's health, and let's face it, we've seen what would happen to Apple if Jobs had to dial back his involvement. More than any other company Apple needs its CEO.
They do make great products though, and deserve all their success. I hope my fears are unfounded and that Steve lives a long and healthy life.
There are plenty of coders, and artists for that matter, who do great work but cannot operate in a collaborative environment, where their impact depends on their ability to solve other peoples' problems. Van Gogh was brilliant, but he could never have worked as a commercial artist: He didn't care what other people thought, which was fine, but happened to make him unemployable.
As a manager, the people I try to avoid are those who convey no sense of ownership or curiosity about things. It's as though they expect the world to come to them, and present them with important problems to work on. It doesn't matter how smart you are, if you need this much care and feeding to be productive, it won't be a productive addition to the team.
On the nature of sentience, I believe Einstein said it best:
"The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery--even if mixed with fear--that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate..." (emphasis mine)
Is a dog aware there are things he cannot and will never know? Even the simplest humans are aware of this, if the ubiquity of religion is any guide.
A test of this is straightforward: Give your presumably sentient AIs bodies and some resources, and observe what they do. If you find that some of them, like Einstein or Van Gogh or Pythagoras, devote their lives against all materialistic logic toward an investigation of abstract ideals they will never truly pin down -- well then you have sentience.
I really like Python. It is cross-platform, Open-Source, and has lots of contributed modules.
I really like Python too, but I couldn't recommend it to the OP. Python is still very narrow in the range of problems it can solve. You aren't going to write a performance-intensive app in Python. You aren't going to write embedded code in Python. You aren't going to write a (good) GUI-based app for OS X or Windows using Python. The current runtime, CPython, is pretty badly broken in terms of support for multithreading. All of this is to say, it a fantastic language with great syntax, and good for learning and scripting, but as a tool to make great software? Try as I might I can't recommend it.
For an old-school programmer the biggest delta between the 1980s and today is object-oriented programming. I'd say learn an object-oriented language that you could use to make a great piece of software; depending on platform Objective C, C#, or Java would be good. Then get started on a project, since that's when you really learn. I would stay away from the hairball that is C++, but that's just my personal bias.