You make a legitimate point. Props to Tesla for the things he did do -- in the US, AC transmission was huge beyond belief because of the distances needed to be traversed between generation and use points. Adoption of electrical power would have been stunted without it, and he made it possible faster. That had enormous and positive impact on the economy and the quality of life of millions of people.
I was indeed referring to "All the other hoopla" that you referred to.
I now have a theory that most people who worship the man haven't met him.
Your theory may or may not be correct, but for the record, I think it helps my geek karma to have corresponded with RMS. Do I worship him? No. Do I defend everything he does? No. Do I think that he has done an awful lot to make free software possible and useful and do I respect his evangelism and contributions to free software? Yes. That's all.
Grant Erickson points to this internet.com story, which says "On Thursday, the California state Senate approved a bill that requires businesses with stores in the state to charge their customers sales tax for purchases made over the Internet." The state's huge ($35 billion) budget deficit is named as a driving force for the measure.
You should check out Tesla's work. He was broadcasting electricity ages ago. You can build the same getup at home for a few hundred bucks and chemo treatments from the cancer which will most likely ensue.
I saw a news story in Time or Newsweek back in 93 or 94 that showed a guy standing beneath some high voltage lines holding a lightbulb. The bulb was glowing. It was a story on the perceived harms that allegedly resulted from EMFs near high-voltage lines.
A girlfriend of mine (an engineer) from college subsequently did an interesting project in combination with a science writing/journalism class that looked at the public's perception of dangers resulting from EMFs (aside from the obvious) compared to the actual risks disclosed in the medical literature of the time. The disparity between the proven risks and the perceived risks among those surveyed (even those from an engineering college of a major university) was stunning.
In any case, I often wondered if the photo from Time or Newsweek was faked. Even today, I still can't get the idea through my head that significant exposure to EMFs can be anything but bad for you. I'm pretty sure it isn't good for you, but I can't really say why I think that other than ignorant fear of something so powerful.
FWIW, it seems that broadcasting electric would be incredibly wasteful under almost all circumstances, though. Besides, anytime I see references to Tesla, I start to think that black helicopters and aliens can't be far behind. Not a fair bias, perhaps, but it is nevertheless one from which I suffer.
I never thought many moons ago I would see someone on TV, and then talk to him many years later on this Internet thing. ..... I felt like I upped my geek status at that point.
I have a saved email from Richard Stallman. The topic it was on is irrelevant to me now, but the fact that I corresponded with an uber geek and got a response other than the typical restraining order I usually receive is something that I wanted to record for posterity, so I have saved the email. Ah, the power of celebrity.
Accordingly, please mod this, and all my future posts, "-1 -- Fucking Loser."
Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia has given iPod digital music players to its students to help them with their coursework....as part of an experimental project to illustrate creative uses for the machine, and University professors say the gadgets have helped the students think more critically about their Gothic Imagination course.
I can think of a number of neat-o ideas:
1. Have the professors record lectures/classes and distribute them in an audio format. MP3 would be ok, except for licensing.
2. Allow packing up of whiteboard notes from the lecture by taking the files home on the iPod after downloading them in class.
FWIW, I would looooooove to have something that would record in a condensed audio format (ogg? ogg? anyone?) so that I could record depositions or hearings. Dictation would be fantastic in this manner, as I could dictate letters and other things in my law practice and email them to my secretary for transcription.
As things stand right now, I carry a PDA, a cell phone, and mini cassette recorder. I frequently carry an MP3 player and a digital camera as well. I feel like I need to get a fucking utility belt (or even just a utility belt - I can handle the fucking without the utilities). I'd love to consolidate all that junk into one handy-dandy device. It would be even better if the hands-free device for a phone device would double as an omni directional microphone for depositions and hearings.
These guys must have read Marvin Minsky's fiction account of robots and AI. This (crop care/maintenance) was one of the first commercial applications of the robotic AI in the book after the prototype was snatched. I think he used bugs instead of weeds, though. Maybe both. Been a while since I read it.
I have been thinking lately that to create a true AI, one would need to give it a robotic interface to our world. Perhaps even raise it like a child. This would be so we would have enough shared experiences with it that we could communicate with it enough to know it was alive. I guess computer AIs could serf the internet to get access to people, but if all it did was that we would just have an AI geek.;)
How the robot raised by geeks would turn out would be interesting. Nevertheless, you have an interesting point about "raising" a robot. One of the reasons that humans have prolonged childhoods is probably that there is an advantage to the genes from a natural selection standpoint.
With an AI, you would need to do this only once, however, or only a relatively limited number of times. Then copy the thing to many bodies.
There is an extant effort to codify "common sense" rules for dealing with the real world, btw. There is a company out there that is collecting into a database a variety of situations and trying to use that as a basis for creating at the least a very "sensible" program. While it may not "think" in a pure sense (do we?), it may at least act prudently (as a general rule, don't jump off cliffs for instance).
I sometimes think that any element of a "man-like" AI (which is extremely limiting) must contain some sort of feedback/self-programming process. It sort of makes me think of collaborative programming in an OS model -- try, revise, try again. The goal orientation (ego) and learning process (self-programming) seem to me to be good places to start.
As I mentioned with the Intel program, the cool thing is the OS software and the (relatively speaking) commodity hardware. Wireless is simply another cool part of the hardware set. A really, really smart AI could probably even use the Wi-fi for radar as well as communication.
On a final note, the gist of many AI projects I have seen (and the Intel one seems to be leaning this way) is on group action and intelligence. A "hive mind" as opposed to self-contained individual members. Wi-fi would be beaucoup for doing this on the cheap (blah blah blah Bluetooth blah blah blah).
I had started doing some research into AI for a variety of reasons recently, not least because I was interested in what intelligence is and whether true AI could be created. It led me into issues involving software, hardware, and differences in basic approaches to AI. I went down a lot of roads - parallel distributed processing, Marvin Minsky, etc. Fascinating stuff.
I thought I had an interesting idea when I started to think about an AI developed as open source versus a closed-source AI developed by a software firm. Hah. Nothing new under the sun, evidently. Still thinking about the possibilities of an AI run through a distributed computing effort. The processing power is there, but the coordination efforts would be nightmarish.
In any case, this Intel research seems to be leading down an interesting path, although robotics is definitely not AI. Some convergence is likely, but anytime I see someone pursuing a project like this with (more or less) commodity hardware and free tools, I am encouraged.
generated some interesting results into the methods by which spammers can track you (with publicly available websites containing your bare email address being the most popular method)
So, if I publish other people's email addresses in a public forum, it will increase the amount of spam they get. Hmmm.
Laura Betterly - vixen@plumpers.com Alan Ralsky - receiver@goatse.cx Hillary Rosen - feltching@clitcommander.com Robert Byrd - JeffDavis@strangefruit.com
I'll leave the personal ones for spiders in a discreet location.
Considering the Hulk's anger-management problem, is it really wise to put him up in another trailer? Maybe he should be forced to lie in the bed he has made. That's the only way he'll learn personal responsibility.
Trust is a central issue in this. This is no different than a more thorough/convenient parent-teacher conference. Some people will abuse it and their kids will revolt. I would bet though it would just be the straw that broke the camel's back type of situation. Trust has to be built up. In this case, if the parents routinely check up on you and your story always is the same as what they get from the school, then the trust will be in your honesty. From there you need to build up the trust in your studies. Put a few hours a day into studying if you need to and they will start to trust your study habits.
Agreed. From a parent's perspective, the operative turn of phrase (applicable to many things in life) is:
Trust in Allah, but tie your camel.
If, as you suggest, the verification by either party continuously matches the statements of the others, then trust can be established. The mechanism proposed by the school (aside from some technical difficulties vis-a-vis the security scheme) actually enables parents to trust their kids more easily.
Neither trust nor respect are as effective if they are gifts. They work much better when they are earned.
Au contraire. A realtor will frequently use an amortization schedule to show a prospective buyer whether a property can cash-flow positively. Banks do them, too, but so do realtors, investors, homebuyers, etc. Partly because of Visicalc. Before Visicalc, more people used tables, but amortization tables have always been a part of the real estate sales pitch, especially for properties that matter, such as multi-family and commercial.
A school near me still uses their apples for flashcard-type math and reading drills. They still work, the kids still learn the material. Why upgrade when the things still do what you need them to do? Young kids, especially, just need a tool to do the job. If they need a hammer, give them a hammer. Don't give them a piledriver.
FWIW, I'd rather see the money sunk into new books than new computers.
I remember a realator telling me that the real-estate market didn't go loony until the creation of the spreadsheet. Before that all real-estate transactions needed to make sense on the back of an envelope.
The real estate boom also was juiced by an incredible inflation of the late 70's that pushed people into hard assets and away from financial assets. Gold and silver and real estate benefitted from the inflationary environment.
In addition, the Roth tax cuts in the early eighties cut depreciation periods for buildings to absurdly low levels. Enormous tax benefits were derived from owning real estate (depreciating an entire building's value in 15 years, for instance). In addition, when inflation was brought under control, interest rates declined, pushing real estate even more as cheap money chased investments. Sort of like today. Throw in the S&Ls gambling with federally insured money, and you had additional fuel for the fire.
Changes in the tax law and economic reality caught up in the latter part of the eighties. Real estate was a gigantic fricking mess in the late eighties and early nineties. It is showing signs of heating up again, IMHO.
The realtor was utterly wrong about the cause of the real estate bubble of the early/mid eighties. Visicalc may have correlated with the bubble, but it didn't cause it.
Besides schools, where were Apple II's embraced by business?
Depends. Lots of small businesses bought them. My folks did, and they ran some custom accounting apps for years on an Apple ][ (which predated PCs by quite a bit), later an Apple ][e, and stil later on a GS.
Just like today, run whatever scratches your itch.
The reason I first got my hands on an Apple ][ at the ripe age of six was because my father wanted it for forecasting and doing bookkeeping. The seed planted in my brain at that time led to an awful lot more than what he expected from the machine. If it hadn't been for that box, I probably never would have started an ISP later in life, and I probably would not be nearly the techno/gadget geek I have become since.
It is a mixed bag, admittedly. On the plus side, Visicalc indirectly led me to doing a pile of neat-o things. On the minus side, I've probably gotten laid less.
Since SCO has its back against the wall and has really nothing to lose at this point, is SCO planning on using weapons of mass destruction as a part of a last-ditch effort to remain relevant?
1. Really dumb ones that simply don't know any better, or
2. Ones that can keep a straight face when drafting the complaint that was filed, or
3. Ones that are really desperate for the money, so that even though they might face Rule 7 sanctions, they were still willing to go ahead with the complaint anyway
the majority of neurotic computers i've worked on were so due to some action of the user, whether it was...., or allowing three inches of cigarette dust to accumulate inside the case.
My computer was getting flaky when I did that to it. I solved the problem when I "patch"-ed it, though. Heh.
Slashdot Mirror
You make a legitimate point. Props to Tesla for the things he did do -- in the US, AC transmission was huge beyond belief because of the distances needed to be traversed between generation and use points. Adoption of electrical power would have been stunted without it, and he made it possible faster. That had enormous and positive impact on the economy and the quality of life of millions of people.
I was indeed referring to "All the other hoopla" that you referred to.
GF.
I now have a theory that most people who worship the man haven't met him.
Your theory may or may not be correct, but for the record, I think it helps my geek karma to have corresponded with RMS. Do I worship him? No. Do I defend everything he does? No. Do I think that he has done an awful lot to make free software possible and useful and do I respect his evangelism and contributions to free software? Yes. That's all.
GF
Grant Erickson points to this internet.com story, which says "On Thursday, the California state Senate approved a bill that requires businesses with stores in the state to charge their customers sales tax for purchases made over the Internet." The state's huge ($35 billion) budget deficit is named as a driving force for the measure.
In other news, there is an effort underway to recall California Governor Gray Davis.
GF.
Let's see, you take a collector, put it between the earth and the sun, where it stops light that would hit the Earth anyway,
Wasn't this already tried by Montgomery Burns?
GF.
You should check out Tesla's work. He was broadcasting electricity ages ago. You can build the same getup at home for a few hundred bucks and chemo treatments from the cancer which will most likely ensue.
I saw a news story in Time or Newsweek back in 93 or 94 that showed a guy standing beneath some high voltage lines holding a lightbulb. The bulb was glowing. It was a story on the perceived harms that allegedly resulted from EMFs near high-voltage lines.
A girlfriend of mine (an engineer) from college subsequently did an interesting project in combination with a science writing/journalism class that looked at the public's perception of dangers resulting from EMFs (aside from the obvious) compared to the actual risks disclosed in the medical literature of the time. The disparity between the proven risks and the perceived risks among those surveyed (even those from an engineering college of a major university) was stunning.
In any case, I often wondered if the photo from Time or Newsweek was faked. Even today, I still can't get the idea through my head that significant exposure to EMFs can be anything but bad for you. I'm pretty sure it isn't good for you, but I can't really say why I think that other than ignorant fear of something so powerful.
FWIW, it seems that broadcasting electric would be incredibly wasteful under almost all circumstances, though. Besides, anytime I see references to Tesla, I start to think that black helicopters and aliens can't be far behind. Not a fair bias, perhaps, but it is nevertheless one from which I suffer.
I never thought many moons ago I would see someone on TV, and then talk to him many years later on this Internet thing.
.....
I felt like I upped my geek status at that point.
I have a saved email from Richard Stallman. The topic it was on is irrelevant to me now, but the fact that I corresponded with an uber geek and got a response other than the typical restraining order I usually receive is something that I wanted to record for posterity, so I have saved the email. Ah, the power of celebrity.
Accordingly, please mod this, and all my future posts, "-1 -- Fucking Loser."
Georgia College & State University in Milledgeville, Georgia has given iPod digital music players to its students to help them with their coursework....as part of an experimental project to illustrate creative uses for the machine, and University professors say the gadgets have helped the students think more critically about their Gothic Imagination course.
I can think of a number of neat-o ideas:
1. Have the professors record lectures/classes and distribute them in an audio format. MP3 would be ok, except for licensing.
2. Allow packing up of whiteboard notes from the lecture by taking the files home on the iPod after downloading them in class.
FWIW, I would looooooove to have something that would record in a condensed audio format (ogg? ogg? anyone?) so that I could record depositions or hearings. Dictation would be fantastic in this manner, as I could dictate letters and other things in my law practice and email them to my secretary for transcription.
As things stand right now, I carry a PDA, a cell phone, and mini cassette recorder. I frequently carry an MP3 player and a digital camera as well. I feel like I need to get a fucking utility belt (or even just a utility belt - I can handle the fucking without the utilities). I'd love to consolidate all that junk into one handy-dandy device. It would be even better if the hands-free device for a phone device would double as an omni directional microphone for depositions and hearings.
GF
GF.
These guys must have read Marvin Minsky's fiction account of robots and AI. This (crop care/maintenance) was one of the first commercial applications of the robotic AI in the book after the prototype was snatched. I think he used bugs instead of weeds, though. Maybe both. Been a while since I read it.
GF.
I have been thinking lately that to create a true AI, one would need to give it a robotic interface to our world. Perhaps even raise it like a child. This would be so we would have enough shared experiences with it that we could communicate with it enough to know it was alive. I guess computer AIs could serf the internet to get access to people, but if all it did was that we would just have an AI geek. ;)
How the robot raised by geeks would turn out would be interesting. Nevertheless, you have an interesting point about "raising" a robot. One of the reasons that humans have prolonged childhoods is probably that there is an advantage to the genes from a natural selection standpoint.
With an AI, you would need to do this only once, however, or only a relatively limited number of times. Then copy the thing to many bodies.
There is an extant effort to codify "common sense" rules for dealing with the real world, btw. There is a company out there that is collecting into a database a variety of situations and trying to use that as a basis for creating at the least a very "sensible" program. While it may not "think" in a pure sense (do we?), it may at least act prudently (as a general rule, don't jump off cliffs for instance).
I sometimes think that any element of a "man-like" AI (which is extremely limiting) must contain some sort of feedback/self-programming process. It sort of makes me think of collaborative programming in an OS model -- try, revise, try again. The goal orientation (ego) and learning process (self-programming) seem to me to be good places to start.
As I mentioned with the Intel program, the cool thing is the OS software and the (relatively speaking) commodity hardware. Wireless is simply another cool part of the hardware set. A really, really smart AI could probably even use the Wi-fi for radar as well as communication.
On a final note, the gist of many AI projects I have seen (and the Intel one seems to be leaning this way) is on group action and intelligence. A "hive mind" as opposed to self-contained individual members. Wi-fi would be beaucoup for doing this on the cheap (blah blah blah Bluetooth blah blah blah).
GF.
I had started doing some research into AI for a variety of reasons recently, not least because I was interested in what intelligence is and whether true AI could be created. It led me into issues involving software, hardware, and differences in basic approaches to AI. I went down a lot of roads - parallel distributed processing, Marvin Minsky, etc. Fascinating stuff.
I thought I had an interesting idea when I started to think about an AI developed as open source versus a closed-source AI developed by a software firm. Hah. Nothing new under the sun, evidently. Still thinking about the possibilities of an AI run through a distributed computing effort. The processing power is there, but the coordination efforts would be nightmarish.
In any case, this Intel research seems to be leading down an interesting path, although robotics is definitely not AI. Some convergence is likely, but anytime I see someone pursuing a project like this with (more or less) commodity hardware and free tools, I am encouraged.
GF.
generated some interesting results into the methods by which spammers can track you (with publicly available websites containing your bare email address being the most popular method)
So, if I publish other people's email addresses in a public forum, it will increase the amount of spam they get. Hmmm.
Laura Betterly - vixen@plumpers.com
Alan Ralsky - receiver@goatse.cx
Hillary Rosen - feltching@clitcommander.com
Robert Byrd - JeffDavis@strangefruit.com
I'll leave the personal ones for spiders in a discreet location.
GF.
New Trailer for The Hulk
Considering the Hulk's anger-management problem, is it really wise to put him up in another trailer? Maybe he should be forced to lie in the bed he has made. That's the only way he'll learn personal responsibility.
GF.
Trust is a central issue in this. This is no different than a more thorough/convenient parent-teacher conference. Some people will abuse it and their kids will revolt. I would bet though it would just be the straw that broke the camel's back type of situation. Trust has to be built up. In this case, if the parents routinely check up on you and your story always is the same as what they get from the school, then the trust will be in your honesty. From there you need to build up the trust in your studies. Put a few hours a day into studying if you need to and they will start to trust your study habits.
Agreed. From a parent's perspective, the operative turn of phrase (applicable to many things in life) is:
Trust in Allah, but tie your camel.
If, as you suggest, the verification by either party continuously matches the statements of the others, then trust can be established. The mechanism proposed by the school (aside from some technical difficulties vis-a-vis the security scheme) actually enables parents to trust their kids more easily.
Neither trust nor respect are as effective if they are gifts. They work much better when they are earned.
GF.
Banks do loan amortizations, not realtors.
Au contraire. A realtor will frequently use an amortization schedule to show a prospective buyer whether a property can cash-flow positively. Banks do them, too, but so do realtors, investors, homebuyers, etc. Partly because of Visicalc. Before Visicalc, more people used tables, but amortization tables have always been a part of the real estate sales pitch, especially for properties that matter, such as multi-family and commercial.
GF.
A school near me still uses their apples for flashcard-type math and reading drills. They still work, the kids still learn the material. Why upgrade when the things still do what you need them to do? Young kids, especially, just need a tool to do the job. If they need a hammer, give them a hammer. Don't give them a piledriver.
FWIW, I'd rather see the money sunk into new books than new computers.
GF.
I remember a realator telling me that the real-estate market didn't go loony until the creation of the spreadsheet. Before that all real-estate transactions needed to make sense on the back of an envelope.
The real estate boom also was juiced by an incredible inflation of the late 70's that pushed people into hard assets and away from financial assets. Gold and silver and real estate benefitted from the inflationary environment.
In addition, the Roth tax cuts in the early eighties cut depreciation periods for buildings to absurdly low levels. Enormous tax benefits were derived from owning real estate (depreciating an entire building's value in 15 years, for instance). In addition, when inflation was brought under control, interest rates declined, pushing real estate even more as cheap money chased investments. Sort of like today. Throw in the S&Ls gambling with federally insured money, and you had additional fuel for the fire.
Changes in the tax law and economic reality caught up in the latter part of the eighties. Real estate was a gigantic fricking mess in the late eighties and early nineties. It is showing signs of heating up again, IMHO.
The realtor was utterly wrong about the cause of the real estate bubble of the early/mid eighties. Visicalc may have correlated with the bubble, but it didn't cause it.
GF.
Besides schools, where were Apple II's embraced by business?
Depends. Lots of small businesses bought them. My folks did, and they ran some custom accounting apps for years on an Apple ][ (which predated PCs by quite a bit), later an Apple ][e, and stil later on a GS.
Just like today, run whatever scratches your itch.
GF.
The reason I first got my hands on an Apple ][ at the ripe age of six was because my father wanted it for forecasting and doing bookkeeping. The seed planted in my brain at that time led to an awful lot more than what he expected from the machine. If it hadn't been for that box, I probably never would have started an ISP later in life, and I probably would not be nearly the techno/gadget geek I have become since.
It is a mixed bag, admittedly. On the plus side, Visicalc indirectly led me to doing a pile of neat-o things. On the minus side, I've probably gotten laid less.
GF.
Since SCO has its back against the wall and has really nothing to lose at this point, is SCO planning on using weapons of mass destruction as a part of a last-ditch effort to remain relevant?
GF.
When you hired your lawyers, did you go for:
1. Really dumb ones that simply don't know any better, or
2. Ones that can keep a straight face when drafting the complaint that was filed, or
3. Ones that are really desperate for the money, so that even though they might face Rule 7 sanctions, they were still willing to go ahead with the complaint anyway
Inquiring minds want to know!
GF.
the majority of neurotic computers i've worked on were so due to some action of the user, whether it was ...., or allowing three inches of cigarette dust to accumulate inside the case.
My computer was getting flaky when I did that to it. I solved the problem when I "patch"-ed it, though. Heh.
GF. (ducking and running)
Machines will have to get a lot more complex before their problems graduate from inefficiency or resource conflicts to "neurosis."
You obviously havne't updated your video card drivers lately.
GF.
I almost read this as "Duke Nukem Forever Released" and then I remembered that April Fools Day was a couple days back.
If I'm not going to RTFA, I can at least RTF headline.
GF.
it is about time they cut down the size of the package.
Some people like a big package.
GF.
1. Smaller
2. Faster
3. Less bloated
Less is more, in many, many things. Including software.
GF.