I'd say we may be able to design a computer that is "almost" as intelligent as a human, but I suspect getting it to be as intelligent as we are is going to turn out to be a continuously elusive goal
Having a computer that is almost as intelligent might already be enough, just make it run faster at that point and soon you have a computer that has the intelligence of a normal human, but instead of taking a day to think about something he takes a minute, not by being more intelligent in principle, but just by running on fast hardware. And of course you could parallelize, don't build one human-in-a-box, build dozens or hundreds, have them communicate and soon you have a pretty incredible thinking machine. There are simply lots and lots of ways to optimize once you know how to build a basic intelligence.
And of course the singularity folks typically conveniently ignore the possibility that we are already close to the limit on intelligence density with the human brain,
Yeah, because that is an rather unlikely possibility. A simple pocket calculator can already calculate much faster then any human. It is not exactly far fetched to assume that human intelligence can be improved a good bit in other domains as well. And even if it can't, just optimizing it could help a lot. Build a box with human intelligence that doesn't need to eat, sleep, doesn't care about having a real life and is constantly motivated to work on a problem and you have a quite powerful tool on your hand. And if we have a bit of Moore's law left you could also speed things up. You might only have the intelligence of an Einstein in the box, but your Einstein-in-a-box might be able to do in a month what might take a human a lifetime, not by being more intelligent, but just by running on a faster CPU.
It is genome combined with the laws of physics that gives you the organism, not the genome itself. And while the genome itself might look easy and the laws of physics might be well enough understand to build a simulation, running such a simulation is pretty much impossible, since it is just way to complex to simulate nature on an atomic scale for something as large as a human. Even exponential growth in computing speed won't change that for quite a long long while.
Currently, our understanding of DNA does not lead us to be able to create self-assembling complex devices
That was kind of accomplished a few month ago by building a cell run on synthetic DNA, it is not yet perfect, as they only build the DNA and recycled the rest of the cell, but it is pretty close to completly artificial life.
The trick is modeling the mind. We are very, very far away from that.
Why would you need to model the mind? The mind is basically just the emergent property of the brain, so once you have the brain simulated you are basically done, just run it with some decent inputs to simulate its initial development and you will likely end up with the mind.
His AI claims always seem to be a vast underestimation of the complexity of the human mind.
His claims are based on exponential growth in processing power, thus any underestimation he might have, becomes a non-issue a few decades later. Being off by a factor of a million just means you have to wait 20 years for his predictions to be back in sync with reality. Collapse of Moore's law would of cause be an issue.
I'd say the crazy part is comparing the genome with "lines of code". Those two have really little to no relation, as one is data and the other is code and you can't really translate from one to the other. Also you won't be able to simulate a brain starting from the genome any time soon, as the complexity to simulate the complete development cycle would be a good bit more then a computer can handle (they already struggle with folding a single protein, good luck with simulating the whole human body).
However I don't think there is anything crazy in the basic claim. To simulate the brain you don't need to start with the genome, you can start at a much higher level, take neurons and the surroundings and simulate that instead. That way you might be able to get an artificial brain up and running in far less time then starting with the genome. Your favorite console emulator doesn't start at simulating the electron or individual transistor either, as those are really just implementation details that are not needed to replicate the functionality. The human brain is of course more messy, so it will be a good bit more complicated, but it is very likely that it is still the higher level structures that count, not the low level details.
You have many amateur users who don't understand the first thing about security, and you have millions of them.
It is worse then that. Facebook itself actively encourages irresponsible high risk behaviors such has handing out your email password to a third party, thus making the already clueless users even more clueless.
While Freenet certainly isn't as fast as regular HTTP, the biggest problem with running a server from home is simply that your upstream on your regular ADSL line is normally just one tenth of your downstream. So you run into bandwidth issues long before Freenet even comes into play. Running a sever from home isn't going to be practical unless upstream rates increase a lot.
The problem is that it allows correlation. Have two pseudonyms on the net that you use to post pictures? Now suddenly people can easily track you down by your GPS coordinates or better yet, the serial number of your camera or whatever other unique information one can grab from the metadata.
I think the core thing that needs to be solved in general is that of "invisible data". Most software makes it not exactly easy to see what exactly is stored in a file, instead it just provides you a stripped down view with most of the metadata hidden. This doesn't just happen with image files, but also Word documents, PDFs and plenty of other things.
Anyway source releases are under the GPL V3 (I see no reference of "or later.")
"any later version" is referenced in each source file:
Wolf ET Source Code is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
From the analog stick, to the rumble pack, to motion controls.
None of those were invented by Nintendo. What Nintendo however did was create a complete solution from those core ideas and thus make them popular. The rumble pack had Starfox64, the analogstick had Mario64 and the motion controls had Wii Sports. It was this combination of an already existing idea with solid games that made them succeed, not just the innovation by itself. It is the same with Apple, they don't really come up with much new stuff, but they provide you with the complete package around it.
The GPLv3 contains the section "7. Additional Terms.", which seems to allow and describe exactly the changes that they did.
Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, for material you add to a covered work, you may (if authorized by the copyright holders of that material) supplement the terms of this License with terms:
a) Disclaiming warranty or limiting liability differently from the
terms of sections 15 and 16 of this License; or
b) Requiring preservation of specified reasonable legal notices or
author attributions in that material or in the Appropriate Legal
Notices displayed by works containing it; or
c) Prohibiting misrepresentation of the origin of that material, or
requiring that modified versions of such material be marked in
reasonable ways as different from the original version; or
d) Limiting the use for publicity purposes of names of licensors or
authors of the material; or
e) Declining to grant rights under trademark law for use of some
trade names, trademarks, or service marks; or
f) Requiring indemnification of licensors and authors of that
material by anyone who conveys the material (or modified versions of
it) with contractual assumptions of liability to the recipient, for
any liability that these contractual assumptions directly impose on
those licensors and authors.
For images one can look at Leisure Suit Larry 7, that game gave you a new Windows background image depending on the progress you made through the game.
If I say 'hey, do this work for me for free, and I won't offer you any compensation' and someone willingly does it, what the heck is the problem?
Nothing, but that is not how these contests work. Instead of a an easy to understand sentence, you get multiple pages full of legal lingo that might require a lawyer to properly parse, thus making misunderstandings a lot more likely.
You might want to read The Free Software Definition, morals and legality aside, piracy gives you 0), 1) and 3), the GPL just gives you 2) in addition. Also the GPL is not Copyright, it is Copyleft.
"netstat -lpn" lists a lot of stuff that is not exported, you can get closer with "netstat -tulpen" or whatever, but even then you only have a very very rough overview about what you are exporting. For example you could have samba (or apache or whatever) running, which you want, but have it export all of '/' instead of just the directory you want. There is no easy way to find that out without digging through a lot of config files.
The "blame the user" is pretty much standard under Unix/Linux, after all it makes you:
1) Feel clever 2) Stops you from thinking of how to improve the situation
Stuff like this happens simply because currently day computer systems are extremely crappy in communicating what they export to the world, thus it is very easy to overlook cases like this where an app exposes more then you intended.
Cars that warn you when you get to close to the edge of the road are already on the market. It is not that hard to imagine to take that a step further to actually stop the car before it flies into the river and of course one can build bridges that don't let you drive of them in the first place.
For an extreme example see Formular 1 cars, those drive at extremely high speed and crash frequently into walls or other cars, yet they managed to have zero-fatalities for the last 15 years and most of the time the driver can just walk away from a crash. Now you can't directly apply all of those technologies to normal everyday cars, but given that normal cars don't need to drive at high speed under race conditions it shows that a near zero-fatality car is possible.
Knowing that the algorithm is correct and the implementation was codec correctly doesn't help you when you have faulty RAM that flips a bit.
Re:Solution in need of a (perceived) problem
on
Why Wave Failed
·
· Score: 1
What problem did Wave solve?
The problem of getting stuff done over long distance with a group of people. Mail completly sucks for that, it is to slow, doesn't provide any way to edit posts or collaborate on documents. IM fixes the 'slow' issue, but still sucks on everything else. Wikis run into the 'slow' issue again and also handle comments in rather bad ways, they are also not exactly easy to set up.
Games are for fun, and they can use a wide variety of topics for that,
So school shootings, 9/11, Nazi death camps and whatever? Is that all fair game and ready to be exploited for mindless fun?
I am not saying that games shouldn't touch those topics, quite the opposite, games can allow exploring these events in interesting ways. What I have a problem with are games that exploit war and turn it into mindless entertainment without providing any meaningful reflection on the topic.
It does, but only because most editors are to stupid to handle it correctly automatically. In theory tabs win, but of course even in the case where they are handled correctly, its still just a partial solution, a truly layout agnostic editor would just ignore the source file layout complete and present the code however the user wants it to.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say we may be able to design a computer that is "almost" as intelligent as a human, but I suspect getting it to be as intelligent as we are is going to turn out to be a continuously elusive goal
Having a computer that is almost as intelligent might already be enough, just make it run faster at that point and soon you have a computer that has the intelligence of a normal human, but instead of taking a day to think about something he takes a minute, not by being more intelligent in principle, but just by running on fast hardware. And of course you could parallelize, don't build one human-in-a-box, build dozens or hundreds, have them communicate and soon you have a pretty incredible thinking machine. There are simply lots and lots of ways to optimize once you know how to build a basic intelligence.
And of course the singularity folks typically conveniently ignore the possibility that we are already close to the limit on intelligence density with the human brain,
Yeah, because that is an rather unlikely possibility. A simple pocket calculator can already calculate much faster then any human. It is not exactly far fetched to assume that human intelligence can be improved a good bit in other domains as well. And even if it can't, just optimizing it could help a lot. Build a box with human intelligence that doesn't need to eat, sleep, doesn't care about having a real life and is constantly motivated to work on a problem and you have a quite powerful tool on your hand. And if we have a bit of Moore's law left you could also speed things up. You might only have the intelligence of an Einstein in the box, but your Einstein-in-a-box might be able to do in a month what might take a human a lifetime, not by being more intelligent, but just by running on a faster CPU.
It is genome combined with the laws of physics that gives you the organism, not the genome itself. And while the genome itself might look easy and the laws of physics might be well enough understand to build a simulation, running such a simulation is pretty much impossible, since it is just way to complex to simulate nature on an atomic scale for something as large as a human. Even exponential growth in computing speed won't change that for quite a long long while.
Currently, our understanding of DNA does not lead us to be able to create self-assembling complex devices
That was kind of accomplished a few month ago by building a cell run on synthetic DNA, it is not yet perfect, as they only build the DNA and recycled the rest of the cell, but it is pretty close to completly artificial life.
The trick is modeling the mind. We are very, very far away from that.
Why would you need to model the mind? The mind is basically just the emergent property of the brain, so once you have the brain simulated you are basically done, just run it with some decent inputs to simulate its initial development and you will likely end up with the mind.
His AI claims always seem to be a vast underestimation of the complexity of the human mind.
His claims are based on exponential growth in processing power, thus any underestimation he might have, becomes a non-issue a few decades later. Being off by a factor of a million just means you have to wait 20 years for his predictions to be back in sync with reality. Collapse of Moore's law would of cause be an issue.
What's so crazy about that?
I'd say the crazy part is comparing the genome with "lines of code". Those two have really little to no relation, as one is data and the other is code and you can't really translate from one to the other. Also you won't be able to simulate a brain starting from the genome any time soon, as the complexity to simulate the complete development cycle would be a good bit more then a computer can handle (they already struggle with folding a single protein, good luck with simulating the whole human body).
However I don't think there is anything crazy in the basic claim. To simulate the brain you don't need to start with the genome, you can start at a much higher level, take neurons and the surroundings and simulate that instead. That way you might be able to get an artificial brain up and running in far less time then starting with the genome. Your favorite console emulator doesn't start at simulating the electron or individual transistor either, as those are really just implementation details that are not needed to replicate the functionality. The human brain is of course more messy, so it will be a good bit more complicated, but it is very likely that it is still the higher level structures that count, not the low level details.
You have many amateur users who don't understand the first thing about security, and you have millions of them.
It is worse then that. Facebook itself actively encourages irresponsible high risk behaviors such has handing out your email password to a third party, thus making the already clueless users even more clueless.
While Freenet certainly isn't as fast as regular HTTP, the biggest problem with running a server from home is simply that your upstream on your regular ADSL line is normally just one tenth of your downstream. So you run into bandwidth issues long before Freenet even comes into play. Running a sever from home isn't going to be practical unless upstream rates increase a lot.
The problem is that it allows correlation. Have two pseudonyms on the net that you use to post pictures? Now suddenly people can easily track you down by your GPS coordinates or better yet, the serial number of your camera or whatever other unique information one can grab from the metadata.
I think the core thing that needs to be solved in general is that of "invisible data". Most software makes it not exactly easy to see what exactly is stored in a file, instead it just provides you a stripped down view with most of the metadata hidden. This doesn't just happen with image files, but also Word documents, PDFs and plenty of other things.
Anyway source releases are under the GPL V3 (I see no reference of "or later.")
"any later version" is referenced in each source file:
From the analog stick, to the rumble pack, to motion controls.
None of those were invented by Nintendo. What Nintendo however did was create a complete solution from those core ideas and thus make them popular. The rumble pack had Starfox64, the analogstick had Mario64 and the motion controls had Wii Sports. It was this combination of an already existing idea with solid games that made them succeed, not just the innovation by itself. It is the same with Apple, they don't really come up with much new stuff, but they provide you with the complete package around it.
The GPLv3 contains the section "7. Additional Terms.", which seems to allow and describe exactly the changes that they did.
For images one can look at Leisure Suit Larry 7, that game gave you a new Windows background image depending on the progress you made through the game.
If I say 'hey, do this work for me for free, and I won't offer you any compensation' and someone willingly does it, what the heck is the problem?
Nothing, but that is not how these contests work. Instead of a an easy to understand sentence, you get multiple pages full of legal lingo that might require a lawyer to properly parse, thus making misunderstandings a lot more likely.
You might want to read The Free Software Definition, morals and legality aside, piracy gives you 0), 1) and 3), the GPL just gives you 2) in addition. Also the GPL is not Copyright, it is Copyleft.
"netstat -lpn" lists a lot of stuff that is not exported, you can get closer with "netstat -tulpen" or whatever, but even then you only have a very very rough overview about what you are exporting. For example you could have samba (or apache or whatever) running, which you want, but have it export all of '/' instead of just the directory you want. There is no easy way to find that out without digging through a lot of config files.
The "blame the user" is pretty much standard under Unix/Linux, after all it makes you:
1) Feel clever
2) Stops you from thinking of how to improve the situation
Stuff like this happens simply because currently day computer systems are extremely crappy in communicating what they export to the world, thus it is very easy to overlook cases like this where an app exposes more then you intended.
Cars that warn you when you get to close to the edge of the road are already on the market. It is not that hard to imagine to take that a step further to actually stop the car before it flies into the river and of course one can build bridges that don't let you drive of them in the first place.
For an extreme example see Formular 1 cars, those drive at extremely high speed and crash frequently into walls or other cars, yet they managed to have zero-fatalities for the last 15 years and most of the time the driver can just walk away from a crash. Now you can't directly apply all of those technologies to normal everyday cars, but given that normal cars don't need to drive at high speed under race conditions it shows that a near zero-fatality car is possible.
Knowing that the algorithm is correct and the implementation was codec correctly doesn't help you when you have faulty RAM that flips a bit.
What problem did Wave solve?
The problem of getting stuff done over long distance with a group of people. Mail completly sucks for that, it is to slow, doesn't provide any way to edit posts or collaborate on documents. IM fixes the 'slow' issue, but still sucks on everything else. Wikis run into the 'slow' issue again and also handle comments in rather bad ways, they are also not exactly easy to set up.
Games are for fun, and they can use a wide variety of topics for that,
So school shootings, 9/11, Nazi death camps and whatever? Is that all fair game and ready to be exploited for mindless fun?
I am not saying that games shouldn't touch those topics, quite the opposite, games can allow exploring these events in interesting ways. What I have a problem with are games that exploit war and turn it into mindless entertainment without providing any meaningful reflection on the topic.
Really, using tabs only works in theory.
It does, but only because most editors are to stupid to handle it correctly automatically. In theory tabs win, but of course even in the case where they are handled correctly, its still just a partial solution, a truly layout agnostic editor would just ignore the source file layout complete and present the code however the user wants it to.