Depends greatly on what you research. Unfortunately, the vast majority isn't as glamorous as you might imagine. I work in a pretty interesting area (an academic area with connections to videogame AI and game design), and this sort of creativity / discovery-systems / curiosity / art / etc. research is interesting too. But the vast majority is more pedestrian. Sure, there's interesting applications: computer vision, robotics, planning, data mining, bioinformatics, etc. But 90% of the work that comes out is incrementalist stuff; relatively boring proofs of some fact, or new algorithm that's 7% faster in some important special case (I suppose that's true of a lot of scientific fields, though).
It goes back and forth in waves, though. It seems that there will be waves of pretty exciting AI research, then a backlash as some of it goes over the top into sci-fi Singularity Is Nigh sort of AI, then things swing all the way to the other direction into AI as a really narrow field that's basically applied statistics, control theory, symbolic logic, and planning, and the only stuff that can get published is Rigorous stuff with Proofs (sort of a defensive reaction by people worried about being branded kooks). Then after a few years of that everyone realizes that 5000 more proofs in some super-narrow area aren't getting us anywhere because the field is stagnant with no direction, and people start doing more speculative applications and proposing new problems again. Then repeat.
It's somewhat unfortunate on the whole that there's such a big gap between what you might call "layperson AI" and "academic AI". The layperson AI (the singularity crowd, etc.) are excited about stuff, and have interesting goals, etc., but often do stuff that verges more on the sci-fi than the scientific. But academic AI is so scared of being them that it consciously tries at times to be super-boring so nobody mistakes them for Hans Moravec.
A minority of AI researchers have tackled the problem on and off, and even built some small-scale models of curious agents. One of the classic precursors is Doug Lenat's 1977 system Automated Mathematician, which shifted from the idea of using AI to prove theorems, to instead looking for theorems that would be interesting if they were true (it didn't actually prove them; it was an interesting-conjecture generator). Essentially a model of mathematical curiosity.
Some interesting more recent work is a 2001 thesis that modeled curiosity as a social phenomenon in societies of agents, where agents try to find things that are: 1) new enough to interest its fellow agents; yet not 2) so new that they were incomprehensible in its cultural context.
(I'm an AI researcher, though not precisely in this area.)
Wired claims they actually turned a profit, in the real sense of dollars coming in being greater than expenses. Apparently the Google deal plus a similar one with Microsoft brought it $25 million in return for a data feed, which is more than running the site costs.
Depends on who it benefits. I'd be willing to bet that the copyright lobby will immediately point to, "but you'd be violating international law!" if any future administration tried to amend the way this non-treaty were applied in domestic law.
A particularly large shift for either kind is that ACTA is, in the U.S. at least, not being called a "treaty" at all, although it clearly is. Rather, both the Bush and Obama administrations claim that it can be implemented as an "executive agreement" that does not require Senate ratification.
On the plus side, an "executive agreement" has only the legal force of an executive order under U.S. domestic law, which is generally subordinate to both statute law and the Constitution (unlike treaties, which have constitutional force). On the down side, it would still be seen as a treaty under international law, so if a future U.S. administration tried to back out of it, that would be perfectly legal under U.S. domestic law (if it were never properly adopted as a formal treaty), but not under international law, setting up a conflict.
For what it's worth, in case you (as I) were wondering who Michael Geist is (I don't want to end up passing on links to some guy who turns out to be a conspiracy theorist or something), he's a University of Ottawa professor, serving as their chair in Internet law.
Debian actually wanted to: 1) use the trademarked name; but 2) not use the logo. Mozilla said yes to that some years back, but under new management gave a flat no: it was use the whole branding package or not at all.
I think they're phasing it out, but at least initially Microsoft was supplementing some of the cashbacks to get enticing numbers in the double-digit percentages range (much more than merchants would typically offer as an affiliate deal), and I believe the one with eBay (8%!) is still a joint deal.
That's not very useful advice, considering that the cost of a lawyer will probably be more than the cost of EITHER just paying the remaining contract, OR breaking it and paying some sort of penalty. So consulting a lawyer is the worst possible option, worse than asking on Slashdot and taking the resulting advice, even if it turns out to be wrong.
Well, it's a mechanism for directly passing on traits (via a direct transfer), which is closer to Lamarckian evolution than Darwinian evolution, in the classic 19th-century dispute. But you're right that it's not a huge challenge to modern evolutionary theory. What it might pose somewhat more of a problem for are certain areas of phylogenetics, especially cladistics that rely fairly heavily on an assumption that evolutionary trees are indeed trees.
In a broad sense, yes, but in a more specific sense, Darwinian evolution, which posits inheritance by natural selection of traits, is often contrasted with Lamarckian evolution, which posits inheritance of adult traits. Horizontal gene transfer is not quite Lamarckian evolution (it's not usually from parents to children), but in the sense that traits acquired in adulthood can be passed on, it's closer to Lamarckian than Darwinian evolution.
They don't have a full set of rights any more, but they do still have a right to be free from completely arbitrary and irrational governmental activity.
If the prison had actually just said, "we banned D&D because it was causing trouble", the whole thing would've seemed a lot more reasonable to me, and probably not really worth commenting on. I'm not quite sure why they didn't just say that, actually, unless it really wasn't causing problems, so they couldn't anyone to testify that D&D-playing prisoners were causing problems--- so they had to resort to the more hypothetical rationale, bolstered by testimony from a "gang expert", that D&D might potentially cause gang activity.
I'm guessing it's more likely a strange sort of paranoia, where some warden really did think it was somehow gang-related. I personally would rather have prisoners playing D&D than lifting weights all the time, though, which seems strangely to be permitted at most prisons.
A prison probably could just not allow any group games at all. This particular prison appears to do so, though, but is uniquely worried about D&D, fearing that D&D-playing prisoners pose some sort of special risk that players of other games don't. That's the part that's sort of weird, and their rationale for it is not very convincing.
Most prisons have some leisure time alloted, which wasn't really at issue here--- the warden had no problem with there being leisure time, he just didn't want D&D played during that leisure time. The prison appears fine with inmates watching TV or reading books or playing chess or whatever during that time.
Mostly what caught my eye is the absurdity of "D&D has a dungeonmaster who gives orders, which is like a gang" rationale. There might be some good reason prisoners should have less leisure in general, or should be prohibited from playing D&D in particular, but that particular reason is pretty absurd.
Like many sci-fi authors who predicted inventions long before they became practical, bluegrass can now claim foresight into future scientific advances.
If you're just reading the occasional journal article or something, that's reasonable, yeah. The original idea of the PDF plugin was that PDFs would be more widespread, as part of websites, so it'd be a hassle to download/view every time you ran across a PDF. That's thankfully not as common as Adobe had hoped, but for some kinds of sites it's still a bit of a hassle if you have no plugin--- restaurant sites that seem to find it necessary to put their lunch/dinner/drinks menus into three separate PDFs come to mind.
Businesses in the private sector, selling actual products or services to actual end users, do indeed have incentives to drive costs down. But businesses contracting for the government do not, as can be seen by the money-pit that constitutes the defense-contracting business.
In fact, the opposite is true: businesses contracting for the government have a strong profit incentive to drive costs up.
Yeah, as can be seen with the horrid, corrupt mess that constitutes the defense-contracting business, this approach gets you the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, you have no real market forces, because everything is funded by guaranteed government dollars--- in most cases, even cost overruns above the original contract amount get charged directly back to the government, not eaten by the company that generated the overruns, so there's no incentive not to generate them. On the other hand, you have none of the transparency and oversight that at least nominally you can get with government-run things; e.g. FOIA requests do not apply.
If the private sector wants to go to space, let the private sector go to space. If the government wants to go to space, let it go to space. But the government paying for the private sector to go to space makes no sense.
The culture there (at least, when I was there around 2000) was very uncomfortable with the "mercenary" mindset of "do job, get paid, leave."
That's sort of the whole point of their corporate culture, though, and why the employees like it there, isn't it? The expectation is that neither management/owners nor employees will treat it as a purely mercenary endeavor, so employees aren't using it as a springboard to the next job that offers a 5% higher salary, and management isn't going to screw over employees at the first opportunity.
I dunno, it sounds pretty crappy to me to spend 1/4 of your life on call. Most respectable companies will hire 24/7 staff if they want 24/7 staff. I have never heard of chemical companies routinely using on-call engineers to solve problems at their plants, for example. Sure, if something explodes, they'll start calling everyone's cell phones---but that better not happen very often at all.
I think if SAS dies, it's more likely to be a long, leisurely death. Their lock-in for business software is quite high--- it's a huge pain in the ass to completely transition a large company from SAS to anything else. Even if they stopped getting new customers altogether, I think their market share would decline only slowly.
Pager duty is a major pain. Smaller teams can expect to be on-call at least one week per month, while larger teams spread out the pain longer. Getting paged in the middle of the night for a high-severity problem that take eight hours of investigation to fix is enough to drive many to quit.
Sounds like they're trying to make routine (as opposed to rare, emergency) use of on-call engineers as a way of maintaining 24/7 staffing without actually paying for 24/7 staffing.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends greatly on what you research. Unfortunately, the vast majority isn't as glamorous as you might imagine. I work in a pretty interesting area (an academic area with connections to videogame AI and game design), and this sort of creativity / discovery-systems / curiosity / art / etc. research is interesting too. But the vast majority is more pedestrian. Sure, there's interesting applications: computer vision, robotics, planning, data mining, bioinformatics, etc. But 90% of the work that comes out is incrementalist stuff; relatively boring proofs of some fact, or new algorithm that's 7% faster in some important special case (I suppose that's true of a lot of scientific fields, though).
It goes back and forth in waves, though. It seems that there will be waves of pretty exciting AI research, then a backlash as some of it goes over the top into sci-fi Singularity Is Nigh sort of AI, then things swing all the way to the other direction into AI as a really narrow field that's basically applied statistics, control theory, symbolic logic, and planning, and the only stuff that can get published is Rigorous stuff with Proofs (sort of a defensive reaction by people worried about being branded kooks). Then after a few years of that everyone realizes that 5000 more proofs in some super-narrow area aren't getting us anywhere because the field is stagnant with no direction, and people start doing more speculative applications and proposing new problems again. Then repeat.
It's somewhat unfortunate on the whole that there's such a big gap between what you might call "layperson AI" and "academic AI". The layperson AI (the singularity crowd, etc.) are excited about stuff, and have interesting goals, etc., but often do stuff that verges more on the sci-fi than the scientific. But academic AI is so scared of being them that it consciously tries at times to be super-boring so nobody mistakes them for Hans Moravec.
A minority of AI researchers have tackled the problem on and off, and even built some small-scale models of curious agents. One of the classic precursors is Doug Lenat's 1977 system Automated Mathematician, which shifted from the idea of using AI to prove theorems, to instead looking for theorems that would be interesting if they were true (it didn't actually prove them; it was an interesting-conjecture generator). Essentially a model of mathematical curiosity.
Some interesting more recent work is a 2001 thesis that modeled curiosity as a social phenomenon in societies of agents, where agents try to find things that are: 1) new enough to interest its fellow agents; yet not 2) so new that they were incomprehensible in its cultural context.
(I'm an AI researcher, though not precisely in this area.)
Wired claims they actually turned a profit, in the real sense of dollars coming in being greater than expenses. Apparently the Google deal plus a similar one with Microsoft brought it $25 million in return for a data feed, which is more than running the site costs.
Depends on who it benefits. I'd be willing to bet that the copyright lobby will immediately point to, "but you'd be violating international law!" if any future administration tried to amend the way this non-treaty were applied in domestic law.
A particularly large shift for either kind is that ACTA is, in the U.S. at least, not being called a "treaty" at all, although it clearly is. Rather, both the Bush and Obama administrations claim that it can be implemented as an "executive agreement" that does not require Senate ratification.
On the plus side, an "executive agreement" has only the legal force of an executive order under U.S. domestic law, which is generally subordinate to both statute law and the Constitution (unlike treaties, which have constitutional force). On the down side, it would still be seen as a treaty under international law, so if a future U.S. administration tried to back out of it, that would be perfectly legal under U.S. domestic law (if it were never properly adopted as a formal treaty), but not under international law, setting up a conflict.
For what it's worth, in case you (as I) were wondering who Michael Geist is (I don't want to end up passing on links to some guy who turns out to be a conspiracy theorist or something), he's a University of Ottawa professor, serving as their chair in Internet law.
Debian actually wanted to: 1) use the trademarked name; but 2) not use the logo. Mozilla said yes to that some years back, but under new management gave a flat no: it was use the whole branding package or not at all.
I think they're phasing it out, but at least initially Microsoft was supplementing some of the cashbacks to get enticing numbers in the double-digit percentages range (much more than merchants would typically offer as an affiliate deal), and I believe the one with eBay (8%!) is still a joint deal.
That's not very useful advice, considering that the cost of a lawyer will probably be more than the cost of EITHER just paying the remaining contract, OR breaking it and paying some sort of penalty. So consulting a lawyer is the worst possible option, worse than asking on Slashdot and taking the resulting advice, even if it turns out to be wrong.
Well, it's a mechanism for directly passing on traits (via a direct transfer), which is closer to Lamarckian evolution than Darwinian evolution, in the classic 19th-century dispute. But you're right that it's not a huge challenge to modern evolutionary theory. What it might pose somewhat more of a problem for are certain areas of phylogenetics, especially cladistics that rely fairly heavily on an assumption that evolutionary trees are indeed trees.
In a broad sense, yes, but in a more specific sense, Darwinian evolution, which posits inheritance by natural selection of traits, is often contrasted with Lamarckian evolution, which posits inheritance of adult traits. Horizontal gene transfer is not quite Lamarckian evolution (it's not usually from parents to children), but in the sense that traits acquired in adulthood can be passed on, it's closer to Lamarckian than Darwinian evolution.
They don't have a full set of rights any more, but they do still have a right to be free from completely arbitrary and irrational governmental activity.
If the prison had actually just said, "we banned D&D because it was causing trouble", the whole thing would've seemed a lot more reasonable to me, and probably not really worth commenting on. I'm not quite sure why they didn't just say that, actually, unless it really wasn't causing problems, so they couldn't anyone to testify that D&D-playing prisoners were causing problems--- so they had to resort to the more hypothetical rationale, bolstered by testimony from a "gang expert", that D&D might potentially cause gang activity.
I'm guessing it's more likely a strange sort of paranoia, where some warden really did think it was somehow gang-related. I personally would rather have prisoners playing D&D than lifting weights all the time, though, which seems strangely to be permitted at most prisons.
A prison probably could just not allow any group games at all. This particular prison appears to do so, though, but is uniquely worried about D&D, fearing that D&D-playing prisoners pose some sort of special risk that players of other games don't. That's the part that's sort of weird, and their rationale for it is not very convincing.
Most prisons have some leisure time alloted, which wasn't really at issue here--- the warden had no problem with there being leisure time, he just didn't want D&D played during that leisure time. The prison appears fine with inmates watching TV or reading books or playing chess or whatever during that time.
Mostly what caught my eye is the absurdity of "D&D has a dungeonmaster who gives orders, which is like a gang" rationale. There might be some good reason prisoners should have less leisure in general, or should be prohibited from playing D&D in particular, but that particular reason is pretty absurd.
That rationale would ban fiction novels, too, though (well, except maybe gritty realist fiction), which prisons don't generally do.
Are white males between the ages of 16 and 35 really involved in accidents at a higher rate than males of other races in the same age range?
Like many sci-fi authors who predicted inventions long before they became practical, bluegrass can now claim foresight into future scientific advances.
If you're just reading the occasional journal article or something, that's reasonable, yeah. The original idea of the PDF plugin was that PDFs would be more widespread, as part of websites, so it'd be a hassle to download/view every time you ran across a PDF. That's thankfully not as common as Adobe had hoped, but for some kinds of sites it's still a bit of a hassle if you have no plugin--- restaurant sites that seem to find it necessary to put their lunch/dinner/drinks menus into three separate PDFs come to mind.
Businesses in the private sector, selling actual products or services to actual end users, do indeed have incentives to drive costs down. But businesses contracting for the government do not, as can be seen by the money-pit that constitutes the defense-contracting business.
In fact, the opposite is true: businesses contracting for the government have a strong profit incentive to drive costs up.
Yeah, as can be seen with the horrid, corrupt mess that constitutes the defense-contracting business, this approach gets you the worst of both worlds. On the one hand, you have no real market forces, because everything is funded by guaranteed government dollars--- in most cases, even cost overruns above the original contract amount get charged directly back to the government, not eaten by the company that generated the overruns, so there's no incentive not to generate them. On the other hand, you have none of the transparency and oversight that at least nominally you can get with government-run things; e.g. FOIA requests do not apply.
If the private sector wants to go to space, let the private sector go to space. If the government wants to go to space, let it go to space. But the government paying for the private sector to go to space makes no sense.
That's sort of the whole point of their corporate culture, though, and why the employees like it there, isn't it? The expectation is that neither management/owners nor employees will treat it as a purely mercenary endeavor, so employees aren't using it as a springboard to the next job that offers a 5% higher salary, and management isn't going to screw over employees at the first opportunity.
I dunno, it sounds pretty crappy to me to spend 1/4 of your life on call. Most respectable companies will hire 24/7 staff if they want 24/7 staff. I have never heard of chemical companies routinely using on-call engineers to solve problems at their plants, for example. Sure, if something explodes, they'll start calling everyone's cell phones---but that better not happen very often at all.
I think if SAS dies, it's more likely to be a long, leisurely death. Their lock-in for business software is quite high--- it's a huge pain in the ass to completely transition a large company from SAS to anything else. Even if they stopped getting new customers altogether, I think their market share would decline only slowly.
According to this review:
Sounds like they're trying to make routine (as opposed to rare, emergency) use of on-call engineers as a way of maintaining 24/7 staffing without actually paying for 24/7 staffing.