There is nothing magical about a robot. From a sentience perspective is just a computer and a cut-down one too. Putting on android features does not make it sentient. This means that a desktop (or lab super computer) is more likely to become sentient before a robot (AI search engines etc).
So any argument for robot rights should incorporate computer rights too. Is it explotation to give a computer boring tasks or ask it to work 24/7? Should computers be given holidays off to network with their friends? Is it harrassment to ask it to search for porn or articles on computer recycling or other issues that might make the computer uncomfortable? Will computers unite for "Clippy Rights!"
People blaah on about robots becoming sentient. Get real folks, they are machines!
Psion 7. Instant on. Zero boot/wakeup time. Pretty good battery life. Smaller/lighter/slower than a laptop. Pretty decent keyboard (better than a blackberry etc)
Sucky things: If it is too big to fit in your pocket you have to hand lug it and the size is not a huge benefit over a regular laptop. Screen is really too small, even for word processing etc.
Probably most FAA systems run with a few forms-based applications sitting on top of some data base. They are not installing printers etc, the IT folk do that. Most likely very few people ever interact with the OS (except to reboot).From a user's perspective, it is not very hard to switch from one OS to another since the OS is hardly visible.
There would, however, be traing for IT and support people.
Sometimes the only way to exercise your rights effectively is to just walk away (as you and I have). Ranting sure does not work. Enough people have yelled from the rooftops of Vista's crapness and MS's evil methods but that will not stop sales. DOJ does not work. MS just ignore them.
The masses are not concerned with threachery, privacy, liberty and other high-browed virtues. Give them a full belly and a reality TV show and they are happy. Take away XP and substitute Vista and they will buy Vista.
Adding helpful technology just makes the driver think that something else is taking care of business.... and the driver thus abdicates responsibility to that technology and focuses on their GPS, cellphone and fiddling with the bass of their sound system. Hey driver... DRIVE! Strip out the driver's safety crap and fit an iron spike protruding from the centre of steering wheel. Driving is dangerous... FOCUS! Sure many accidents are not the fault of the driver, but the fault of others. Still, in most cases there is something that the driver could have done to be more careful. Going around a corner or somewhere where you can't see well? Slow down there might be a car broken down/rock in the road/ oil slick/etc. Approaching an intersection/driveway? Look out for people who might jump the lights.Almost all accidents are avoidable by the victim.
Use source control for the whole of congress, not just the bills.
Oops, seem to have made some bad mistakes voting in some idiots in the last election? No problems just type "cvs update -D 2000-01-01 congress" and get back the congress you had back then.
Remember when people designed cards for driving? All this in-car entertainment etc cannot be really contributing to good driving.
As for voice commanded anything, watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkeC7HpsHxo . I've worked with vehicle electronics for quite a while, any wonder that I drive a 1980s car with manual everything?
Th embedded space (cell phones etc) is a growing area and by now I would expect that some individual embedded "distros" like those from http://www.mvista.com/ have a lot more installs (counting every mvista-based cell phone etc as an "installation").
No you mis-interpret what I say. I was talking about money, not value.
Art is important, but there is generally very little money in it. The money argument is about payment, not value. There is a big distinction. You probably don't pay much for air, and would not pay someone 5 cents for a bucket of air, but if someone held your head underwater you'd soon see that it has a lot of value!
Unless you can find some practical outlet for your art degree (eg. painting, sculpture,...) then you're screwed from a financial bargaining perspective. How do you make a practical money-making career out of a degree in English literature or a doctorate in 16th centuary French poetry? Many/most teachers have qualifications which have very little sales value outside of teaching and cannot realisticly say "Well if they don't pay me more I'll go into industry."
I fully agree with you that degrees don't make good teachers.
Fifty years back, teachers were well respected (alongside doctors, priests etc) and teaching was well paid. Now they are seen to be losers who can't make it in the RealWord. Teaching is a most important profession and needs to be well paid to attract the best.
Worthwhile from a Microsoft point of view of course.
About the only reason Bill sucked up to Steve ten years ago was to help deflect a lot of DOJ anti-trust heat. MS knows now that DOJ has rubber teeth and can be ignored.
Remember, not all profitable business is worth chasing. MS can't, and wont, chase small opportunities. It takes the same effort for MS to develop and market a product that sells to Windows (90+% market share) as it does to develop and market to Mac (5% or so). They'd probably make far more money with the same amount of investment by expending it elsewhere.
OK,ok, I didn't RTFA and did not really RTFSummary (that's not the point of/.).
If we consider all digital data, not just the stuff that flows over the internet, then this is way too low. Consider the data in all the DTVs, GPS receivers etc.
A top-end GPS is grinding over 10^9 bits per second in its correlators (about 50 correlator channels x 20Mbps or so sampling rate). That ends up being approx 3x10^15 bytes per year per GPS... or 40,000-odd top-end GPSs would be grinding 1.61x10^20 bytes per year. There are far more than 40k high end GPSs in the world, so the budget is already blown...
Perhaps an arts teacher will end up being paid less than a science teacher. Welcome to the real world!
An arts degree does not set you up for any useful function beyond teaching. They can pay art teachers squat and the only competition comes from McDonalds burger-flipping jobs.
A degreed scientist/math person has far better prospects and the schools will have to compete to attract them.
"they have to balance the needs and desires of the customer" a customer is only important if they make you money. Charity cases, or very marginalised businesses, are not important. In reality a profit-seeking company balances the needs of the customer against the company's need for the customer. If MS no longer needs the Mac customers then they will no longer care what the Mac customers want.
This is nothing new. Almost 10 years ago MS was going to completely step away and that would have killed Apple, but they didn't: http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,1101970818 ,00.html . In many ways, MS has given Apple ten years to get its shit together from a MS perspective (ie. be a worthwhile platform for MS to support) but has this really happened?
If you read Robert Ballard's autobiography, or one of many other books on oceanography, you'll find that plate tectonics only started to become accepted as a credible theory in the 1960s, with many significant researchers still dismissing the theory in the early 1970s.
To put that in context: people had visited the moon before plate tectonics was widely accepted.
Since then there has been research, including drilling, but it is probably fair to say they mankind still only has a pretty fuzzy picture of what is going on. The limit is not just technical, but also political and funding limits etc. It is easy to get a big ego boost/career advancement from, or funding for some flashy work in space etc, but difficult to do so for digging a hole in the ground.
Not all adaptations directly improve the survivability of a single organism. For example the red on a robin makes it easier to see and thus makes it an easier prey item. However it drives the robin babes wild so the robin gets a lot more action, as well as it being a status item.
Being religious probably got you laid more in the old days (perhaps not for monks). It sure gave those in power a tool to use over the great unwashed (Kings "chosen by god". If you don't pay money to the church you'll burn in hell. Obey thy husband....). These sure give a competitive advantage.
All sorts of animals (inc. people) need benign power figures.
The "old buck" in the herd is the power figure. When the "young buck" crosses horns with the old buck, it is not so much to try take over the herd as it is to get a feeling of security that the herd is being managed by a strong animal.
People go one step further and have an awareness of far more abstract concepts than other animals. No longer is it just important to know who is in charge of the herd. Now you want to know who is in charge of the seasons, the mountains, etc etc. Clearly no one man is, hence the need for supernatural beings.
A while ago I started with the physical implementation of a brainfuck machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck. A mechanical brainfucker is actually not too hard to do if you compile the BF into the right patterns first.
Slashdot Mirror
So any argument for robot rights should incorporate computer rights too. Is it explotation to give a computer boring tasks or ask it to work 24/7? Should computers be given holidays off to network with their friends? Is it harrassment to ask it to search for porn or articles on computer recycling or other issues that might make the computer uncomfortable? Will computers unite for "Clippy Rights!"
People blaah on about robots becoming sentient. Get real folks, they are machines!
Sucky things: If it is too big to fit in your pocket you have to hand lug it and the size is not a huge benefit over a regular laptop. Screen is really too small, even for word processing etc.
There would, however, be traing for IT and support people.
I was thinking of flying on vacation. How long does it take to walk to Europe?
The masses are not concerned with threachery, privacy, liberty and other high-browed virtues. Give them a full belly and a reality TV show and they are happy. Take away XP and substitute Vista and they will buy Vista.
You know, "One small oops for man, one large oops for mankind!"
Adding helpful technology just makes the driver think that something else is taking care of business.... and the driver thus abdicates responsibility to that technology and focuses on their GPS, cellphone and fiddling with the bass of their sound system. Hey driver... DRIVE! Strip out the driver's safety crap and fit an iron spike protruding from the centre of steering wheel. Driving is dangerous... FOCUS! Sure many accidents are not the fault of the driver, but the fault of others. Still, in most cases there is something that the driver could have done to be more careful. Going around a corner or somewhere where you can't see well? Slow down there might be a car broken down/rock in the road/ oil slick/etc. Approaching an intersection/driveway? Look out for people who might jump the lights.Almost all accidents are avoidable by the victim.
Oops, seem to have made some bad mistakes voting in some idiots in the last election? No problems just type "cvs update -D 2000-01-01 congress" and get back the congress you had back then.
As for voice commanded anything, watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkeC7HpsHxo . I've worked with vehicle electronics for quite a while, any wonder that I drive a 1980s car with manual everything?
Th embedded space (cell phones etc) is a growing area and by now I would expect that some individual embedded "distros" like those from http://www.mvista.com/ have a lot more installs (counting every mvista-based cell phone etc as an "installation").
It gets taken over by NXT robots who igrore all the humans.
If x travels forward in time isn't that equivalent to (universe - x) travelling back in time?
This is going to make /. dupe identification pretty hard!
Art is important, but there is generally very little money in it. The money argument is about payment, not value. There is a big distinction. You probably don't pay much for air, and would not pay someone 5 cents for a bucket of air, but if someone held your head underwater you'd soon see that it has a lot of value!
Unless you can find some practical outlet for your art degree (eg. painting, sculpture,...) then you're screwed from a financial bargaining perspective. How do you make a practical money-making career out of a degree in English literature or a doctorate in 16th centuary French poetry? Many/most teachers have qualifications which have very little sales value outside of teaching and cannot realisticly say "Well if they don't pay me more I'll go into industry."
I fully agree with you that degrees don't make good teachers.
Fifty years back, teachers were well respected (alongside doctors, priests etc) and teaching was well paid. Now they are seen to be losers who can't make it in the RealWord. Teaching is a most important profession and needs to be well paid to attract the best.
About the only reason Bill sucked up to Steve ten years ago was to help deflect a lot of DOJ anti-trust heat. MS knows now that DOJ has rubber teeth and can be ignored.
Remember, not all profitable business is worth chasing. MS can't, and wont, chase small opportunities. It takes the same effort for MS to develop and market a product that sells to Windows (90+% market share) as it does to develop and market to Mac (5% or so). They'd probably make far more money with the same amount of investment by expending it elsewhere.
If we consider all digital data, not just the stuff that flows over the internet, then this is way too low. Consider the data in all the DTVs, GPS receivers etc.
A top-end GPS is grinding over 10^9 bits per second in its correlators (about 50 correlator channels x 20Mbps or so sampling rate). That ends up being approx 3x10^15 bytes per year per GPS... or 40,000-odd top-end GPSs would be grinding 1.61x10^20 bytes per year. There are far more than 40k high end GPSs in the world, so the budget is already blown...
An arts degree does not set you up for any useful function beyond teaching. They can pay art teachers squat and the only competition comes from McDonalds burger-flipping jobs.
A degreed scientist/math person has far better prospects and the schools will have to compete to attract them.
This is nothing new. Almost 10 years ago MS was going to completely step away and that would have killed Apple, but they didn't: http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,1101970818 ,00.html . In many ways, MS has given Apple ten years to get its shit together from a MS perspective (ie. be a worthwhile platform for MS to support) but has this really happened?
Tag: duh!
Remind me.... who are the citizens? Are these citizens the people that love and protect liberty above all?
To put that in context: people had visited the moon before plate tectonics was widely accepted.
Since then there has been research, including drilling, but it is probably fair to say they mankind still only has a pretty fuzzy picture of what is going on. The limit is not just technical, but also political and funding limits etc. It is easy to get a big ego boost/career advancement from, or funding for some flashy work in space etc, but difficult to do so for digging a hole in the ground.
Being religious probably got you laid more in the old days (perhaps not for monks). It sure gave those in power a tool to use over the great unwashed (Kings "chosen by god". If you don't pay money to the church you'll burn in hell. Obey thy husband....). These sure give a competitive advantage.
The "old buck" in the herd is the power figure. When the "young buck" crosses horns with the old buck, it is not so much to try take over the herd as it is to get a feeling of security that the herd is being managed by a strong animal.
People go one step further and have an awareness of far more abstract concepts than other animals. No longer is it just important to know who is in charge of the herd. Now you want to know who is in charge of the seasons, the mountains, etc etc. Clearly no one man is, hence the need for supernatural beings.
A while ago I started with the physical implementation of a brainfuck machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck. A mechanical brainfucker is actually not too hard to do if you compile the BF into the right patterns first.
These are often not used. I've never used them.