Code executed automatically off external media could be allowed if the O/S had a security model that allowed it. For example, if code in external media did not have write capabilities to the hard disk, or if said code had lower privileges over installed applications etc.
There is a way out for Microsoft: they can "virtualize" the O/S so as that apps think it's like Windows 95, where they can own all files, but in reality the apps would only do damage to their own version of the files.
More importantly, as science begins to understand the mind-body link better, it appears more and more likely that human-like intelligence requires a human-like body. A disembodied intelligence is likely to be very strange and very much unlike us.
The real reason about this is not that AI needs a human body, it's that AI needs the 5 human input sensors: sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. The human brain stores the experiences coming from this senses in it. Technology will eventually duplicate the senses.
And finally, the entire area of emotions has just begun to catch the interest of AI researchers, while brain scientists are finding out that it is a whole lot more important to the whole thing than we thought, that you can not take it away and end up with an emotionless, but otherwise human being.
Emotions are necessary for survival. They are the chemical reactions that make us take a defensive or offensive position, depending on the assessment of the situation by our brain. A human-level AI (as opposed to human-like AI) would not need emotions, as it would have other mechanisms for coping with survival.
So if you want an AI that you can chat with and that understands you, the order is quite tall. You need to understand and code not only reasoning
I really doubt you need to code reasoning. Do humans really have reasoning? from the ancient times, humans believed in the most illogical things.
but also understand and emulate body-feedback and emotions. And at this point, since we don't even know how they work in the human brain, we have no idea how to do that.
I think all the above you mentioned is covered by pattern matching. Human behavior is strictly the result of the brain's effort to match the current experience to the experiences stored in it. The brain's function is to find the probability of survival. The highest the probability of survival is, the more the brain instructs the body to stay and take advantage of the situation; the lowest the probability is, the more the brain instructs the body to run away.
This is very visible in human babies: they don't know that hot materials cause pain. They easily touch something hot, they experience pain and then they don't touch the same surface again.
So don't be so quick with assuming that there's machine intelligence out there.
I'd rather be conservative on these kind of statements. Our scientists are only recently realizing that the brain is mostly a statistical machine. In other fields, when they realized that statistics is so important, there has been tremendous progress. Take spam filters, for example: ten years ago, we had to manually remove spam most of the time, because spam filters where not that impressive. Nowadays, we don't do anything about spam, because the computer recognizes it with almost 100% efficiency, thanks to the statistical methods applied to them.
My prediction is that our scientists will try to think about AI in traditional ways for a few more years, and then they will just snap out of their "AI sleep" and use statistical methods/pattern matching for approaching AI...and then we would have a tremendous AI explosion, with terrorizing consequences for human life.
As for extraterrestrial AI, it would be extremely difficult for us to recognize it, especially if the extraterrestrial AI has been mixed with organic material. Personally, I don't expect to find electronic circuits on such an AI; it would be more like a brain, i.e. a network of neurons cultivated for this exact purpose.
How do we know that the CMBR is not the result of another phenomenon? Could it be, for example, the result of the virtual particle soup that permeats the universe? Is there no alternative explanations for it?
Do the Linux developers put a news announcement out every time there is a bug and they forgot about it this time?
Isn't it a little sensational to imply that Linus and the other people didn't want this bug to be known because they fear Linux will be characterized as buggy?
You give a perfect example of how much necessary an "internet O/S" is. The Browser wasn't meant to do anything else other than showing static documents, and its limitations are quite a lot (as per in your example).
An "internet O/S" would essentially be a virtual machine that abstracts the local machine, the local network and the wide area network in such a way that allows the seamless integration of applications across networks, the delivery and update of content (including code), security/safety and persistence. It wouldn't have any presentation layer, it would simply provide the means for implementing presentation layers according to the various application needs.
I long for the day that I would be able to write "import www.foo.com/module" in my programming language of choice, i.e. importing a module from the internet and let the compiler take care of downloading, updating, versioning and linking the appropriate module...I also long for the day that I would be able to publish my module automatically using a statement like "public on www.foo.com:" or similar, and let the compiler take care of uploading and versioning...;-)
(Disclaimer: I am not an Apple fan, I don't have a Mac or iPhone or iPad or iPod; I have programmed on Macs though and I've seen projects for the iPad and the iPhone)
I know only one company that makes computer products for the average consumer, and that is Apple. It's strange, but there is no other company that is in the same category as Apple. All other companies are in a different segment of the computer market, and they occasionally see what Apple does and want a piece of the pie, but they have no idea how to achieve it. Microsoft is in the operating system/office/development/tools/video game market; Google is in the internet apps market; Linux vendors are mostly in the server market; Sony and Nintendo is in the video game market. None of the markets mentioned above has to do 100% with the market Apple is into. There are overlaps between what the others do and what Apple does, but they are different markets.
Apple caught everyone by surprise when they released the iPhone. Did the consumers want an easy to use phone with a multimedia/internet flavor around it? you bet. But no other company has really understood that, because they were busy hyping themselves and their products. Now Apple caught everyone by surprise for a second time! and the others have still not learned the lesson, i.e. that they have no idea about what the consumer really wants. The reviewed tablets of this topic is testament to that: they are either vaporware or inferior to iPad, and I just don't see any iPad alternatives in the future.
Which companies could offer Apple some competition?
Microsoft could not do it because they are a geek programmers' company, they don't have the consumer product mentality in sufficient amounts; their product line is testament to that.
Nintendo knows how to make game consoles, but I really doubt they can do anything else; even internet browsing on their consoles is always a 2nd rate feature for them.
Google doesn't really have the resources to do it, because consumer level products require different operating systems and user interfaces, something that Google doesn't seem to be able to do. There is a lot of fine open source code out there for desktop systems, but pads and phones require a different approach.
Sony is a great big mystery, because they are into mass-market electronic products for many decades, but they have totally missed the point for the last decade.
Smaller companies have some interesting approaches but they always fail to produce a product which is so polished like Apple's products.
Where does that leave us? there is Apple and then there are all the rest companies. This means that if there is not a good tablet out there from another company in the next year, I'll give in and buy an iPad instead. How long can we wait for an alternative anyway?
...because it brought so many new things in TV sci-fi! DS9 may seem less distant, but it really lacks the smell of new and exciting things that TNG brought to TV audiences!
It's amazing that so many people, including you, have fallen for the official excuse for the Afghanistan war. America is not there to spread civilization, because there are lots of other places on Earth like that. America is there due to the vast deposits of minerals, metals, gold etc. The story about the Afghan riches broke out a few months ago, so they should have been known for decades by the army and secret services.
The entire sum of human existence shouldn't be forgotten for nothing, you know?
Yes. Why not? we are so unimportant anyway. Supposing that a great comet destroys the human race in the next 1000 years, humans would exist for, let's say, 100,000 years, which is 1/130,000 of the universe's age (13 billion years).
I have a Batchelor's degree in CS and a Masters degree in Software Engineering. To keep the long story short:
1) the university didn't make me think scientifically. I try to do that in my own spare time, and I get the most help on this from online science forums. I guess I am not the only one, since I haven't seen the university change anyone's perception of reality. Most people come into the university with certain views about important topics, mostly learned from family, and they get out with the same views more or less.
2) the material taught in most courses has little to do with what is happening in the market/industry. Not even the foundations of computer science are not taught in the correct perspective. In order to really understand the taught material, one has to apply it in real projects, and that rarely happens in universities.
3) the lowest common denominator approach results in holding the more advanced students back. And usually the lowest common denominator is quite low, except if you attend the top universities.
4) lectures cover a small percentage of the material. For the rest of the material, you have to read it and understand it yourself.
5) interaction in the class is quite limited, and there is usually a bunch of students that want to dominate the in-class interaction, prohibiting others from participating.
The only possible benefits of universities for me is a) the labs, b) the interaction with other students. But these two things don't require a university, they could happen at a smaller scale.
First of all, the claim that piracy doesn't cause lost sales is false. It's not that all the pirates of a program will buy said program if it wasn't pirated; but it's also not that none of the pirates would not buy the program. Some people would buy the game if it could not be easily found in the wild. The percentage of people that would buy a game depends on the game's quality: better games lose more sales from piracy. I know a lot of people that have played lots of games that they were downloaded illegally. Some of those games are rated as top in their categories; Half Life 1 & 2, for example. These people would certainly buy Half Life if it wasn't one click away. On the other hand, they wouldn't buy World Of Goo because they didn't like the game that much, after giving the pirated copy a try.
Secondly, the notion that piracy is not theft is dubious at best, if not outright false. If you don't buy my program but you download it illegally, you deprive me of money, which is translated to certain things I could buy with that money. If that isn't stealing, then what is? please don't insist on the technical definition of theft, because it does not include the whole proper meaning of stealing.
Thirdly, the argument that piracy is ok as long as developers cover their costs and have a profit contains a certain (high) dose of immorality. Western societies are based on equality, but they are also based on giving credit were credit is due, i.e. the more worthy people are the more they are compensated for their works. Piracy is communist: a bad game that is pirated may sold at numbers equal or close to a good game that is pirated, since both games are only bought by those who don't pirate games. If it wasn't for piracy, good games would sold in much higher numbers that bad games, i.e. the difference in numbers would be much greater that what it is now.
Fourthly, I wonder why everyone is complaining about DRM. There is stealthy DRM that doesn't affect our machines and there is shitty DRM that creates a lot of problem on our machines. The problem lies in badly written DRM software, not in DRM itself. So what if a certain DRM mechanism checks if the game you are using is legally bought? that's the correct thing to do anyway. You should complain about bad DRM, not DRM in general.
Fifthly, there are hardly any people that cannot afford any game whatsoever. From the moment they can afford a computer, there is a ton of free games out there, so not having money to buy the latest and greatest game is not an excuse for pirating it. There is also a list of games that are cheap to buy, and there is also the 2nd hand market.
Sixthly, that point that DRM does not work is wrong. DRM does work, but it can be hacked out of a program just like any other piece of code.
In conclusion, each time there is a topic about piracy on Slashdot, the Slashdot crowd tries to justify piracy with logical fallacies like "piracy is not lost sales" and that "piracy is not theft". Most of us are guilty of pirating software, and in the past we have done it because we didn't think about it twice. Now that some of us are software professionals, we see the other side of the coin and we can realize how bad piracy is about software.
The car companies could already have done things such as putting radars in cars and signaling devices. After all, ships and aircraft have had such devices for years. Not only that, but radar computers are constantly calculating where another ship will go, based on its current velocity, and warn about collisions.
Cars could have had an emitter/receiver around them (a thin metallic line around the middle of the car) which calculated the velocity of other vehicles every few milliseconds as well as the collision course and take actions immediately, adjusting the speed and hard breaking if required.
The only reason, for me, that such thing does not exist in the cars is that it would initially raise the cost of the cars, and therefore car companies keep postpone it until electronics become cheap enough not to seriously affect the price of a car. Expensive/luxurious cars could have had it though.
Slashdot Mirror
The Latin character set evolved initially for stone carving.
No.
Code executed automatically off external media could be allowed if the O/S had a security model that allowed it. For example, if code in external media did not have write capabilities to the hard disk, or if said code had lower privileges over installed applications etc.
It is these kinds of announcements that make me wish warp drive was real. Space is so interesting!
Thank you, please mod parent up.
There is a way out for Microsoft: they can "virtualize" the O/S so as that apps think it's like Windows 95, where they can own all files, but in reality the apps would only do damage to their own version of the files.
And all this trouble because Microsoft denied doing the sane thing, i.e. name its DLLs with a version number (as well as the DLL name).
More importantly, as science begins to understand the mind-body link better, it appears more and more likely that human-like intelligence requires a human-like body. A disembodied intelligence is likely to be very strange and very much unlike us.
The real reason about this is not that AI needs a human body, it's that AI needs the 5 human input sensors: sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. The human brain stores the experiences coming from this senses in it. Technology will eventually duplicate the senses.
And finally, the entire area of emotions has just begun to catch the interest of AI researchers, while brain scientists are finding out that it is a whole lot more important to the whole thing than we thought, that you can not take it away and end up with an emotionless, but otherwise human being.
Emotions are necessary for survival. They are the chemical reactions that make us take a defensive or offensive position, depending on the assessment of the situation by our brain. A human-level AI (as opposed to human-like AI) would not need emotions, as it would have other mechanisms for coping with survival.
So if you want an AI that you can chat with and that understands you, the order is quite tall. You need to understand and code not only reasoning
I really doubt you need to code reasoning. Do humans really have reasoning? from the ancient times, humans believed in the most illogical things.
but also understand and emulate body-feedback and emotions. And at this point, since we don't even know how they work in the human brain, we have no idea how to do that.
I think all the above you mentioned is covered by pattern matching. Human behavior is strictly the result of the brain's effort to match the current experience to the experiences stored in it. The brain's function is to find the probability of survival. The highest the probability of survival is, the more the brain instructs the body to stay and take advantage of the situation; the lowest the probability is, the more the brain instructs the body to run away.
This is very visible in human babies: they don't know that hot materials cause pain. They easily touch something hot, they experience pain and then they don't touch the same surface again.
So don't be so quick with assuming that there's machine intelligence out there.
I'd rather be conservative on these kind of statements. Our scientists are only recently realizing that the brain is mostly a statistical machine. In other fields, when they realized that statistics is so important, there has been tremendous progress. Take spam filters, for example: ten years ago, we had to manually remove spam most of the time, because spam filters where not that impressive. Nowadays, we don't do anything about spam, because the computer recognizes it with almost 100% efficiency, thanks to the statistical methods applied to them.
My prediction is that our scientists will try to think about AI in traditional ways for a few more years, and then they will just snap out of their "AI sleep" and use statistical methods/pattern matching for approaching AI...and then we would have a tremendous AI explosion, with terrorizing consequences for human life.
As for extraterrestrial AI, it would be extremely difficult for us to recognize it, especially if the extraterrestrial AI has been mixed with organic material. Personally, I don't expect to find electronic circuits on such an AI; it would be more like a brain, i.e. a network of neurons cultivated for this exact purpose.
How do we know that the CMBR is not the result of another phenomenon? Could it be, for example, the result of the virtual particle soup that permeats the universe? Is there no alternative explanations for it?
Don't you give away your rights as well by fearing to go in said area at night?
I don't see that many problems concerning privacy. So this system will remember when and where we went. So? It is not to be placed in our homes.
Do the Linux developers put a news announcement out every time there is a bug and they forgot about it this time?
Isn't it a little sensational to imply that Linus and the other people didn't want this bug to be known because they fear Linux will be characterized as buggy?
You give a perfect example of how much necessary an "internet O/S" is. The Browser wasn't meant to do anything else other than showing static documents, and its limitations are quite a lot (as per in your example).
An "internet O/S" would essentially be a virtual machine that abstracts the local machine, the local network and the wide area network in such a way that allows the seamless integration of applications across networks, the delivery and update of content (including code), security/safety and persistence. It wouldn't have any presentation layer, it would simply provide the means for implementing presentation layers according to the various application needs.
I long for the day that I would be able to write "import www.foo.com/module" in my programming language of choice, i.e. importing a module from the internet and let the compiler take care of downloading, updating, versioning and linking the appropriate module...I also long for the day that I would be able to publish my module automatically using a statement like "public on www.foo.com:" or similar, and let the compiler take care of uploading and versioning...;-)
(Disclaimer: I am not an Apple fan, I don't have a Mac or iPhone or iPad or iPod; I have programmed on Macs though and I've seen projects for the iPad and the iPhone)
I know only one company that makes computer products for the average consumer, and that is Apple. It's strange, but there is no other company that is in the same category as Apple. All other companies are in a different segment of the computer market, and they occasionally see what Apple does and want a piece of the pie, but they have no idea how to achieve it. Microsoft is in the operating system/office/development/tools/video game market; Google is in the internet apps market; Linux vendors are mostly in the server market; Sony and Nintendo is in the video game market. None of the markets mentioned above has to do 100% with the market Apple is into. There are overlaps between what the others do and what Apple does, but they are different markets.
Apple caught everyone by surprise when they released the iPhone. Did the consumers want an easy to use phone with a multimedia/internet flavor around it? you bet. But no other company has really understood that, because they were busy hyping themselves and their products. Now Apple caught everyone by surprise for a second time! and the others have still not learned the lesson, i.e. that they have no idea about what the consumer really wants. The reviewed tablets of this topic is testament to that: they are either vaporware or inferior to iPad, and I just don't see any iPad alternatives in the future.
Which companies could offer Apple some competition?
Microsoft could not do it because they are a geek programmers' company, they don't have the consumer product mentality in sufficient amounts; their product line is testament to that.
Nintendo knows how to make game consoles, but I really doubt they can do anything else; even internet browsing on their consoles is always a 2nd rate feature for them.
Google doesn't really have the resources to do it, because consumer level products require different operating systems and user interfaces, something that Google doesn't seem to be able to do. There is a lot of fine open source code out there for desktop systems, but pads and phones require a different approach.
Sony is a great big mystery, because they are into mass-market electronic products for many decades, but they have totally missed the point for the last decade.
Smaller companies have some interesting approaches but they always fail to produce a product which is so polished like Apple's products.
Where does that leave us? there is Apple and then there are all the rest companies. This means that if there is not a good tablet out there from another company in the next year, I'll give in and buy an iPad instead. How long can we wait for an alternative anyway?
You've just proven how important case sensitivity is.
...because it brought so many new things in TV sci-fi! DS9 may seem less distant, but it really lacks the smell of new and exciting things that TNG brought to TV audiences!
It's amazing that so many people, including you, have fallen for the official excuse for the Afghanistan war. America is not there to spread civilization, because there are lots of other places on Earth like that. America is there due to the vast deposits of minerals, metals, gold etc. The story about the Afghan riches broke out a few months ago, so they should have been known for decades by the army and secret services.
DOOM is the most important game ever. It was the game that opened the floodgates for 3d games.
Killing oneself for purpose is not the same as not doing anything to preserve life. When our time comes, we will die, just like our predecessors.
but at this point the only way that is going to happen is if the earth explodes and my ashes get distributed through space.
Not true. We could create a huge generational spaceship in orbit with the following:
Of course it would cost trillions of dollars, but it would be a huge step towards colonization of other planets and star systems.
The entire sum of human existence shouldn't be forgotten for nothing, you know?
Yes. Why not? we are so unimportant anyway. Supposing that a great comet destroys the human race in the next 1000 years, humans would exist for, let's say, 100,000 years, which is 1/130,000 of the universe's age (13 billion years).
I have a Batchelor's degree in CS and a Masters degree in Software Engineering. To keep the long story short:
1) the university didn't make me think scientifically. I try to do that in my own spare time, and I get the most help on this from online science forums. I guess I am not the only one, since I haven't seen the university change anyone's perception of reality. Most people come into the university with certain views about important topics, mostly learned from family, and they get out with the same views more or less.
2) the material taught in most courses has little to do with what is happening in the market/industry. Not even the foundations of computer science are not taught in the correct perspective. In order to really understand the taught material, one has to apply it in real projects, and that rarely happens in universities.
3) the lowest common denominator approach results in holding the more advanced students back. And usually the lowest common denominator is quite low, except if you attend the top universities.
4) lectures cover a small percentage of the material. For the rest of the material, you have to read it and understand it yourself.
5) interaction in the class is quite limited, and there is usually a bunch of students that want to dominate the in-class interaction, prohibiting others from participating.
The only possible benefits of universities for me is a) the labs, b) the interaction with other students. But these two things don't require a university, they could happen at a smaller scale.
First of all, the claim that piracy doesn't cause lost sales is false. It's not that all the pirates of a program will buy said program if it wasn't pirated; but it's also not that none of the pirates would not buy the program. Some people would buy the game if it could not be easily found in the wild. The percentage of people that would buy a game depends on the game's quality: better games lose more sales from piracy. I know a lot of people that have played lots of games that they were downloaded illegally. Some of those games are rated as top in their categories; Half Life 1 & 2, for example. These people would certainly buy Half Life if it wasn't one click away. On the other hand, they wouldn't buy World Of Goo because they didn't like the game that much, after giving the pirated copy a try.
Secondly, the notion that piracy is not theft is dubious at best, if not outright false. If you don't buy my program but you download it illegally, you deprive me of money, which is translated to certain things I could buy with that money. If that isn't stealing, then what is? please don't insist on the technical definition of theft, because it does not include the whole proper meaning of stealing.
Thirdly, the argument that piracy is ok as long as developers cover their costs and have a profit contains a certain (high) dose of immorality. Western societies are based on equality, but they are also based on giving credit were credit is due, i.e. the more worthy people are the more they are compensated for their works. Piracy is communist: a bad game that is pirated may sold at numbers equal or close to a good game that is pirated, since both games are only bought by those who don't pirate games. If it wasn't for piracy, good games would sold in much higher numbers that bad games, i.e. the difference in numbers would be much greater that what it is now.
Fourthly, I wonder why everyone is complaining about DRM. There is stealthy DRM that doesn't affect our machines and there is shitty DRM that creates a lot of problem on our machines. The problem lies in badly written DRM software, not in DRM itself. So what if a certain DRM mechanism checks if the game you are using is legally bought? that's the correct thing to do anyway. You should complain about bad DRM, not DRM in general.
Fifthly, there are hardly any people that cannot afford any game whatsoever. From the moment they can afford a computer, there is a ton of free games out there, so not having money to buy the latest and greatest game is not an excuse for pirating it. There is also a list of games that are cheap to buy, and there is also the 2nd hand market.
Sixthly, that point that DRM does not work is wrong. DRM does work, but it can be hacked out of a program just like any other piece of code.
In conclusion, each time there is a topic about piracy on Slashdot, the Slashdot crowd tries to justify piracy with logical fallacies like "piracy is not lost sales" and that "piracy is not theft". Most of us are guilty of pirating software, and in the past we have done it because we didn't think about it twice. Now that some of us are software professionals, we see the other side of the coin and we can realize how bad piracy is about software.
...Hurd (pun intended, sorry).
The car companies could already have done things such as putting radars in cars and signaling devices. After all, ships and aircraft have had such devices for years. Not only that, but radar computers are constantly calculating where another ship will go, based on its current velocity, and warn about collisions.
Cars could have had an emitter/receiver around them (a thin metallic line around the middle of the car) which calculated the velocity of other vehicles every few milliseconds as well as the collision course and take actions immediately, adjusting the speed and hard breaking if required.
The only reason, for me, that such thing does not exist in the cars is that it would initially raise the cost of the cars, and therefore car companies keep postpone it until electronics become cheap enough not to seriously affect the price of a car. Expensive/luxurious cars could have had it though.
5 trillion digits are a *lot* of digits! no patterns yet in there?