Except that assumes a single times line where every alteration that can be made has been and you can't change the future etc. (like 12 monkeys).
But if there are multiple time lines then our past cannot be altered by the present or the future, in which case when people go back in time it will not be into our past but into someone elses. So the date must be in the future.
Actually, it assumes no such thing. In fact, such an idea could be used to test that hypothesis (in a way). If one discovers that such an event did actually occur, then it clearly shows that both time travel is possible (and did occur) and that it occurred in your timeline.
The idea of infinitely branching quantum realities is profoundly disturbing. That, of course, does not mean that it isn't true. But it is disturbing in the extreme. Why isn't my awareness following a more rewarding trajectory through my quantum probability space? Is it that elusive thing we call choice? Which plane of reality do the choices get made? All of them?
I am telling you man, this is very disturbing so I must ignore it.;-)
Setting the date to sometime in the past is a *much* better idea, because it can be empirically analyzed.
First, we must pick a location and time that a very large collection of people, many acting and possibly looking out-of-place, would not stand out as strange. Large city-parks are good candidates.
Second, we must begin the effort (in earnest) to get the information out that such an event will be occurring (in the past).
Third, once it is clear that the marketing has been widely performed enough to ensure that it is *locatable* in the future, we should go look at newspaper clippings from the time in question and attempt to find a gathering such as that which we organized.
I dunno. I work with someone that has the interests of the customer foremost above everything. It's like he has a crusade to bend over backwards to show the customer that we care. Even to the point of pointing out where faults are in the software instead of simply saying, "we have an issue, and we're working on it." And my current task for getting the requirements for the next build to the real customers is way behind because this fine fellow keeps thinking of things that he thinks that the customer needs. Unfortunately, we're in a small company, and the owner feels that this guy's word is golden (and he's fireproof), plus he keeps promising customers anything that pops into his head, so we never ship on schedule anymore. In fact, we ship when he figures out that not getting the software to the customer is a worse thing than not putting in more features.
A famous general once said that there are four types of people:
(1) The lazy and smart kind, like him.. These are the thinkers and the leaders..
(2) The lazy and stupid kind. These are the grunts, the soldiers, the factory workers. The world is mostly these kind and the world needs them. They are valuable.
(3) The smart and hardworking kind. These people are the glue that bind organizations together and make civilization function. They are the lieutenants, managers and designers, the people who push things forward.
(4) But beware, said the general, of the forth kind, the stupid and hardworking man. For he shall certainly be the death of you.
It costs alot of money to prosecute a case in a Superior Court my friend. There is no "profit motive" as you suggest in the suits, but rather a pandering to their constituency.
Have they actually prosecuted any of the 10k cases? My understanding is that everyone settles...
There is no "market" in suing the general public.
If the RIAA was suing kids to get settlements from parents and doing it at a high profit, then they have effectively established a business. It's predatory and extortionist, but it's a business. Their market is that group of people (mostly kids) who swap songs on P2P networks.
If the RIAA wanted to expand their market, one of the easiest ways to do that would be to quietly fund the development of more P2P network efforts. By owning the software (incognito), they could control a variety of things and would be in the position to more easily get their marketing leads (uh, I mean the list of defendants)...
The RIAA will never quit suing P2P users because the RIAA is making a profit from it...
How right you are! Imagine, 10k lawsuits. Let's assume that each one of them settles for an average of $5k (a pittance compared to what they could get by copyright law, and I believe many of these settlements are much higher).
At $5k a pop, 10k of these settlements is worth $50,000,000 dollars.
How long will it be before the profits from lawsuits exceeds that of music licensing for the RIAA? Is it really that far fetched to imagine? Settlements are better business than records ($5k vs. $9)...
Perhaps, like antivirus companies spinning virus out into the wild, the RIAA will begin quietly sponsoring P2P programming efforts in an attempt to expand their new market (defendants)...
The customer who killed your project already had it in for you. They were going to get it killed no matter what, at any expense. Don't be so quick to point your finger, just because they used someone's email as a convenient excuse.
If it wasn't that email, it would have been a different one or it would have been an article in Wall Street journal or a discussion of the weather or whatever.
My point is, the reason they killed the project clearly has nothing to do with the email and it is terrible for you, knowing this, to blame the poor guy who complained about the build. For christsake, he is just doing his job. If anything, whoever granted access for the customers to be on the build-mailing list should be fired as that is a clear breach of practice (to provide politically minded business people in the customer organization with access to engineering build reports and whatnot).
When someone will use anything as an excuse to kill a project, any imperfection will result in project termination. This means that everything must run PERFECTLY in order to continue. Are you going to blame the first person that makes a mistake for screwing up and destroying the company and 130 jobs?
No amount of email filtering or censorship would have stopped this. The only thing that would have [stopped this email event] is preventing the customer from being on the list to begin with. But even if that was done, the customer would have found a different way to kill the project - it was already decided and was inevitable, someone else just would have been the patsy.
Personally, I feel bad for the engineer that almost got dropped off the building. Sounds like he got blamed for mistakes that can only be attributed to incompetent management (Having 130 jobs depend on one project, providing your enemies with access to engineering build reports, finger pointing, etc..)
At the magazine I edit, many of the department email address forward to me before they go to the department editors. Part of the reason is that some of the department editors can be, shall we say, less than diplomatic when dealing with incorrigible readers. Part of my job is to ensure that exchanges do not become denigrating or insulting, and to avoid lawsuits.
When dealing with customers or other company related correspondence, having multiple eyes on the correspondence makes good sense for exactly that reason.
I think this entire issue is somewhat confused. Let's face it, corporate email is for company business. People shouldn't be using it for personal matters. It should be considered an advantage for a company to ensure that it's correspondence with the outside world meets with expectations. For these reasons, it is clearly beneficial in for corporations to have open email policys (e.g. all corporate correspondence is subject to review). But the company should make it clear to employees that the reason such a policy exists is to ensure quality correspondence with the outside world and that it is okay to use non-company email at work for personal correspondence, which will not be monitored.
If you want to send a dirty joke to your girlfriend, use yahoo mail, not your corporate email address. Besides not having to worry about your privacy being violated, you will be doing your employer a favor; It reflects poorly on your employer to have that crap bouncing around the Internet with their name attached to it.
The mind certainly does summersalts on this issue. So an LED would be more power-efficient than a bulb, of course, because it generates less heat. However, you have to convert to DC which generates MORE heat. So in saving power, we waste power.
I find myself wondering what percentage of the power in our grid system ends up being consumed in AC->DC conversion. Could it be more than 50%?
Perhaps power-supply manufacturers should be taxed relative to the efficiency of their power supplies? That would be incentive to build devices that convert into DC with higher efficiency as well as providing incentive to have centralized conversion in a home.
I think it makes a great deal of sense to have power outlets in the home that supply both AC and DC current. Granted, DC does not carry well over large distances, but it should be okay in the typical home, right?
The fact that seeds are chosen manually restricts the use of such a scheme to seeds that never change or are known for a fact to be reliable (such as fortune 1000 companies, governement sites or media outlets). Otherwise, a site can start as one that has terrific content only to switch to a spam site the moment it gets a good trust ranking (and other abuses).
I don't favor this type of scheme because it is not adaptive enough.
A much better manner for achieving the goals that Google is reaching for would be to hammer out multiple metrics for automated ranking (call them whatever you wish; trust, linkage, etc..) and then apply operations on the ranking vectors to sort site listings. The simple fact that there are multiple metrics would allow statistical analysis to be performed to catch attempted rank hikes.
Having multiple schemes would allow Google to use much more advanced statistical analysis techniques to catch cheats. My assertion here is that while the quality of each individual metric shouldn't be ignored, it is the emergence of patterns between metrics where the most valuable data lies. Ensuring that all data is purely adaptive and algorithmic (rather than hand-chosen seeds, etc..) will provide much more robust results.
A simple example might be an offense meeter. Much like tivo has thumbs-up, thumbs-down,.. google could have a manner for acquiring feedback from the users regarding the level of offense of sites acquired. But this in itself may not be that interesting. When combined (think vectorspace combined) with other metrics, it becomes quite valuable.
Because there ain't no way the Bush White House is paying for this.
You know this is just a cover story for additional funding for UFT based antigravity craft. The people have to see something going on. It can't all be black..
The 3 Laws are just silly. A robot either couldn't interpret those kinds of rules or if it could you couldn't force them upon one.
While at first glance through the spectacles of today's theories of adaptive systems, the three laws looks terribly shortsighted, there is another angle that you can perceive them through.
It is clear that computational intelligence will emerge through emergence and therefore be somewhat resilient to full analysis and control. That much is almost certain. For instance, how do you encode the three laws into heirarchical neural nets?
However, it is also true that a fully functional robotic system will contain more than simply a brain. It will, for instance, contain a power supply of some sort as well as actuators and other mechanical parts for movement.
Just as modern automobiles sometimes include speedlimiters to override the brain (the human) when he/she decides to push the vehicle into a dangerous speed range, so too could deterministic software detect and shutdown the emergent intelligent systems of a robot in situations considered dangerous.
Consider a robot that has effectively two different brains.
(Brain 1) This is what we normally consider a brain - the robot's personality, decision making system, memories and whatnot... Build as you like
(Brain 2) Akin to a speedlimiter, a programmed system that watches what the robot does and takes action to shut it down if those actions go outside of the boundaries of acceptibility.
Clearly, it would be difficult to build (brain 2) in such a way as to catch all foul play by (brain 1), because (brain 2) would be restricted by deterministic techniques (e.g. traditional programming techniques). However, encoding Assimov's three laws in some form in (brain 2) is certainly conceivable.
Will the USA become a place where the only jobs needed will be thought based.
Unfortunately, no. Don't say it like it's a bad thing. Just because someone can't do calculus doesn't mean he/she cannot design an aesthetic sofa or come up with a new pattern for jeans or something. As we are liberated from manual and repetitive tasks, we are given the gift of donating our talents to aesthetics and other intellectual and artistic pursuits. And with the coming age of just-in-time manufacturing, there should be quite a demand for such things.
No more jobs where a person is needed to do a repetitious task over and over? Will the next outsorcing be not out of the USA, but from human labour to robots?
You say it like it is a bad thing.
I don't want this to sound like trolling, but it will. There are enough people out there who are not made for work which requires too much thought. Not everyone can pass Chemistry 101.
Who taught you this? So you actually beleive there are people (aside from the obviously disabled) who couldn't pass Chemistry 101 if provided with an environment (including home environment) that is stable and supportive?
Some people require the factory jobs to make enough money to buy a house, and live a life. If we start lowering the value of those jobs, we will be shoving a whole class of people into poverty.
I simply disagree with you. The economy will shift from things required to things desired. The new class of sustenance workers will emerge from the arts and soft sciences - but because robotic manufacturing is taking care of resources, sustenance should be at or above middle-class living standards of today.
I also can't help but think of the horror of the next war we face. No more "human life lost", instead we'll send drone airplanes and robots to do the fighting. Mr and Mrs Redstate will no longer have to reconsider if a war is just when their child is killed ("Was it worth it?"). I wonder if we would have burned all of Vietnam down if we did not have to send any Americans, if we only had to send robots. We could declare the area too unsafe and keep the reporters out.
This part of your comment I agree with. However, it is likely that our enemies will have this tech as well - which implies that perhaps no human life will be lost. More of a robot wars type scenario, ending when one's defenses fall apart.
Of course, there could be abuses... But think about the whole system advancing in stride instead of point replacing one variable (such as labor) and imagining the immediate consequences. Systems don't evolve like that.
Unfortunately, any behavior that is learned rather than instictual will show pattern responses that are unique in every brain. It should be possible to map out sexual response, hunger, pain and other instictual (read: built-in) programming.
But a database for other stuff would be person specific. A general purpose mind-reader is unlikely to happen anytime soon.
There is a need for signed RSS for a number of reasons:
* It will be no-time before we start to see fake articles and whatnot directing us to fake merchants and fake bank sites trying to phish us and other nonsense
* Without signed articles / Signed RSS, there is no-way, other than finding and verifying the original content source, to ensure that a feed is authentic
(E) Ezekiel saw something and wrote a confusing description of it, that modern people with the concept of a stereotypical flying saucer interpret as being that, but that interpretation may well be wrong.
Ah, but you see the dilema we have with choice (E) right? Replace Ezekiel with "A UFO witness" and remove the word "modern"... The result is a sentence that fits quite nicely with the UFO phenomena...
What's my point? Any way you slice it, it appears that he saw something that fits into the same exact category as what people today are claiming to see... Before, they called it GOD and it got written into the bible... Now they call it Aliens and report about it on TV.
Considering the fact that he used the word "living creatures" instead of people and he clearly described vehicles and they clearly resemble flying saucers with portholes, we can safely say that if he was having a hallucination or dream, he was having one about flying saucers with non-human pilots.
Since this occurred thousands of years ago and nothing in this dude's life could have possibly seeded his imagination in such a way as to make him hallucinate about advanced technology and non-human pilots, we can also safely say that if he did dream or hallucinate this vision then either he had seen or heard about something like this before or he was seeing the future through prescience or divine inspiration.
Taking this a bit further, if we assume that flying saucers (let's just call them UFOs) and non-human intelligences are works of 20th century science fiction, then we are ready to draw conclusions about this dude.
Either
(A) Ezekiel was, through prescience or divine inspiration, having dreams, hallucinations (visions) of phenomena that does not exist, that exactly matches the UFO phenomena from 20th century science fiction and ascribing this as god
or
(B) Ezekiel was having dreams, hallucinations (visions) of some phenomena that was known at the time that, through pure coincidence, exactly matches the UFO phenomena from 20th century science fiction and ascribing this as god.
or, if we assume that UFOs are real (not just science fiction)
(C) Ezekiel was truly seeing (or having dreams or hallucinations based on his or other's experiences), real UFOs and non-human pilots and he believed them to be of god.
or, lastly,
(D) Ezekiel really did have a dream or hallucination of god and it is just coincidence that his view of god matches our modern view of UFOs and aliens.
Which scenario makes more sense? Use Occom's razor.
1 Now it came about in the thirtieth year, in the fourth [month], on the fifth [day] of the month, while I was in the midst of the exiled people by the river Chebar, that the heavens were opened and I began to see visions of God.
"Now as I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel upon the earth beside the living creatures one for each of the four of them. As for the appearance of the wheels and their construction, their appearance was like the gleaming of a chrysolite, and the four had the same likeness being as it were a wheel within a wheel. The four wheels had rims and they had spokes, and their rims were full of eyes round about. And when the living creatures went, the wheels went beside them and when the living creatures went, the wheels went with them, for the living creature was in the wheel".
- Ezekiel, chapter 1, Versus 15 thru 21.
It could be that I am just dense when it comes to interpretations of scripture, but the phrase "...by the river Chebar, that the heavens were opened and I began to see visions of God." reads to me like a dude was by a river, the clouds were disturbed and he saw something that could only be understood as the work of god.
I really don't think that he meant that he was standing by the river, the clouds opened up, then he passed out and channeled with god who made him halucinate or dream something completely irrelevant but that just so happened to perfectly describe what he would have seen if he had seen flying saucers with portholes carrying lifeforms from the sky, disturbing the clouds as they came down. Since he neglected to mention that he passed out and hallucinated or dreamed, I think we can assume that he was describing what he saw and "vision of god" is a literal translation.
This slashdot summary is bunk. It reads as if the indicated company has broken all secure hashing algorithms in existence today. I can guarantee that has not happened and they cannot do what they claim to do.
However, there was an interesting claim in the actual article:
The company says it has developed digital rights protection software that can be incorporated into digital movie, music or software releases and set to play havoc with P2P networks on which releases may appear.
I take this to mean that, perhaps, they have a means to prepare a digital file (say a movie) such that the 128k segments that bittorrent hashes will have always result in the same hash, allowing them to take junk data (that also hashes to the same value) and substitute it in the bittorrent network. While this is still a substantially difficult problem, it is much more believable than breaking secure hash.
If what I am suggesting is true, then they will only be able to wreak havok on their own digitally prepared files. If you are downloading a DVD rip, for example, there is nothing they can do about it.
This will never bother anyone. It is just some finish company trying to take advantage of MPAA type paranoia. I wish them success and hope they make a bundle off of what they are doing;-)
You are (and I don't believe this to be deliberate at all) dragging the argument outside of its bounds. This is purely about whether or not OSS is more profitable than Propritary software.
Profitable to whom?
This topic can get deeper than you may imagine very fast.
I am reminded of an article in the San Francisco chronicle some years ago about gays using rest-stops for anonymous sex rendezvous points. Given that, I can definitely see why the Texans would want to filter wireless at these sites...
How about we compare corporations like Red Hat to Microsoft. I think that argument is much more compelling.
Before we run off comparing anyone to anyone (and anyone to Microsoft is silly and irrelevant for obvious reasons), let's take a moment to question the motivation for making assertions that OSS is stupid because proprietary software is more profitable.
First, whether a company is pushing proprietary or open source, using standards (e.g. open systems) or not (closed systems) essentially amounts to a marketing decision. The average buyer just wants his problem solved.
Second, competition is interesting. Open source can slither into an enterprise with zero resistance, but it generally cannot achieve system-wide acceptance without maintenance and service contracts. Proprietary systems must pass through the bean-counter hoops before being brought in and so has a more difficult first step, but once achieved does not have the general problems of the second step. Either way, the products are competing and there will be profits for someone. In one case, the profits are derived from sales of licenses, in the other it is often service contracts or somesuch, but it generally amounts to the same thing.
My belief is that companies that get terrified of Open Source are really just terrified of the competition. Generally, it is only the monopolies that have to fear. Non monopolies are used to competition and see OSS as simply another competitor and/or another opportunity. Monopolies are not used to competition and have no instict on how to kill the OSS competitor to return the market to it's comfortable non-competitive environment.
So when you state that OSS is bad because proprietary systems are more profitable, are you speaking from the point of view of a monopolist or a vendor/potential vendor of proprietary software that doesn't understand the competitive pressures and opportunities of doing business in an environment where OSS exists?
The arguments against OSS tend to be quite transparent, this is another reason that the monopolies have such a problem with it... You just can't lie well about your competitor when your competitor is legion...
I read that as "will i be sued by Microsoft if i use this free software"
Am I the only one? Is Microsoft announcing it's intentions to throw rocks at the gears? I can see some Microsoft black-project to get some independant [ehum..] developers to sue big companies for some triviality related to an open-source license to try to drive the point home.
The license itself may be a work of sheer genius, but the idiotic, uncompromising fanaticism and elitism of the GPL crowd drives people away.
They generally are uncompromising, elite fanatics. But I would hardly call their behavior idiotic. What drives every GPL swinging fanatic is the lucid realization that if the source is closed, the software will eventually rot and die. Why would anyone in their right mind want to depend on anything that is guaranteed to rot and die? If we take software to be the bricks and mortar of the world's communications and data infrastructure, then we also have the additional variable of control. Do you want private companies controlling world infrastructure? These are the central themes of the open-source religion and for people that give a damn, they are strong themes.
Free software is not always the solution. Proprietary software does not need liberation. You can't make as much money with open source software as you can with closed source software. Making profit is a good thing.
If the proprietary software is something that is expected to exist for a long time, participate in public data infrastructure and/or is of very high importance, then there are some very compelling arguments that it should indeed be liberated.
It is not even completely clear that you can make more money with proprietary software. The largest and most profitable computer company in the world is open-sourcing practically everything these days, they believe it is good for business. You know the one, with three blue letters?
Pure science fiction, but maybe possible in a decade or so:
If convicted of a felony, you are chipped. The biochip is implanted directly into your cerebellum (perhaps around your language centers) in such a way that you could not think (in words) or speak without the chip transcribing the thought or communication. The encrypted stream of mental babble is flushed to government hotspots whenever you are near them (read: all the time). Goverment computers sort through the babble and do a first-pass, flagging anything considered *unsatisfactory* for further analysis.
The chip can signal the language centers of your brain as well as intercept, allowing you to be talked to. So if you are thinking alot about committing a crime, the chip can talk you out of it, for example.
The chip can also act to temporarily paralyze you. For instance, if there are restrictions placed on your travel, attempts to bypass those restrictions results in temporary paralysis.
Your location is known to some precision for the rest of your life and your thoughts are no longer private. Your prison becomes life itself, no need for a jail (except in cases of violent behavior).
If you behave yourself, you are left alone and not bothered, paralyzed or talked to by the voice in your head. You will not have the terrible burden of prison on your record (perhaps even the conviction itself could be made private as we are into corrective territory rather than punishment territory and do not want to make life impossible to lead, but rather make it impossible to lead a criminal life).
But misbehave and things get weird: Your chip starts talking to you, you may become temporarily paralyzed and you will probably have MIB showing up and discussing your troubling behaviors with you.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea of infinitely branching quantum realities is profoundly disturbing. That, of course, does not mean that it isn't true. But it is disturbing in the extreme. Why isn't my awareness following a more rewarding trajectory through my quantum probability space? Is it that elusive thing we call choice? Which plane of reality do the choices get made? All of them?
I am telling you man, this is very disturbing so I must ignore it.
Setting the date to sometime in the past is a *much* better idea, because it can be empirically analyzed.
First, we must pick a location and time that a very large collection of people, many acting and possibly looking out-of-place, would not stand out as strange. Large city-parks are good candidates.
Second, we must begin the effort (in earnest) to get the information out that such an event will be occurring (in the past).
Third, once it is clear that the marketing has been widely performed enough to ensure that it is *locatable* in the future, we should go look at newspaper clippings from the time in question and attempt to find a gathering such as that which we organized.
(1) The lazy and smart kind, like him.. These are the thinkers and the leaders..
(2) The lazy and stupid kind. These are the grunts, the soldiers, the factory workers. The world is mostly these kind and the world needs them. They are valuable.
(3) The smart and hardworking kind. These people are the glue that bind organizations together and make civilization function. They are the lieutenants, managers and designers, the people who push things forward.
(4) But beware, said the general, of the forth kind, the stupid and hardworking man. For he shall certainly be the death of you.
If the RIAA wanted to expand their market, one of the easiest ways to do that would be to quietly fund the development of more P2P network efforts. By owning the software (incognito), they could control a variety of things and would be in the position to more easily get their marketing leads (uh, I mean the list of defendants)...
Yes, this is a joke... I think...
The RIAA will never quit suing P2P users because the RIAA is making a profit from it...
How right you are! Imagine, 10k lawsuits. Let's assume that each one of them settles for an average of $5k (a pittance compared to what they could get by copyright law, and I believe many of these settlements are much higher).
At $5k a pop, 10k of these settlements is worth $50,000,000 dollars.
How long will it be before the profits from lawsuits exceeds that of music licensing for the RIAA? Is it really that far fetched to imagine? Settlements are better business than records ($5k vs. $9)...
Perhaps, like antivirus companies spinning virus out into the wild, the RIAA will begin quietly sponsoring P2P programming efforts in an attempt to expand their new market (defendants)...
These are strange times...
The customer who killed your project already had it in for you. They were going to get it killed no matter what, at any expense. Don't be so quick to point your finger, just because they used someone's email as a convenient excuse.
If it wasn't that email, it would have been a different one or it would have been an article in Wall Street journal or a discussion of the weather or whatever.
My point is, the reason they killed the project clearly has nothing to do with the email and it is terrible for you, knowing this, to blame the poor guy who complained about the build. For christsake, he is just doing his job. If anything, whoever granted access for the customers to be on the build-mailing list should be fired as that is a clear breach of practice (to provide politically minded business people in the customer organization with access to engineering build reports and whatnot).
When someone will use anything as an excuse to kill a project, any imperfection will result in project termination. This means that everything must run PERFECTLY in order to continue. Are you going to blame the first person that makes a mistake for screwing up and destroying the company and 130 jobs?
No amount of email filtering or censorship would have stopped this. The only thing that would have [stopped this email event] is preventing the customer from being on the list to begin with. But even if that was done, the customer would have found a different way to kill the project - it was already decided and was inevitable, someone else just would have been the patsy.
Personally, I feel bad for the engineer that almost got dropped off the building. Sounds like he got blamed for mistakes that can only be attributed to incompetent management (Having 130 jobs depend on one project, providing your enemies with access to engineering build reports, finger pointing, etc..)
I think this entire issue is somewhat confused. Let's face it, corporate email is for company business. People shouldn't be using it for personal matters. It should be considered an advantage for a company to ensure that it's correspondence with the outside world meets with expectations. For these reasons, it is clearly beneficial in for corporations to have open email policys (e.g. all corporate correspondence is subject to review). But the company should make it clear to employees that the reason such a policy exists is to ensure quality correspondence with the outside world and that it is okay to use non-company email at work for personal correspondence, which will not be monitored.
If you want to send a dirty joke to your girlfriend, use yahoo mail, not your corporate email address. Besides not having to worry about your privacy being violated, you will be doing your employer a favor; It reflects poorly on your employer to have that crap bouncing around the Internet with their name attached to it.
The mind certainly does summersalts on this issue. So an LED would be more power-efficient than a bulb, of course, because it generates less heat. However, you have to convert to DC which generates MORE heat. So in saving power, we waste power.
I find myself wondering what percentage of the power in our grid system ends up being consumed in AC->DC conversion. Could it be more than 50%?
Perhaps power-supply manufacturers should be taxed relative to the efficiency of their power supplies? That would be incentive to build devices that convert into DC with higher efficiency as well as providing incentive to have centralized conversion in a home.
I think it makes a great deal of sense to have power outlets in the home that supply both AC and DC current. Granted, DC does not carry well over large distances, but it should be okay in the typical home, right?
I challenge others to so colorfully draw metaphors of Microsoft's Longhorn adventure!
The fact that seeds are chosen manually restricts the use of such a scheme to seeds that never change or are known for a fact to be reliable (such as fortune 1000 companies, governement sites or media outlets). Otherwise, a site can start as one that has terrific content only to switch to a spam site the moment it gets a good trust ranking (and other abuses).
.. google could have a manner for acquiring feedback from the users regarding the level of offense of sites acquired. But this in itself may not be that interesting. When combined (think vectorspace combined) with other metrics, it becomes quite valuable.
I don't favor this type of scheme because it is not adaptive enough.
A much better manner for achieving the goals that Google is reaching for would be to hammer out multiple metrics for automated ranking (call them whatever you wish; trust, linkage, etc..) and then apply operations on the ranking vectors to sort site listings. The simple fact that there are multiple metrics would allow statistical analysis to be performed to catch attempted rank hikes.
Having multiple schemes would allow Google to use much more advanced statistical analysis techniques to catch cheats. My assertion here is that while the quality of each individual metric shouldn't be ignored, it is the emergence of patterns between metrics where the most valuable data lies. Ensuring that all data is purely adaptive and algorithmic (rather than hand-chosen seeds, etc..) will provide much more robust results.
A simple example might be an offense meeter. Much like tivo has thumbs-up, thumbs-down,
It is clear that computational intelligence will emerge through emergence and therefore be somewhat resilient to full analysis and control. That much is almost certain. For instance, how do you encode the three laws into heirarchical neural nets?
However, it is also true that a fully functional robotic system will contain more than simply a brain. It will, for instance, contain a power supply of some sort as well as actuators and other mechanical parts for movement.
Just as modern automobiles sometimes include speedlimiters to override the brain (the human) when he/she decides to push the vehicle into a dangerous speed range, so too could deterministic software detect and shutdown the emergent intelligent systems of a robot in situations considered dangerous.
Consider a robot that has effectively two different brains.
(Brain 1) This is what we normally consider a brain - the robot's personality, decision making system, memories and whatnot... Build as you like
(Brain 2) Akin to a speedlimiter, a programmed system that watches what the robot does and takes action to shut it down if those actions go outside of the boundaries of acceptibility.
Clearly, it would be difficult to build (brain 2) in such a way as to catch all foul play by (brain 1), because (brain 2) would be restricted by deterministic techniques (e.g. traditional programming techniques). However, encoding Assimov's three laws in some form in (brain 2) is certainly conceivable.
Just food for thought
Of course, there could be abuses... But think about the whole system advancing in stride instead of point replacing one variable (such as labor) and imagining the immediate consequences. Systems don't evolve like that.
Unfortunately, any behavior that is learned rather than instictual will show pattern responses that are unique in every brain. It should be possible to map out sexual response, hunger, pain and other instictual (read: built-in) programming.
But a database for other stuff would be person specific. A general purpose mind-reader is unlikely to happen anytime soon.
There is a need for signed RSS for a number of reasons:
* It will be no-time before we start to see fake articles and whatnot directing us to fake merchants and fake bank sites trying to phish us and other nonsense
* Without signed articles / Signed RSS, there is no-way, other than finding and verifying the original content source, to ensure that a feed is authentic
What's my point? Any way you slice it, it appears that he saw something that fits into the same exact category as what people today are claiming to see... Before, they called it GOD and it got written into the bible... Now they call it Aliens and report about it on TV.
Considering the fact that he used the word "living creatures" instead of people and he clearly described vehicles and they clearly resemble flying saucers with portholes, we can safely say that if he was having a hallucination or dream, he was having one about flying saucers with non-human pilots.
Since this occurred thousands of years ago and nothing in this dude's life could have possibly seeded his imagination in such a way as to make him hallucinate about advanced technology and non-human pilots, we can also safely say that if he did dream or hallucinate this vision then either he had seen or heard about something like this before or he was seeing the future through prescience or divine inspiration.
Taking this a bit further, if we assume that flying saucers (let's just call them UFOs) and non-human intelligences are works of 20th century science fiction, then we are ready to draw conclusions about this dude.
Either
(A) Ezekiel was, through prescience or divine inspiration, having dreams, hallucinations (visions) of phenomena that does not exist, that exactly matches the UFO phenomena from 20th century science fiction and ascribing this as god
or
(B) Ezekiel was having dreams, hallucinations (visions) of some phenomena that was known at the time that, through pure coincidence, exactly matches the UFO phenomena from 20th century science fiction and ascribing this as god.
or, if we assume that UFOs are real (not just science fiction)
(C) Ezekiel was truly seeing (or having dreams or hallucinations based on his or other's experiences), real UFOs and non-human pilots and he believed them to be of god.
or, lastly,
(D) Ezekiel really did have a dream or hallucination of god and it is just coincidence that his view of god matches our modern view of UFOs and aliens. Which scenario makes more sense? Use Occom's razor.
I really don't think that he meant that he was standing by the river, the clouds opened up, then he passed out and channeled with god who made him halucinate or dream something completely irrelevant but that just so happened to perfectly describe what he would have seen if he had seen flying saucers with portholes carrying lifeforms from the sky, disturbing the clouds as they came down. Since he neglected to mention that he passed out and hallucinated or dreamed, I think we can assume that he was describing what he saw and "vision of god" is a literal translation.
However, there was an interesting claim in the actual article: I take this to mean that, perhaps, they have a means to prepare a digital file (say a movie) such that the 128k segments that bittorrent hashes will have always result in the same hash, allowing them to take junk data (that also hashes to the same value) and substitute it in the bittorrent network. While this is still a substantially difficult problem, it is much more believable than breaking secure hash.
If what I am suggesting is true, then they will only be able to wreak havok on their own digitally prepared files. If you are downloading a DVD rip, for example, there is nothing they can do about it.
This will never bother anyone. It is just some finish company trying to take advantage of MPAA type paranoia. I wish them success and hope they make a bundle off of what they are doing
You are (and I don't believe this to be deliberate at all) dragging the argument outside of its bounds. This is purely about whether or not OSS is more profitable than Propritary software.
Profitable to whom?
This topic can get deeper than you may imagine very fast.
I am reminded of an article in the San Francisco chronicle some years ago about gays using rest-stops for anonymous sex rendezvous points. Given that, I can definitely see why the Texans would want to filter wireless at these sites...
How about we compare corporations like Red Hat to Microsoft. I think that argument is much more compelling.
Before we run off comparing anyone to anyone (and anyone to Microsoft is silly and irrelevant for obvious reasons), let's take a moment to question the motivation for making assertions that OSS is stupid because proprietary software is more profitable.
First, whether a company is pushing proprietary or open source, using standards (e.g. open systems) or not (closed systems) essentially amounts to a marketing decision. The average buyer just wants his problem solved.
Second, competition is interesting. Open source can slither into an enterprise with zero resistance, but it generally cannot achieve system-wide acceptance without maintenance and service contracts. Proprietary systems must pass through the bean-counter hoops before being brought in and so has a more difficult first step, but once achieved does not have the general problems of the second step. Either way, the products are competing and there will be profits for someone. In one case, the profits are derived from sales of licenses, in the other it is often service contracts or somesuch, but it generally amounts to the same thing.
My belief is that companies that get terrified of Open Source are really just terrified of the competition. Generally, it is only the monopolies that have to fear. Non monopolies are used to competition and see OSS as simply another competitor and/or another opportunity. Monopolies are not used to competition and have no instict on how to kill the OSS competitor to return the market to it's comfortable non-competitive environment.
So when you state that OSS is bad because proprietary systems are more profitable, are you speaking from the point of view of a monopolist or a vendor/potential vendor of proprietary software that doesn't understand the competitive pressures and opportunities of doing business in an environment where OSS exists?
The arguments against OSS tend to be quite transparent, this is another reason that the monopolies have such a problem with it... You just can't lie well about your competitor when your competitor is legion...
I read that as "will i be sued by Microsoft if i use this free software"
Am I the only one? Is Microsoft announcing it's intentions to throw rocks at the gears? I can see some Microsoft black-project to get some independant [ehum..] developers to sue big companies for some triviality related to an open-source license to try to drive the point home.
Never mind me, I'm just paranoid..
If the proprietary software is something that is expected to exist for a long time, participate in public data infrastructure and/or is of very high importance, then there are some very compelling arguments that it should indeed be liberated.
It is not even completely clear that you can make more money with proprietary software. The largest and most profitable computer company in the world is open-sourcing practically everything these days, they believe it is good for business. You know the one, with three blue letters?
Pure science fiction, but maybe possible in a decade or so:
If convicted of a felony, you are chipped. The biochip is implanted directly into your cerebellum (perhaps around your language centers) in such a way that you could not think (in words) or speak without the chip transcribing the thought or communication. The encrypted stream of mental babble is flushed to government hotspots whenever you are near them (read: all the time). Goverment computers sort through the babble and do a first-pass, flagging anything considered *unsatisfactory* for further analysis.
The chip can signal the language centers of your brain as well as intercept, allowing you to be talked to. So if you are thinking alot about committing a crime, the chip can talk you out of it, for example.
The chip can also act to temporarily paralyze you. For instance, if there are restrictions placed on your travel, attempts to bypass those restrictions results in temporary paralysis.
Your location is known to some precision for the rest of your life and your thoughts are no longer private. Your prison becomes life itself, no need for a jail (except in cases of violent behavior).
If you behave yourself, you are left alone and not bothered, paralyzed or talked to by the voice in your head. You will not have the terrible burden of prison on your record (perhaps even the conviction itself could be made private as we are into corrective territory rather than punishment territory and do not want to make life impossible to lead, but rather make it impossible to lead a criminal life).
But misbehave and things get weird: Your chip starts talking to you, you may become temporarily paralyzed and you will probably have MIB showing up and discussing your troubling behaviors with you.
This would make a good sci-fi book, methinks...