Attempting to cut off funding and deride all such related research because it isn't in vogue right now is tantamount to calling Gallileo before the Inquisition.
Hardly. It is more like avoiding spending money on a perpetual motion machine until you've either got reproducable results or a modification to the laws of thermodynamics that make some sort of sense. And obviously any scientist would demand a lot of reproducability of there were no theory behind it.
Doing anything other than maybe trying to reproduce it once is not a "good investment". It is a horrid investment because the chance of this being anything is basically nil. It is not like, say, transisters, where what they were doing was well understood by the time they moved from theory to practice.
I'm not talking about allowing for quantum effects. I'm talking about using them for a basis of new technology. This antigravity stuff is on par with a massive project to build a quantum computer in the 1920s.
We don't have a theory here, remember. What we have is one wierd result that has not yet been replicated. Try and replicate it perhaps, but spend real money on it? That's idiocy.
There is a difference between understanding the side-effects of a technology ("Why does cold pizza taste good?") and understanding the basis for a technology ("how do you cook a pizza?"). If you wanted to use these results to explain some other odd results somewhere else, yeah, that might make sense. But to say "We're gonna build us an anti-gravity machine" at this stage is pure idiocy.
This isn't about scientific conservatism. This is about demanding proof, and reproducability. Unfortunately, with the press the way it is and with moneyed fools too eager to jump in, we seem to get fooled a lot lately. But I suppose it is more fun dreaming of instant free energy than worrying about boring theory.
Because if they make a deal, it can go into effect tomorrow. If they don't make a deal, Microsoft will appeal, and this thing will likely continue for most of the next decade, until it hits the Supreme Court.
Does this mean that we should try to build every perpetual motion machine some crackpot without an understanding of the laws of thermodynamics tries to build?
To me the small effect this guy found (~2%) is a real good indication that it doesn't mean much. Sounds to me like the guy isn't properly paying attention to errors in his data.
Sounds like Cold Fusion Redux to me. From what the article says, this is all coming from one scientist who claimed a 2% drop in an object's weight, and whose work has not been published or reproduced anywhere.
Then, of course, you get a bunch of money types whose eyes are glittering with the thought of all those dollars they'll get "if it works" and are thus blind to the fact that this is almost certainly a crock of shit. Reminds me of all that telepathy research both the US and USSR engaged in during the cold war.
These guys need to look at history. I can't recall a single new technology that appeared like this. New technology almost invariably comes only after the underlying physics has been well worked out. For example, we are only now starting to create technologies using quantum effects, which have been part of standard physics for over half a century.
So in essense what you are saying is that if 50% of the people click a button, I'm denied the right to watch the entirety of a speech I might want to watch.
That doesn't sound like either "interactivity" or "a great idea". It sounds like a tyranny of the majority.
The author seems to be using a definition of the word "interactive" of which I have been previously unaware. Something is "interactive" if the viewer has control over what is viewed. Pure and simple. And while perhaps a poll on when people shold stop talking would be marginally "interactive", most of what is mentioned as evidence of interactivity, simply isn't. Seeing behind the curtain has absolutely nothing to do with interactivity. Zero. Zip. Nada. Interactivity is not about what you can see. It is about what you can control.
Even allowing polling is only barely "interactive". To be truly "interactive", what you see changes each according to your commands. Not according to the commands of you and a million other people. According to yours alone. Saying that an online poll is interactive is like saying that you get to hand-pick the president. Obviously, a broadcast medium can't be interactive, by definition. I don't see the point in bothering to try...
In practice it is really a matter of how much the professor cares. I sat in on a film class a couple of years running without actually being enrolled. This was at a California State school which, though "public", does collect tuition. I was an alumni at the time, but I doubt that mattered. (A good friend was enrolled in the class first time around, the projectionist the second.)
It is probably quite a bit different if the class is full, though.
No, he wasn't, both my wife and I noticed it. And we were wondering what the hell was up with that? Crystal was "digitally inserted" in two of his movies up front, and they can't even bother to note that he passed this year!?
A way a virus could get into system files even if the user rarely runs under root:
User downloads a binary. User runs it. Code in the binary attempts to write a program called 'ls' or 'rm' or 'make' something similar in any obvious place it has rights to.
Some time later, user su's to do maintenance. User types 'ls' or 'rm' or 'make'. System files are now infected.
Now obviously that is not as simple as getting into Windows system files, but it isn't "nigh-on impossible", either.
(Though obviously this would be pretty easy to spot if you were paying attention. But would you notice something called "vi" in your home directory?)
If I recall correctly, these satellites only have a lifespan of about ten years. Just getting the deal through and putting together some useful application is going to put you in the second half of this lifespan. After that, to keep going, you've got to start launching new ones. Seems to me that anyone trying to make money would find it easier just to start from scratch. (And anyone not doing it for money is simply not going to have the cash to continue after that point.)
And as long as servers are somewhere, people will own (and be able to govern) the net.
The US doesn't "own" the net as a whole, but US corporations own whopping big portions of it. And as long as that is the case, the net will be pretty US-Centric. And with inertia being what it is, this is not likely to change. Today, "getting on the net" in any kind of global manner means conforming to the current net culture. And current net culture is pretty damn US-centric, with some European culture thrown in for spice.
We probably will see some more "local" subsets of the internet based on local languages. But I suspect that most of these will remain just that, local subsets, while the main streets of the internet will remain pretty much like they are now.
Really, this is only one little piece of the cultural changes that are going on in the world. As the world shrinks, cultures get jammed together. And as they get jammed together, they tend to borrow from and/or absorb each other. This is really what the "Invasive American Culture" really is. And it isn't just a matter American culture swamping others. American culture itself is aquiring foreign elements. As "The Economist" noted last year, the two hot things among the eight-year-old set were a Japanese cartoon and a British book.
If someone had managed to figure out how to perform a database queries efficiently with this type of massively parallel machine, they would have sold like very expensive hotcakes, Thinking Machines Corp would still be around, and Danny Hillis wouldn't be wasting his time dicking around with a huge dumb clock.
Hmmm....database queries are among the easiest sorts of algorithms to parallelize. In fact, I had the pleasure of working on a parallel database supercomputer built by NCR in the early nineties. If you've got 256 nodes, for example, you can come pretty close to finding a key 256 times as fast as on a single node. (There is a lot of overhead, of course, but it was per node, note per record.)
This was a pretty cool machine, built entirely out of 486 and pentium boards with standard hard drives, all running ATT Unix. Cool stuff. Not quite "massively parallel", though, in that I think it only went up to something like 128 or 256 nodes.
It was really cool to work on. It was fun being able to create a 100 gigibyte table. (Though it is getting less and less cool. Bear in mind that at the time I only had a 100 mb drive on my PC.)
I've been using Quicken for around ten bills a month for years and have had only a few problems.
The one problem I have had is that creditors will sometimes change your account number without telling you. If you don't notice the new number on the stub, the automatic service will happily pay to the old account. It usually takes a month or so to straighten that out.
The other issue I had was that I get my insurance and credit card from the same company, but from two different divisions. For a while, all my credit card payments were going to my insurance account. I was simultaneously getting "deadbeat" notices and "why are you sending us all this extra cash" notices from the same company.
I don't know about this position, but I do know that I graduated with a Psychology (Cognitive Science) degree twelve years ago, and have since ended up in a number of positions that said "Must have a CS degree".
Usually what that actually means is that you went to a real college, as opposed to a technical school, and that you can demonstrate that you had training in Comp Sci methods. If you can do that, the CS requirement usually vanishes.
Training in Comp Sci methods is especially important. I know a lot of kid like to think that they can learn everything by just hacking away, but unless you are a true genius, you really do learn something in a degree program that you won't just hacking around.
That is pretty hard to say. Since all we have is bones, we can only say that no gross physical changes occurred in Cro-Magnon man occurred about when the Neanderthals went under. There could easily have been changes in the brain, say, or changes in the vocal cords (allowing speech). Since those are soft tissues, those changes wouldn't appear in the fossil record.
I think the real applications of human-machine interfaces will be in the brain.
The brain, and the senses as well. For example, the ultimate monitor would be an interface that hooks directly into the optic nerve and projects a screen, when desired, wherever in the environment you want it. The same could be done for the ears. Imagine having essentially a movie quality display literally everywhere you go.
That's only true if you assume that creating human-level intelligence is just a matter of getting the right hardware together. I'm fairly certain that we'll have the hardware necessary for human-level intelligence within my lifetime. I'm willing to bet that figuring out how to get that hardware to think will take centuries.
In the same fifty years, I fully expect that we'll have good machine/human interfaces. Given those, I suspect it will be easier to simply improve the intelligent object we've got (the brain) rather than create a new one.
That is mostly because what is called "AI" in most games isn't real AI. There are two reasons that we can create an AI in chess that can beat anyone:
Millions have been invested in that one game over a period of fifty years.
No one gets upset if a chess AI takes two minutes to move.
Most of the games you mention require that all AI be done in the background, as action occurs in the foreground. Since game makers usually view pretty graphics and smooth animation as primary, they tend to avoid any AI that might take lots of CPU cycles. Of course, lots of CPU cycles is exactly what you need if you want to create an AI that has any sort of strategic concept.
This is also true of strategic games like Civilization. Those games are far more complex than chess, yet though people will wait for two minutes for a chess computer to make a move, they complain if they have to wait ten seconds between turns in Civilization.
In general, game companies pretty much just suck at AI. I suspect few people have real training in it. Game AIs I've seen range from utter crap, to mediocre. A couple, like that in the "Warlords" series, do a little better. But in general, it is easier for game designers to use presets and scenerio designs as in "Age of Empires", allow the computer to cheat (certain aspects of "Civilization", or give it certain combat/production bonuses. A good AI takes real talent, while those other things are pretty easy to do.
But anyway, don't ever thing that game AI has anything at all to do with AI as it is practiced at places like MIT.
The problem here is the implication that one day, a bunch of humans, just like us, are suddenly going to find themselves obsolete, and either destroyed, or perhaps ignored, but some new, superintelligent entity that they created. But I don't see it happening that way.
Instead, what we will see is a series of gradual changes. Genetically superior humans won't appear overnight. Instead, humans will be slowly made superior, genetically. Superintelligent robots won't suddenly appear. Instead, they will slowly improve, and around the same time, I firmly believe that hardware will start being connected to human brains and human limbs.
So yes, in a thousand years, the rulers of this earth may not seem much like what we'd call human. But I'm willing to bet that if you looked over the period in between, you wouldn't see "humans" going extinct. You'd see a slow process of evolution (not darwinian, but directed) towards something greater. You'd never be able to find a dividing line between "human" and what's next.
And while that may be frightening to some, it isn't really to me. We are "greater", at least in certain anthropomoprhic senses, than the ape-like creature that we are descended from. But that creature did not "go extinct". It evolved into us. Something is going to evolve from us. This doesn't necessarily mean that we're all going to die at the hands of some sort of "SkyNet" AI. It just means that we aren't the be-all and end-all of creation.
The human race won't be supplanted by "homo superior". It will become "homo superior".
Let's see, first you complain about there being "no new open source developers". Then you insult someone you never met, whose code you've never seen, merely because he mentioned that he was a "new open source developer".
Slashdot Mirror
Hardly. It is more like avoiding spending money on a perpetual motion machine until you've either got reproducable results or a modification to the laws of thermodynamics that make some sort of sense. And obviously any scientist would demand a lot of reproducability of there were no theory behind it.
Doing anything other than maybe trying to reproduce it once is not a "good investment". It is a horrid investment because the chance of this being anything is basically nil. It is not like, say, transisters, where what they were doing was well understood by the time they moved from theory to practice.
And the judge cannot just "deny the appeal". If this goes against Microsoft, it is almost certainly going to the Supreme Court.
We don't have a theory here, remember. What we have is one wierd result that has not yet been replicated. Try and replicate it perhaps, but spend real money on it? That's idiocy.
There is a difference between understanding the side-effects of a technology ("Why does cold pizza taste good?") and understanding the basis for a technology ("how do you cook a pizza?"). If you wanted to use these results to explain some other odd results somewhere else, yeah, that might make sense. But to say "We're gonna build us an anti-gravity machine" at this stage is pure idiocy.
This isn't about scientific conservatism. This is about demanding proof, and reproducability. Unfortunately, with the press the way it is and with moneyed fools too eager to jump in, we seem to get fooled a lot lately. But I suppose it is more fun dreaming of instant free energy than worrying about boring theory.
To me the small effect this guy found (~2%) is a real good indication that it doesn't mean much. Sounds to me like the guy isn't properly paying attention to errors in his data.
Then, of course, you get a bunch of money types whose eyes are glittering with the thought of all those dollars they'll get "if it works" and are thus blind to the fact that this is almost certainly a crock of shit. Reminds me of all that telepathy research both the US and USSR engaged in during the cold war.
These guys need to look at history. I can't recall a single new technology that appeared like this. New technology almost invariably comes only after the underlying physics has been well worked out. For example, we are only now starting to create technologies using quantum effects, which have been part of standard physics for over half a century.
That doesn't sound like either "interactivity" or "a great idea". It sounds like a tyranny of the majority.
Even allowing polling is only barely "interactive". To be truly "interactive", what you see changes each according to your commands. Not according to the commands of you and a million other people. According to yours alone. Saying that an online poll is interactive is like saying that you get to hand-pick the president. Obviously, a broadcast medium can't be interactive, by definition. I don't see the point in bothering to try...
It is probably quite a bit different if the class is full, though.
User downloads a binary. User runs it. Code in the binary attempts to write a program called 'ls' or 'rm' or 'make' something similar in any obvious place it has rights to.
Some time later, user su's to do maintenance. User types 'ls' or 'rm' or 'make'. System files are now infected.
Now obviously that is not as simple as getting into Windows system files, but it isn't "nigh-on impossible", either.
(Though obviously this would be pretty easy to spot if you were paying attention. But would you notice something called "vi" in your home directory?)
su /etc/inetd.conf
vi
The US doesn't "own" the net as a whole, but US corporations own whopping big portions of it. And as long as that is the case, the net will be pretty US-Centric. And with inertia being what it is, this is not likely to change. Today, "getting on the net" in any kind of global manner means conforming to the current net culture. And current net culture is pretty damn US-centric, with some European culture thrown in for spice.
We probably will see some more "local" subsets of the internet based on local languages. But I suspect that most of these will remain just that, local subsets, while the main streets of the internet will remain pretty much like they are now.
Really, this is only one little piece of the cultural changes that are going on in the world. As the world shrinks, cultures get jammed together. And as they get jammed together, they tend to borrow from and/or absorb each other. This is really what the "Invasive American Culture" really is. And it isn't just a matter American culture swamping others. American culture itself is aquiring foreign elements. As "The Economist" noted last year, the two hot things among the eight-year-old set were a Japanese cartoon and a British book.
Hmmm....database queries are among the easiest sorts of algorithms to parallelize. In fact, I had the pleasure of working on a parallel database supercomputer built by NCR in the early nineties. If you've got 256 nodes, for example, you can come pretty close to finding a key 256 times as fast as on a single node. (There is a lot of overhead, of course, but it was per node, note per record.)
This was a pretty cool machine, built entirely out of 486 and pentium boards with standard hard drives, all running ATT Unix. Cool stuff. Not quite "massively parallel", though, in that I think it only went up to something like 128 or 256 nodes.
It was really cool to work on. It was fun being able to create a 100 gigibyte table. (Though it is getting less and less cool. Bear in mind that at the time I only had a 100 mb drive on my PC.)
The one problem I have had is that creditors will sometimes change your account number without telling you. If you don't notice the new number on the stub, the automatic service will happily pay to the old account. It usually takes a month or so to straighten that out.
The other issue I had was that I get my insurance and credit card from the same company, but from two different divisions. For a while, all my credit card payments were going to my insurance account. I was simultaneously getting "deadbeat" notices and "why are you sending us all this extra cash" notices from the same company.
Usually what that actually means is that you went to a real college, as opposed to a technical school, and that you can demonstrate that you had training in Comp Sci methods. If you can do that, the CS requirement usually vanishes.
Training in Comp Sci methods is especially important. I know a lot of kid like to think that they can learn everything by just hacking away, but unless you are a true genius, you really do learn something in a degree program that you won't just hacking around.
Someone ought to moderate the above post up. It is a very real danger.
The brain, and the senses as well. For example, the ultimate monitor would be an interface that hooks directly into the optic nerve and projects a screen, when desired, wherever in the environment you want it. The same could be done for the ears. Imagine having essentially a movie quality display literally everywhere you go.
In the same fifty years, I fully expect that we'll have good machine/human interfaces. Given those, I suspect it will be easier to simply improve the intelligent object we've got (the brain) rather than create a new one.
Most of the games you mention require that all AI be done in the background, as action occurs in the foreground. Since game makers usually view pretty graphics and smooth animation as primary, they tend to avoid any AI that might take lots of CPU cycles. Of course, lots of CPU cycles is exactly what you need if you want to create an AI that has any sort of strategic concept.
This is also true of strategic games like Civilization. Those games are far more complex than chess, yet though people will wait for two minutes for a chess computer to make a move, they complain if they have to wait ten seconds between turns in Civilization.
In general, game companies pretty much just suck at AI. I suspect few people have real training in it. Game AIs I've seen range from utter crap, to mediocre. A couple, like that in the "Warlords" series, do a little better. But in general, it is easier for game designers to use presets and scenerio designs as in "Age of Empires", allow the computer to cheat (certain aspects of "Civilization", or give it certain combat/production bonuses. A good AI takes real talent, while those other things are pretty easy to do.
But anyway, don't ever thing that game AI has anything at all to do with AI as it is practiced at places like MIT.
The problem here is the implication that one day, a bunch of humans, just like us, are suddenly going to find themselves obsolete, and either destroyed, or perhaps ignored, but some new, superintelligent entity that they created. But I don't see it happening that way.
Instead, what we will see is a series of gradual changes. Genetically superior humans won't appear overnight. Instead, humans will be slowly made superior, genetically. Superintelligent robots won't suddenly appear. Instead, they will slowly improve, and around the same time, I firmly believe that hardware will start being connected to human brains and human limbs.
So yes, in a thousand years, the rulers of this earth may not seem much like what we'd call human. But I'm willing to bet that if you looked over the period in between, you wouldn't see "humans" going extinct. You'd see a slow process of evolution (not darwinian, but directed) towards something greater. You'd never be able to find a dividing line between "human" and what's next.
And while that may be frightening to some, it isn't really to me. We are "greater", at least in certain anthropomoprhic senses, than the ape-like creature that we are descended from. But that creature did not "go extinct". It evolved into us. Something is going to evolve from us. This doesn't necessarily mean that we're all going to die at the hands of some sort of "SkyNet" AI. It just means that we aren't the be-all and end-all of creation.
The human race won't be supplanted by "homo superior". It will become "homo superior".
Do you fail to see the contradiction there?