If they sold a $100 computer, I'd like to suggest
warming up some great old ideas:
Why _load_ Firefox/OOffice when you can run it
in the ROM? It might run a bit slower, but the perceived responsiveness is often determined by application startup time.
Why _boot_ a machine at all? I'm ok with developers' machines being booted, since they
stay up 27/7 anyway. But a consumer who wants
to check something on the Net or write a quick letter can't be bothered to go through a 3-minute boot cycle.
Also, it can't hurt to modify the hardware slightly so that a LED indicates there are new emails even if the whole box is switched off, to save energy.
I hope I will live to see a real consumer computer
that is as much an appliance as a microwave oven.
The only idea that goes a little bit in this direction is modern BIOSes that have a built-in Web browser that doesn't need an OS.
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MacKay's Dasher is very useful since it's a simple
tactile input device. Unlike T9, which speeds up
entry using a conservative keypad, text entry with Dasher is based on up/down movements, which some
handicapped people are capable of that could not
operate an ordinary keypad.
The statistical properties of languages are utilized in most (successful) approaches for natural language processing, from part-of-speech tagging, information extraction, syntactic parsing, machine translation to question answering; you could almost say that NLP=S(tatistical)NLP nowadays.
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Next thing, Amazon opens a cornershop behind my house.
On second thought it wouldn't be too bad to be able to browse all O'Reilly books, real paper version, at 5:18 a.m...
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UCSD Pascal (not the first Pascal, mind you) was such an utterly cool system.
Well, it already had a virtual machine (like the Java JVM), the P-machine back in the early 1980s. PASCAL is very readable, and Wirth's booklet on compiler construction is still a great introduction to compilers, which contains the very short and readable source code of a simple compiler.
However the editor sucked as much as vi, as you had to press 'i' for insert. Thanks to Emacs, pico and fellows.
For those lamenting FORTRAN posters: There was a system around called Oxford PASCAL for the Commodore C64, which actually was an interpreter, probably the only PASCAL with line numbers...
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There are the following individual problems, which
should not be bagged together, since they require
different solutions:
1) The current tool runs with Administrator permissions.
This is simply a tiny technical oddity that Google will soon be able to fix.
2) The current tool indexes cache content.
We users don't want that. Even if the fact that
it merely exposes underlying OS or app security
flaws (by virtue of the power of indexing), it's
not likely to impress users if Google brings
these things up as search results.
This can be easily fixed by excluding cached content from indexing.
3) Search might move in a direction where global
repositories and Web content are accessed using
the same query.
This is tough: because it's such a useful feature, many people will want to have it. However, by submitting all your local searches in parallel
also to a global search engine that maintains
knowledge about your IP and a cookie, Google will
soon more about you than your next to kin.
This needs a theoretical solution (most likely there needs to be an intermediate layer of anonymization, like Freenet has it).
4) Google might be transferring "interesting" local content they find to their site to spy on you.
I don't believe they do this now, but that doesn't matter. The problem is they might in the future: imagine a fictional country passed a law that allowed their agents to get access to Google's infrastructure to fight a made-up enemy....
Right now, you have to TRUST them, but nobody
monitors this in a principled way, so there should
be a well-found mechanism in place to render potential temptations meaningless. Freedom is at stake here.
5) Even if you index only your own account, you don't want to see everything all the time. When you're being watched by your nine-year old boy, a search for mum shouldn't perhaps bring up and email revealing somebody close to him will probably die from cancer within 6 months. There are more examples.
This is tough, and it's a conceptual HCI issue, and a social one, not a technical security flaw.
One solution could be to introduce a MODE to indicate the privacy/trust level of your context/environment, e.g. "I'm working alone at home", "I'm working in a group of colleagues in my company", "I'm on a public terminal in a busy shopping mall" (some people access their home machines remotely). The problem is somewhat related to watching other people type their passwords: it's always been part of hacker etiquette to look away when somebody logs on to a machine rather than stare on their fingers and take pencil notes. But the search issue is more complex, and there really needs to be a mechanism in place, not a social norm.
In summary, the Google desktop search tool is useful, because it forces us to re-think security
and privacy as boundaries between local and global
systems are blurred. After all, the network is the computer.
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"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
on
Good Bad Attitude
·
· Score: 1
When he was working on the Manhattan Project, Richard Feynman used to amuse himself by breaking into safes containing secret documents.
I've always been wondering where the title
of his book came from (recommended, BTW). Now I suspect it's what his boss said when he found him "working" on his office safe late at night...
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Some of these are even available for research purposes. The HCI expert Ben Shneiderman is said to prepare the release of his personal email archive for research purposes. Another source of emails is the Enron corpus.
For researchers in style or computational linguistics, the prospect of getting the hands on
more people's INBOXes is mind-boggling. Eventually, I hope this will improve the horrible present-day interfaces to email.
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Claiming that this is a re-definition of 'human' for ulterior purposes implies there's a clear and accepted definition which obviously includes embryos.
This indeed assumes the not unreasonable:
human = organism of species homo sapiens
person = living human being (life being defined by the usual 5 scientific criteria)
My perspective is that humanity has more to do with the mind than the body, and I'd be more willing to extend whatever ethical privileges it implies to other intelligent animals than to embryos.
Okay, but then you have to answer: what about people in coma, old people, or people
with severe damage? Will they lose their rights
once they lose their mind irreversibly? I say no.
my existence is predicated on a huge number of contingencies of which this possibility would just be one, and my lack of existence would not change much.
I find this view interesting. But: because you might grow and prosper, and enjoy life and love and be loved by others.
This feelings exist, are likely to even have
a material correlate in some brains, but measuring
what you mean to the people around you might
prove elusive taking an outside stance.
To say that anyone doesn't make much of a difference isn't evident to me.
For those who disagree, I'd be interested how you feel about the following. Suppose an unfertilized ovum could be somehow modified so when fertilized it could not possibly develop beyond the initial stages of growth. Would that be an acceptable source of stem cells, or would tampering with the unfertilized ovum in that way be unethical?
I find it unethical because you are still
the cause of the new organism's death (intentionally!), despite the fact that when you modified it you were actually allowed to do so (but not with the intention of subsequently fertilising it afterwards. It would be fine with me if you destroyed the unfertilised egg (just organic material, part of somebody's body who "owns" that egg like their hair, but as soon as there's a new life with independent set of genes that starts to grow to become a separate person it should be protected, especially if the ethical question is controversial, and the embryo can't defend him or herself), I don't think it's right to intent to cause its destruction. Of course it may die _naturally_, but that happens all the time, people die at all stages of life. Natural death might occur in large numbers, with high probabilities etc, but that can never justify taking life _un_naturally, IMHO. Your example is analoguous to somebody setting up a trap for somebody else, who will step in it and die; you just set up the trap before the passer-by is born.
Can you imagine that embryo could be you?
Assume yes, if you could vote now whether it
was right to let YOU continue to live when you were in the same state, you surely will say "Yes!" (I hope). And these single-cell units can't say yes, but if you waited for long enough you COULD ask them, and most of them would indeed not very likely say "no".
If you agree with me on this one, you might also agree that these embryos need somebody's special protection until they're old enough to act by and speak out for themselves (cry for help, take a lawyer, run away from researchers etc;-).
Both are humans, I think that's what we agree on (as it doesn't depend on time).
Now the question is: do we grant every human the right to life?
Before you go moving the 24 week target, have a look at what happens if you go too early, you become the Catholic Church, and then every sperm IS sacred.
No, because sperm cells and eggs are not human
beings. They are simply cells. Things change
dramatically once you bring them together.
From that moment, a NEW human life starts.
Diploid chomosome set, new set of genes due to
potential chross-overs/mutations, and if you don't
work against it (and modulo naturally ocurring deaths) it will get born and surf the Web,
read slashdot and stuff. Union of egg and sperm
is everybody's canonical $t_0$, so to speak.
If doing research on 200 stem cell clones resulted in the cure to aids, which would cure 20 million, would the research be worth it?
That's a very important argument, however, this
type of argument has been studied in philosophy
extensively under the name of Utilitarianism:
do just what maximises good to most people.
The drawback of such a philosophy is that it
lends itself to sacrificing minorities for the
benefit of the rest. So I argue that human
rights must never become object of a utilitarian argument.
I'd also want some research done into pain, reaction and the like, of the stem cells, to indeed see if there was any capacity for suffering or any suffering going on.
I think the stem cells themselves are not
problematic (as they don't contain all the elements of a human being anymore).
So they aren't humans. However the process of
getting there is unethical.
It's the killing of spurious embryos that
is the problem.
Other than that, they are just organic matter, same as a menstrual cycles, or sperm, livers, kidneys and hearts.
Yes, just organic matter.
I'm still amazed that the people arguing against this aren't arguing against heart/liver/kidney transplants as being traumatic to hearts/livers/kidneys.
They article should distinguish better between
stem cell research, where "spurious/superfluous embryos are discarded" (human embryos killed without their consent, i.e. technically this is murder) and cloning. The title suggests the latter, but the article is more about the former.
While cloning sounds scary (due to its sci-fi legacy), stem cell research _is_ scary, not in itself, but just because in its course human embryos get killed on a daily basis (although some few labs freeze them and keep them, in which case I can't be opposed, of course).
Rgarding stem cell research people should really
wake up about the language keen researchers are
using. Considering an instance of human life to be "superfluous" is very dangerous and reminds me (being German and thus carrying special responsibility in this matter) of the Nazi's language, who declared handicapped people and Jews
"unworthy" life in order to create a pretext to extinguish them. It is wrong to re-define what a human is in order to be able to destroy it. I don't want to equate stem
cell research with the darkest chapter of German history here, but as a linguist the striking similarity of the euphemisms used in both cases in the media is just appaling to me, just check for yourself.
The problem, of course, is ABSTRACTION: lay people who read these papers only hear "blabla... cure illness... blabla stem cell... blabla... " and get to think "oh, sounds useful" rather than trying to imagine that a little embryo could basically have been _them_, just at a very early age! You don't want to BE that embryo that isn't needed by researchers and gets 'discarded'.
Moving on from ethics (what you should do) to a more scientific note (what you can do, instead), there seem to be alternative proposals around that are equally promosing as stem cell research, but do not require that embyos get created that are not raised:
Dr Charli Kruse and his team at the Institute for Medical Molecular Biology at the University of Lübeck has been successful in developing a new process which has enabled him to isolate cells from various animal and human tissues which have the properties of pluripotent adult stem cells.
(just Google for the guy to get more info)
AFAIK, they have even patented their method by now.
So, please, dear researchers in Harvard, reconsider!
[Greetings from Edinburgh, where Dolly was cloned, and where _sadly_ stem cell research is not illegal at the moment.]
Very obscure circumstances. Is there no official police statement anywhere?
It has been verified that the returned hard-drives are the originals... The hard-drives will be treated as "hacked" (compromised)
That's an interesting aspect. It might be worth
not re-formatting the drives, but rather investigate whether any spyware has been installed (or maybe data modified), using the same forensic methods that law enforcement agencies use.
The hallmark of democracy is that state powers
are also controlled themselves, by institutions
and its citizens.
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Computer science = abstract + conquer!
on
Java 1.5 vs C#
·
· Score: 1
since both languages are built to support OOP from the ground-up, their constructs become almost identical
Since the two languages have striking similarities, one wonders when people will
begin to develop source code translators to
shield problem-oriented developers from the
idiosyncrac differences between the two languages.
For instance, ISI's STELLA
is a LISP dialect which compiles to
Common LISP, C++ and Java(R). Along the same line,
it would be nice to have a compiler for a "JaC#" language that compiles to both, utilising tons
of Java APIs and C#'s ability to do native compilation (I am aware there are portability limits, but I'd much rather be able to be confined to a common subset while able to easily move between the C++/Java/C# worlds than using obscure language features that others can't decipher anyway).
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You just have to give the robot a list of things together with the apropriate detergent.
Okay. But if location of things is not fixed (chairs) or can contain objects (tables, desks), then you need to recognize objects before matching "things" against your detergent list. Pattern recognition is hard.
Meanwhile, my house could use cleaning, and there aren't any robots to do it for me.
Maybe roller-skating is much easier than
cleaning a real home with all its niches and
obstacles, after all. You'd have to teach the
robot that the carpet has to be hoovered, and the
windows need to be cleaned with a sponge, water and a few drops of dish washing liquid in it and not the other way round. You need to tell it not to pour any water over your brand new 21" TFT, and you'd have to hardwire the use of stonger detergents for cleaning the toilet. You might even have to encode a map of your place so that the robot doesn't get lost (if the robot needs energy, do you really have _two_ unused sockets in each room of your house--one for the robot, one for the hoover)?
There's two way of tackling this: bottom-up or
top-down. Top-down means you do research on robots
that roller-skate, somebody else might do a little
project teaching robots how to climb stairs etc,
and none of the might have applications in mind.
The bottom-up approach starts from the current-day
state of the art and uses proven engineering principles to push that state of the art just a little bit further with each product generation.
So you'd start designing hoovers, then hoovers that detect vases and avoid bumping into them,
then you add an additional arm that cleans windows on the fly etc. Each generation is rolled out to alpha/beter test users and eventually to real customers before the next stage. In practice,
the first type of research and development ("academic") and the latter ("industrial") usually
interact, but not nearly as much as one would wish, since assumptions and motivations are very different.
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My dishwaster just starting leaking all over the floor btw. Damn you murphy!
You're cursing the wrong guy. The real (Edward A.) Murphy(, Jr.) can't be blamed for your dishwashers leakage because (a) he is dead now AFAIK and (b) he was an aircraft engineer, not a diswasher technician...
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NB: 'Liebniz' -> read: Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz
[I]t's quite difficult to spend time in Cambridge, England without encountering Newton.
Well, hard to not encounter anyone who has a King Kong sized statue in his old college's chapel.
I wonder whether the discovery of the Turing Machine, the machine that can be all machines, at the very same place might not be
an equally impressive achievement.
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South Korea is particularly vulnerable to cyber-crime because it has the world's highest usage of broadband services and relatively poor levels of internet security.
Is there any evidence to back up the claim that Koreans have poorer IT security than, say, the US or Europe?
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Method for licensing software to an entity, including determining a per-employee cost for the software, determining a number of employees of the entity, and determining a total licensing cost using the number of employees and the per-employee cost.
They should be ashamed to even think about patenting a no-brainer like that. No honourable
geek would even consider working for Sun now.
Come to think of it, how about filing a patent
entitled 'Method and apparatus to evcuate human excrements using a water-flushed chair (T.O.I.L.E.T)'?
What, you have seen/used such a device before...?
When the patent system was invented, it was never meant to keep ideas proprietary. It was meant to encourage innovation by protecting significant investments in research and development. Licensing
models might be clever, but they aren't a result
of investing in a 5-year plan to build a new factory. Now it's time to modify the law to ensure that the innovation-fostering rationale gets to
apply again.
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Likely this will result in better traffic monitoring, lots of traffic planning data to analyze to help prevent traffic jams, and less privacy for everyone.
I'd rather they sign and ratify
the Kyoto
agreement like 166 odd other states, and work on means of transportation that consume less energy and don't pollute our environment as much, because THAT'S what we really need (IMHO).
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Slashdot Mirror
- Why _load_ Firefox/OOffice when you can run it
in the ROM? It might run a bit slower, but the perceived responsiveness is often determined by application startup time.
- Why _boot_ a machine at all? I'm ok with developers' machines being booted, since they
stay up 27/7 anyway. But a consumer who wants
to check something on the Net or write a quick letter can't be bothered to go through a 3-minute boot cycle.
- Also, it can't hurt to modify the hardware slightly so that a LED indicates there are new emails even if the whole box is switched off, to save energy.
I hope I will live to see a real consumer computer that is as much an appliance as a microwave oven.The only idea that goes a little bit in this direction is modern BIOSes that have a built-in Web browser that doesn't need an OS.
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The statistical properties of languages are utilized in most (successful) approaches for natural language processing, from part-of-speech tagging, information extraction, syntactic parsing, machine translation to question answering; you could almost say that NLP=S(tatistical)NLP nowadays.
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On second thought it wouldn't be too bad to be able to browse all O'Reilly books, real paper version, at 5:18 a.m...
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Well, it already had a virtual machine (like the Java JVM), the P-machine back in the early 1980s. PASCAL is very readable, and Wirth's booklet on compiler construction is still a great introduction to compilers, which contains the very short and readable source code of a simple compiler.
However the editor sucked as much as vi, as you had to press 'i' for insert. Thanks to Emacs, pico and fellows.
For those lamenting FORTRAN posters: There was a system around called Oxford PASCAL for the Commodore C64, which actually was an interpreter, probably the only PASCAL with line numbers...
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1) The current tool runs with Administrator permissions.
This is simply a tiny technical oddity that Google will soon be able to fix.
2) The current tool indexes cache content.
We users don't want that. Even if the fact that it merely exposes underlying OS or app security flaws (by virtue of the power of indexing), it's not likely to impress users if Google brings these things up as search results.
This can be easily fixed by excluding cached content from indexing.
3) Search might move in a direction where global repositories and Web content are accessed using the same query.
This is tough: because it's such a useful feature, many people will want to have it. However, by submitting all your local searches in parallel also to a global search engine that maintains knowledge about your IP and a cookie, Google will soon more about you than your next to kin. This needs a theoretical solution (most likely there needs to be an intermediate layer of anonymization, like Freenet has it).
4) Google might be transferring "interesting" local content they find to their site to spy on you.
I don't believe they do this now, but that doesn't matter. The problem is they might in the future: imagine a fictional country passed a law that allowed their agents to get access to Google's infrastructure to fight a made-up enemy.... Right now, you have to TRUST them, but nobody monitors this in a principled way, so there should be a well-found mechanism in place to render potential temptations meaningless. Freedom is at stake here.
5) Even if you index only your own account, you don't want to see everything all the time. When you're being watched by your nine-year old boy, a search for mum shouldn't perhaps bring up and email revealing somebody close to him will probably die from cancer within 6 months. There are more examples.
This is tough, and it's a conceptual HCI issue, and a social one, not a technical security flaw. One solution could be to introduce a MODE to indicate the privacy/trust level of your context/environment, e.g. "I'm working alone at home", "I'm working in a group of colleagues in my company", "I'm on a public terminal in a busy shopping mall" (some people access their home machines remotely). The problem is somewhat related to watching other people type their passwords: it's always been part of hacker etiquette to look away when somebody logs on to a machine rather than stare on their fingers and take pencil notes. But the search issue is more complex, and there really needs to be a mechanism in place, not a social norm.
In summary, the Google desktop search tool is useful, because it forces us to re-think security and privacy as boundaries between local and global systems are blurred. After all, the network is the computer.
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I've always been wondering where the title of his book came from (recommended, BTW). Now I suspect it's what his boss said when he found him "working" on his office safe late at night...
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For researchers in style or computational linguistics, the prospect of getting the hands on more people's INBOXes is mind-boggling. Eventually, I hope this will improve the horrible present-day interfaces to email.
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This indeed assumes the not unreasonable:
human = organism of species homo sapiens
person = living human being (life being defined by the usual 5 scientific criteria)
My perspective is that humanity has more to do with the mind than the body, and I'd be more willing to extend whatever ethical privileges it implies to other intelligent animals than to embryos.
Okay, but then you have to answer: what about people in coma, old people, or people with severe damage? Will they lose their rights once they lose their mind irreversibly? I say no.
my existence is predicated on a huge number of contingencies of which this possibility would just be one, and my lack of existence would not change much.
I find this view interesting. But: because you might grow and prosper, and enjoy life and love and be loved by others. This feelings exist, are likely to even have a material correlate in some brains, but measuring what you mean to the people around you might prove elusive taking an outside stance.
To say that anyone doesn't make much of a difference isn't evident to me.
For those who disagree, I'd be interested how you feel about the following. Suppose an unfertilized ovum could be somehow modified so when fertilized it could not possibly develop beyond the initial stages of growth. Would that be an acceptable source of stem cells, or would tampering with the unfertilized ovum in that way be unethical?
I find it unethical because you are still the cause of the new organism's death (intentionally!), despite the fact that when you modified it you were actually allowed to do so (but not with the intention of subsequently fertilising it afterwards. It would be fine with me if you destroyed the unfertilised egg (just organic material, part of somebody's body who "owns" that egg like their hair, but as soon as there's a new life with independent set of genes that starts to grow to become a separate person it should be protected, especially if the ethical question is controversial, and the embryo can't defend him or herself), I don't think it's right to intent to cause its destruction. Of course it may die _naturally_, but that happens all the time, people die at all stages of life. Natural death might occur in large numbers, with high probabilities etc, but that can never justify taking life _un_naturally, IMHO. Your example is analoguous to somebody setting up a trap for somebody else, who will step in it and die; you just set up the trap before the passer-by is born.
Can you imagine that embryo could be you? Assume yes, if you could vote now whether it was right to let YOU continue to live when you were in the same state, you surely will say "Yes!" (I hope). And these single-cell units can't say yes, but if you waited for long enough you COULD ask them, and most of them would indeed not very likely say "no". ;-).
If you agree with me on this one, you might also agree that these embryos need somebody's special protection until they're old enough to act by and speak out for themselves (cry for help, take a lawyer, run away from researchers etc
Both are humans, I think that's what we agree on (as it doesn't depend on time). Now the question is: do we grant every human the right to life?
Before you go moving the 24 week target, have a look at what happens if you go too early, you become the Catholic Church, and then every sperm IS sacred.
No, because sperm cells and eggs are not human beings. They are simply cells. Things change dramatically once you bring them together. From that moment, a NEW human life starts. Diploid chomosome set, new set of genes due to potential chross-overs/mutations, and if you don't work against it (and modulo naturally ocurring deaths) it will get born and surf the Web, read slashdot and stuff. Union of egg and sperm is everybody's canonical $t_0$, so to speak.
If doing research on 200 stem cell clones resulted in the cure to aids, which would cure 20 million, would the research be worth it?
That's a very important argument, however, this type of argument has been studied in philosophy extensively under the name of Utilitarianism: do just what maximises good to most people. The drawback of such a philosophy is that it lends itself to sacrificing minorities for the benefit of the rest. So I argue that human rights must never become object of a utilitarian argument.
I'd also want some research done into pain, reaction and the like, of the stem cells, to indeed see if there was any capacity for suffering or any suffering going on.
I think the stem cells themselves are not problematic (as they don't contain all the elements of a human being anymore). So they aren't humans. However the process of getting there is unethical. It's the killing of spurious embryos that is the problem.
Other than that, they are just organic matter, same as a menstrual cycles, or sperm, livers, kidneys and hearts.
Yes, just organic matter.
I'm still amazed that the people arguing against this aren't arguing against heart/liver/kidney transplants as being traumatic to hearts/livers/kidneys.
Yeah, that is pseudo-science, so no comment.
Here's the URL of the research group: http://www.molbio.mu-luebeck.de/research.htm
Rgarding stem cell research people should really wake up about the language keen researchers are using. Considering an instance of human life to be "superfluous" is very dangerous and reminds me (being German and thus carrying special responsibility in this matter) of the Nazi's language, who declared handicapped people and Jews "unworthy" life in order to create a pretext to extinguish them. It is wrong to re-define what a human is in order to be able to destroy it. I don't want to equate stem cell research with the darkest chapter of German history here, but as a linguist the striking similarity of the euphemisms used in both cases in the media is just appaling to me, just check for yourself.
The problem, of course, is ABSTRACTION: lay people who read these papers only hear "blabla ... cure illness ... blabla stem cell ... blabla... " and get to think "oh, sounds useful" rather than trying to imagine that a little embryo could basically have been _them_, just at a very early age! You don't want to BE that embryo that isn't needed by researchers and gets 'discarded'.
Moving on from ethics (what you should do) to a more scientific note (what you can do, instead), there seem to be alternative proposals around that are equally promosing as stem cell research, but do not require that embyos get created that are not raised:
Dr Charli Kruse and his team at the Institute for Medical Molecular Biology at the University of Lübeck has been successful in developing a new process which has enabled him to isolate cells from various animal and human tissues which have the properties of pluripotent adult stem cells. (just Google for the guy to get more info)
AFAIK, they have even patented their method by now.
So, please, dear researchers in Harvard, reconsider!
[Greetings from Edinburgh, where Dolly was cloned, and where _sadly_ stem cell research is not illegal at the moment.]
It has been verified that the returned hard-drives are the originals ... The hard-drives will be treated as "hacked" (compromised)
That's an interesting aspect. It might be worth not re-formatting the drives, but rather investigate whether any spyware has been installed (or maybe data modified), using the same forensic methods that law enforcement agencies use.
The hallmark of democracy is that state powers are also controlled themselves, by institutions and its citizens.
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Since the two languages have striking similarities, one wonders when people will begin to develop source code translators to shield problem-oriented developers from the idiosyncrac differences between the two languages.
For instance, ISI's STELLA is a LISP dialect which compiles to Common LISP, C++ and Java(R). Along the same line, it would be nice to have a compiler for a "JaC#" language that compiles to both, utilising tons of Java APIs and C#'s ability to do native compilation (I am aware there are portability limits, but I'd much rather be able to be confined to a common subset while able to easily move between the C++/Java/C# worlds than using obscure language features that others can't decipher anyway).
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Okay. But if location of things is not fixed (chairs) or can contain objects (tables, desks), then you need to recognize objects before matching "things" against your detergent list. Pattern recognition is hard.
Maybe roller-skating is much easier than cleaning a real home with all its niches and obstacles, after all. You'd have to teach the robot that the carpet has to be hoovered, and the windows need to be cleaned with a sponge, water and a few drops of dish washing liquid in it and not the other way round. You need to tell it not to pour any water over your brand new 21" TFT, and you'd have to hardwire the use of stonger detergents for cleaning the toilet. You might even have to encode a map of your place so that the robot doesn't get lost (if the robot needs energy, do you really have _two_ unused sockets in each room of your house--one for the robot, one for the hoover)?
There's two way of tackling this: bottom-up or top-down. Top-down means you do research on robots that roller-skate, somebody else might do a little project teaching robots how to climb stairs etc, and none of the might have applications in mind. The bottom-up approach starts from the current-day state of the art and uses proven engineering principles to push that state of the art just a little bit further with each product generation. So you'd start designing hoovers, then hoovers that detect vases and avoid bumping into them, then you add an additional arm that cleans windows on the fly etc. Each generation is rolled out to alpha/beter test users and eventually to real customers before the next stage. In practice, the first type of research and development ("academic") and the latter ("industrial") usually interact, but not nearly as much as one would wish, since assumptions and motivations are very different.
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You're cursing the wrong guy. The real (Edward A.) Murphy(, Jr.) can't be blamed for your dishwashers leakage because (a) he is dead now AFAIK and (b) he was an aircraft engineer, not a diswasher technician...
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[I]t's quite difficult to spend time in Cambridge, England without encountering Newton.
Well, hard to not encounter anyone who has a King Kong sized statue in his old college's chapel.
I wonder whether the discovery of the Turing Machine, the machine that can be all machines, at the very same place might not be an equally impressive achievement.
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Could they analyze your files and give your government access to their index for cash?
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"Turn left!"
"Sorry, Dave, I can't do that."
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Is there any evidence to back up the claim that Koreans have poorer IT security than, say, the US or Europe?
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They should be ashamed to even think about patenting a no-brainer like that. No honourable geek would even consider working for Sun now.
Come to think of it, how about filing a patent entitled 'Method and apparatus to evcuate human excrements using a water-flushed chair (T.O.I.L.E.T)'? What, you have seen/used such a device before...?
When the patent system was invented, it was never meant to keep ideas proprietary. It was meant to encourage innovation by protecting significant investments in research and development. Licensing models might be clever, but they aren't a result of investing in a 5-year plan to build a new factory. Now it's time to modify the law to ensure that the innovation-fostering rationale gets to apply again.
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I'd rather they sign and ratify the Kyoto agreement like 166 odd other states, and work on means of transportation that consume less energy and don't pollute our environment as much, because THAT'S what we really need (IMHO).
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