Invisible barcodes tattoed on our foreheads? Beeing read by lasers as we shop groceries? And on every single citizen of the world / europe?
It don't take much to debunk a myth like that, it falls flat on it's face from the sheer impossiblity of a) managing to register and tattoing everyone without someone noticing, b) actually correlating all the data, and c) getting usefull information out. In short, the computer - espesially if it was based on the avilable technology in the early 70's - wouldn't been able to coope with the sheer amount of raw data.
I'm sure it's a bureaucrats wet dream to know everything about everyone, but it is beyond the realm of the possible. In order to believe this myth in the first place, you probaly has to be among those who wear tinfoilhats to stop the goverment from spying on you with rays... and if you are, nothing can change your mind on this, or convince you that man has walked on the moon.
News for nerds? Not really. Stuff that matters? Not to me at any rate. Something that made me smile a sunday morning? Sure did, and I needed that.
But it isn't natural selection if the selection is made by a sentinent beeing. By your logic, you might as well call the process that took a wolf (a wild predator, beutyfully fit to savagly tear elks into tiny bits) and turned it into a chihuahua (a teeny little thing most suited to be put out of it's misery) for a natural selection.
My statement stands. Evolution is unguided by intelligence, breeding is guided. Thus, this page of poems has nothing to do with evolution, and all to do with breeding. Off course, the end result is dependent on the first generation (just as you can say that the chihuahua exists in potentia in the genes of the wolf), but that don't turn the process into something it is not.
To qoute; The goal of this project is to see if non-negotiated collaboration can evolve interesting poetry using (un)natural selection.
Darwinism is all to do with natural selection, while this is un-natural selection. It's about breeding poems, nothing more. That aside, I must say I find the idea interesting, and the end result can't be worse than what a lot of modern poets spew out (these days, it seems like "art" is defined as what the selfproclaimed artist manages to sell).
For a true darwinistic approach thought, it ought to be possible do analyze a heapload of poems written by humans, derive a handfull of rules as to what defines a 'good' poem (lenght, avrage lenght of words etc etc etc) and write a program that 'culls the herd' strickly on basis of those rules, ie: the 50% of the population which come closest to fullfilling the rules (best adapted to their enviromant) are allowed to breed and give rise to the next geneartion, at which point the process repeats.
who can possibly resist if the word "Free" is in red and bold? Well, me for starters. Still, this one line of the article is taken from the opening, describing a more serious problem; the fact that much spam uses so called 'enchanted email', that is HTML-mail. For all the other bad thing about that, the one thing I find most sinister is that it is easy to have the html-code pull a picture or something from a remote server; thus making it easy to validate your e-mail adress (logicaly, if you open the mail, the adress they sendt it to is active). In short, banning 'enchanted email' would lessen the amout of spam, as well as the bandwith it steals.
Apart from that I got a chuckle out the fact that spammers now seem to be speaking 1337; Ze Foreign Accent
What: Replace letters with numbers or use nonsense accents
Example from the wild:
The best spamfilter - withthe least false positives - are the one most people of common sence has between his ears. Anything else are mearly sorting your mail according to a fixed set of rules.
Just like beeing an alcholic doesn't mean you're a drunk. If someone live out their alcoholism, s/he will become a drunk - if someone live out their paedofiliact tendencies, s/he will become a childmolester.
Please do not interprent the avbove statement as as defence for paedofiliacs. I find the idea sick and twisted - but I aslo belive that like beeing homosexual, some people just can't control what they are turned on by. Controlling their urges on the other hand, is something all grown-ups should and could be capable of.
Beeing a peadofile is a bit like beeing an alcoholic. If you got it, you have a problem you must work with to overcome.
I hope they get some austrlian spammers in the process.
Can't spammer in a lot of cases said to be fraudulent? Anyway, I'm not sure if I feel that this is good news. On one hand, anything that will make it easier to prevent childabuse and catch those sick, sick peadeofiliacts are a Good Thing (tm) in my book, but isn't the cost too high - stopping a whole raft of legitamate users of the services - in this cause?
I have a couple of free e-mails myself, neither is set up to identify myself from the information I voluntered (on Yahoo!Mail I'm a 96 yr old lady from West Virginia, on Hotmail I'm a 20yr old male from Brasil - funny thought since I'm thirtysomething and living in Norway). They are both excelent spamtraps, and just the thing to give to thsoe sites who demand that you register your e-mail to allow you in. They also are great for giving out in chatrooms, as you never knows who listens in. Just give out your spamtrap addy, reply to the one mail you wanted and hand that person your real adress (if you trust him/her).
Give me free webbased e-mail, or give me a spamfree 'net!
So an airline has said that they will start taping the cabind during flight, to prevent terrorism and other safety threats. Why is this bad? Is this any different from a drugstore or a bank having a surveilence camera running? No, it isn't. Do we complain about those? Not that I've heard.
I know, some of you may say that beeing taped while you're on board a plane is a breach of your right to privacy - but since when is a chartered plane your private area anyway? It's a public area, and when you're in public, you can be seen by others.
That said, I'm not too happy about them storing the video for ten years - two years should be the most, and unless something spectacular happened on the flight (like Elvis materialising and singing 'love me tender'), it should only be released to the proper authorities by the orders of a court. The one exeption to that rule would be if the carrier themself needed to use the video if it had to sue a passenger for air-rage (endangering the safety of the other passangers).
No, installing a few cameras in an airplane wont - as the article points out - prevernt terrists from attemting to take over the plane. But it might just be enought to stop that fatass next to you from getting hideously drunk and suffer from air-rage. And that can't be a bad thing, can it?
If you read the old icelandic sagas, you'll find that all documented attemts to colonize Vinland - which most likely was the area around Newfoundland - failed. The longest semi-permanent settlement I can recall, was no more than two years before they had to withdraw; partly because of external treats (ie; the native americans), partly because of internal quarrels.
As far as the Kensintongtonrunestone goes, it is widely accepted as a hoax (allthought I did find and include a link claiming the opposite). To sum up; The inscription doesnt follow the formula commonly used on runestones in scandinavia, use of a word not used in the scandinavian languages at the time, date (1362) out of whack with reality (by 1362, the old vikings had long since settled down and stopped exploring - and the tradition of putting up runestones had died out as well), the runic alphabet used to write the stone is younger than the date placed on the stone (in particulary the J-rune, which wasn't in use until around the mid 1500's).
Before anyone goes apeshit on me here; yes, runes was in common usage among norwegians and other scandinavians at the time the stone is supposed to date from; we have plenty of evidence of that from archeological digs in our old cities. But this sort of text, and so long texts, are not found in scandinavia. The vikings and their decendants were not a people of the book, allthought quite a lot of ordinary people could read and write in a fashion.
I have no explonations why you got a group of "fair-skinned" and "fair-haired" indians up in Michigan thought - but it's probaly just a coincidence of genetics. Blue eyes and blond hair are both recessive genes; meaning that if norse and native american mixed blood, those traits should be gone in a few generations anyway.
Most of the countires in northern europe speaks some branch of the germanic laungue-group (finnish and hungarian are the major exeption). The norsemen spoke - obviously as it may seem - a lingo often called norse, or old nordic. Even back then there was a noticable difference between what the swedes, the danes and we norwegians spoke. The old norweigans spoke a subvariant frequently called 'old norwegian' (yes, it is blindingly obvious), which were spread to Iceland, Greenland and the illfated colonies in Vinland (north america). In fact, the spoken language of Iceland is very close to the norse tounge.
Useless fact; the english didn't have a seperate word for dying of hunger until the vikings had been visiting for a few years.
It is the same here in Norway. In fact, only idiots actually pays a montly fee, unless they a) have it thru their job (meaning the company picks up the bill) or b) has broadband and thus ain't using the telephonewire for access.
For the benefit of our US friends who may wonder how the ISP can survive giving away free service with a usefull numbver of perks (e-mail adresses by the handfull, webspace and so on), lemme point out two things that explains why. Firstly, we pay by the minute to use the phone, no matter if we call grandma or to connect to the net. Secondly, the major ISP in Norway are also telcos...
Or even, why Open Source Software? I can see several possible reasons for the particular choice of operatingsystem they have picked to train the afgans in.
Linux is essesially free off charge (if you pick the right distros), which means that the UN and the afgan goverment can spend their money on other things than buying lisences for the OS we all love to hate.
Linux (and most other OSS) are not tied to a particular country of origin. Face it folks, both OS X, the various flavours of Windows and many of the commercial *nix belong to corpetations based in the US, and the US has managed to make itself less than popular with the UN lately.
You can still get support for distrebutions of Linux that can and will run on older machines, like 386s and 486s. Thus it is possible to run the infrastructure on the hardware that is already present in the country, instead of forcing them to invest in the latest and greatest from Intel or AMD.
Stability may be an issue. Linux has a reputation for beeing more stabel than a certain other OS, and it is certainly less likely to catch a virus. Thus money can be saved on support.
Overall, I think the monetary considerations are the most important here - while the chance to kick the US on the leg may be a (happy) coincidence. And off course, the other question is; Do MicroSoft or Apple even provide a local flavour of their operatingsystems?
Like other online publishers, The New York Times charges readers to access articles on its Web site. But why pay when you can use Google instead?
Scuse me? I thought the NYT did free registrations?
And you got to love the last part of the article, where they discuss if Google's cache is in fact legal - which should have some bearing on the/.cache some of us wish for when we have taken down yet another interesting website...
Say, for the sake of argument, that the consept of 'car' has been patented (by Karl Benz, who did in fact apply for a patent of a "vehicle with gas engine operation," on January 29, 1886) and that the patent is still in force, and I build a faster car (which does all the things Karl's threewheeler does, only faster, with a more fancy bodywork and with four wheels), I should be awarded a patent on the consept of 'faster car'?
To me that sounds like a load of something you'll find just to the rear of a male bovine, and if it is true that the patentsystem works this way it needs changing. Imitation is not inovation, even if the implementation differ behind the scenes.
Apart from the fact that I don't blog (tried, but gave up as I couldn't find anything to say that even I found interesting), you're right. The in-crowd of the cyberworld must now find something else to do, so that they can look down on the 'common luser'.
In a way, this is very much like trying to follow the latest taste in music and clothing to stay 'cool'.
If you're doing something I don't approve off (ie; developing software for a closed system) you're dumb and I'll use a whole page on this here interweb to tell everyone.
Okay. so he has one or two points, the first is that the corp that owns the OS can develop their own software and give it away to push you out of business. Funny, I can't say I see that MS Paint or even Adobe PhotoShop (btw, by his logic, Adobe are sharecroppers) have prevented PaintShopPro from becoming successfull... I don't see how the inclussion of CD-burner functionality in the latest OS from the softwaregiant we love to hate has slowed down the sale of for instance Nero... and despite the fact that a certain company bundles a browser with their OS, Opera and other alternative browsers seems to be gathering followers by the minute.
His second point is more strained; that the one controlling the OS is the one in controll of all sotware that runs on it. This is, as even I can see, stupid at best and FUD at worst. If this held even remoptly true, each and every firm that makes any sort of software, be it wordprossessors, MP3-rippers or graphicsmanipulators, would provide their own underlying OS to stop others from using it to something else... No one can controll what people run on their computers, no matter what OS.
There will always be a marked for second- and thirdparty developers on all operatingsystems, both closed and open source. The difference is, if you develop for closed source, it's more accepted to actually ask for some money to compensate for the time you too to write the code.
So in the end, I'll say he is plain wrong. There are a number of good reasons to develop for OSS, but this is not one of them.
I'm sure someone will manage to get it running some flavour of Linux. In the mean time, I'll be happy to run Contiki on my real C64 - unless someone can come up with a linux-distro for it that is.
If this 'new C64' turns out to be naught more than a reasonable standard PC bundled with an emulator and some repackaged software, porting Linux to it should be as hard as placing the Knoppix CD in the drive and booting it up...
Personaly, I would think it would be great if they brought back to life some of the old hardware - the VIC was an interesting grapichscontroller with it's independent sprites, and the SID could make music like no chip has before or after.
If you're a youngster and wish to learn more about one of the most influential micros in the early 80's, you may want to look at Marko Mäkelä 8-bit server. His document page is a treasure in it's own right.
I did in fact read the article first. The entire point of my post was that instead of arguing beforehand if it'll work, they ought to build it and then see if the current theories do infact hold water.
There is a simple, yet somewhat expencive, way to see who's right.
Built a satelite / spaceprobe with a whopping huge and light (mylar maybe?) sail. Launch into space (as the sail will be then main experiment on this one, it can be relatively light and might piggyback anotehr launch). Deploy sail. Wait and see what happens. THEN one can sit down ans find out if current theories are on the mark.
...a craftsmanly Russian program defeated a sophisticated genetic algorithm from NASA.
This is not the first time something craftmanslike can beat something sofisticated. Even thought the following examples are strictly hardware, the general idea is the same.
Take, for instace the T34
vs the Tiger. The Tiger was one of the most sofisticated - if not the most sofisticated - tanks in production at the time, but were drowned by hordes of the more craftmanlike and easily manufactured T34.
The battle between a simple, craftmanlike approach and sofistication was once again seen in the early sixties, in the race to get a man into space. The russians fielded the Vostok, a design born more out of solid craftmanship than anything else. It's very simplicity was a strenght, allowing it to undertake missions up to five days long, while the american attemt at a longdurationflight in the highly sofisicated Mercury lasted just under a day and a half, leaving Gordon Cooper in a virtualy dead capsule (having to eyeball his attitude thru the windown and manualy fire the retros). Granted, one reason the US had to go for sofisication is that their rockets simply couldn't lift as much as russian rockets... but whereas derivatives of the Vostok still flies (as unmanned recoverable satelites), the line that breed the Mercury is dead.
Sofistication is well and good, but many times a less sofisticated but better crafted designs / programs can outperform it. Sofistication for it's own sake is usually not worth the tradeoffs.
To misqoute one of my favorite authors, "it sounds like jargon to me". The person behind this patent is, as far as I'm given to understand, a marriage councellor. It is not expected that someone whos job mainly consist of asking people to stop stabbing one another and start communicating has the same profeccianal lingo as a teacher in etichal theory. The few words they share, they will most likely have different defintions of.
That said, I think that the patent description and the scematic diagram is hogwash, and the name choosen is not even fit to be called that. As far as I can gather thsi isn't an etical AI, but an emotional one; by sounding like it care it should help the users reach whatever end they have in mind easier. And it's not even an AI; it is an simulated AI... if artifical inteligence simulate natural intelligence, how do you simulate AI itself?
And 'The patent shows someone who has knowledge of the A.I. field how to make the invention.'? What happened to having a working prototype before you were granted a patent?
Anywhy, it looks like a glorified and costly voicemail system to me... but then I don't work with ethichs or AI on a daily, or even yearly, basis.
Slashdot Mirror
Invisible barcodes tattoed on our foreheads? Beeing read by lasers as we shop groceries? And on every single citizen of the world / europe?
It don't take much to debunk a myth like that, it falls flat on it's face from the sheer impossiblity of a) managing to register and tattoing everyone without someone noticing, b) actually correlating all the data, and c) getting usefull information out. In short, the computer - espesially if it was based on the avilable technology in the early 70's - wouldn't been able to coope with the sheer amount of raw data.
I'm sure it's a bureaucrats wet dream to know everything about everyone, but it is beyond the realm of the possible. In order to believe this myth in the first place, you probaly has to be among those who wear tinfoilhats to stop the goverment from spying on you with rays... and if you are, nothing can change your mind on this, or convince you that man has walked on the moon.
News for nerds? Not really. Stuff that matters? Not to me at any rate. Something that made me smile a sunday morning? Sure did, and I needed that.
But it isn't natural selection if the selection is made by a sentinent beeing. By your logic, you might as well call the process that took a wolf (a wild predator, beutyfully fit to savagly tear elks into tiny bits) and turned it into a chihuahua (a teeny little thing most suited to be put out of it's misery) for a natural selection.
My statement stands. Evolution is unguided by intelligence, breeding is guided. Thus, this page of poems has nothing to do with evolution, and all to do with breeding. Off course, the end result is dependent on the first generation (just as you can say that the chihuahua exists in potentia in the genes of the wolf), but that don't turn the process into something it is not.
To qoute; The goal of this project is to see if non-negotiated collaboration can evolve interesting poetry using (un)natural selection.
Darwinism is all to do with natural selection, while this is un-natural selection. It's about breeding poems, nothing more. That aside, I must say I find the idea interesting, and the end result can't be worse than what a lot of modern poets spew out (these days, it seems like "art" is defined as what the selfproclaimed artist manages to sell).
For a true darwinistic approach thought, it ought to be possible do analyze a heapload of poems written by humans, derive a handfull of rules as to what defines a 'good' poem (lenght, avrage lenght of words etc etc etc) and write a program that 'culls the herd' strickly on basis of those rules, ie: the 50% of the population which come closest to fullfilling the rules (best adapted to their enviromant) are allowed to breed and give rise to the next geneartion, at which point the process repeats.
who can possibly resist if the word "Free" is in red and bold? Well, me for starters. Still, this one line of the article is taken from the opening, describing a more serious problem; the fact that much spam uses so called 'enchanted email', that is HTML-mail. For all the other bad thing about that, the one thing I find most sinister is that it is easy to have the html-code pull a picture or something from a remote server; thus making it easy to validate your e-mail adress (logicaly, if you open the mail, the adress they sendt it to is active). In short, banning 'enchanted email' would lessen the amout of spam, as well as the bandwith it steals.
Apart from that I got a chuckle out the fact that spammers now seem to be speaking 1337;
Ze Foreign Accent
What: Replace letters with numbers or use nonsense accents
Example from the wild:
V1DE0 T4PE M0RTG4GE
Fántástìç -- eárn mõnéy thrôugh unçõlleçted judgments
The best spamfilter - withthe least false positives - are the one most people of common sence has between his ears. Anything else are mearly sorting your mail according to a fixed set of rules.
Just like beeing an alcholic doesn't mean you're a drunk. If someone live out their alcoholism, s/he will become a drunk - if someone live out their paedofiliact tendencies, s/he will become a childmolester.
Please do not interprent the avbove statement as as defence for paedofiliacs. I find the idea sick and twisted - but I aslo belive that like beeing homosexual, some people just can't control what they are turned on by. Controlling their urges on the other hand, is something all grown-ups should and could be capable of.
Beeing a peadofile is a bit like beeing an alcoholic. If you got it, you have a problem you must work with to overcome.
I hope they get some austrlian spammers in the process.
Can't spammer in a lot of cases said to be fraudulent? Anyway, I'm not sure if I feel that this is good news. On one hand, anything that will make it easier to prevent childabuse and catch those sick, sick peadeofiliacts are a Good Thing (tm) in my book, but isn't the cost too high - stopping a whole raft of legitamate users of the services - in this cause?
I have a couple of free e-mails myself, neither is set up to identify myself from the information I voluntered (on Yahoo!Mail I'm a 96 yr old lady from West Virginia, on Hotmail I'm a 20yr old male from Brasil - funny thought since I'm thirtysomething and living in Norway). They are both excelent spamtraps, and just the thing to give to thsoe sites who demand that you register your e-mail to allow you in. They also are great for giving out in chatrooms, as you never knows who listens in. Just give out your spamtrap addy, reply to the one mail you wanted and hand that person your real adress (if you trust him/her).
Give me free webbased e-mail, or give me a spamfree 'net!
So an airline has said that they will start taping the cabind during flight, to prevent terrorism and other safety threats. Why is this bad? Is this any different from a drugstore or a bank having a surveilence camera running? No, it isn't. Do we complain about those? Not that I've heard.
I know, some of you may say that beeing taped while you're on board a plane is a breach of your right to privacy - but since when is a chartered plane your private area anyway? It's a public area, and when you're in public, you can be seen by others.
That said, I'm not too happy about them storing the video for ten years - two years should be the most, and unless something spectacular happened on the flight (like Elvis materialising and singing 'love me tender'), it should only be released to the proper authorities by the orders of a court. The one exeption to that rule would be if the carrier themself needed to use the video if it had to sue a passenger for air-rage (endangering the safety of the other passangers).
No, installing a few cameras in an airplane wont - as the article points out - prevernt terrists from attemting to take over the plane. But it might just be enought to stop that fatass next to you from getting hideously drunk and suffer from air-rage. And that can't be a bad thing, can it?
If you read the old icelandic sagas, you'll find that all documented attemts to colonize Vinland - which most likely was the area around Newfoundland - failed. The longest semi-permanent settlement I can recall, was no more than two years before they had to withdraw; partly because of external treats (ie; the native americans), partly because of internal quarrels.
As far as the Kensintongton rune stone goes, it is widely accepted as a hoax (allthought I did find and include a link claiming the opposite). To sum up; The inscription doesnt follow the formula commonly used on runestones in scandinavia, use of a word not used in the scandinavian languages at the time, date (1362) out of whack with reality (by 1362, the old vikings had long since settled down and stopped exploring - and the tradition of putting up runestones had died out as well), the runic alphabet used to write the stone is younger than the date placed on the stone (in particulary the J-rune, which wasn't in use until around the mid 1500's).
Before anyone goes apeshit on me here; yes, runes was in common usage among norwegians and other scandinavians at the time the stone is supposed to date from; we have plenty of evidence of that from archeological digs in our old cities. But this sort of text, and so long texts, are not found in scandinavia. The vikings and their decendants were not a people of the book, allthought quite a lot of ordinary people could read and write in a fashion.
I have no explonations why you got a group of "fair-skinned" and "fair-haired" indians up in Michigan thought - but it's probaly just a coincidence of genetics. Blue eyes and blond hair are both recessive genes; meaning that if norse and native american mixed blood, those traits should be gone in a few generations anyway.
Most of the countires in northern europe speaks some branch of the germanic laungue-group (finnish and hungarian are the major exeption). The norsemen spoke - obviously as it may seem - a lingo often called norse, or old nordic. Even back then there was a noticable difference between what the swedes, the danes and we norwegians spoke. The old norweigans spoke a subvariant frequently called 'old norwegian' (yes, it is blindingly obvious), which were spread to Iceland, Greenland and the illfated colonies in Vinland (north america). In fact, the spoken language of Iceland is very close to the norse tounge.
Useless fact; the english didn't have a seperate word for dying of hunger until the vikings had been visiting for a few years.
To launch yourself, yes. To launch someone else (ie; some white trash)? No.
You don't see the engineers who designed and built the car driving round and round, do you?
Ah, you are refering off course to the "hottest reentry" prize, the only prize that will be awared post mortem.
It is the same here in Norway. In fact, only idiots actually pays a montly fee, unless they a) have it thru their job (meaning the company picks up the bill) or b) has broadband and thus ain't using the telephonewire for access.
For the benefit of our US friends who may wonder how the ISP can survive giving away free service with a usefull numbver of perks (e-mail adresses by the handfull, webspace and so on), lemme point out two things that explains why. Firstly, we pay by the minute to use the phone, no matter if we call grandma or to connect to the net. Secondly, the major ISP in Norway are also telcos...
"This security patch addresses both previous and newly discovered security vulnerabilities pertaining to homeland security."
Or even, why Open Source Software? I can see several possible reasons for the particular choice of operatingsystem they have picked to train the afgans in.
Linux is essesially free off charge (if you pick the right distros), which means that the UN and the afgan goverment can spend their money on other things than buying lisences for the OS we all love to hate.
Linux (and most other OSS) are not tied to a particular country of origin. Face it folks, both OS X, the various flavours of Windows and many of the commercial *nix belong to corpetations based in the US, and the US has managed to make itself less than popular with the UN lately.
You can still get support for distrebutions of Linux that can and will run on older machines, like 386s and 486s. Thus it is possible to run the infrastructure on the hardware that is already present in the country, instead of forcing them to invest in the latest and greatest from Intel or AMD.
Stability may be an issue. Linux has a reputation for beeing more stabel than a certain other OS, and it is certainly less likely to catch a virus. Thus money can be saved on support.
Overall, I think the monetary considerations are the most important here - while the chance to kick the US on the leg may be a (happy) coincidence. And off course, the other question is; Do MicroSoft or Apple even provide a local flavour of their operatingsystems?
Like other online publishers, The New York Times charges readers to access articles on its Web site. But why pay when you can use Google instead?
Scuse me? I thought the NYT did free registrations?
And you got to love the last part of the article, where they discuss if Google's cache is in fact legal - which should have some bearing on the /.cache some of us wish for when we have taken down yet another interesting website...
Say, for the sake of argument, that the consept of 'car' has been patented (by Karl Benz, who did in fact apply for a patent of a "vehicle with gas engine operation," on January 29, 1886) and that the patent is still in force, and I build a faster car (which does all the things Karl's threewheeler does, only faster, with a more fancy bodywork and with four wheels), I should be awarded a patent on the consept of 'faster car'?
To me that sounds like a load of something you'll find just to the rear of a male bovine, and if it is true that the patentsystem works this way it needs changing. Imitation is not inovation, even if the implementation differ behind the scenes.
Apart from the fact that I don't blog (tried, but gave up as I couldn't find anything to say that even I found interesting), you're right. The in-crowd of the cyberworld must now find something else to do, so that they can look down on the 'common luser'.
In a way, this is very much like trying to follow the latest taste in music and clothing to stay 'cool'.
..that blogging can be officially declared out, just as the newsgroups was when someone let the hordes from AOL in.
On the other hand, it's good to see that an IPS can do more than just take your money and provide shitty service :-)
If you're doing something I don't approve off (ie; developing software for a closed system) you're dumb and I'll use a whole page on this here interweb to tell everyone.
Okay. so he has one or two points, the first is that the corp that owns the OS can develop their own software and give it away to push you out of business. Funny, I can't say I see that MS Paint or even Adobe PhotoShop (btw, by his logic, Adobe are sharecroppers) have prevented PaintShopPro from becoming successfull... I don't see how the inclussion of CD-burner functionality in the latest OS from the softwaregiant we love to hate has slowed down the sale of for instance Nero... and despite the fact that a certain company bundles a browser with their OS, Opera and other alternative browsers seems to be gathering followers by the minute.
His second point is more strained; that the one controlling the OS is the one in controll of all sotware that runs on it. This is, as even I can see, stupid at best and FUD at worst. If this held even remoptly true, each and every firm that makes any sort of software, be it wordprossessors, MP3-rippers or graphicsmanipulators, would provide their own underlying OS to stop others from using it to something else... No one can controll what people run on their computers, no matter what OS.
There will always be a marked for second- and thirdparty developers on all operatingsystems, both closed and open source. The difference is, if you develop for closed source, it's more accepted to actually ask for some money to compensate for the time you too to write the code.
So in the end, I'll say he is plain wrong. There are a number of good reasons to develop for OSS, but this is not one of them.
I'm sure someone will manage to get it running some flavour of Linux. In the mean time, I'll be happy to run Contiki on my real C64 - unless someone can come up with a linux-distro for it that is.
If this 'new C64' turns out to be naught more than a reasonable standard PC bundled with an emulator and some repackaged software, porting Linux to it should be as hard as placing the Knoppix CD in the drive and booting it up...
Personaly, I would think it would be great if they brought back to life some of the old hardware - the VIC was an interesting grapichscontroller with it's independent sprites, and the SID could make music like no chip has before or after.
If you're a youngster and wish to learn more about one of the most influential micros in the early 80's, you may want to look at Marko Mäkelä 8-bit server. His document page is a treasure in it's own right.
I did in fact read the article first. The entire point of my post was that instead of arguing beforehand if it'll work, they ought to build it and then see if the current theories do infact hold water.
There is a simple, yet somewhat expencive, way to see who's right.
Built a satelite / spaceprobe with a whopping huge and light (mylar maybe?) sail. Launch into space (as the sail will be then main experiment on this one, it can be relatively light and might piggyback anotehr launch). Deploy sail. Wait and see what happens. THEN one can sit down ans find out if current theories are on the mark.
Dont that sound awfully familiar?
This is not the first time something craftmanslike can beat something sofisticated. Even thought the following examples are strictly hardware, the general idea is the same.
Take, for instace the T34 vs the Tiger. The Tiger was one of the most sofisticated - if not the most sofisticated - tanks in production at the time, but were drowned by hordes of the more craftmanlike and easily manufactured T34.The battle between a simple, craftmanlike approach and sofistication was once again seen in the early sixties, in the race to get a man into space. The russians fielded the Vostok, a design born more out of solid craftmanship than anything else. It's very simplicity was a strenght, allowing it to undertake missions up to five days long, while the american attemt at a longdurationflight in the highly sofisicated Mercury lasted just under a day and a half, leaving Gordon Cooper in a virtualy dead capsule (having to eyeball his attitude thru the windown and manualy fire the retros). Granted, one reason the US had to go for sofisication is that their rockets simply couldn't lift as much as russian rockets... but whereas derivatives of the Vostok still flies (as unmanned recoverable satelites), the line that breed the Mercury is dead.
Sofistication is well and good, but many times a less sofisticated but better crafted designs / programs can outperform it. Sofistication for it's own sake is usually not worth the tradeoffs.
To misqoute one of my favorite authors, "it sounds like jargon to me". The person behind this patent is, as far as I'm given to understand, a marriage councellor. It is not expected that someone whos job mainly consist of asking people to stop stabbing one another and start communicating has the same profeccianal lingo as a teacher in etichal theory. The few words they share, they will most likely have different defintions of.
That said, I think that the patent description and the scematic diagram is hogwash, and the name choosen is not even fit to be called that. As far as I can gather thsi isn't an etical AI, but an emotional one; by sounding like it care it should help the users reach whatever end they have in mind easier. And it's not even an AI; it is an simulated AI... if artifical inteligence simulate natural intelligence, how do you simulate AI itself?
And 'The patent shows someone who has knowledge of the A.I. field how to make the invention.'? What happened to having a working prototype before you were granted a patent?
Anywhy, it looks like a glorified and costly voicemail system to me... but then I don't work with ethichs or AI on a daily, or even yearly, basis.