Vinge's problem is that he makes too much of the famous failures of AI, and has fallen in with the camp that believes that software will never be able to compete with wetware.
Do you realize you're accusing an author of being wrong about what happens in the world he created? It's like telling Tolkien "No no no, elves are short and happy and wear pointy hats and work for Santa, they're not elegant beings who have been around since the dawn of time".
Just so you know, since I don't remember if it's actually in that novel, one of the basises of the Zones of Thought scenario is that it becomes easier to do nifty ultra-high-tech stuff the further out from the galactic core you go - and as I recall, Deepness in the Sky takes place in a region of space where the best AI you can make is retarded moron level or worse.
And also, I'm pretty sure that for Vinge, software will never "compete" with wetware. They'll just merge - look up The Cookie Monster, Fast Times at Fairmount High, True Names, and apparently also Rainbow's End though I have not read that yet.
From the summary: "Where three hydrogen bombs were (OMFG HOLY SHIT) lost by the US..."
(my emphasis added)
What the hell? How the fuck do you lose a goddamn hydrogen bomb? Did it fall out of someone's pockets or something like that? Perhaps we should move the sofa? Did it roll under the stove? And you know, the next two were just a complete surprise.
Just... wow. Holy shit. In general. Maybe if I read the actual article it would be less amazing.
Erm, you don't necessarily have to restore the mind-state in the same body. Read, for instance, Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan, which I believe was even reviewed on Slashdot.
This won't get modded up since the article is too old, so I'm just posting it for your elucidation.
Anyway, unlike energy, wealth can be created and destroyed. Consider cookies, for instance: I take some flour, sugar, butter, chocolate chips and other miscellaneous goods. The total value of these goods is only a bit more than a dollar. Using them in various arcane ways, I craft, say, a dozen chocolate chip cookies, the likes of which anyone would pay $.25 and think it was a good deal. So, we started out with about a dollar's worth of goods, and ended up with something like three dollars worth of cookies. There's now two more dollars worth of value in the economy, and it's all mine. This is what people mean when they say "wealth creation".
If I were to, instead, just set all those ingredients aflame, the world's economy would be poorer by about a dollar. That would be the destruction of wealth.
Of course, it's true that in a closed system, it would be impossible to create more than a certain amount of wealth. It's a good thing, then, that there's this big giant flaming ball of gas up in the sky spewing an unimaginable amount of energy in every direction, some of which fortunately falls on us. In a more universal sense, you could make the case that there's only a certain maximum amount of wealth possible; however, reaching that would involve things like dyson spheres and asteroid farms.
I really can't make up my opinion on this case, probably because it's 12:30 am here. Anyway, on the one hand, the people who responded to this with any information that's directly traceable to them are morons, and doubly so for the ones who were stupid enough to use their friggin' work e-mail. I mean, come on! Everyone likes a bit of the old misuse of company resources now and then, but asking for sex with your work address? It's probably a good thing your genes won't spread far.
On the other hand, though, publishing their information in a public place isn't quite kosher. Although we all know that sending someone a plaintext e-mail is almost as bad as shouting from the rooftops should anyone actually want to intercept the message, it's not quite as bad as posting pictures of your stoned self on MySpace and expecting nobody to ever find it. There is at least a little bit of expectation that this is a private sort of thing; I would be a lot happier with him if he'd just quietly notified the people who replied that they'd been scammed, and only published the details of those who became abusive.
One thing I don't really care about is the way the 27B-6 guy is complaining about marriages being destroyed because of this. It really makes no sense; if the guy is responding to ads online and his wife doesn't know about it, there's probably something deeply troubled in the marriage and it's likely to go to divorce soon anyway. Similarly with the public lynching argument: if you are so uncomfortable with your tastes that you wouldn't like to publicize them, why are you even taking the risk of replying to something on Craig's List? Yes, this is likely to be the first time such a stunt has been publicized, but still - you'd expect people would rather keep their activities a secret to take some reasonable precautions. Like not using their damn work e-mail.
Which actually brings up an interesting point! How many times has this stunt been pulled on Craig's List, only instead of being put on some stupid Wiki, those who responded with useful information just got blackmailed? How much would you pay so that your wife doesn't find out about your animal bondage fetish?
Undergraduate textbooks are nothing more than a scam. Calculus, physics, chemistry and biology on such a basic level have not changed significantly in the past decade; why do I have to buy books which were printed this year?
Oh, right, because the problems that are assigned out of the book get shuffled every printing by magical pixies. Literally shuffled; in one of my recent classes, the professor would assign the (optional) homework out of the seventh edition of the text, but also had a list of where the exact same problems were in the sixth and fifth. I checked with one of the older editions in the library, and aside from the color scheme this was the only change. The explanations were all the same, which is a good thing since I'd hate to think our fundamental understanding of the principles of vector calculus had changed so quickly.
I've actually had a couple professors talk about this; apparently, such decisions are usually made by the department heads, and the people teaching the class just go with it - not that it's just the higher-ups getting kickbacks. Publishers drop old editions like hot potatos; in another of my classes, the professor refused to move on to the sixth edition and taught out of the fifth, because apparently they'd swapped some of the chapters around and he didn't want to deal with it. Even though the sixth edition had been released that same year, people had so much trouble finding copies of it he eventually gave up and published an equivalence guide. This was in a course where the material didn't quite need to be taught in order, which is probably why they didn't just stop at the homework problems.
Anyway, in order to keep this 3:00 am post from being completely offtopic: there is absolutely no reason at all for anyone to charge money for textbooks in the first place, much less put ads in them. The basic principles have been known for longer than anyone currently in college has been alive; all that really needs to happen is for some philanthropist to fund writers who are good at writing teaching texts, and then release that into the public domain - and don't talk about those open textbooks, I doubt any professor will teach out of something without officious credentials.
Now I'm hallucinating bugs crawling on my legs. Or at least I hope I'm hallucinating. Either way, it's time for sleep.
Ah, no, see, this one wins because we lived to tell about it.
History is written by those who survive it, after all.
Re:Pacemaker Recharge by Induction
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Who says the batteries are near the thing? I think they string the batteries on a bit of wire far enough away so that the induction doesn't interfere with the electronics. At least, that's what I would do.
I'm sorry, but what you require from an intelligence to consider it truly "creative" is entirely too much. If you make this a requirement for sentience, you've just ruled out most of the world's population. When was the last time you made something that was not influenced by anything, in any way, that has been previously made? Something that was completely new, totally original? Almost nothing we make or do is entirely unique; there was almost always some inspiration for it in the past. Bringing something completely new into existance takes either genious level intellect or sheer blind luck, and a whole lot of effort in either case. I know that I, myself, have not made anything completely unique in my life, at least to the best of my knowledge. While writing this post, for instance, Newton's quote about standing on the shoulders of giants kept running through my mind. This is pretty much just an expansion on that.
Besides, if you look closely, nothing we make comes into existance perfect. Every new technology that is made can be improved, however incrementally. Every new method of manufacture can be refined. Every hypothesis can be altered to fit the facts. And almost everything that appears "new" at first glance has roots in something else.
Re:Rusty Glucose - Good Question...
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Yes! And you can make people's names float over their heads, just like in an FPS! And then you can blow them away, and they'll respawn at the nearest cloning centre! It's genious, I tell you!
What, you mean if they burn their own cd and boot from that? See, the entire point of this is that there is no information stored on the computer at all. You can do whatever you want, but any changes you make are just a reset away from being wiped out. There is no permanent storage except for the cd, and that is not write accesible.
I think the reason is that when you drink coffee while studying, your mind makes a connection between the taste of coffee and material studied, kind of like a hypnotic trigger (i.e, "when I snap my fingers, you'll quack like a duck." The snap is the trigger, and the quacking you make is the action.). When you drink coffee before your test, it triggers a memory of the material. This can actually work with most aromatic or tasty things, I believe.
I do know that a certain brand of soap always makes me think of Morrowind, because its fragrance is really strong and was always on my hands during the weeks I was playing that game.
Hah! That shows how well you built legos! Mine were often thrown against walls and lived! Of course, they were ugly sons of bitches, but they were indestructible to anything except prying them apart block by block.
That's exactly the point. Do you think a cellphone currently has enough storage space to retain 30+ photos (for a magazine) in readable quality?* You take a few pictures, then send them over to your home server, freeing up space for the next batch. If your cell phone is jammed, you won't be able to get away with as many photos.
If you are genuinely deluded, then you can be considered to not be in your right mind and any contracts made with you are voided.
Essentially, you have to give the money back, but you get to live in a room with soft walls. They even provide these stylish jackets and blunt eating utensils! Score!
It doesn't seem like he's really done anything really all that interesting. He's just disassembled a scanner and hooked it up to some legos, and taken multiple photos of a skull with a digital camera. This doesn't demonstrate any nifty mechanical, chemical, or physical properties of anything, it's not particularly artistic, and there's no explosions.
I would like to apologize for the above badly written piece of excrement. I really shouldn't post when I'm too tired to think straight.
But hey, this is Slashdot. It's not like anyone's going to read either of these comments.
If you take a normal piece of paper and bend it back and forth a few times, you'll find that it starts "remembering" where you bent it.
Yes, I know they're small piezoelectric particles to generate voltage when compressed, but those can't last forever. The material of the card might start developing a memory if you bend it too much.
However, this will be kickass if they can make them cheap enough. Imagine: walk up to a vending machine in an airport, buy a little credit-card sized game to occupy you during the flight, and throw it away when the battery runs out. Or have a book on the card - a novel and text output probably won't take up that much memory.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you realize you're accusing an author of being wrong about what happens in the world he created? It's like telling Tolkien "No no no, elves are short and happy and wear pointy hats and work for Santa, they're not elegant beings who have been around since the dawn of time".
Just so you know, since I don't remember if it's actually in that novel, one of the basises of the Zones of Thought scenario is that it becomes easier to do nifty ultra-high-tech stuff the further out from the galactic core you go - and as I recall, Deepness in the Sky takes place in a region of space where the best AI you can make is retarded moron level or worse.
And also, I'm pretty sure that for Vinge, software will never "compete" with wetware. They'll just merge - look up The Cookie Monster, Fast Times at Fairmount High, True Names, and apparently also Rainbow's End though I have not read that yet.
(my emphasis added)
What the hell? How the fuck do you lose a goddamn hydrogen bomb? Did it fall out of someone's pockets or something like that? Perhaps we should move the sofa? Did it roll under the stove? And you know, the next two were just a complete surprise.
Just... wow. Holy shit. In general. Maybe if I read the actual article it would be less amazing.
Erm, you don't necessarily have to restore the mind-state in the same body. Read, for instance, Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan, which I believe was even reviewed on Slashdot.
This won't get modded up since the article is too old, so I'm just posting it for your elucidation.
Anyway, unlike energy, wealth can be created and destroyed. Consider cookies, for instance:
I take some flour, sugar, butter, chocolate chips and other miscellaneous goods. The total value of these goods is only a bit more than a dollar.
Using them in various arcane ways, I craft, say, a dozen chocolate chip cookies, the likes of which anyone would pay $.25 and think it was a good deal.
So, we started out with about a dollar's worth of goods, and ended up with something like three dollars worth of cookies. There's now two more dollars worth of value in the economy, and it's all mine. This is what people mean when they say "wealth creation".
If I were to, instead, just set all those ingredients aflame, the world's economy would be poorer by about a dollar. That would be the destruction of wealth.
Of course, it's true that in a closed system, it would be impossible to create more than a certain amount of wealth. It's a good thing, then, that there's this big giant flaming ball of gas up in the sky spewing an unimaginable amount of energy in every direction, some of which fortunately falls on us.
In a more universal sense, you could make the case that there's only a certain maximum amount of wealth possible; however, reaching that would involve things like dyson spheres and asteroid farms.
This Parking Lot is Full strip, perhaps?
On the other hand, though, publishing their information in a public place isn't quite kosher. Although we all know that sending someone a plaintext e-mail is almost as bad as shouting from the rooftops should anyone actually want to intercept the message, it's not quite as bad as posting pictures of your stoned self on MySpace and expecting nobody to ever find it. There is at least a little bit of expectation that this is a private sort of thing; I would be a lot happier with him if he'd just quietly notified the people who replied that they'd been scammed, and only published the details of those who became abusive.
One thing I don't really care about is the way the 27B-6 guy is complaining about marriages being destroyed because of this. It really makes no sense; if the guy is responding to ads online and his wife doesn't know about it, there's probably something deeply troubled in the marriage and it's likely to go to divorce soon anyway. Similarly with the public lynching argument: if you are so uncomfortable with your tastes that you wouldn't like to publicize them, why are you even taking the risk of replying to something on Craig's List? Yes, this is likely to be the first time such a stunt has been publicized, but still - you'd expect people would rather keep their activities a secret to take some reasonable precautions. Like not using their damn work e-mail.
Which actually brings up an interesting point! How many times has this stunt been pulled on Craig's List, only instead of being put on some stupid Wiki, those who responded with useful information just got blackmailed? How much would you pay so that your wife doesn't find out about your animal bondage fetish?
Oh, right, because the problems that are assigned out of the book get shuffled every printing by magical pixies. Literally shuffled; in one of my recent classes, the professor would assign the (optional) homework out of the seventh edition of the text, but also had a list of where the exact same problems were in the sixth and fifth. I checked with one of the older editions in the library, and aside from the color scheme this was the only change. The explanations were all the same, which is a good thing since I'd hate to think our fundamental understanding of the principles of vector calculus had changed so quickly.
I've actually had a couple professors talk about this; apparently, such decisions are usually made by the department heads, and the people teaching the class just go with it - not that it's just the higher-ups getting kickbacks. Publishers drop old editions like hot potatos; in another of my classes, the professor refused to move on to the sixth edition and taught out of the fifth, because apparently they'd swapped some of the chapters around and he didn't want to deal with it. Even though the sixth edition had been released that same year, people had so much trouble finding copies of it he eventually gave up and published an equivalence guide. This was in a course where the material didn't quite need to be taught in order, which is probably why they didn't just stop at the homework problems.
Anyway, in order to keep this 3:00 am post from being completely offtopic: there is absolutely no reason at all for anyone to charge money for textbooks in the first place, much less put ads in them. The basic principles have been known for longer than anyone currently in college has been alive; all that really needs to happen is for some philanthropist to fund writers who are good at writing teaching texts, and then release that into the public domain - and don't talk about those open textbooks, I doubt any professor will teach out of something without officious credentials.
Now I'm hallucinating bugs crawling on my legs. Or at least I hope I'm hallucinating. Either way, it's time for sleep.
"Can you ping me now?"
Bill Nye the Science Guy?
Unless, of course, you actually have a sense of humor.
Ah, no, see, this one wins because we lived to tell about it. History is written by those who survive it, after all.
Who says the batteries are near the thing? I think they string the batteries on a bit of wire far enough away so that the induction doesn't interfere with the electronics. At least, that's what I would do.
Besides, if you look closely, nothing we make comes into existance perfect. Every new technology that is made can be improved, however incrementally. Every new method of manufacture can be refined. Every hypothesis can be altered to fit the facts. And almost everything that appears "new" at first glance has roots in something else.
Yes! And you can make people's names float over their heads, just like in an FPS! And then you can blow them away, and they'll respawn at the nearest cloning centre! It's genious, I tell you!
What, you mean if they burn their own cd and boot from that? See, the entire point of this is that there is no information stored on the computer at all. You can do whatever you want, but any changes you make are just a reset away from being wiped out. There is no permanent storage except for the cd, and that is not write accesible.
I do know that a certain brand of soap always makes me think of Morrowind, because its fragrance is really strong and was always on my hands during the weeks I was playing that game.
Judging by his expression, the robot appears to be a terrible dancer.
Hah! That shows how well you built legos! Mine were often thrown against walls and lived! Of course, they were ugly sons of bitches, but they were indestructible to anything except prying them apart block by block.
*I dunno, they might. I've never had one.
Essentially, you have to give the money back, but you get to live in a room with soft walls. They even provide these stylish jackets and blunt eating utensils! Score!
What's the point of this post?
But... didn't Wal-Mart really file for bankruptcy? I'm fairly certain I've heard/read something about it within the past six months.
I would like to apologize for the above badly written piece of excrement. I really shouldn't post when I'm too tired to think straight. But hey, this is Slashdot. It's not like anyone's going to read either of these comments.
Yes, I know they're small piezoelectric particles to generate voltage when compressed, but those can't last forever. The material of the card might start developing a memory if you bend it too much.
However, this will be kickass if they can make them cheap enough. Imagine: walk up to a vending machine in an airport, buy a little credit-card sized game to occupy you during the flight, and throw it away when the battery runs out. Or have a book on the card - a novel and text output probably won't take up that much memory.