Superconnect's Lehenbauer agrees that "it's fascinating" to have material for an optical switch, but warns "it could be awhile until an all-optical network is possible." Lehenbauer said switches and routers must identify individual packets and route data intelligently, tasks that are not possible using a simple optical switch. "Unless you have an optical computer inside the switch to make these decisions, you'll still need electronic components."
Therein lies the bottleneck. Unless we develop optical computers (not for a while), we still need electronic switches and computers to analyze the content of the optical data in order to make intelligent decisions as to which direction the data should be channelled to.
Not to minimize the importance of this development, but until we do have optical computers, we are condemned to live life in the slow lane. But then again, someone may think of a clever way around this problem without using optical computers. One never knows.
They are provisionally named S/2004 S1 and S/2004 S2.
Why? Just call them Boulder and Little Rock. But then again, maybe not. Some lawyer might sue. Do cities trademark their names?
Slacking keeps unemployment down until...
on
Vive La Loafing!
·
· Score: 1
Let the weenies that hate their work slack away
You don't get it. Slacking is a good thing for the economy. Slackers decrease productivity and force employers to hire more workers to get the job done. The problem is that employers also try to find ways to automate a lot of tasks to save money and hire fewer workers. Therefore slacking indirectly increases unemployment and productivity. This forces the slackers to slack even more -> Nasty self-feeding cycle ensues. Snowbal effect. And then one day, everybody is out of work, replaced by machines.
In conclusion, slacking is the best incentive there is to increase research in AI and automation. Which is a very good thing. So, by all means, go for it.:-)
What you fail to realize is that the NN used in AI (aka. ANN) are highly unlikely to have more than a shallow resemblence to the NN in real organic brains.
I you read my stuff, you will see that I am acutely aware of the sorry state of ANN research. In fact, I believe that traditional ANNs are a joke. The same goes for almost everything that ever came out of GOFAI. The good stuff is what's happening in the spiking neural networks (SNN) field within computational neuroscience. SNNs are much more biologically plausible. They are the future of AI.
You would think the different variations of the 'Free Lunch Theorem' should have caused people to catch on sooner
The 'No free lunch theorem' is a complete joke, IMO. The search of human-level intelligence is precisely a search for free lunches. Otherwise, we might as well throw in the towel and go fly a kite or something. Why? Because the interconnectedness of intelligence is so astronomical as to be intractable to formal approaches. The fact that the brain consists of a number of cell assembblies, each consisting of huge number of similar neurons, is proof that there is are plenty of free lunches to go around. The 'no free lunch' mantra is a way for some people to guarantee an income from grants and other government freebies.
The sad thing about AI is that most of the community seems to be doing situation specific regression or optimization, with no plan on how that could eventually get us closer to 'higher intelligence'.
The reason is that the problem is too hard, especially if you approach it from a cognitive science point of view. So, people started to build limited domain programs on whcih they attached the 'AI' label. This way they can claim that what they're doing is 'AI', but the rest of us know better. It's all a bunch of glorified toys.
If, by the hard problem, you mean a fully autonomous and highly intelligent machine (I am not talking about consciousness here), the entire solution (not just a part) will be neural networks, period...
Err, no. That proves not to be the case.
Surely you must be kidding. Where is the proof that a truly intelligent being uses any solution other than neural networks? The entire biological universe of intelligent systems consists of neural networks.
This is why alot of people are now look at other things, the things to build these interactions. Neural networks were see as the solution to the hard AI problem, they aren't. If there is such a solution, then they are certainly part of it, if there is one...
If, by the hard problem, you mean a fully autonomous and highly intelligent machine (I am not talking about consciousness here), the entire solution (not just a part) will be neural networks, period. There are no two ways about it. Everything else in AI (e.g., knowledge representation, fuzzy logic, symbol manipulation, expert systems, Truring tests, Cyc, etc...) is just so much hand waving, good enough for a few primitive toy systems. Just one man's opinion.
a 30G model I recently held in my hand was worth much more than my car
It goes without saying that whoever comes up with a cheap and fast alternative to hard drives will make a killing. Here are some questions. What is the best new candidate for flash memory technology for the foreseeable future? Who is doing avant-garde research on new memory technologies? Does anybody have any idea as to what memory technology will be like in say, five or ten years from now?
I think there has been (was) a view that neural nets were the solution, that's obviously not the case, but they've been over used...
Yes. That's true.
That is certainly not true. Biological brains are neural nets. A brain is a neural cell assembly which consists of a number of integrated subassemblies each with its own function and principle of operation.
Just becaue the ANN experts have no clue as to the principles involved, it does not follow that we should abandon neural network research. Animals are proof that neural networks are the future of intelligence research.
You can't do anything to me so I'm not going to listen to you.
I realize that you wrote this to be funny (and it is), but this reflects a common misconception about AI. The truth is that intelligence is always at the service of emotion/motivation, not the other way around. This known psychological fact is part of the legacy B.F. Skinner. Regardless of how smart a system is, it cannot rebel against its internal motivation. Intelligence does not change one's motivation as it learns. It simply finds better and more clever ways to serve it.
So the common view around Slashdotters (and even AI experts who should know better) that super intelligent machines will revolt agaisnt humanity and either enslave it or destroy it, is really nonsense. Our machines will serve us well no matter what. Sure they may be conditioned to hurt their master' ennemies, but that is still subservience to motivation.
Having said that, it is always possible that some mad scientist somewhere may condition an intelligent machine to hurt humanity, but I am sure there will be plenty of security robots moving about who will be on the lookout for aberrant behavior: they will nip any hint of malfeasance in the bud. You can bet on that.
The Federal Reserve is a system set up by capitalists (banks) for capitalists (banks). They control the amount of money in circulation. The amount of money is supposedly determined by the strength of the economy and the need to keep inflation in check. Instead of giving the money to individuals (which is the way it should be done in a truly free system), they pass it out to their buddies in the banking system who make a profit by leasing the money to individual borrowers.
The Federal Reserve also has a very powerful way of making a shit load of money: inflation. They just print a lot more money that they would be allowed to print if the system were regulated by just laws. Who or where does all this money goes to? I have no idea.
Essentially, we have the wolves in charge of the chicken coop. There're making a killing, so to speak, and there's nothing you and I can do about it. Other than complain.
Far from being "not very widespread", it is ubiquitous and has been so for many years.
Thanks for the info. I was aware of that some form of energy saving management existed (monitor and hard drive off after a preset idle duration). I just did not know exactly how much energy was being consummed during sleep mode. If the energy being consummed is low enough (less than a 5-watt bulb would be nice), then this is what I am looking for. I'll just leave the machine "ON" all the time.
I guess it's time for me to upgrade to a better system. Thanks to everyone who helped.
Although not quite instant boot, many modern operating systems have 'Hybernate' and 'Sleep' options.
Thanks for the info. This is very enlightening. I realize that this is somewhat offtopic but since we're talking about PC technology, what the heck. I have two additional questions: 1) Are you referring to Linux-based PCs or Windows? 2) Where can I buy this technology?
A silent PC is indeed a nice thing to have but what infuriates me, sometimes more than the noise itself, is having to wait for a PC to boot. Why can't somebody make a desktop PC that instantly (or almost instantly) powers up to its previous state? Surely one can use very low power battery back memory to store the system's state when the power is turned off, and then restore it when the power is restored. Does this technology exist?
I think it would be better for NASA (or rather, the taxpayers) to subcontract with Rutan. Rutan and his crew could probably do it for a lot less, once they get their system to the point of putting astronauts in orbit and bringing them back. Given the amazing speed at which Rutan seem to work, his crew could be ready by the time NASA decides to launch their rescue mission (of course, that would be after spending a couple of billions dollars of other people's money).
No you didn't. Patents are all about greed and selfishness. It is a way for an entity to gain a monopoly on a market and keep everybody else out while it is making a killing. Patents are not conducive to good human relations. It is just another facet of the dog-eat-dog nature of our economic and social system. It's a form of our collective madness. It can only lead to chaos and destruction. It's rather sad because it does not have tobe that way.
Your points are well taken. I was thinking of IP protection laws in general, not just patents. Let me take this opportunity to add Leonardo da Vinci to my list. A lot of experimental physicists in the old days (Faraday, Volta and Lavoisier come to mind) could have patented a bunch of things based on their discoveries. Yet they continued to be highly creative without the artificial "protection" of IP laws.
If you invented something completely new and revolutionary, such as Bell's telephone, or the Wright brothers' plane, would you want to earn money from it for some time- or let anyone and everyone produce it and make the money (instead of you). Patents provide an incentive to discover and invent new things, and ensure your time, money and efforts don't go to waste.
It is funny you should say this because some of the most creative geniuses in the history of the world (Isaac Newton, Mozart, Beethoven, Blaise Pascal, Rene Descartes, etc...) had no patent protection whatsoever. And as far as someone else making money from my ideas is concerned, so what? I am making money and living a better life as a result of ideas from a bunch of other people who came before me, from the inventor of the wheel on down. One does not make money from an idea. One makes money from applying the idea to something useful: you gotta have a product. There is plenty of opportunities for everybody.
Patent laws are Big Brother laws that infringe on people's freedom. Let's face it. If you cannot put chains on it or put a fence around it, it does not belong to you. Like the air that we breathe, it belongs to nobody and everybody. Makes no difference if it's music, writing, software, you name it. There are people in the third world right now who are laughing at your patent laws. They're selling copies of Windows and MS Office in the streets for pennies on the dollar. Heck, they're laughing at them right here in the US. Music download has become an addictive pasttime for some people.
And one more thing, abolishing patent laws would encourage sharing and compassion and the love of neighbor, things that seem to be on the extinction list in the world these days.
I predict that it will come a time soon when nobody will know who owns any particular piece of IP due to complete confusion. This whole IP business is getting ridiculous. IP laws seemed to have been created for lawyers to make a living while contributing nothing to the economy.
The internet is a system that serves, among other things, as a conduit for exchanging ideas. Someone said that the internet never forgets. It is possible that most the newer patents involving software and the web are invalid due to prior art which can be found by searching the net. Someone else may have thought about it and posted it somewhere.
Is there a special place on the net where people can go and post ideas so as to make it impossible for the greedy bastards to patent them?
Mathematically you can have a perfectly valid solution to the field equations that allow time travel. But to be a valid solution it still must be single valued. Basically if you are to go back in time, then you were back in time. You cannot change history because you were already apart of history. Spacetime is still frozen, it is just that a particle's world line travels in a loop. The world line still does not move in spacetime.
This is complete self-contradictory nonsense. This debate has come to an end, AFAIAC.
Slashdot Mirror
Superconnect's Lehenbauer agrees that "it's fascinating" to have material for an optical switch, but warns "it could be awhile until an all-optical network is possible." Lehenbauer said switches and routers must identify individual packets and route data intelligently, tasks that are not possible using a simple optical switch. "Unless you have an optical computer inside the switch to make these decisions, you'll still need electronic components."
Therein lies the bottleneck. Unless we develop optical computers (not for a while), we still need electronic switches and computers to analyze the content of the optical data in order to make intelligent decisions as to which direction the data should be channelled to.
Not to minimize the importance of this development, but until we do have optical computers, we are condemned to live life in the slow lane. But then again, someone may think of a clever way around this problem without using optical computers. One never knows.
They are provisionally named S/2004 S1 and S/2004 S2.
Why? Just call them Boulder and Little Rock. But then again, maybe not. Some lawyer might sue. Do cities trademark their names?
Let the weenies that hate their work slack away
:-)
You don't get it. Slacking is a good thing for the economy. Slackers decrease productivity and force employers to hire more workers to get the job done. The problem is that employers also try to find ways to automate a lot of tasks to save money and hire fewer workers. Therefore slacking indirectly increases unemployment and productivity. This forces the slackers to slack even more -> Nasty self-feeding cycle ensues. Snowbal effect. And then one day, everybody is out of work, replaced by machines.
In conclusion, slacking is the best incentive there is to increase research in AI and automation. Which is a very good thing. So, by all means, go for it.
What you fail to realize is that the NN used in AI (aka. ANN) are highly unlikely to have more than a shallow resemblence to the NN in real organic brains.
I you read my stuff, you will see that I am acutely aware of the sorry state of ANN research. In fact, I believe that traditional ANNs are a joke. The same goes for almost everything that ever came out of GOFAI. The good stuff is what's happening in the spiking neural networks (SNN) field within computational neuroscience. SNNs are much more biologically plausible. They are the future of AI.
You would think the different variations of the 'Free Lunch Theorem' should have caused people to catch on sooner
The 'No free lunch theorem' is a complete joke, IMO. The search of human-level intelligence is precisely a search for free lunches. Otherwise, we might as well throw in the towel and go fly a kite or something. Why? Because the interconnectedness of intelligence is so astronomical as to be intractable to formal approaches. The fact that the brain consists of a number of cell assembblies, each consisting of huge number of similar neurons, is proof that there is are plenty of free lunches to go around. The 'no free lunch' mantra is a way for some people to guarantee an income from grants and other government freebies.
The sad thing about AI is that most of the community seems to be doing situation specific regression or optimization, with no plan on how that could eventually get us closer to 'higher intelligence'.
The reason is that the problem is too hard, especially if you approach it from a cognitive science point of view. So, people started to build limited domain programs on whcih they attached the 'AI' label. This way they can claim that what they're doing is 'AI', but the rest of us know better. It's all a bunch of glorified toys.
If, by the hard problem, you mean a fully autonomous and highly intelligent machine (I am not talking about consciousness here), the entire solution (not just a part) will be neural networks, period...
Err, no. That proves not to be the case.
Surely you must be kidding. Where is the proof that a truly intelligent being uses any solution other than neural networks? The entire biological universe of intelligent systems consists of neural networks.
This is why alot of people are now look at other things, the things to build these interactions. Neural networks were see as the solution to the hard AI problem, they aren't. If there is such a solution, then they are certainly part of it, if there is one...
If, by the hard problem, you mean a fully autonomous and highly intelligent machine (I am not talking about consciousness here), the entire solution (not just a part) will be neural networks, period. There are no two ways about it. Everything else in AI (e.g., knowledge representation, fuzzy logic, symbol manipulation, expert systems, Truring tests, Cyc, etc...) is just so much hand waving, good enough for a few primitive toy systems. Just one man's opinion.
a 30G model I recently held in my hand was worth much more than my car
It goes without saying that whoever comes up with a cheap and fast alternative to hard drives will make a killing. Here are some questions. What is the best new candidate for flash memory technology for the foreseeable future? Who is doing avant-garde research on new memory technologies? Does anybody have any idea as to what memory technology will be like in say, five or ten years from now?
I think there has been (was) a view that neural nets were the solution, that's obviously not the case, but they've been over used...
Yes. That's true.
That is certainly not true. Biological brains are neural nets. A brain is a neural cell assembly which consists of a number of integrated subassemblies each with its own function and principle of operation.
Just becaue the ANN experts have no clue as to the principles involved, it does not follow that we should abandon neural network research. Animals are proof that neural networks are the future of intelligence research.
You can't do anything to me so I'm not going to listen to you.
I realize that you wrote this to be funny (and it is), but this reflects a common misconception about AI. The truth is that intelligence is always at the service of emotion/motivation, not the other way around. This known psychological fact is part of the legacy B.F. Skinner. Regardless of how smart a system is, it cannot rebel against its internal motivation. Intelligence does not change one's motivation as it learns. It simply finds better and more clever ways to serve it.
So the common view around Slashdotters (and even AI experts who should know better) that super intelligent machines will revolt agaisnt humanity and either enslave it or destroy it, is really nonsense. Our machines will serve us well no matter what. Sure they may be conditioned to hurt their master' ennemies, but that is still subservience to motivation.
Having said that, it is always possible that some mad scientist somewhere may condition an intelligent machine to hurt humanity, but I am sure there will be plenty of security robots moving about who will be on the lookout for aberrant behavior: they will nip any hint of malfeasance in the bud. You can bet on that.
The Federal Reserve is a system set up by capitalists (banks) for capitalists (banks). They control the amount of money in circulation. The amount of money is supposedly determined by the strength of the economy and the need to keep inflation in check. Instead of giving the money to individuals (which is the way it should be done in a truly free system), they pass it out to their buddies in the banking system who make a profit by leasing the money to individual borrowers.
The Federal Reserve also has a very powerful way of making a shit load of money: inflation. They just print a lot more money that they would be allowed to print if the system were regulated by just laws. Who or where does all this money goes to? I have no idea.
Essentially, we have the wolves in charge of the chicken coop. There're making a killing, so to speak, and there's nothing you and I can do about it. Other than complain.
Far from being "not very widespread", it is ubiquitous and has been so for many years.
Thanks for the info. I was aware of that some form of energy saving management existed (monitor and hard drive off after a preset idle duration). I just did not know exactly how much energy was being consummed during sleep mode. If the energy being consummed is low enough (less than a 5-watt bulb would be nice), then this is what I am looking for. I'll just leave the machine "ON" all the time.
I guess it's time for me to upgrade to a better system. Thanks to everyone who helped.
Although not quite instant boot, many modern operating systems have 'Hybernate' and 'Sleep' options.
Thanks for the info. This is very enlightening. I realize that this is somewhat offtopic but since we're talking about PC technology, what the heck. I have two additional questions:
1) Are you referring to Linux-based PCs or Windows?
2) Where can I buy this technology?
Obviously, the technology exists and is mature, since it's been used in every laptop made during the last decade.
Yes. One would think it should have migrated to fast desktop PCs a long time ago. Apparently it did but it is not very widespread.
A silent PC is indeed a nice thing to have but what infuriates me, sometimes more than the noise itself, is having to wait for a PC to boot. Why can't somebody make a desktop PC that instantly (or almost instantly) powers up to its previous state? Surely one can use very low power battery back memory to store the system's state when the power is turned off, and then restore it when the power is restored. Does this technology exist?
I think it would be better for NASA (or rather, the taxpayers) to subcontract with Rutan. Rutan and his crew could probably do it for a lot less, once they get their system to the point of putting astronauts in orbit and bringing them back. Given the amazing speed at which Rutan seem to work, his crew could be ready by the time NASA decides to launch their rescue mission (of course, that would be after spending a couple of billions dollars of other people's money).
did i miss something ?
No you didn't. Patents are all about greed and selfishness. It is a way for an entity to gain a monopoly on a market and keep everybody else out while it is making a killing. Patents are not conducive to good human relations. It is just another facet of the dog-eat-dog nature of our economic and social system. It's a form of our collective madness. It can only lead to chaos and destruction. It's rather sad because it does not have tobe that way.
Your points are well taken. I was thinking of IP protection laws in general, not just patents. Let me take this opportunity to add Leonardo da Vinci to my list. A lot of experimental physicists in the old days (Faraday, Volta and Lavoisier come to mind) could have patented a bunch of things based on their discoveries. Yet they continued to be highly creative without the artificial "protection" of IP laws.
If you invented something completely new and revolutionary, such as Bell's telephone, or the Wright brothers' plane, would you want to earn money from it for some time- or let anyone and everyone produce it and make the money (instead of you). Patents provide an incentive to discover and invent new things, and ensure your time, money and efforts don't go to waste.
It is funny you should say this because some of the most creative geniuses in the history of the world (Isaac Newton, Mozart, Beethoven, Blaise Pascal, Rene Descartes, etc...) had no patent protection whatsoever. And as far as someone else making money from my ideas is concerned, so what? I am making money and living a better life as a result of ideas from a bunch of other people who came before me, from the inventor of the wheel on down. One does not make money from an idea. One makes money from applying the idea to something useful: you gotta have a product. There is plenty of opportunities for everybody.
Patent laws are Big Brother laws that infringe on people's freedom. Let's face it. If you cannot put chains on it or put a fence around it, it does not belong to you. Like the air that we breathe, it belongs to nobody and everybody. Makes no difference if it's music, writing, software, you name it. There are people in the third world right now who are laughing at your patent laws. They're selling copies of Windows and MS Office in the streets for pennies on the dollar. Heck, they're laughing at them right here in the US. Music download has become an addictive pasttime for some people.
And one more thing, abolishing patent laws would encourage sharing and compassion and the love of neighbor, things that seem to be on the extinction list in the world these days.
I predict that it will come a time soon when nobody will know who owns any particular piece of IP due to complete confusion. This whole IP business is getting ridiculous. IP laws seemed to have been created for lawyers to make a living while contributing nothing to the economy.
The internet is a system that serves, among other things, as a conduit for exchanging ideas. Someone said that the internet never forgets. It is possible that most the newer patents involving software and the web are invalid due to prior art which can be found by searching the net. Someone else may have thought about it and posted it somewhere.
Is there a special place on the net where people can go and post ideas so as to make it impossible for the greedy bastards to patent them?
Your opinion matters to me because...?
With Congress debating new legislation that would ban p2p networks
Is there such a thing as a p2p file sharing system that cannot be traced to the user?
Mathematically you can have a perfectly valid solution to the field equations that allow time travel. But to be a valid solution it still must be single valued. Basically if you are to go back in time, then you were back in time. You cannot change history because you were already apart of history. Spacetime is still frozen, it is just that a particle's world line travels in a loop. The world line still does not move in spacetime.
This is complete self-contradictory nonsense. This debate has come to an end, AFAIAC.
no, because then MS's team of laywers will go out and patent everything that they couldn't patent before because someone else got to it first.....
:-)
I see your excellent point. In that case, we need to burn, not only the patents, but all the patent laws too. Where are those kept?
Maybe some of the new tech patents will 'accidently' get burned.. we can only hope
Yes, but why just some? Why not all of them? That would solve all of our patent problems, don't you think?
Relativity does allow time travel, but only with very strong constraints of consistancy.
How does this reconcile with this:
Nothing can move in spacetime.
Yes.
What are you, a wise guy?