Evolved speech is one thing but how about music? Here is a few little questions for the evolutionary crowd.
What is it about appreciating music that is evolutionary important? Does loving music make one more fit for survival? If not, where are the music-insensitive humanoid species? Why were they wiped out if they ever existed? Was it war? Di the music lovers kill off the others? Is there something about a mutated music-loving gene that makes some of us violent and want to kill off non-music lovers?
Privacy and fascism had nothing to do with it. Nor was census taking illegal (the book of Numbers is one counter-example). The reason God forbade this particular census was because David wanted to use it to build an army (cf 2 Sam 24:9) -- instead of relying upon the Lord God,
I agree that David did not rely on God but I don't buy that God killed 70,000 people just because David did not rely on him? David already had an army. He wanted to increase it by fascist means because he did not trust the people to join the army ranks. He was, so to speak, a control freak. The people, too, were a bunch of jerks because they knew what David was up to and did nothing to oppose it. They wanted to control those who did not volunteer to fight so as to force them to enlist. God was mad at the people because they were a bunch of jerks who were willing to forgo their liberty for selfish reasons.
As far as the Book of Numbers is concerned, it was not Moses who ordered the counting but God who commanded him to do it. There is a difference. It was a way not only to build the army (sword-carrying men were to be counted) but to divide the people into distinct families of each tribe and to prepare them to inherit the promised land: a plot of land for each family. It was not done for fascist control reasons. Land ownership is freedom. Remember, they were landless slaves in Egypt.
I thought government's role was to defend its citizens and provide a system of justice.
That's the ideal but, in practice, the government does not care about justice. If it did, there would be no private lawyers. Everybody would be provided with effective and equal legal aid, regardless of their financial or social status.
These are paid for by taxes, sure, but if what you said is true, then a government is as ethically sound as the self-perpetuating disease.
It's a disease alright. And no cure in sight that I can see.
umm.... no. That had nothing to do with why God was angry with David. God was angry with David because of David's pride -- his census was a public display of pride, which God hates. The people's privacy had nothing to do with it.
Is that why God killed 70,00 people? To punish David's pride? Wow! Nice God! The truth is that taking a census is forbidden in the Torah for the reasons I have stated. It's fascist and it allows the goverment to control people's daily lives.
The goverment keeps tab on its people for a simple reason: it does not trust them to pay their taxes and it knows that the people does not trust it either. Government without trust is bound to fail in the end. This includes democratic governments. Heck, the very tenet of democracy is that we cannot trust anybody. Hence checks and balances, etc...
To deal with your other statements -- just because I have a SSN and a credit card doesn't mean the government can track all my purchases.
That is not the point of government control. The point of government control is to make sure its taxes are paid.
It funny seeing how people react to the continuing encroachments on their freedom by their chosen government. This reminds me of an old Biblical story about King David ordering that a census be taken of the people (they were all willing participants). God got so pissed off at this blatant and fascist violation of freedom that he sent a nasty plague on them that killed close to 70,000 people. And David was a man after his own heart.
Moral: you already lost. If you have a social security number or driver license number or anything that allows the government to identify or control you, you are already living in a Big Brother society. Either you go along with it or you do something about it. Whichever you choose, you loose.
Sorry, but you are all like cattle, tagged with a number. You are not as free as you have been led to believe. No amount of prideful boasts about living in the freest country in the world will change that fact. You are a bunch of deluded slaves working for a central controlling government. And you are paying a lot more in taxes than you can imagine. It's sad.
I've written this before but it's worth repeating.
Intellectual property laws exist only because we have a slavery system. Our livelihood depends on working for others so we can pay our taxes. The reason that we have to work for others is that 99% of people have been deprived of an inheritance in the wealth of the land. Income property is owned by a few and the state. The others are slaves. Artists, programmers and inventors depend on their work to make a living. Can we blame them? We all depend on our labor because we are all slaves. So now we are swimming in a ocean of laws and rules that take away our remaining liberties, one by one.
Let's face it, if you cannot put a fence around it or put chains on it, it does not belong to you. Makes no difference whether it is ideas, writings, software, music or what have you. Once you've released it, like the air, it belongs to nobody and everybody.
Intellectual property owners (such as Microsoft, Adobe, the music industry, and yes, even that Segway inventor Karmen) will fight freedom with everything they've got. They have to because it's the system. Right now they have two formidable weapons: IP laws and powerful police states to enforce them. But those who yearn to be free also have a formidable weapon, the internet.
The internet and other communication technologies (e.g., file sharing systems) are the first major kinks in the armor of a sick system. As technology progresses, the system will eventually collapse. What will happen to a slave-based economy when robots and advanced artificial intelligences replace everybody, i. e., when human labor, knowledge and expertise become worthless?
And don't think for a minute this won't happen in your lifetime. The internet is the latest giant leap in human communication. Before that came mass telecommunication technologies and before that was the movable press. If history is any indication, we can expect a giant leap in technological progress and scientific knowledge. In fact, it is happening before our very eyes.
We should all demand a system where everybody is guaranteed income property, a piece of the pie, an estate if you will. There is plenty for everybody.
Communism confiscates all property and enslaves everybody. Capitalism gives property to a few and enslaves the rest. It's sad. The land should not be divided for a price. It should be an inheritance for us and our children and their children. It's the only way to guarantee freedom and a truly free market in a world where human labor is about to go the way of the dinosaurs.
If you don't own income property. You are a slave. If you have to work for someone else for a living, you are a slave. And don't think that just because you can quit and go to work for someone else, that this makes you free. It does not matter where you go or who you work for. Wherever you go, you are a slave. They know the fear of hunger will keep you working.
All the hoopla about sophisticated robot manipulators does not hide the fact they have no idea how they are goping to control these things in real time. Motor control is a very complex process. It will require more than just powerful computers. Manual dexterity is not something one can hand-program into a computer. It will take a general learning system to learn sensori-motor control in a real-world environment. Spiking neural networks have the best chance of solving this problem. Although I applaud their engineering approach, it will be some time before Shadow's hand becomes useful to handicapped.
Nothing. It simply should not be the basis of programming. Do a search on Google for "synchronous reactive systems" to get a sense of where software engineering is going.
We're the next group to advance CS/E. We've got to adopt these folks as our mentors and learn all we can from them.
Not just _how_ their stuff works, but _why_ they did it. Fundamental practices 30 years ago are as fundamental today as they were then.
True. But we must also learn why their stuff did not work. Dijkstra learned why the old stuff did not work and changed it. The truth is that we are in a middle of a software reliability and productivity crisis.
Dijkstra did us all a favor by eliminating the cancer of spaghetti code from algorithmic software. Now we need to look further. Are there any more cancerous tumors in software engineering that need to be cut out? I think so.
I think the biggest and nastiest cancer of them all is the practice of basing software construction on the algorithm. We need to abandon our algorithmic past and embrace a signal-based, reactive software paradigm. It took decades before Dijkstra's contributions became widely adopted. I hope we do not repeat the same mistake.
Its unfortunate that our field is so young that its pioneers are just now starting to pass on (compared to other sciences such as Physics, Chemistry, etc.).
Yes. Computer science is indeed in its infancy. Dijkstra cleaned up algorithms by eliminating spaghetti code and introducing structured programming. In my opinion, we are still mired deep in the dark ages of computing. If only someone would clean up software engineering by eliminating the algorithm as the basis of software construction.
Do a search on Google for 'synchronous reactive systems' and find out about the next big advance in software engineering.
If you want to convince people, *do something*, don't just *talk about doing something*.
I have done a lot more than you think. These ideas did not materialize into thin air from nowhere while sitting on my ass. They've been a long time coming. You may not realize it but that is the brunt of the work. The rest is just engineering.
I am working on a two-sided project, AI (Animal) and software reliability (COSA). I have done a tremendous amount of research in AI (see the links below) and written C++ code for a chess learning spiking neural network which can be downloaded from the site. Check it out. I am currently writing code for the COSA execution kernel.
I think this work is too important to allow business interests to control it. I have decided to open-source all the code and research as soon as I can attract one or more sponsors.
There is something fundamentally wrong with the way we create software. The solution requires a fundamental change in the way we program our computers. Software suffers from a seminal problem. The primary reason that software is so unreliable and so hard to produce has to do with a custom that is as old as the computer: the practice of using the algorithm as the basis of software construction. Moving to a pure signal-based software model will result in at least an order of magnitude improvement in both reliability and productivity.
There is something rotten at the heart of software engineering. We are using a software technology that was introduced one hundred and sixty years ago by Lady Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage. This was at a time when the best performance they could hope for that speed demon of theirs--the analytical engine, too bad they never got it to work--was maybe fifty cycles per second at the most. Times have changed somewhat since then. More details can be found at the links below:
My longstanding opinion is that neural networks are the wrong level of abstraction for understanding intelligence, human or machine.
Not a very valid opinion since the behavioral complexity and robustness of biological neural networks are many, many orders of magnitude greater than that of any robot or program in existence. Alice is a good example. But this view is to be expected from a GOFAI (good old fashioned AI) guru whose livelihood depends on hawking the hopelessly flawed symbolic intelligence and knowledge representation approach to AI. This approach is over fifty years old and they still can't use it to make a machine as smart as a cockroach. Not a very good track record, IMO.
For a better take on why neural networks are the only hope for achieving human level AI, click on the links below:
Big Brother will not come about mainly as a result of goverment mandated decrees, but mainly as a result of the rampant greed of business and industry. Big Brother already tells us we cannot cultivate certain naturally growing plants. What's next? Tobacco? Coffee? They already know where we live and what we buy and sell. We've all been identified and numbered like cattle. Now they want to control our driving habits. Why am I not surprised?
That's right, bring on the snooping technologies, the vide cameras on every corner and continue to delude yourselves that you live in a free society. One day we will wake up to realize that we are all a bunch of slaves under surveillance. By then, it will be too late.
"Oh Liberty, where art thou? We have never seen thy face or heard thy voice."
Interesting moderation totals. I must have struck a sensitive nerve. For the record, my site received over a twelve hundred hits in less than 12 hours after I posted my message on Slashdot. I thank the few enlightened souls who were kind enough to email me their words of encouragement. Stay tuned. There is much more to come.
Because that is the nature of complex algorithmic systems. An algorithmic system is temporally inconsistent and unstable by nature. Using the algorithm as the basis of software construction is an ancient practice pioneered by Lady Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage. It is the fundamental reason why dependable software systems are so hard to produce.
There is something rotten at the core of software engineering. Software functionality should not be fundamentally different from hardware functionality. Software should emulate hardware and serve as an extension to it. It should only provide the two things that are lacking in hardware: flexibility and ease of modification. The only way to solve the reliability crisis is to abandon the bad practice of using algorithms as the basis of software construction and to adopt a pure signal-based paradigm. More details can be found at the links below:
In a way, it's sad. We're stuck with vanilla architecture like x86 and vanilla languages like C. There are many better approaches, but none better enough that the pain of conversion is worth it.
I disagree. There is a better approach to software construction and execution that can bring at least an order of magnitude improvement in reliability and productivity. We are in the middle of a crisis because there is something fundamentally wrong in the way we develop software. The root cause of the problem is as old as Lady Ada and Charles Babbage. It is the old practice of using the algorithm as the basis of software construction. Fortunately we don't have to live with it.
This is a golden opportunity for Transmeta (or any struggling chip and software company) to redefine software engineering and computing as we know it. They can do the right thing and leave Microsoft, Intel and AMD in the dust. Details at the links below.
Transmetta does not have to die. They need to focus on the two biggest problems in the computer industry: unreliability and low productivity. If they can come up with a solution that can bring at least an order of magnitude improvement in both productivity and reliability, they can kick both Intel's and Microsoft's asses.
There is something fundamentally wrong with the way we develop software and the way we design our CPUs to execute the software that we develop. There is something rotten at the heart of software engineering. It has to do with the old practice of using the algorithm as the basis of software development.
We need a new software construction paradigm, one which is based on signals. Transmeta has the golden opportunity to do something real cool and save lives in the process. More can be found at the links below.
Well said. But there are other advantages coming in the future. For example, on can conceivably do away with the screen altogether. One could have private booths set up with digital viewing goggles. 3-D anyone?
Heck, who needs the theater at all? Digital movies can be piped to homes, restaurants, etc..., without any loss in quality. Just a thought. And the resolution argument against DP is just stalling tactics. As DP technology improves, its resolution will eventually surpass that of film. Besides there is nothing like a little competition to spur things in the right direction. There are currently two competing DLP technologies that I know of:
The metric unit for time is the second. For intervals less than a second we use milliseconds, microseconds, picoseconds, nanoseconds, femtoseconds, etc... I don't think we need to change the basic metric second that is already in use. What's the point of changing to a day unit?
The problem is that for anything above a second, somehow we change to minutes, hours, days, months years, etc... What's us with that? Why not use deciseconds, centiseconds, kiloseconds, etc... I for one, like the sound of decisec, centisec and kilosec, megasec, etc...
To replicate any non-trivial program in hardware would be incredibly complex -- on the order of producing an Intel or AMD CPU.
And we all know our CPUs are extremely reliable. I haven't had one fail on me yet.
Given the kind of budget used for a CPU, any single program could be made extremely reliable -- until the compiler or the CPU changed, of course. I'll believe in siver bullets when the Lone Ranger rides in.
It is expensive to build a CPU because of the nature of the beast: clean room fabrication, extremely small tolerances, signal racing conditions, physical impurities, etc... Once these problems are solved, the chip usually performs flawlessly. None of these problems are present in software construction. At least, they should not be.
There is silver bullet. We must emulate the parallelism of hardware ICs in our software ICs. In a 1995 article titled "What if there's a Silver Bullet..." Dr. Brad Cox wrote the following:
Building applications (rack-level modules)
solely with tightly-coupled technologies like
subroutine libraries (block-level modules) is
logically equivalent to wafer-scale
integration, something that hardware
engineering can barely accomplish to this day.
I disagree with Dr. Cox, primarily because subroutine libraries have no analog in integrated circuits. The biggest difference between hardware and software is that the former operates in a parallel, signal-based environment, whereas the latter uses sequential algorithmic code. I believe that this is the main reason that hardware is orders of magnitude more reliable than software. My approach completely eliminates algorithmic coding from everyday software development.
Blame software unreliability on a software coding practice that is as old as Lady Ada Lovelace: the algorithmic code. I am convinced that, if we stop basing software construction on the algorithm, we can expect several orders of magnitude improvement in the reliability of our software.
I agree with your Spruce Goose analogy. Longhorn will never get off the ground. The biggest problem in software is not how many features you can add but whether the features can work reliably. Longhorn sounds like a nightmare of complexity.
My prediction is that, unless there is breakthrough in software engineering soon, Longhorn will be so ladden with bugs (termites in the spruce) that it will just crumble into dust before it gets off the ground.
If there was no protection to intellectual property, people would not be encouraged to share knowledge with others. Writers would not write, inventors would not invent, artists would not.
This is, of course, nonsense! How do you explain Mozart, Beethoven, Sir Isaac Newton, Galileo, Descartes, etc... What intellectual property rights did they have beside general societal rules against plagiarism? You, sir, are a fool in a foolish world. You are forgiven though, because we are all fools to one degree or another.
Like I said, I agree that the human brain is flexible, but it is in general *not* reliable. Even "dumb" machines tend to be more consistent at repetative tasks than humans.
It is obvious that you don't know the first thing about reliability and how it is measured. I don't have the time to educate you. See you around.
Slashdot Mirror
Evolved speech is one thing but how about music? Here is a few little questions for the evolutionary crowd.
What is it about appreciating music that is evolutionary important? Does loving music make one more fit for survival? If not, where are the music-insensitive humanoid species? Why were they wiped out if they ever existed? Was it war? Di the music lovers kill off the others? Is there something about a mutated music-loving gene that makes some of us violent and want to kill off non-music lovers?
Privacy and fascism had nothing to do with it. Nor was census taking illegal (the book of Numbers is one counter-example). The reason God forbade this particular census was because David wanted to use it to build an army (cf 2 Sam 24:9) -- instead of relying upon the Lord God,
I agree that David did not rely on God but I don't buy that God killed 70,000 people just because David did not rely on him? David already had an army. He wanted to increase it by fascist means because he did not trust the people to join the army ranks. He was, so to speak, a control freak. The people, too, were a bunch of jerks because they knew what David was up to and did nothing to oppose it. They wanted to control those who did not volunteer to fight so as to force them to enlist. God was mad at the people because they were a bunch of jerks who were willing to forgo their liberty for selfish reasons.
As far as the Book of Numbers is concerned, it was not Moses who ordered the counting but God who commanded him to do it. There is a difference. It was a way not only to build the army (sword-carrying men were to be counted) but to divide the people into distinct families of each tribe and to prepare them to inherit the promised land: a plot of land for each family. It was not done for fascist control reasons. Land ownership is freedom. Remember, they were landless slaves in Egypt.
I thought government's role was to defend its citizens and provide a system of justice.
That's the ideal but, in practice, the government does not care about justice. If it did, there would be no private lawyers. Everybody would be provided with effective and equal legal aid, regardless of their financial or social status.
These are paid for by taxes, sure, but if what you said is true, then a government is as ethically sound as the self-perpetuating disease.
It's a disease alright. And no cure in sight that I can see.
umm.... no. That had nothing to do with why God was angry with David. God was angry with David because of David's pride -- his census was a public display of pride, which God hates. The people's privacy had nothing to do with it.
Is that why God killed 70,00 people? To punish David's pride? Wow! Nice God! The truth is that taking a census is forbidden in the Torah for the reasons I have stated. It's fascist and it allows the goverment to control people's daily lives.
The goverment keeps tab on its people for a simple reason: it does not trust them to pay their taxes and it knows that the people does not trust it either. Government without trust is bound to fail in the end. This includes democratic governments. Heck, the very tenet of democracy is that we cannot trust anybody. Hence checks and balances, etc...
To deal with your other statements -- just because I have a SSN and a credit card doesn't mean the government can track all my purchases.
That is not the point of government control. The point of government control is to make sure its taxes are paid.
It funny seeing how people react to the continuing encroachments on their freedom by their chosen government. This reminds me of an old Biblical story about King David ordering that a census be taken of the people (they were all willing participants). God got so pissed off at this blatant and fascist violation of freedom that he sent a nasty plague on them that killed close to 70,000 people. And David was a man after his own heart.
Moral: you already lost. If you have a social security number or driver license number or anything that allows the government to identify or control you, you are already living in a Big Brother society. Either you go along with it or you do something about it. Whichever you choose, you loose.
Sorry, but you are all like cattle, tagged with a number. You are not as free as you have been led to believe. No amount of prideful boasts about living in the freest country in the world will change that fact. You are a bunch of deluded slaves working for a central controlling government. And you are paying a lot more in taxes than you can imagine. It's sad.
I've written this before but it's worth repeating.
Intellectual property laws exist only because we have a slavery system. Our livelihood depends on working for others so we can pay our taxes. The reason that we have to work for others is that 99% of people have been deprived of an inheritance in the wealth of the land. Income property is owned by a few and the state. The others are slaves. Artists, programmers and inventors depend on their work to make a living. Can we blame them? We all depend on our labor because we are all slaves. So now we are swimming in a ocean of laws and rules that take away our remaining liberties, one by one.
Let's face it, if you cannot put a fence around it or put chains on it, it does not belong to you. Makes no difference whether it is ideas, writings, software, music or what have you. Once you've released it, like the air, it belongs to nobody and everybody.
Intellectual property owners (such as Microsoft, Adobe, the music industry, and yes, even that Segway inventor Karmen) will fight freedom with everything they've got. They have to because it's the system. Right now they have two formidable weapons: IP laws and powerful police states to enforce them. But those who yearn to be free also have a formidable weapon, the internet.
The internet and other communication technologies (e.g., file sharing systems) are the first major kinks in the armor of a sick system. As technology progresses, the system will eventually collapse. What will happen to a slave-based economy when robots and advanced artificial intelligences replace everybody, i. e., when human labor, knowledge and expertise become worthless?
And don't think for a minute this won't happen in your lifetime. The internet is the latest giant leap in human communication. Before that came mass telecommunication technologies and before that was the movable press. If history is any indication, we can expect a giant leap in technological progress and scientific knowledge. In fact, it is happening before our very eyes.
We should all demand a system where everybody is guaranteed income property, a piece of the pie, an estate if you will. There is plenty for everybody.
Communism confiscates all property and enslaves everybody. Capitalism gives property to a few and enslaves the rest. It's sad. The land should not be divided for a price. It should be an inheritance for us and our children and their children. It's the only way to guarantee freedom and a truly free market in a world where human labor is about to go the way of the dinosaurs.
If you don't own income property. You are a slave. If you have to work for someone else for a living, you are a slave. And don't think that just because you can quit and go to work for someone else, that this makes you free. It does not matter where you go or who you work for. Wherever you go, you are a slave. They know the fear of hunger will keep you working.
Demand liberty! Nothing less.
All the hoopla about sophisticated robot manipulators does not hide the fact they have no idea how they are goping to control these things in real time. Motor control is a very complex process. It will require more than just powerful computers. Manual dexterity is not something one can hand-program into a computer. It will take a general learning system to learn sensori-motor control in a real-world environment. Spiking neural networks have the best chance of solving this problem. Although I applaud their engineering approach, it will be some time before Shadow's hand becomes useful to handicapped.
What's wrong with the algorithm?
Nothing. It simply should not be the basis of programming. Do a search on Google for "synchronous reactive systems" to get a sense of where software engineering is going.
Project COSA
We're the next group to advance CS/E. We've got to adopt these folks as our mentors and learn all we can from them.
Not just _how_ their stuff works, but _why_ they did it. Fundamental practices 30 years ago are as fundamental today as they were then.
True. But we must also learn why their stuff did not work. Dijkstra learned why the old stuff did not work and changed it. The truth is that we are in a middle of a software reliability and productivity crisis.
Dijkstra did us all a favor by eliminating the cancer of spaghetti code from algorithmic software. Now we need to look further. Are there any more cancerous tumors in software engineering that need to be cut out? I think so.
I think the biggest and nastiest cancer of them all is the practice of basing software construction on the algorithm. We need to abandon our algorithmic past and embrace a signal-based, reactive software paradigm. It took decades before Dijkstra's contributions became widely adopted. I hope we do not repeat the same mistake.
Project COSA
Its unfortunate that our field is so young that its pioneers are just now starting to pass on (compared to other sciences such as Physics, Chemistry, etc.).
Yes. Computer science is indeed in its infancy. Dijkstra cleaned up algorithms by eliminating spaghetti code and introducing structured programming. In my opinion, we are still mired deep in the dark ages of computing. If only someone would clean up software engineering by eliminating the algorithm as the basis of software construction.
Do a search on Google for 'synchronous reactive systems' and find out about the next big advance in software engineering.
Project COSA
If you want to convince people, *do something*, don't just *talk about doing something*.
I have done a lot more than you think. These ideas did not materialize into thin air from nowhere while sitting on my ass. They've been a long time coming. You may not realize it but that is the brunt of the work. The rest is just engineering.
I am working on a two-sided project, AI (Animal) and software reliability (COSA). I have done a tremendous amount of research in AI (see the links below) and written C++ code for a chess learning spiking neural network which can be downloaded from the site. Check it out. I am currently writing code for the COSA execution kernel.
I think this work is too important to allow business interests to control it. I have decided to open-source all the code and research as soon as I can attract one or more sponsors.
Temporal Intelligence
Animal
There is something fundamentally wrong with the way we create software. The solution requires a fundamental change in the way we program our computers. Software suffers from a seminal problem. The primary reason that software is so unreliable and so hard to produce has to do with a custom that is as old as the computer: the practice of using the algorithm as the basis of software construction. Moving to a pure signal-based software model will result in at least an order of magnitude improvement in both reliability and productivity.
There is something rotten at the heart of software engineering. We are using a software technology that was introduced one hundred and sixty years ago by Lady Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage. This was at a time when the best performance they could hope for that speed demon of theirs--the analytical engine, too bad they never got it to work--was maybe fifty cycles per second at the most. Times have changed somewhat since then. More details can be found at the links below:
Project COSA
My longstanding opinion is that neural networks are the wrong level of abstraction for understanding intelligence, human or machine.
Not a very valid opinion since the behavioral complexity and robustness of biological neural networks are many, many orders of magnitude greater than that of any robot or program in existence. Alice is a good example. But this view is to be expected from a GOFAI (good old fashioned AI) guru whose livelihood depends on hawking the hopelessly flawed symbolic intelligence and knowledge representation approach to AI. This approach is over fifty years old and they still can't use it to make a machine as smart as a cockroach. Not a very good track record, IMO.
For a better take on why neural networks are the only hope for achieving human level AI, click on the links below:
Temporal Intelligence
Animal
Big Brother will not come about mainly as a result of goverment mandated decrees, but mainly as a result of the rampant greed of business and industry. Big Brother already tells us we cannot cultivate certain naturally growing plants. What's next? Tobacco? Coffee? They already know where we live and what we buy and sell. We've all been identified and numbered like cattle. Now they want to control our driving habits. Why am I not surprised?
That's right, bring on the snooping technologies, the vide cameras on every corner and continue to delude yourselves that you live in a free society. One day we will wake up to realize that we are all a bunch of slaves under surveillance. By then, it will be too late.
"Oh Liberty, where art thou? We have never seen thy face or heard thy voice."
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=1, Troll=1, Insightful=1, Interesting=4, Funny=1, Overrated=3, Total=11.
Interesting moderation totals. I must have struck a sensitive nerve. For the record, my site received over a twelve hundred hits in less than 12 hours after I posted my message on Slashdot. I thank the few enlightened souls who were kind enough to email me their words of encouragement. Stay tuned. There is much more to come.
Project COSA
Why do you need the inflight reboot?
Because that is the nature of complex algorithmic systems. An algorithmic system is temporally inconsistent and unstable by nature. Using the algorithm as the basis of software construction is an ancient practice pioneered by Lady Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage. It is the fundamental reason why dependable software systems are so hard to produce.
There is something rotten at the core of software engineering. Software functionality should not be fundamentally different from hardware functionality. Software should emulate hardware and serve as an extension to it. It should only provide the two things that are lacking in hardware: flexibility and ease of modification. The only way to solve the reliability crisis is to abandon the bad practice of using algorithms as the basis of software construction and to adopt a pure signal-based paradigm. More details can be found at the links below:
Project COSA
In a way, it's sad. We're stuck with vanilla architecture like x86 and vanilla languages like C. There are many better approaches, but none better enough that the pain of conversion is worth it.
I disagree. There is a better approach to software construction and execution that can bring at least an order of magnitude improvement in reliability and productivity. We are in the middle of a crisis because there is something fundamentally wrong in the way we develop software. The root cause of the problem is as old as Lady Ada and Charles Babbage. It is the old practice of using the algorithm as the basis of software construction. Fortunately we don't have to live with it.
This is a golden opportunity for Transmeta (or any struggling chip and software company) to redefine software engineering and computing as we know it. They can do the right thing and leave Microsoft, Intel and AMD in the dust. Details at the links below.
Project COSA
Transmetta does not have to die. They need to focus on the two biggest problems in the computer industry: unreliability and low productivity. If they can come up with a solution that can bring at least an order of magnitude improvement in both productivity and reliability, they can kick both Intel's and Microsoft's asses.
There is something fundamentally wrong with the way we develop software and the way we design our CPUs to execute the software that we develop. There is something rotten at the heart of software engineering. It has to do with the old practice of using the algorithm as the basis of software development.
We need a new software construction paradigm, one which is based on signals. Transmeta has the golden opportunity to do something real cool and save lives in the process. More can be found at the links below.
Project COSA
Well said. But there are other advantages coming in the future. For example, on can conceivably do away with the screen altogether. One could have private booths set up with digital viewing goggles. 3-D anyone?
Heck, who needs the theater at all? Digital movies can be piped to homes, restaurants, etc..., without any loss in quality. Just a thought. And the resolution argument against DP is just stalling tactics. As DP technology improves, its resolution will eventually surpass that of film. Besides there is nothing like a little competition to spur things in the right direction. There are currently two competing DLP technologies that I know of:
Silicon Light
Digital Light Projection
In my opinion, Silicon light has an advantage because their projector is cheaper and potentially better. Check both of them out.
The metric unit for time is the second. For intervals less than a second we use milliseconds, microseconds, picoseconds, nanoseconds, femtoseconds, etc... I don't think we need to change the basic metric second that is already in use. What's the point of changing to a day unit?
The problem is that for anything above a second, somehow we change to minutes, hours, days, months years, etc... What's us with that? Why not use deciseconds, centiseconds, kiloseconds, etc... I for one, like the sound of decisec, centisec and kilosec, megasec, etc...
To replicate any non-trivial program in hardware would be incredibly complex -- on the order of producing an Intel or AMD CPU.
And we all know our CPUs are extremely reliable. I haven't had one fail on me yet.
Given the kind of budget used for a CPU, any single program could be made extremely reliable -- until the compiler or the CPU changed, of course. I'll believe in siver bullets when the Lone Ranger rides in.
It is expensive to build a CPU because of the nature of the beast: clean room fabrication, extremely small tolerances, signal racing conditions, physical impurities, etc... Once these problems are solved, the chip usually performs flawlessly. None of these problems are present in software construction. At least, they should not be.
There is silver bullet. We must emulate the parallelism of hardware ICs in our software ICs. In a 1995 article titled "What if there's a Silver Bullet..." Dr. Brad Cox wrote the following:
Building applications (rack-level modules)
solely with tightly-coupled technologies like
subroutine libraries (block-level modules) is
logically equivalent to wafer-scale
integration, something that hardware
engineering can barely accomplish to this day.
I disagree with Dr. Cox, primarily because subroutine libraries have no analog in integrated circuits. The biggest difference between hardware and software is that the former operates in a parallel, signal-based environment, whereas the latter uses sequential algorithmic code. I believe that this is the main reason that hardware is orders of magnitude more reliable than software. My approach completely eliminates algorithmic coding from everyday software development.
Blame software unreliability on a software coding practice that is as old as Lady Ada Lovelace: the algorithmic code. I am convinced that, if we stop basing software construction on the algorithm, we can expect several orders of magnitude improvement in the reliability of our software.
I agree with your Spruce Goose analogy. Longhorn will never get off the ground. The biggest problem in software is not how many features you can add but whether the features can work reliably. Longhorn sounds like a nightmare of complexity.
My prediction is that, unless there is breakthrough in software engineering soon, Longhorn will be so ladden with bugs (termites in the spruce) that it will just crumble into dust before it gets off the ground.
If there was no protection to intellectual property, people would not be encouraged to share knowledge with others. Writers would not write, inventors would not invent, artists would not.
This is, of course, nonsense! How do you explain Mozart, Beethoven, Sir Isaac Newton, Galileo, Descartes, etc... What intellectual property rights did they have beside general societal rules against plagiarism? You, sir, are a fool in a foolish world. You are forgiven though, because we are all fools to one degree or another.
Like I said, I agree that the human brain is flexible, but it is in general *not* reliable. Even "dumb" machines tend to be more consistent at repetative tasks than humans.
It is obvious that you don't know the first thing about reliability and how it is measured. I don't have the time to educate you. See you around.