In my opinion, trademark laws give too much power to trademark holders. I can understand that corporate identity is paramount to fair business practices in a free society. But then again, so is individual identity. Yet there are millions of people around the world who have exactly the same name. Does that rob them of their identity? I don't think so. Should corporations have greater rights than human beings when it comes to the law? I don't think so. In the case of Adobe Illustrator, there is no way that there can be widespread confusion between Killustrator and Adobe Illustrator for the same reason that there is no confusion between John A. Taylor of Iowa and John B. Taylor of New Zealand. There is much more to identity than name alone.
We need to offer the KDE folks all the support we can muster. We also need to write to our representatives in Washington and elsewhere around the world and let them know that we are not pleased with the current trademark laws.
Look at it this way, a lot of other private rocketeers are keeping an eye on Bennett and his launch efforts. Whatever happens, success or failure, they will gain from his experience. Bennet is a voluntary guinea pig. It sounds crazy but come to think of it, Christopher Columbus and his crew were willing guinea pigs too. They sure did not have the technology to send a self-piloted ship across the atlantic and back.
Ok. I see many people feel strongly about retaining plain text messages and I can sympathize with their concerns. Maybe this is a question for Ask Slashdot. Or maybe it should be put to a universal vote. But then again, why not create a parallel HTML-based discussion network separate from the old one and let market and technology forces decide?
Jim Ellis changed the world and will be sorely missed. Usenet is still going strong. In Jim's honor, I propose that we slightly modify usenet protocols so as to allow greater freedom in message formatting. It would be nice if usenet messages adopted HTML formatting. There is only so much one can do with plain text. The new usenet could then be renamed ellisnet in Jim's honor. Just a thought.
Proprietary software is a cancer. GPL is the cure
on
Microsoft and the GPL
·
· Score: 2
I applaud Dr. Pfaffenberger's insight. The focus is on GPL because Linux won't last forever but GPL will. GPL is an exquisite pain in Gates' groin and he can't stand it any longer. In the wake of today's court announcement that Microsoft will not be broken up, we should expect a legal challenge by MS against GPL soon on constitutional grounds. We must be prepared to support the FSF legal team with every penny we have.
By knowing where it is and the correct time, the robot can compute where the Sun is and keep its solar panel pointed in the right direction.
Strange. Why does a robot need to know its location and the time of day in order to find where the sun is? Unless it's a cloudy day, would not a simple light-sensitive sensor suffice? And if it's cloudy or night time solar panels are not much use.
Besides, even if it knows its precise location and the correct time, it would also need to know which direction it is facing and its exact angle with respect to the vertical. Seems to be a rather complex approach to a relatively simple problem.
PostgreSQL is PostgreSQL. If they don't intend to fork PostgreSQL, then why give it it's own name (Red Hat Database)? I'm not sure I understand the incentive here.
In the business world, what counts is service, support and reliability. RH is not selling software. They are selling service and expertise. PostgreSQL is a reliable but complex piece of software that requires knowledgeable people to support. That's where RH comes in. I am sure they have hired competent people who can help small to medium size businesses set up and operate their databases. Good move on RH part IMO.
I don't see any reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Spacetime exists, sure, just some of the extrapolations thrown about are nonsense.
Not at all. Spacetime cannot exist because it makes motion impossible. I thought you understood Zeno's paradox of the arrow but aparently not. A time dimension forbids motion.
But in order to do that, it needs to have all the basic fundamental "truths" and assumptions we humans take for granted, and that's the stage I see their proyect is, currently.
But is is not true that we take encyclopedic knowledge for granted and that is the fallacy of Cyc's approach to AI. Little kids have lots of common sense knowledge even before they start going to school. They learn it automatically and that's the reason why we say kids are intelligent.
Given enough time, Cyc will learn to learn.
That is what it should have been doing from day one, if it was intelligent.
The sensible thing to do is to eliminate the one assumption that makes it false, the time axis.
That is not the only possible assumption that makes it false: another assumption is that time and space can both be divided infinitely. If they can't then movement becomes possible again.
I agree. The continuity assumption (infinite divisibilty) is part of the other "paradoxes" of Zeno. Get rid of the continuity and time assumptions and the problem is solved. It's simple. But would you believe that famous and celebrated physicists like Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking have trouble grasping this? Instead of doing what you just did, they would rather come up with a bunch of cockamamie nonsense like time travel. Go figure!
AI systems of this class are comparable to "how-to" books. If the author anticipated your question, they're useful, and otherwise they're not.
I agree. The symbolic crowd is holding on for dear life to an obsolete science. Their approach to AI is an insult to those of us who know that the only viable solution will be a neural one. Why? Because intelligence is so atrononomically complex as to be intractable to formal symbolic means. Intelligence must be acquired through sensory experience. The ability to interact with the environment via motor neurons is a big plus.
The symbolic clan (that includes people like Marvin Minsky, Lenat, etc...) have taken to equating AI with inference engines, expert systems and glorified databases. To defend their moribund approach to AI, they invent cute little phrases like "there is no such thing as a free lunch". It's sad. It goes to show you that delusion has its rewards.
If it looks intelligent, and acts intelligent in all conceiveable circumstances, then we'll be forced to conclude that it is intelligent, even if we know what's going on under the hood.
The problem is that Cyc will never look intelligent, not in a million years. Unless a machine builds its knowledge of the world through its senses, it will never have common sense. No machine will ever understand enough about nature from being fed a bunch of facts, regardless of how how many inferences it can make from those facts. The interconnectedness of intelligence is so astronomical as to be intractable to formal symbolic means. We have the common sense to hold a cup of coffee upright and level without spilling it from experience and from our ability to coordinate millions upon millions of sensory nerve impulses so as to trigger the right sequence of impulse from our motor neurons. How can a machine accomplish this sort of dexterity from spoon fed facts?
Holding a cup of coffee is just one in myriads of highly detailed knowledge that one can learn through experience. A machine cannot gain this sort of knowledge from being spoon fed facts via a keyboard. Cyc is merely a glorified database with a fancy query language, one that requires experienced human data entry slaves to maintain. Unless a machine is given the ability to learn from and interact with its environment via its sensors and effectors it's not intelligent. Sure Cyc is a cool hack but it has about as much to do with intelligence as MySQL. To associate it with intelligence is an insult to computational neuroscience researchers around the world whose goal is true human level AI. Sorry.
Nobody is arguing that there is no motion. In fact that is precisely what I argue against. One of Zeno's pardoxes (the paradox of the arrow) does prove that, if one assumes the existence of a time, there can be no motion. Rather than sit around and scream that the paradox is false because there is motion in the world, the sensible thing to do is to eliminate the one assumption that makes it false, the time axis. And, of course, if there is no time axis there is no time travel either.
Unless a machine builds its knowledge of the world through its senses, it will never have common sense. No machine will ever understand enough about nature from being fed a bunch of facts, regardless of how how many inferences it can make. The interconnectedness of intelligence is intractable to formal symbolic means. We have the common sense to hold a cup of coffee upright and level without spilling it from experience and our ability to coordinate millions of sensory nerve impulses so as to trigger the right sequence of motor neurons.
Holding a cup of coffee is just one in myriads of highly detailed knowledge that one can learn through experience. A machine cannot gain this sort of knowledge from being spoon fed facts via a keyboard. Cyc is merely a glorified database with a fancy query language, one that requires experienced human data entry slaves to maintain. Unless a machine is given the ability to learn from and interact with its environment via its sensors and effectors it's not intelligent. Sure Cyc is a cool hack but it has about as much to do with intelligence as MySQL. To associate it with intelligence is an insult to computational neuroscience researchers around the world whose goal is true human level AI. Sorry.
A matter of personal opinion, of course. There are people a lot smarter than you are, who have the exact opposite opinion about the page in question.
Care to name some?
Some are listed on my site. Feel free to write to them. Several among them are full physics professors at major universities. Don't think for a second that the time-travel and wormhole con artists have a monopoly on what's accepted in the physics community.
But then again, I also get emails from young kids who have no trouble grasping that nothing can move in spacetime. Too bad you can't do the same, eh? Besides, it's my credibility to reduce or increase as I see fit.
Zeno's paradox is a fallacy, "nemesis".
Proof by assertion, I see. Not even the greatest scientists of the world held such power. Besides, there are more than one Zeno's "paradox." Get a clue.
By the way, how do you equate everyone agreeing with you with everyone violently disagreeing with you and still keep a straight face?
"Violently" is the right word for it. Many, like you, take it to heart, jumping up and down and foaming at the mouth. Indeed I can't keep a straight face. It's rather amusing. See ya!
Just out of interest, why do you reduce your credibility by linking to that Crackpot's page about Spacetime physics?
A matter of personal opinion, of course. There are people a lot smarter than you are, who have the exact opposite opinion about the page in question. But then again, I also get emails from young kids who have no trouble grasping that nothing can move in spacetime. Too bad you can't do the same, eh? Besides, it's my credibility to reduce or increase as I see fit.
Just out of interest, why do you get so bent out of shape over a crackpot?
I'm all in favor of the benefits that society at large gains from active competition in for-profit free markets.
[...]
Without patents the drug companies would not have done the research to create the aids drugs in the first place so the whole issue would be moot. But clearly it is not in anyone's interest including the drug companies to charge so much for their product that their consumers (patients) cannot afford them. So they need to figure out how to charge less (in Africa - a lot less) in markets where the consumers cannot afford the regular price.
With all due respect to Mr. Young, there really is no such thing as free market coexisting with IP laws. IP laws are not designed to free the market but to restrict its freedom. So we are left in a quandary: how does a free society finance scientific research without IP restrictions on its freedom? How do programmers, artists, etc.. make a living if they cannot live off their work?
The way I see it, there is no such thing as intellectual property. If you can't lock it up or put a fence around it, it does not belong to you.Once you release it to the world it belongs to nobody and to everybody. The only property worthy of the name is tangible property. A economic system based on human labor will not survive, whether it is communism or capitalism. What will happen to a slave economy when AI and advanced automation replaces everybody? It will collapse, that's what.
So now the IP owners can only rely on powerful police states to enforce their "property." And it will get worse. The only way to truly enforce IP laws in the age of the internet and file sharing technologies is by instituting increasingly Orwellian governing bodies that continually spy on its citizens. When that happens, I hope the people of the world rise up against it.
We will not be truly free until we are all guaranteed an inheritance in the land and its wealth, a piece of the pie. What we do with our piece should be up to us. The wealth of the earth is the earth and it should not be divided for a price so that it ultimately ends up under the control of the few while everyone else is forced to be slave. It should be divided up and given to the people. Only then will we have a free market where nobody is forced to suck up to those who would enslave us. Knowledge should only serve as a mechanism for increasing the wealth of the earth.
Once we have a society based of giving rather than taking, we will openly share our knowledge with one another. We will cooperate and freely share our knowledge so that society as a whole benefits. Someone recently emailed me this delightful quote by Benjamin Franklin: "As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously."
This can only happen in truly free society. Slaves cannot be expected to give freely to others when their livelihood depends on competing against other slaves. The system forces us to exploit our fellow human beings. It must be changed or we will soon face disaster.
Thanks for the info on Excite's zoom feature. I am impressed. I wonder how they go about creating their topic associations. Do they compile it manually or do they have a automated tool that searches previous user inputs to come up with the most common keyword associations? An automated tool would, of couurse, be much more efficient and cheaper to operate.
Google already has this. If you do a search on 'slishdot' it asks you if you meant slashdot.
Thanks for this suggestion. Although it is a good example of interaction between the engine and the user, it seems to be based on a simple spelling check. Rather, I was thinking more in terms of what Monika Henziger referred to as a topic based query. For example, typing 'bicycle' and receiving a choice of 'bicycle repair', 'bicycle racing', 'bicycle sales', 'bicycle parts', 'bicycle touring', etc...
Slashdot Mirror
And if not, how can the software/hardware be modified to make it applicable to amputees and/or paralyzed people?
In my opinion, trademark laws give too much power to trademark holders. I can understand that corporate identity is paramount to fair business practices in a free society. But then again, so is individual identity. Yet there are millions of people around the world who have exactly the same name. Does that rob them of their identity? I don't think so. Should corporations have greater rights than human beings when it comes to the law? I don't think so. In the case of Adobe Illustrator, there is no way that there can be widespread confusion between Killustrator and Adobe Illustrator for the same reason that there is no confusion between John A. Taylor of Iowa and John B. Taylor of New Zealand. There is much more to identity than name alone.
:-)
We need to offer the KDE folks all the support we can muster. We also need to write to our representatives in Washington and elsewhere around the world and let them know that we are not pleased with the current trademark laws.
And don't even get me started on patent laws.
One day we'll all wake up to the fact that we are a bunch of slaves under surveillance. Then it will be too late to do anything about it.
The world does not need another scripting language. Enough is enough!
Look at it this way, a lot of other private rocketeers are keeping an eye on Bennett and his launch efforts. Whatever happens, success or failure, they will gain from his experience. Bennet is a voluntary guinea pig. It sounds crazy but come to think of it, Christopher Columbus and his crew were willing guinea pigs too. They sure did not have the technology to send a self-piloted ship across the atlantic and back.
Now, a US team has been able to show that the simple molecule nitric oxide acts as the on-off "button"."
Cool. Now the real important question to us computer geeks is, can they switch on and off at 1000 Ghz?
I am very much opposed to allowing HTML messages.
Ok. I see many people feel strongly about retaining plain text messages and I can sympathize with their concerns. Maybe this is a question for Ask Slashdot. Or maybe it should be put to a universal vote. But then again, why not create a parallel HTML-based discussion network separate from the old one and let market and technology forces decide?
Jim Ellis changed the world and will be sorely missed. Usenet is still going strong. In Jim's honor, I propose that we slightly modify usenet protocols so as to allow greater freedom in message formatting. It would be nice if usenet messages adopted HTML formatting. There is only so much one can do with plain text. The new usenet could then be renamed ellisnet in Jim's honor. Just a thought.
I applaud Dr. Pfaffenberger's insight. The focus is on GPL because Linux won't last forever but GPL will. GPL is an exquisite pain in Gates' groin and he can't stand it any longer. In the wake of today's court announcement that Microsoft will not be broken up, we should expect a legal challenge by MS against GPL soon on constitutional grounds. We must be prepared to support the FSF legal team with every penny we have.
By knowing where it is and the correct time, the robot can compute where the Sun is and keep its solar panel pointed in the right direction.
Strange. Why does a robot need to know its location and the time of day in order to find where the sun is? Unless it's a cloudy day, would not a simple light-sensitive sensor suffice? And if it's cloudy or night time solar panels are not much use.
Besides, even if it knows its precise location and the correct time, it would also need to know which direction it is facing and its exact angle with respect to the vertical. Seems to be a rather complex approach to a relatively simple problem.
I think the name 'Red Hat' is much more marketable and attractive than PosgreSQL. I too, seriously doubt that RH is thinking of forking the code.
PostgreSQL is PostgreSQL. If they don't intend to fork PostgreSQL, then why give it it's own name (Red Hat Database)? I'm not sure I understand the incentive here.
In the business world, what counts is service, support and reliability. RH is not selling software. They are selling service and expertise. PostgreSQL is a reliable but complex piece of software that requires knowledgeable people to support. That's where RH comes in. I am sure they have hired competent people who can help small to medium size businesses set up and operate their databases. Good move on RH part IMO.
I don't see any reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Spacetime exists, sure, just some of the extrapolations thrown about are nonsense.
Not at all. Spacetime cannot exist because it makes motion impossible. I thought you understood Zeno's paradox of the arrow but aparently not. A time dimension forbids motion.
But in order to do that, it needs to have all the basic fundamental "truths" and assumptions we humans take for granted, and that's the stage I see their proyect is, currently.
But is is not true that we take encyclopedic knowledge for granted and that is the fallacy of Cyc's approach to AI. Little kids have lots of common sense knowledge even before they start going to school. They learn it automatically and that's the reason why we say kids are intelligent.
Given enough time, Cyc will learn to learn.
That is what it should have been doing from day one, if it was intelligent.
The sensible thing to do is to eliminate the one assumption that makes it false, the time axis.
That is not the only possible assumption that makes it false: another assumption is that time and space can both be divided infinitely. If they can't then movement becomes possible again.
I agree. The continuity assumption (infinite divisibilty) is part of the other "paradoxes" of Zeno. Get rid of the continuity and time assumptions and the problem is solved. It's simple. But would you believe that famous and celebrated physicists like Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking have trouble grasping this? Instead of doing what you just did, they would rather come up with a bunch of cockamamie nonsense like time travel. Go figure!
AI systems of this class are comparable to "how-to" books. If the author anticipated your question, they're useful, and otherwise they're not.
I agree. The symbolic crowd is holding on for dear life to an obsolete science. Their approach to AI is an insult to those of us who know that the only viable solution will be a neural one. Why? Because intelligence is so atrononomically complex as to be intractable to formal symbolic means. Intelligence must be acquired through sensory experience. The ability to interact with the environment via motor neurons is a big plus.
The symbolic clan (that includes people like Marvin Minsky, Lenat, etc...) have taken to equating AI with inference engines, expert systems and glorified databases. To defend their moribund approach to AI, they invent cute little phrases like "there is no such thing as a free lunch". It's sad. It goes to show you that delusion has its rewards.
If it looks intelligent, and acts intelligent in all conceiveable circumstances, then we'll be forced to conclude that it is intelligent, even if we know what's going on under the hood.
The problem is that Cyc will never look intelligent, not in a million years. Unless a machine builds its knowledge of the world through its senses, it will never have common sense. No machine will ever understand enough about nature from being fed a bunch of facts, regardless of how how many inferences it can make from those facts. The interconnectedness of intelligence is so astronomical as to be intractable to formal symbolic means. We have the common sense to hold a cup of coffee upright and level without spilling it from experience and from our ability to coordinate millions upon millions of sensory nerve impulses so as to trigger the right sequence of impulse from our motor neurons. How can a machine accomplish this sort of dexterity from spoon fed facts?
Holding a cup of coffee is just one in myriads of highly detailed knowledge that one can learn through experience. A machine cannot gain this sort of knowledge from being spoon fed facts via a keyboard. Cyc is merely a glorified database with a fancy query language, one that requires experienced human data entry slaves to maintain. Unless a machine is given the ability to learn from and interact with its environment via its sensors and effectors it's not intelligent. Sure Cyc is a cool hack but it has about as much to do with intelligence as MySQL. To associate it with intelligence is an insult to computational neuroscience researchers around the world whose goal is true human level AI. Sorry.
Nobody is arguing that there is no motion. In fact that is precisely what I argue against. One of Zeno's pardoxes (the paradox of the arrow) does prove that, if one assumes the existence of a time, there can be no motion. Rather than sit around and scream that the paradox is false because there is motion in the world, the sensible thing to do is to eliminate the one assumption that makes it false, the time axis. And, of course, if there is no time axis there is no time travel either.
Unless a machine builds its knowledge of the world through its senses, it will never have common sense. No machine will ever understand enough about nature from being fed a bunch of facts, regardless of how how many inferences it can make. The interconnectedness of intelligence is intractable to formal symbolic means. We have the common sense to hold a cup of coffee upright and level without spilling it from experience and our ability to coordinate millions of sensory nerve impulses so as to trigger the right sequence of motor neurons.
Holding a cup of coffee is just one in myriads of highly detailed knowledge that one can learn through experience. A machine cannot gain this sort of knowledge from being spoon fed facts via a keyboard. Cyc is merely a glorified database with a fancy query language, one that requires experienced human data entry slaves to maintain. Unless a machine is given the ability to learn from and interact with its environment via its sensors and effectors it's not intelligent. Sure Cyc is a cool hack but it has about as much to do with intelligence as MySQL. To associate it with intelligence is an insult to computational neuroscience researchers around the world whose goal is true human level AI. Sorry.
A matter of personal opinion, of course. There are people a lot smarter than you are, who have the exact opposite opinion about the page in question.
Care to name some?
Some are listed on my site. Feel free to write to them. Several among them are full physics professors at major universities. Don't think for a second that the time-travel and wormhole con artists have a monopoly on what's accepted in the physics community.
But then again, I also get emails from young kids who have no trouble grasping that nothing can move in spacetime. Too bad you can't do the same, eh? Besides, it's my credibility to reduce or increase as I see fit.
Zeno's paradox is a fallacy, "nemesis".
Proof by assertion, I see. Not even the greatest scientists of the world held such power. Besides, there are more than one Zeno's "paradox." Get a clue.
By the way, how do you equate everyone agreeing with you with everyone violently disagreeing with you and still keep a straight face?
"Violently" is the right word for it. Many, like you, take it to heart, jumping up and down and foaming at the mouth. Indeed I can't keep a straight face. It's rather amusing. See ya!
Just out of interest, why do you reduce your credibility by linking to that Crackpot's page about Spacetime physics?
A matter of personal opinion, of course. There are people a lot smarter than you are, who have the exact opposite opinion about the page in question. But then again, I also get emails from young kids who have no trouble grasping that nothing can move in spacetime. Too bad you can't do the same, eh? Besides, it's my credibility to reduce or increase as I see fit.
Just out of interest, why do you get so bent out of shape over a crackpot?
I'm all in favor of the benefits that society at large gains from active competition in for-profit free markets.
[...]
Without patents the drug companies would not have done the research to create the aids drugs in the first place so the whole issue would be moot. But clearly it is not in anyone's interest including the drug companies to charge so much for their product that their consumers (patients) cannot afford them. So they need to figure out how to charge less (in Africa - a lot less) in markets where the consumers cannot afford the regular price.
With all due respect to Mr. Young, there really is no such thing as free market coexisting with IP laws. IP laws are not designed to free the market but to restrict its freedom. So we are left in a quandary: how does a free society finance scientific research without IP restrictions on its freedom? How do programmers, artists, etc.. make a living if they cannot live off their work?
The way I see it, there is no such thing as intellectual property. If you can't lock it up or put a fence around it, it does not belong to you.Once you release it to the world it belongs to nobody and to everybody. The only property worthy of the name is tangible property. A economic system based on human labor will not survive, whether it is communism or capitalism. What will happen to a slave economy when AI and advanced automation replaces everybody? It will collapse, that's what.
So now the IP owners can only rely on powerful police states to enforce their "property." And it will get worse. The only way to truly enforce IP laws in the age of the internet and file sharing technologies is by instituting increasingly Orwellian governing bodies that continually spy on its citizens. When that happens, I hope the people of the world rise up against it.
We will not be truly free until we are all guaranteed an inheritance in the land and its wealth, a piece of the pie. What we do with our piece should be up to us. The wealth of the earth is the earth and it should not be divided for a price so that it ultimately ends up under the control of the few while everyone else is forced to be slave. It should be divided up and given to the people. Only then will we have a free market where nobody is forced to suck up to those who would enslave us. Knowledge should only serve as a mechanism for increasing the wealth of the earth.
Once we have a society based of giving rather than taking, we will openly share our knowledge with one another. We will cooperate and freely share our knowledge so that society as a whole benefits. Someone recently emailed me this delightful quote by Benjamin Franklin: "As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously."
This can only happen in truly free society. Slaves cannot be expected to give freely to others when their livelihood depends on competing against other slaves. The system forces us to exploit our fellow human beings. It must be changed or we will soon face disaster.
Thanks for the info on Excite's zoom feature. I am impressed. I wonder how they go about creating their topic associations. Do they compile it manually or do they have a automated tool that searches previous user inputs to come up with the most common keyword associations? An automated tool would, of couurse, be much more efficient and cheaper to operate.
Google already has this. If you do a search on 'slishdot' it asks you if you meant slashdot.
Thanks for this suggestion. Although it is a good example of interaction between the engine and the user, it seems to be based on a simple spelling check. Rather, I was thinking more in terms of what Monika Henziger referred to as a topic based query. For example, typing 'bicycle' and receiving a choice of 'bicycle repair', 'bicycle racing', 'bicycle sales', 'bicycle parts', 'bicycle touring', etc...
Interesting work. Thanks for the helpful links.