Seriously though, perhaps we're coming to a time when we will only believe some event happened if we get multiple life-recorder video POVs from multiple independent eyewitnesses (on youtube of course. No, wait. Sorry, That video is no longer available.)
It's still pretty technically difficult to alter all of those videos to add or omit the same thing.
If the general cloud does not also support high-bandwidth content viewing, the pipe providers (cable cos) will grab our throats and shake us down for money.
This trend ought to be resisted, by net neutrality legislation or just more peer to peer innovation.
You know, I hope, that the Sun and the Earth rotate around a common centre of gravity located somewhere between the centres of the two of them.
I'm not actually sure this C of G is within the heliopause (radius of surface of the Sun.) If it is, we could say the Earth rotates around the Sun. If outside, they wobble around each other.
Americans seem to forego skepticism in order to be agreeable with their peers and leaders and national direction. So they are good at pulling together and fighting things or overcoming challenges.
Unfortunately, that collectively agreed and beleved direction could easily be heading off a cliff. That's it. Today's Americans are like plains buffalo.
So the best you can hope is that the most charismatic charmer (the one will therefore become leader) is coincidentally also one of the rare few who does know how to be properly sceptical and methodical in their analysis of the issues of the day.
Go and boil your bottom, sons of a silly person. I blow my nose at you, so-called Arthur King, you and all your silly English k-nnnnniggets. Thpppppt! Thppt! Thppt! GALAHAD: What a strange person. ARTHUR: Now look here, my good man-- FRENCH GUARD: I don't wanna talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper! I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!
Is storing peoples' digital "faces" (life histories, medical records, ids etc) in ways that are not owned by any particular "hosting" company, and are not subject to sifting for marketing purposes, nor pre-crime analysis purposes.
Also, since the data would be redundantly stored, distributed around the world, on several of billions of Internet edge nodes, the data would not be subject to destruction by the bankruptcy of or legal injunction against, any single host corporation.
For similar reasons, the data would not be subject to destruction by natural disaster, nor by totalitarian regime.
This is the beginning of the possibility of perpetually persistent information. Too bad so much of it will be used for nausiously boringly similar videos of toddlers learning to fall down.
What strikes me is that no researchers are really putting together a multiplicity of AI techniques to produce a generally intelligent "human analogue" or "smart and lippy assistant".
Instead, the researchers are going to the nth degree of detail on a very specialized aspect, like some variant of bayesian inference that is optimal under these very particular circumstances, etc.
I don't know of any AI research other than Marvin Minsky who is even interested in or advocating a grand synthesis of current techniques to produce a first cut of general intelligence.
That being said, probably there are two (related) exceptions:
1. I think some fascinating AI stuff must be going on at Google. They have the motherlode of associative data to work with. They are sifting all of human knowledge, news, interest, and opinion that anyone bothers to put on the net. They must be trying to figure out how to make algorithms take advantage of the general patterns in this data to start giving people info-concierge type of functionality. Pro-active information gethering, organization, prioritization in support of the users' activities, which have been inferred by google-spying on their pattern of computer use and other peoples' average patterns.
2. I think there is some pretty squirrelly stuff happening on behalf of the department of homeland security, though. Stuff that probably combs all signals intelligence including the whole Internet, and tries to impute motives and then detect very weak correlations that might be consistent with those motives.
Microsoft leadership wisely understood that the vast majority of business owners and other people at the time had no clue what would be good or bad in computing equipment generally, or software or operating software or application design and features specifically.
The key was to get something out there fast, market it as if it was good, and make sure it was what was installed by default on all of the cheapest computers available.
Only the 0.01% computer or software experts out there would be lamenting for the substantially greater quality and simplicity that could have been, if only there had been a sophisticated market to begin with.
The effect continues. I mean, for example, it's now clear to absolutely anyone with a clue that macs and osx are far superior to windows xp or vista pcs, but the market share is still the exact opposite of what it would/ should be if quality were the deciding factor, and price and lock-in wasn't.
I've reviewed the details of the Sugar UI and the apps that come with Sugar, and I was struck by the fact that every effort has been made to make the operation of the programs simple and intuitive. There's clearly a lot of usability design in there.
I think the problem is that the OS UI, and the Apps, are new and different. I think the adults evaluating this are stuck in old ways of thinking. They learned computers on Windows, and Windows and Windows app ui conventions are just how it should be, dammit. Anything else is scary and complex, from their solidified-brain perspective.
People aren't willing to give something new (and yes, pretty much objectively better) a chance.
It's the old "we haven't changed anything, and we're not dead yet, so why change something now" conservative viewpoint.
It seems to me that many people don't have a meta-level theory of what they are doing when they perceive, think, model the world (partially and using abstraction and synthesis) in their brain, form theories, assess probabilities, assess motivations of authors or speakers etc.
They could know better when to to be skeptical, and about what, if these representational issues were understood more explicitly and formally.
Also helpful would be an understanding of philosophy of science, including knowledge of how to evaluate a theory, and on what grounds one should prefer one theory over another.
By creating bolloxed, over-complex software applications, interfaces, frameworks, and modules, the "wrong-minded" "development organization" thus enables an entire business eco-system engaged in the production of "for dummies" manuals, malware detection and security services, and IT support, which is needed to arbitrate between the shyte software, and the "right-brained" users.
Science should be done with free, open sharing of the results, so that anyone, anywhere, can read the details and possibly come up with the next idea.
These subscription journals are holding back science.
The service of organizing peer-review is logically independent of whether something is in a limited distribution paid, paper journal. Sell google ads on the things if you must, dammit.
I know its a bit offtopic but it pisses me off royally.
Science is above all else about building shared knowledge. Period. If you're putting your findings behind firewalls, you are harming science.
As I mentioned, read the articles at http://criticality.wordpress.com/ and you will see that my basic premise is that all human groups, including governments and corporations, religious organizations and criminal gangs, behave in essentially the same ways, as hierarchically organized "organisms" mainly concerned with their own self-preservation, just like individual people.
It's up to people to elect governments that will effectively regulate corporate behaviour - to set the rules of the game then let them play.
One of the biggest distortions that is happening in politics is that corporations have more resources and organization than ordinary people or even most ad-hoc groups of people, so the corporations can apply these massive resources to buying influence and opinion, through massive issue-framing and marketing campaigns, through direct lobbying, and thus they can buy the steering control of even a democratic government.
Constitutions should be amended to prevent this excessive influence of corporations on democratic governance.
Then let them play again, because they do whatever we let them do very efficiently.
Windows is an awful user interface. And it's getting worse in many ways. You can call it many things, but consistent, simple, intuitive, and easy to learn and use are not five of them.
Linux has a disorganized gaggle of over-complex, disorganized, user interfaces with option acne used by people who are smart enough to be able to figure out how to use such ghastly user interfaces but not smart enough to realize they shouldn't have to be using such an overcomplicated mess.
MacOsX has some redeeming features, compared to the above competion. I put in my DVD and it plays it. Imagine that.
But it still has a long way to go. You practically have to call a
"genius" to install a program. What the hell is a DMG when you're a five year old from the country?
So I'm just pointing out that the Sugar people sure have a vacuum to fill. i.e. a user interface so easy even a young child
could figure out how to do a fair range of essential tasks with
it.
I think they were on the right track, and it's a shame the
PHBs on the project had an attack of FUD and PEBCAK on
the whole issue.
The hardware is revolutionary. Looks like the software is
going to be the same old crap. Too bad.
Seeking out the half dozen or so people whose views are well thought out enough to be worth listening to.
In my humble and profoundly uninformed opinion, that is.
If we can use quantum computers to decrypt.. Why can't we use them to come up with an equally mind-blowing way of encrypting?
I don't mean single photon secure fibre channel stuff. That seems fairly impractical to deploy to the whole internet.
I mean, why can't some mathematical genius come up with a new encryption algorithm that you can only implement on a quantum computer, and which produces a cipher text so random that it can't be decrypted even by another quantum computer unless it knows the secret.
Does anyone have any ideas how such an algorithm might work?
because it is too good and would make their current stuff look like ****?
Seriously, I guess this means it isn't in their mainstream OS roadmap, which seems like bad news for those who would hope M$ might eventually produce and sell a simple, safe, easy to use non-strongbad product.
panspermia hypothesis, in some ways, just defers the question, in the same way that "Intelligent Design" "hypothesis" does.
e.g. for ID. The obvious "doh" question is who designed the designer.
for panspermia, ok, if that's how life got on earth, how did it get where it was before earth?
Regarding time frames for origin of life: There is a hypothesis that you needed 10 billion years (give or take a few billion between friends) of universe evolution prior to life formation in order to allow supernovas to happen which produce the heavy elements which combine with the more common lighter ones to exhibit molecular structural diversity and chemical reaction diversity (material property diversity and energy transformation process diversity) that would increase the probability of viable self-sustaining matter patterns happening.
i.e. Science fiction 5 billion year older civilizations may make for ripping good yarns but may not be able to be anything but that.
In a similar vein, while Earth is almost certainly not the only life generating region of the universe, it may be that the thermodynamic regime constraints (too cold - nothing happens and everything sits as an inanimate rock-like lump - too hot - everything blows apart and can't stay organized) and diverse material (in all three phases) co-location and density requirements may mean that other life-holding places are constrained to be similar in many ways to Earth. Life may need to be built out of essentially the same ingredients as it is here. This is not just anthropocentric, earth-bigotted thinking. It is based on first-principles reasoning (speculative, admittedly) about constraints and probabilities of living pattern occurrence through a process of spontaneous accidental structural and process experimentation.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously though, perhaps we're coming to a time when we will only believe some event happened if we get multiple life-recorder video POVs from multiple independent eyewitnesses (on youtube of course. No, wait. Sorry, That video is no longer available.)
It's still pretty technically difficult to alter all of those videos to add or omit the same thing.
If the general cloud does not also support high-bandwidth content viewing, the pipe providers (cable cos) will grab our throats and shake us down for money.
This trend ought to be resisted, by net neutrality legislation or just more peer to peer innovation.
You know, I hope, that the Sun and the Earth rotate around a common centre of gravity located somewhere between the centres of the two of them.
I'm not actually sure this C of G is within the heliopause (radius of surface of the Sun.) If it is, we could say the Earth rotates around the Sun. If outside, they wobble around each other.
Americans seem to forego skepticism in order to be agreeable with their peers and leaders and national direction. So they are good at pulling together and fighting things or overcoming challenges.
Unfortunately, that collectively agreed and beleved direction could easily be heading off a cliff. That's it. Today's Americans are like plains buffalo.
So the best you can hope is that the most charismatic charmer (the one will therefore become leader) is coincidentally also one of the rare few who does know how to be properly sceptical and methodical in their analysis of the issues of the day.
Bringing law and order at the point of a god-given revolver to the wild west Internet.
Go and boil your bottom, sons of a silly person. I blow my nose at you, so-called Arthur King, you and all your silly English k-nnnnniggets. Thpppppt! Thppt! Thppt!
GALAHAD:
What a strange person.
ARTHUR:
Now look here, my good man--
FRENCH GUARD:
I don't wanna talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper! I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!
Is storing peoples' digital "faces" (life histories, medical records, ids etc) in ways that are not owned by any particular "hosting" company, and are not subject to sifting for marketing purposes, nor pre-crime analysis purposes.
Also, since the data would be redundantly stored, distributed around the world, on several of billions of Internet edge nodes, the data would not be subject to destruction by the bankruptcy of or legal injunction against, any single host corporation.
For similar reasons, the data would not be subject to destruction by natural disaster, nor by totalitarian regime.
This is the beginning of the possibility of
perpetually persistent information. Too bad so
much of it will be used for nausiously boringly
similar videos of toddlers learning to fall down.
What strikes me is that no researchers are really putting together a multiplicity of AI techniques to produce a generally intelligent "human analogue" or "smart and lippy assistant".
Instead, the researchers are going to the nth degree of detail on a very specialized aspect, like some variant of bayesian inference that is optimal under these very particular circumstances,
etc.
I don't know of any AI research other than Marvin Minsky who is even interested in or advocating a grand synthesis of current techniques to produce a first cut of general intelligence.
That being said, probably there are two (related) exceptions:
1. I think some fascinating AI stuff must be going on at Google. They have the motherlode of associative data to work with. They are sifting all of human knowledge, news, interest, and opinion that anyone bothers to put on the net.
They must be trying to figure out how to make algorithms take advantage of the general patterns in this data to start giving people info-concierge
type of functionality. Pro-active information gethering, organization, prioritization in support of the users' activities, which have been inferred by google-spying on their pattern of computer use and other peoples' average patterns.
2. I think there is some pretty squirrelly stuff
happening on behalf of the department of homeland security, though. Stuff that probably combs all signals intelligence including the whole Internet, and tries to impute motives and then detect very weak correlations that might be consistent with those motives.
This isn't about companies saving money on provisioning.
This is about a deep fear in some circles of people
getting together in egalitarian groups to do mysterious
and no doubt evil things.
This is about preventing people from having the power
of independent thought and action.
This is about spying to identify those who try to
move out of their assigned channel.
Clearly, a cold war is going to be needed here, and
the key weapon is going to be steganography.
Microsoft leadership wisely understood that the vast majority of business owners and other people at the time had no clue what would be good or bad in computing equipment generally, or software or operating software or application design and features specifically.
The key was to get something out there fast, market it as if it was good, and make sure it was what was installed by default on all of
the cheapest computers available.
Only the 0.01% computer or software experts out there would be lamenting for the substantially greater quality and simplicity that could have
been, if only there had been a sophisticated market to begin with.
The effect continues. I mean, for example,
it's now clear to absolutely anyone with a
clue that macs and osx are far superior to
windows xp or vista pcs, but the market share
is still the exact opposite of what it would/
should be if quality were the deciding factor,
and price and lock-in wasn't.
I've reviewed the details of the Sugar UI and the apps that come with Sugar, and I was struck by the fact that every effort has been made to make the operation of the programs simple and intuitive. There's clearly a lot of usability design in there.
I think the problem is that the OS UI, and the Apps, are new and different. I think the adults evaluating this are stuck in old ways of thinking. They learned computers on Windows, and Windows and Windows app ui conventions are just how it should be, dammit. Anything else is scary and complex, from their solidified-brain perspective.
People aren't willing to give something new (and yes, pretty much objectively better) a chance.
It's the old "we haven't changed anything, and we're not dead yet, so why change something now"
conservative viewpoint.
It seems to me that many people don't have a meta-level theory of what they are doing when they perceive, think, model the world (partially and using abstraction and synthesis) in their brain, form theories, assess probabilities, assess motivations of authors or speakers etc.
They could know better when to to be skeptical,
and about what, if these representational issues were understood more explicitly and formally.
Also helpful would be an understanding of philosophy of science, including knowledge of how to evaluate a theory, and on what grounds one
should prefer one theory over another.
"Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce..."
Business Process and Method:
By creating bolloxed, over-complex software applications, interfaces, frameworks, and modules, the "wrong-minded" "development organization" thus enables an entire business
eco-system engaged in the production of "for dummies" manuals, malware detection and security services, and IT support, which is needed to arbitrate between the shyte software, and the "right-brained" users.
Science should be done with free, open sharing of the results, so that anyone, anywhere, can read the details and possibly come up with the next idea.
These subscription journals are holding back science.
The service of organizing peer-review is logically independent
of whether something is in a limited distribution paid, paper
journal. Sell google ads on the things if you must, dammit.
I know its a bit offtopic but it pisses me off royally.
Science is above all else about building shared knowledge.
Period. If you're putting your findings behind firewalls,
you are harming science.
we'll just have to learn to write on the walls in secret hieroglyphs...
and form a mesh of underground railroads.
As I mentioned, read the articles at http://criticality.wordpress.com/ and you will see that my basic premise is that all human groups, including governments and corporations, religious organizations and criminal gangs, behave in essentially the same ways, as hierarchically organized "organisms" mainly concerned with their own self-preservation, just like individual people.
It's up to people to elect governments that will effectively regulate corporate behaviour - to set the rules of the game then let them play.
One of the biggest distortions that is happening in politics is that corporations have more resources and organization than ordinary people or even most ad-hoc groups of people, so the corporations can apply these massive resources to buying influence and opinion, through massive issue-framing and
marketing campaigns, through direct lobbying, and thus they can buy the steering control of even a democratic government.
Constitutions should be amended to prevent this excessive influence of corporations on democratic governance.
Then let them play again, because they do whatever we let them do very efficiently.
For more musings on group dynamics and social hierarchies, see my "blog" at http://criticality.wordpress.com/
I for one was not looking forward to welcoming a new generation of young, creative, inquisitive, independent minded developing country overlords.
Windows is an awful user interface. And it's getting worse in many ways. You can call it many things, but consistent, simple, intuitive, and easy to learn and use are not five of them. Linux has a disorganized gaggle of over-complex, disorganized, user interfaces with option acne used by people who are smart enough to be able to figure out how to use such ghastly user interfaces but not smart enough to realize they shouldn't have to be using such an overcomplicated mess. MacOsX has some redeeming features, compared to the above competion. I put in my DVD and it plays it. Imagine that. But it still has a long way to go. You practically have to call a "genius" to install a program. What the hell is a DMG when you're a five year old from the country? So I'm just pointing out that the Sugar people sure have a vacuum to fill. i.e. a user interface so easy even a young child could figure out how to do a fair range of essential tasks with it. I think they were on the right track, and it's a shame the PHBs on the project had an attack of FUD and PEBCAK on the whole issue. The hardware is revolutionary. Looks like the software is going to be the same old crap. Too bad.
Seeking out the half dozen or so people whose views are well thought out enough to be worth listening to. In my humble and profoundly uninformed opinion, that is.
SHOW ME THE iPHONE
SHOW ME - THE iPHONE
SHOW - ME - THE - iPHONE
If we can use quantum computers to decrypt..
Why can't we use them to come up with an equally mind-blowing way of encrypting?
I don't mean single photon secure fibre channel stuff. That seems fairly impractical to deploy to the whole internet.
I mean, why can't some mathematical genius come up with a new encryption algorithm that you
can only implement on a quantum computer, and which produces a cipher text so random that it
can't be decrypted even by another quantum computer unless it knows the secret.
Does anyone have any ideas how such an algorithm might work?
because it is too good and would make their current stuff look like ****?
Seriously, I guess this means it isn't in their mainstream OS roadmap,
which seems like bad news for those who would hope M$ might eventually
produce and sell a simple, safe, easy to use non-strongbad product.
panspermia hypothesis, in some ways, just defers the question, in the same way that "Intelligent Design" "hypothesis" does.
e.g. for ID. The obvious "doh" question is who designed the designer.
for panspermia, ok, if that's how life got on earth, how did it get where it was before earth?
Regarding time frames for origin of life: There is a hypothesis that you needed 10 billion years (give or take a few billion
between friends) of universe evolution
prior to life formation in order to allow supernovas to happen which produce the heavy elements which combine with the more
common lighter ones to exhibit molecular structural diversity and chemical reaction diversity (material property diversity and
energy transformation process diversity) that would increase the probability
of viable self-sustaining matter patterns happening.
i.e. Science fiction 5 billion year older civilizations may make for ripping good yarns but may not be able to be anything
but that.
In a similar vein, while Earth is almost certainly not the only life generating region of the universe, it may be that the
thermodynamic regime constraints (too cold - nothing happens and everything sits as an inanimate rock-like lump
- too hot - everything blows apart and can't stay organized)
and diverse material (in all three phases) co-location and density requirements may mean that other life-holding
places are constrained to be similar in many ways to Earth. Life may need to be built out of essentially the same ingredients
as it is here. This is not just anthropocentric, earth-bigotted thinking. It is based on first-principles reasoning
(speculative, admittedly) about
constraints and probabilities of living pattern occurrence through a process of spontaneous accidental structural and
process experimentation.