Life must have originated by a generalized and initially weaker version of the evolutionary process.
Essentially, in
a. certain intermediate-free-energy thermodynamic regimes (regimes in which common elements and molecules can co-exist in all three of solid,liquid, and gaseous phases so that rigid and semi-rigid structure can be combined with constrained energy flows), and with
b. the right soup of lots of different common and chemically combinable elements trapped together in a gravity well,
you get the preconditions for randomly occurring structural and process experiments.
Some of these randomly occurring but probable-due-to-the-regime-and-the-ingredients experiments end up making structural and process fragments that alter/interact with/use their environment in such a way as to incrementally, or in some cases dramatically, increase the probability of a similar structure or process fragment recurring nearby in time and space to the first one. This is already a positive feedback loop. Eventually, by chance, some cluster of these self-probability-improving structure+processes, a cluster most likely made of smaller self-made-more-probable structure-process fragments, reaches a threshold at which its robustness leads to a probability of 1 of structure and process like that existing in the general area. Pattern self-preserving functionality transcends pattern occurrence improbability.
Call it stochastic evolution transforming into classical evolution.
Have you ever noticed there are three kinds of people:
1. Those who notice whether there is a single line-up or multiple line-ups to get to the McD's order counter, and take their place appropriately.
2. Those who notice, but decide that they can interpret the situation as ambiguous, and/or pretend they didn't notice, so they can just go ahead and... well, go ahead.
3. The oblivious. These come in two subvarieties:
a. The oblivious go-to-the-fronter-past-everyone-else-in-single-line.
b. The oblivious hanger-backer in single-line position, unknowingly tempting everyone behind them to create their own line.
I just want you all to know that I notice, and I notice whether you're noticing, and in my hungry imagination, intentional queue jumpers have laser holes smoking in the back of their skulls from my intensely glowering black stare.
Perhaps I'll patent little poles with ropes between them or something that could solve this unnecessary and potentially tragic situation.
A better solution for information safety (preservation) is a combination of the following attributes: -Widely Distributed -Massively Redundant -Strongly Encrypted -Rewrappable by newer encryption -Fragmented with self-seeking assembly -Self-healing (checks that enough copies of self exist and makes more if not) -Autonomously Mobile - Self-seeks newer and more reliable storage using a map of internet hosts with stats
That's orders of magnitude better than one bunker to which the electricity or datapipes can be cut.
I should be able to choose between internet service I pay for, or free internet service with ads from the ISP.
As long as it's my choice I'm happy with that. Of course if they try to have their cake and eat it too, my cake actually, I'll be the first in line to collaborate with my electrical engineer friends to engineer that pirate wi-max network in our city which hooks in in an informal basis to everyone elses' open wi-fis for its net connectivity.
Oh you haven't heard of that one? It's all good.
Why can't AI get the semantics from the plain text
on
Semantic Web Getting Real
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
When you start aggregating as much text as google does, the semantics just starts popping out, in the form of word relationship statistics. The massive corpus size, when measured carefully, acts to filter semantic signal from expressive difference "noise".
Combine that kind of latent semantic analysis of global human text with conceptual knowledge representation and inference technologies (which would use a combination of higher-order logic, bayesian probability, etc) and it should be possible to create a software program that could start to get a basic semantic understanding of documents and document relationships in the ordinary "dumb" web.
Could the proponents of the semantic web please tell me what it will add to this?
My basic proposition is that if an averagely intelligent human can infer the semantic essence (the gist, shall we say), of individual documents, and relationships between documents on the web, why can't we build AI software that does the same thing, and then reports its results out to people who ask.
The people who believe that software can be certified like bridges clearly haven't built or maintained any software.
The orders of complexity are geometrically greater with software.
Every serious piece of software I have ever seen or heard of ships with hundreds if not thousands of known defects.
It would never be cost-effective to eliminate these.
Theory says it is impossible to know if you have eliminated all errors from a program.
Program correctness is often a matter of opinion, semantics, and the result of hundreds of subtle trade-off compromises that ensure that it is not possible, except at a meanngless management level, to say that it is "done" or correct.
The worst code I have ever seen has been written by certified engineers (electrical, mechanical, eng. phys, you name it) who basically think there's nothing to it. (And when they do it, they're right.)
The best code I've seen is usually written by a loner in a dark room who hates paperwork, because he or she is concentrating, but can out-think any 10 other certified practitioners.
If you certify programmers, you'll get damned reliable MacDonalds hamburgers for programs.
And call myself a software engineer whenever I feel like it.
I haven't got the cease and desist letter in the mail, and when I do, I hope it's only typed on on one side so I can use the other side for to scribble work notes for my very rigorous "waterfall" process. Otherwise I'll have to use it for my iterative spiral "butt-wipe" process .
Sounds like a political move by a bunch of embittered loser Taliban cleric types.
I hope for the young man's sake the glowering zealots get overruled. It's kind of incumbent on the US gov. to get their puppet to overrule these desperate, medieval, mysogynistic bearded dudes (I say that as a bearded dude myself.)
Organized religion served its purpose:
- It corrected peoples' wilder selfish or atavistic impulses, and aligned aspirations,
to promote efficient co-operation in groups. -This enforced internal alignment and co-operation led to great power and persistence for the organized religion memes. Still going strong on internal momentum.
- But now we have more subtle and less restrictive ways of enforcing necessary amounts of co-operation with society, through the rule of civil law and democratic (or partly democratic) governance.
The sooner that organized religion can be seen by all, worldwide, for what it is: - an outmoded, often unjust, and certainly undemocratic form of groupiness - the better off we'll be.
Fundamentally, asymmetric bandwidth says "You want to hear from us (consume from us) more than we want to hear from you.
Slight asymmetry may be justified as an optimal use of bandwidth in cases where technically it is in fact inter-constrained bidirectionally, but large and increasing asymmetry would be a self-fulfilling prophecy. See, these mere ordinary consumers have nothing to say. Nothing to offer. Nothing to store or process for us.
It's not really conspiracy, but rather the inexorable creep of business logic. Protocol standards that encourage a more symmetrical peering are needed, I suggest, to combat this creep toward monopoly and serfdom (or is that surf-dumb?)
It reminds me of the argument that we can't afford to maintain a good bus service level in this suburb, because our study shows that nobody who lives there takes the bus. Hmmmmm.
Availability of secure P2P protocols, and creation of a location-free, fragmented encrypted redundant moving storage virtual layer on top of lower-level net protocols, could retain freedom from monopoly control of information and services.
But watch for the predictable attempts to get legislation against such "nebulous dark-matter middle-nets". Watch for fear arguments to be used as justification. Watch for increasingly asymmetric ISP plans (download good, upload bad), and protocol-based throttling or filtering, by the pipe providers.
These are all the very predictable reactions by "the man". They must it goes without saying be resisted, in law and political discourse, and economic boycott, or circumvented by all ingenious tricky means necessary.
P.S. I've been predicting this inversion of the intranet to where it is the "extranet", and inversion of where we would trust our data (What, you kept your data on your own servers, and not the massively redundant global storage net? Are you insane??) for a long time now, but nobody listens to me. (Brain the size of a planet, and they've got me parking cars...)
- Seriously address global warming by throwing on a carbon tax and using it to:
-build super high speed commuter train and interurban train network.
-start a "manhattan project" or "moon project" kind of endeavour to
-do seriously major r&d on solar, geothermal, wave-power, ocean-current power,
and nuclear fusion power solutions, placing the guys who started Tesla Motors
in charge.
- Begin global negotiations on bringing a directly elected United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, or Assemblage du Citoyen Mondial, into being with jurisdiction, initially, over human rights enforcement, a standing peacekeeping military force, and regulation of global-scale environmental issues.
- Give every American the right to free health care.
Aren't you glad I was born in Scotland so don't qualify?
1. Clients (laptops) default installed wifi software (hint: Steve Jobs are you reading???) need a scanning mode which does not waste my time telling me about all the password or mac-address locked wifi basestations, and only advises me about open ones.
2. Basestation/routers need a simple-to-configure mode where they will let others into a separate subnet that goes straight out to the Internet but does not see my home computers directly.
3. (Brain software/mindset change.) Americans need to stop reflexively calling sharing 'stealing'. You've been trained into this terminology by those who have already stolen everything and don't want you to get it back.
Have you ever noticed how AI is almost automatically and religiiously attacked; ridiculed, denied.
This is a really interesting phenomenon. I think when you dig beneath it, it's some kind of species-ism. A natural impulse to circle the wagons when confronted with some early noises indicating a vague but no doubt dangerous new threat.
I think that the threat being perceived is not just that there might be other non-human things out there with intelligence and a will of there own, eventually, but also the threat of knocking us from our self-perceived pedestal of uniqueness. I think a lot of people treasure the idea that humans are inherently uniquely sentient.
I for one will tip my cap to the people who can invent something that shows that we are not. We really have to get over ourselves.
If it is true that we have slowed our physical evolution, it would likely be because we have adapted and "tamed" our environments to have fewer problems and more opportunities for ourselves.
One can view this as an internalizing of part of our environment so that it actually becomes an integral part of the artificial stable-yet-evolving systems we are creating around ourselves. We human individuals are clearly cogs in larger homeostatic cultural and technological systems that are in competition and cooperation and being group-selected.
In doing this, however, we need to be careful that we don't kill the environment's prior, long-term sustainability, and try to be clever enough to tend all of it by invented means.
That would be an unwise underestimation of the environments' pre-existing complexity and robustness. We are smart enough to tame parts of it for a cushy, safe, lazy life. But we are also clearly destroying much of it as we do this. And we are not smart enough to replace it by wonders from drawing boards.
So we'll see how this evolutionary tactic works out in the fairly near term (next 500 years I imagine.)
it seems, with perhaps Marvin Minsky as an exception, but we need a new guard.
Everything is understanding the nth degree of optimizing Bayesian network inference, usually applied to a very specific toy problem.
Nothing wrong with that research. Not really knocking it.
But where is the research on how a generally intelligent system could choose what to focus its inference-engine attention on. Where is the meta-logic about prioritization and pruning of "trains of thought" depending on success of search and progress and urgency of need to know compared to other concurrent topics. Where are the systems that can posit and explore multiple incrementally variant theories of some aspect of the world, and figure out which theory-variant is a better model of past and present observations. Where is the system that can take in lots of different peoples' writings or sayings about things and synthesize an ontology and figure out whose beliefs are the most promising (truthwise) and relevant. Where is the episodic memory? Where is the emotion-tagging of experiences and important generalizations, and the emotion-guided prioritized recall? Where are the short-term memory blackboards? Where is the "utterance" theory and theories for how to inform and motivate other intelligent agents into execution of a cooperative plan. Where is the AI just for the sheer wonder of trying to put several techniques all together and see what emerges?
You have put your "precious" stuff on a server the sole purpose of which is to allow people to click a hyperlink which will cause a copy of your stuff to be created (with them as the agent of the copying action.)
So we are left with: Either every hyperlink click on the web is a copyright violation, or none of them are because web posting (unless somehow qualified by a stated license restriction) indicates intent to allow copying, and since no stipulation of copying to where or where not has been made, then copying it into my codebase is hunky dory too.
We have to face the fact that the whole web is in fact illegal under copyright law, so this just shows that copyright law, as currently interpreted and applied, is an ass and deserves the general ignoring that it gets.
There is no freakin' way you U.S.A. coder types are going to retain any kind of dominant position in software if you don't learn to share a little more freely. The most successful of you right now are either open source contributors, or work for Google, a company that while not open source, has lots of free interfaces and components that anyone can use, and Google's search function essentially is a tool for enabling widesperead, indiscriminant, free in both senses sharing of information. Both of these approaches build wealth by building a large community of shared work, which builds value faster than any other approach can.
Code is like math, written out longhand. Can you imagine how useless a mathematician is who keeps their work to themself.
My guess is that with the way that the GPL works, the copyright holder (i.e. contributor) to any other part of the Linux kernel or even to other GPL software that links with it, could sue a violator of the GPL if that violator is including the contributor's code in their distribution. Every extension of any part of a single connected GPL software system potentially violates the copyright of any other contributor, if they violate the license. It is one big cross-licensing of copyrights.
This doesn't count as a statistical study, but discusses how accurate the count would have to have been in Florida to have a determinate result in Bush v. Gore:
Here is a claim by Washington State electoral officials that studies had shown their elections to be 99.99 % accurate. Even if true, that represents an error of 10,000 votes in a 100million voter federal election.
A paper trail just gets you a manual recount process that has a demonstrated error/uncertainty rate greater than the percentage of votes by which George W Bush "won" his first presidency.
If you're going to have close elections like that, then with a human paper counting system you may as well just call it, heads or tails, because that will be just as valid as the alleged "result."
Some kind of open-source hardware and software stack, top to bottom, using public key encryption and digital signature techniques to allow verification that a ballot was counted in the result without revealing how the ballot was actually voted, should be fine. Why is this so difficult to comprehend?
The idea that all competent mathematicians and computer geeks, who could vouch for the system and the process and the result, are somehow all in favor of one side in an election and so would engage in a vast, unanimous conspiracy to defraud the populace is so far fetched that anyone who believes it should have their right to vote revoked anyway, because if the quality of decisions made by those they support is anything like their own decision making prowess, we are all completely f**ked.
Miraculous as they seemed in the 80s, they are outclassed on a number of fronts by simple digital files, as far as a consumer is concerned. 1. The digital file isn't tied to any particular physical object, or player, or location. It's simpler. If I know part of its name, I can be playing it a few seconds later. 2. The digital files can be more flexibly arranged in groups to different tastes and purposes. 3. They can be stored on the Internet and communities of people can review them, collate them very flexibly. 4. They don't encourage the production of cruft to fill extra tracks on a CD album.
So why are we talking about CDs at all. That was so 80s.
The discussion should be how music artists should be compensated in the post CD world.
I think Radiohead demonstrated the way forward.
The traditional music industry, by fighting an inevitable change, is driving a stake into its own heart by guaranteeing its irrelevance.
Slashdot Mirror
Life must have originated by a generalized and initially weaker version of the evolutionary process.
Essentially, in
a. certain intermediate-free-energy thermodynamic regimes (regimes in which common
elements and molecules can co-exist in all three of solid,liquid, and gaseous phases so that rigid and semi-rigid
structure can be combined with constrained energy flows),
and with
b. the right soup of lots of different common and chemically combinable elements trapped together in a gravity well,
you get the preconditions for randomly occurring structural and process experiments.
Some of these randomly occurring but probable-due-to-the-regime-and-the-ingredients experiments
end up making structural and process fragments that alter/interact with/use their environment in such a way as to
incrementally, or in some cases dramatically, increase the probability of a similar structure or process
fragment recurring nearby in time and space to the first one. This is already a positive feedback loop.
Eventually, by chance, some cluster of these self-probability-improving structure+processes, a cluster
most likely made of smaller self-made-more-probable structure-process fragments, reaches a threshold
at which its robustness leads to a probability of 1 of structure and process like that existing in the general
area.
Pattern self-preserving functionality transcends pattern occurrence improbability.
Call it stochastic evolution transforming into classical evolution.
Call it the origin of life if you like.
On a slightly related note...
... well, go ahead.
Have you ever noticed there are three kinds of people:
1. Those who notice whether there is a single line-up or multiple line-ups
to get to the McD's order counter, and take their place appropriately.
2. Those who notice, but decide that they can interpret the situation as
ambiguous, and/or pretend they didn't notice, so they can just go ahead
and
3. The oblivious. These come in two subvarieties:
a. The oblivious go-to-the-fronter-past-everyone-else-in-single-line.
b. The oblivious hanger-backer in single-line position,
unknowingly tempting everyone behind them to create their own line.
I just want you all to know that I notice, and I notice whether you're
noticing, and in my hungry imagination, intentional queue jumpers
have laser holes smoking in the back of their skulls from my intensely
glowering black stare.
Perhaps I'll patent little poles with ropes between them or something
that could solve this unnecessary and potentially tragic situation.
Especially if known about.
A better solution for information safety (preservation) is a combination of the following attributes:
-Widely Distributed
-Massively Redundant
-Strongly Encrypted
-Rewrappable by newer encryption
-Fragmented with self-seeking assembly
-Self-healing (checks that enough copies of self exist and makes more if not)
-Autonomously Mobile - Self-seeks newer and more reliable storage using a map of internet hosts with stats
That's orders of magnitude better than one bunker to which the electricity or datapipes can be cut.
I should be able to choose between internet service I pay for, or
free internet service with ads from the ISP.
As long as it's my choice I'm happy with that.
Of course if they try to have their cake and eat it too,
my cake actually, I'll be the first in line to collaborate
with my electrical engineer friends to engineer that pirate
wi-max network in our city which hooks in in an informal basis
to everyone elses' open wi-fis for its net connectivity.
Oh you haven't heard of that one? It's all good.
When you start aggregating as much text as google does, the semantics just starts popping out, in the form of word relationship statistics.
The massive corpus size, when measured carefully, acts to filter semantic signal from expressive difference "noise".
Combine that kind of latent semantic analysis of global human text with conceptual knowledge representation and inference
technologies (which would use a combination of higher-order logic, bayesian probability, etc) and it should be possible to
create a software program that could start to get a basic semantic understanding of documents and document relationships
in the ordinary "dumb" web.
Could the proponents of the semantic web please tell me what it will add to this?
My basic proposition is that if an averagely intelligent human can infer the semantic essence (the gist, shall we say), of
individual documents, and relationships between documents on the web, why can't we build AI software that does
the same thing, and then reports its results out to people who ask.
plotting dangerous megalomaniacal schemes around my kitchen table either.
Because they don't know I'm a terrorist.
Oh, Sh**t! What's that red dot?
The people who believe that software can be certified like bridges clearly haven't built or maintained any software.
The orders of complexity are geometrically greater with software.
Every serious piece of software I have ever seen or heard of ships with hundreds if not thousands of known defects.
It would never be cost-effective to eliminate these.
Theory says it is impossible to know if you have eliminated all errors from a program.
Program correctness is often a matter of opinion, semantics, and the result of hundreds of subtle trade-off compromises
that ensure that it is not possible, except at a meanngless management level, to say that it is "done" or correct.
The worst code I have ever seen has been written by certified engineers (electrical, mechanical, eng. phys, you name it)
who basically think there's nothing to it. (And when they do it, they're right.)
The best code I've seen is usually written by a loner in a dark room who hates paperwork, because he or she is concentrating,
but can out-think any 10 other certified practitioners.
If you certify programmers, you'll get damned reliable MacDonalds hamburgers for programs.
And call myself a software engineer whenever I feel like it.
I haven't got the cease and desist letter in the mail,
and when I do, I hope it's only typed on on one side so
I can use the other side for to scribble work notes for my very
rigorous "waterfall" process. Otherwise I'll have to use
it for my iterative spiral "butt-wipe" process .
Sounds like a political move by a bunch of embittered loser Taliban cleric types.
I hope for the young man's sake the glowering zealots get overruled.
It's kind of incumbent on the US gov. to get their puppet to overrule these
desperate, medieval, mysogynistic bearded dudes (I say that as a bearded dude myself.)
Organized religion served its purpose:
- It corrected peoples' wilder selfish or atavistic impulses, and aligned aspirations,
to promote efficient co-operation in groups.
-This enforced internal alignment and co-operation led to great power and persistence
for the organized religion memes. Still going strong on internal momentum.
- But now we have more subtle and less restrictive ways of enforcing necessary
amounts of co-operation with society, through the rule of civil law and
democratic (or partly democratic) governance.
The sooner that organized religion can be seen by all, worldwide, for what it is:
- an outmoded, often unjust, and certainly undemocratic form of groupiness -
the better off we'll be.
Fundamentally, asymmetric bandwidth says "You want to hear from us (consume from us) more than we want to hear from you.
Slight asymmetry may be justified as an optimal use of bandwidth in cases where technically
it is in fact inter-constrained bidirectionally, but large and increasing asymmetry would be a self-fulfilling
prophecy. See, these mere ordinary consumers have nothing to say. Nothing to offer. Nothing to store or process
for us.
It's not really conspiracy, but rather the inexorable creep of business logic. Protocol standards that encourage
a more symmetrical peering are needed, I suggest, to combat this creep toward monopoly and serfdom (or is that surf-dumb?)
It reminds me of the argument that we can't afford to maintain a good bus service level in this suburb, because our
study shows that nobody who lives there takes the bus. Hmmmmm.
Availability of secure P2P protocols, and creation of a location-free, fragmented
encrypted redundant moving storage virtual layer on top of lower-level net
protocols, could retain freedom from monopoly control of information
and services.
But watch for the predictable attempts to get legislation against such
"nebulous dark-matter middle-nets". Watch for fear arguments to be used
as justification. Watch for increasingly asymmetric ISP plans (download good,
upload bad), and protocol-based throttling or filtering, by the pipe providers.
These are all the very predictable reactions by "the man". They must it goes
without saying be resisted, in law and political discourse, and economic boycott,
or circumvented by all ingenious tricky means necessary.
P.S. I've been predicting this inversion of the intranet to where it is the "extranet",
and inversion of where we would trust our data (What, you kept your data on
your own servers, and not the massively redundant global storage net?
Are you insane??) for a long time now, but nobody listens to me.
(Brain the size of a planet, and they've got me parking cars...)
If I were elected President I would:
- Seriously address global warming by throwing on a carbon tax and using it
to:
-build super high speed commuter train and interurban train network.
-start a "manhattan project" or "moon project" kind of endeavour to
-do seriously major r&d on solar, geothermal, wave-power, ocean-current power,
and nuclear fusion power solutions, placing the guys who started Tesla Motors
in charge.
- Begin global negotiations on bringing a directly elected United Nations Parliamentary
Assembly, or Assemblage du Citoyen Mondial, into being with jurisdiction, initially,
over human rights enforcement, a standing peacekeeping military force,
and regulation of global-scale environmental issues.
- Give every American the right to free health care.
Aren't you glad I was born in Scotland so don't qualify?
1. Clients (laptops) default installed wifi software (hint: Steve Jobs are you reading???) need a scanning
mode which does not waste my time telling me about all the password or mac-address locked wifi
basestations, and only advises me about open ones.
2. Basestation/routers need a simple-to-configure mode where they will let others into a separate
subnet that goes straight out to the Internet but does not see my home computers directly.
3. (Brain software/mindset change.) Americans need to stop reflexively calling sharing 'stealing'.
You've been trained into this terminology by those who have already stolen everything and don't
want you to get it back.
"will of THEIR own"
Have you ever noticed how AI is almost automatically and religiiously attacked;
ridiculed, denied.
This is a really interesting phenomenon. I think when you dig beneath it,
it's some kind of species-ism. A natural impulse to circle the wagons when
confronted with some early noises indicating a vague but no doubt dangerous
new threat.
I think that the threat being perceived is not just that there might be other
non-human things out there with intelligence and a will of there own, eventually,
but also the threat of knocking us from our self-perceived pedestal of
uniqueness. I think a lot of people treasure the idea that humans are
inherently uniquely sentient.
I for one will tip my cap to the people who can invent something that shows
that we are not. We really have to get over ourselves.
If it is true that we have slowed our physical evolution,
it would likely be because we have adapted and "tamed" our
environments to have fewer problems and more opportunities for
ourselves.
One can view this as an internalizing of part of our environment
so that it actually becomes an integral part of the
artificial stable-yet-evolving systems we are creating around
ourselves. We human individuals are clearly cogs in larger
homeostatic cultural and technological systems that are
in competition and cooperation and being group-selected.
In doing this, however, we need to be careful that we don't
kill the environment's prior, long-term sustainability, and
try to be clever enough to tend all of it by invented means.
That would be an unwise underestimation of the environments'
pre-existing complexity and robustness. We are smart enough
to tame parts of it for a cushy, safe, lazy life. But we are
also clearly destroying much of it as we do this. And we are
not smart enough to replace it by wonders from drawing boards.
So we'll see how this evolutionary tactic works out in the
fairly near term (next 500 years I imagine.)
it seems, with perhaps Marvin Minsky as an exception, but we need a new guard.
Everything is understanding the nth degree of optimizing Bayesian network inference,
usually applied to a very specific toy problem.
Nothing wrong with that research. Not really knocking it.
But where is the research on how a generally intelligent system could choose what to
focus its inference-engine attention on. Where is the meta-logic about prioritization
and pruning of "trains of thought" depending on success of search and progress
and urgency of need to know compared to other concurrent topics.
Where are the systems that can posit and explore multiple incrementally variant theories
of some aspect of the world, and figure out which theory-variant is a better model of
past and present observations. Where is the system that can take in lots of different
peoples' writings or sayings about things and synthesize an ontology and figure out
whose beliefs are the most promising (truthwise) and relevant.
Where is the episodic memory?
Where is the emotion-tagging of experiences and important generalizations,
and the emotion-guided prioritized recall?
Where are the short-term memory blackboards?
Where is the "utterance" theory and theories for how to inform and motivate
other intelligent agents into execution of a cooperative plan.
Where is the AI just for the sheer wonder of trying to put several techniques all
together and see what emerges?
You have put your "precious" stuff on a server the sole purpose of which is to allow people
to click a hyperlink which will cause a copy of your stuff to be created (with them as the agent of the copying action.)
So we are left with: Either every hyperlink click on the web is a copyright violation, or
none of them are because web posting (unless somehow qualified by a stated license restriction)
indicates intent to allow copying, and since no stipulation of copying to where or where not has
been made, then copying it into my codebase is hunky dory too.
We have to face the fact that the whole web is in fact illegal under copyright law, so this just shows
that copyright law, as currently interpreted and applied, is an ass and deserves the general ignoring
that it gets.
There is no freakin' way you U.S.A. coder types are going to retain any kind of dominant position in
software if you don't learn to share a little more freely. The most successful of you right now
are either open source contributors, or work for Google, a company that while not open source,
has lots of free interfaces and components that anyone can use, and Google's search function essentially
is a tool for enabling widesperead, indiscriminant, free in both senses sharing of information.
Both of these approaches build wealth by building a large community of shared work, which builds
value faster than any other approach can.
Code is like math, written out longhand. Can you imagine how useless a mathematician
is who keeps their work to themself.
My guess is that with the way that the GPL works, the copyright holder (i.e. contributor) to any other part of the Linux kernel
or even to other GPL software that links with it, could sue a violator of the GPL if that violator is including
the contributor's code in their distribution. Every extension of any part of a single connected GPL software system
potentially violates the copyright of any other contributor, if they violate the license. It is one big cross-licensing
of copyrights.
Correct me if I'm wrong. IANAL.
This doesn't count as a statistical study, but discusses how accurate
the count would have to have been in Florida to have a determinate result in
Bush v. Gore:
http://web.jhu.edu/president/articles/2000/wpnov00.html
Here is a claim by Washington State electoral officials that studies had shown
their elections to be 99.99 % accurate. Even if true, that represents
an error of 10,000 votes in a 100million voter federal election.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002185379_accuracy20m.html
http://www.secstate.wa.gov/office/osos_news.aspx?i=U4SQ5nub4drPOpM60107aQ%3D%3D
Note that the claimed accuracy is not enough to have determined the
Florida presidential vote in 2000.
Here's a typical Mexican election:
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3344
More anecdotes:
http://www.knoxstudio.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=MISCOUNT-ELECT-12-20-04&cat=AN
A paper trail just gets you a manual recount process that has a demonstrated error/uncertainty rate
greater than the percentage of votes by which George W Bush "won" his first presidency.
If you're going to have close elections like that, then with a human paper counting system you may
as well just call it, heads or tails, because that will be just as valid as the alleged "result."
Some kind of open-source hardware and software stack, top to bottom, using public key encryption and
digital signature techniques to allow verification that a ballot was counted in the result without revealing
how the ballot was actually voted, should be fine. Why is this so difficult to comprehend?
The idea that all competent mathematicians and computer geeks, who could vouch for the system and the
process and the result, are somehow all in favor of one side in an election and so would engage in a vast,
unanimous conspiracy to defraud the populace is so far fetched that anyone who believes it should
have their right to vote revoked anyway, because if the quality of decisions made by those they support
is anything like their own decision making prowess, we are all completely f**ked.
Oh yeah, we already are, I forgot.
Someone else (who isn't busy like me ;-) ) should form another organization by the same name then
I suppose.
Anyone?
The worst that could happen is that M$ will pay you a bundle to close it down again.
At best you could shepherd a format that we sorely need promoted.
Miraculous as they seemed in the 80s,
they are outclassed on a number of fronts by simple digital files,
as far as a consumer is concerned.
1. The digital file isn't tied to any particular physical object,
or player, or location. It's simpler. If I know part of its name,
I can be playing it a few seconds later.
2. The digital files can be more flexibly arranged in groups to different
tastes and purposes.
3. They can be stored on the Internet and communities of people
can review them, collate them very flexibly.
4. They don't encourage the production of cruft to fill extra
tracks on a CD album.
So why are we talking about CDs at all. That was so 80s.
The discussion should be how music artists should be compensated
in the post CD world.
I think Radiohead demonstrated the way forward.
The traditional music industry, by fighting an inevitable change,
is driving a stake into its own heart by guaranteeing its irrelevance.
Wouldn't a circle of infinite radius work?