This is so one hundred percent correct. I started telecommuting in my first software job after college, and after being so used to living with 12 roommates crammed into two tiny adjacent apartments, being alone for the entire day (and living in the avenues in San Francisco... foggy and depressing) drove me bonkers.
I felt like the mathematician from Pi. I'd see someone I knew on the walk down to Haight St. to get lunch, and I'd be talking to them, secretly wondering in my head if I remembered how to communicate with people, and if I wasn't just spouting absolute weirdness to them.
The people at the main office of my company (in Boston) used to make fun of me 'cause to all of them I was just a voice out of a box.
I work in an office now and it's great. Do not work from home unless you have lots of social opportunity.
Ultimately, no one knows what would happen. The premises presented in Terminator and The Matrix aren't necessarily infeasible, but rather, we lack the perspective and knowledge to evaluate the possibility of them. The advancement of technology is not necessarily linear or exponential, or progressive in any pattern identifiable by us, and to say where Artificial Intelligence is going to be in ten or twenty or thirty years is, well, kind of silly.
I think the more important issue is one of morals vs. science... a question of 'should we' versus 'can we'?
I don't think any moderately intelligent lifeform is going to view us as gods. An intelligent lifeform is also a world apart from a conscious one... conscious lifeforms that are self-aware have the possibility (IMO) of asking moral questions. A lifeform of pure intelligence would evaluate humans as detrimental to planet Earth's ecology, do some calculations, and wipe out enough of us to make things better. A conscious lifeform that is more than just pure intelligence might question the reasoning-based decision on moral grounds.
The implications? For starters, regardless of where the security hole is, NT or Passport or Apache or wherever, hotmail is still a Microsoft-run site, and is the source of a lot of Microsoft propaganda, and considering the high-profile nature of the security hole, this is likely going to be a PR disaster for them.
Some time ago, Microsoft gradually began to trade engineering and software talent for PR and marketing talent, resulting in well-advertised software that sucks. This is, to date, possibly the most high-profile example of Microsoft's shift of priority from programming to propaganda, and hopefully will alert the public at large to a lot of the smaller issues - Outlook, Word, Macro viruses, poor implementation of PPTP, etc. that the Redmond PR dept. slipped under the rug.
Slashdot Mirror
This is so one hundred percent correct. I started telecommuting in my first software job after college, and after being so used to living with 12 roommates crammed into two tiny adjacent apartments, being alone for the entire day (and living in the avenues in San Francisco... foggy and depressing) drove me bonkers.
I felt like the mathematician from Pi. I'd see someone I knew on the walk down to Haight St. to get lunch, and I'd be talking to them, secretly wondering in my head if I remembered how to communicate with people, and if I wasn't just spouting absolute weirdness to them.
The people at the main office of my company (in Boston) used to make fun of me 'cause to all of them I was just a voice out of a box.
I work in an office now and it's great. Do not work from home unless you have lots of social opportunity.
Ultimately, no one knows what would happen. The premises presented in Terminator and The Matrix aren't necessarily infeasible, but rather, we lack the perspective and knowledge to evaluate the possibility of them. The advancement of technology is not necessarily linear or exponential, or progressive in any pattern identifiable by us, and to say where Artificial Intelligence is going to be in ten or twenty or thirty years is, well, kind of silly.
I think the more important issue is one of morals vs. science... a question of 'should we' versus 'can we'?
I don't think any moderately intelligent lifeform is going to view us as gods. An intelligent lifeform is also a world apart from a conscious one... conscious lifeforms that are self-aware have the possibility (IMO) of asking moral questions. A lifeform of pure intelligence would evaluate humans as detrimental to planet Earth's ecology, do some calculations, and wipe out enough of us to make things better. A conscious lifeform that is more than just pure intelligence might question the reasoning-based decision on moral grounds.
But hey... who knows...
The implications? For starters, regardless of where the security hole is, NT or Passport or Apache or wherever, hotmail is still a Microsoft-run site, and is the source of a lot of Microsoft propaganda, and considering the high-profile nature of the security hole, this is likely going to be a PR disaster for them.
Some time ago, Microsoft gradually began to trade engineering and software talent for PR and marketing talent, resulting in well-advertised software that sucks. This is, to date, possibly the most high-profile example of Microsoft's shift of priority from programming to propaganda, and hopefully will alert the public at large to a lot of the smaller issues - Outlook, Word, Macro viruses, poor implementation of PPTP, etc. that the Redmond PR dept. slipped under the rug.