I'm leading development on the official Java port, here. The code was originally a line-by-line port from the original Python (3.0.2), but it's in the middle of a refactoring to take into account some of the ways Java does things differently. We plan to match release numbers with the original Python codebase. Once we get the code cleaned up, we'll make a 3.0.2 release, and add features to get ourselves up to the current Python. The code is currently in CVS, directions available on SourceForge. We're always looking for developers and testers, of course. If you have any questions, email me directly, my SF username is flickboy. More general comments can go to the boards. We're in the process of getting our own web page up, so cut us a little slack.
I've heard complaints about and requests for "advanced" features, on the mailing lists, on IRC, and of course here. As far as the P2P protocol is concerned, I trust Bram's judgment. There are no plans to include any advanced features like upload bandwidth throttling. Instead, what I'm hoping will differentiate the Java port will be the GUI and ease-of-use, the ability of testers familiar with Java (leading to great security and QA), and code cleanliness.
If you're at all interested in seeing a (mostly) working Java implementation, and the only feature-for-feature 'official' version, check out JTorrent, and drop me a line. If you're curious about other language ports, or other ports with different goals, check out the "btports" Yahoo group. For general questions, or questions about the original Python, use the "bittorrent" Yahoo group, or go to #bittorrent on irc.freenode.net.
Go one better, and make the code Public Domain. Then watch as the MPAA attack the Public Domain code on one hand, while spouting lies about how copyrights protect the Public Domain on the other.
SCO sold (distributed) Linux only by exercising their right to do so under copyright law provided by the terms of the GPL. Copyright must be addressed, since that right derives authority from the same phrase in the Constitution as their IP misappropriation claims ("To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries").
To introduce copyright into your analogy, when SCO distributed Linux (as Caldera) under the GPL, they hung a great big "Free shit inside!" sign on their front door. Can't go blaming the robber after pulling a stunt like that, now can you?
The problem is that capitalism is a broken system.
Capitalism is a system designed to best allocate scarce (finite) resources amongst a group of cooperative participants (a market). To that end it has been wildly successful, resulting in creating a massive superpower out of the one country to embrace it as a fundamental, national principle. On the other hand, capitalism works only when allocating scarce resources. The immediate corollary is that you can't apply capitalism to ideas, which aren't finite and controllable, like a chair or a CD.
CDs can be controlled, sheet music can be controlled, the sale of instruments can be controlled, but the music itself, in pure form, cannot be controlled through capitalism. It isn't that the RIAA abused the capitalist system (of bribing politicians and fixing prices) to exploit its customers, its that they never really had control in the first place. They just had superior technology. Now, that lack of control is becoming apparent due to two very recent advances in cheap-and-easy consumer technology: conversion of physical music (CDs, etc) to and from virtual music (MP3s), and a way to distribute the virtual music (Internet).
Capitalism isn't broken. It's forcing older, more expensive trade models (RIAA now, and the MPAA within a few more years) out of the way for newer, cheaper, more efficient ones (Internet distribution), just like it's supposed to.
I never said I wanted the shuttle fleet grounded, I just said they couldn't be retrofitted to make the trip to Mars. I agree that we need a LEO infrastructure, but I don't see it getting built any time soon. As far as profitable endeavors in space, there aren't too many in LEO per se. Nothing up there to harvest except radiation and hard vacuum. Maybe someone can put microgravity to commercial use, but I can't think of any manufacturing process using it that has any decent (say, less than 20 years) ROI with current space technology. If someone comes up with one, you can bet NASA won't be able to stand in their way.
Turn them into the first step of having a shuttle fleet between LOE and the moon and mars.
A good idea, but unfortunately impractical from an engineering standpoint. See the NASA STS overview for why.
Here are a few more practical reasons why we can't use shuttles for trips to Mars:
Radiation. Shuttles fly in LEO, inside the Earth's protective radiation shield. When we leave it for Mars, we'll need heavy lead shielding somewhere on the ship to protect astronauts against sudden sun flares. Where does it go? (On the Apollo missions, the astronauts reported seeing flashes, which were caused by cosmic radiation. Even jaunts to the Moon are dangerous.)
Food. There isn't nearly enough food capacity on the shuttle for a trip to Mars. We're talking launch windows only every 18 months, and best technology puts us at 3-6 months to get there. Where are you gonna grow (or store??) 2 years worth of food on the shuttle?
Water. The average person should consume daily a number of ounces of water equal to half their weight in pounds (sorry for the Imperial units). A 176 pound (80 kg) astronaut needs to consume 88 ounces (2.5 kg / 2.5 L) of water per day (from whatever source). Multiply that by an 800-day mission and by the number of crewmembers and you see very quickly that you need a water reclamation system on board. Where does that go?
Psychology. NASA is undergoing extensive research into a problem which has been known in space for decades and on the ground for centuries: cabin fever. The shuttle is too small for extended missions.
Energy. The amount of fuel required to get to Mars (or the moon) is considerable. Yes, it's a lot easier to go from orbit to another celestial body, assuming you've got the fuel up there. That's a HUGE assumption. Tell me how you propose to get the fuel up there, and where it goes on the shuttle. Remember that the shuttle is going to be literally tons heavier than it is now, due to all the extra systems I've listed above (and many I've omitted) being included.
Here's the executive summary: shuttles were designed for 2 week missions in low earth orbit, with some extra slack for unforeseen problems. There is no way on (or off) God's green Earth that they can be modified for a trip to Mars.
after all, it's not like that couldn't be easily automated
Sorry, that's the whole point behind C/R. I show you an image of a bicycle (or a teepee or a mountain or a list of numbers, etc etc) and ask you 'what is this image'. If you can show me an image processing program that responds correctly in all cases, let me know, I've got $1 million for you. And don't tell anyone else I asked.
Editor at Financial Times encounters social problem, proposes economic solution. Did anyone else see this coming? Mod this article (-1, Overrated). Nothing to see here, folx.
Re:This is rediculous
on
Brain Privacy
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I participated in neurological research for the Salk Institute at the UCSD Thornton Hospital MRI last year, and they're nowhere near anything like this.
Let me explain the experiment, for those of you who are curious about the state of the art in neuro research. The purpose of the experiment was to determine the location in the brain of areas which are active during certain tasks. The task I was given was a memory / reflex test. I was given a button, and shown a sequence of letters at varying rates. I was supposed to press the button when I saw a letter that was identical to the letter shown two letters earlier. So if I saw E-C-E-C-C, I'd press the button on the second E, and again on the second C, but not the third C. (This is a hard enough test without being a medical experiment!)
First, they wired me up for an EEG. This involved sitting still for about 45 minutes while two people stood over me, put a skullcap with wires on my head, and went over each electrical contact with some grease and a little wooden dowel to move the hair out of the way so the electrodes would have good contact with the skin. (The goop washed out in the shower, but it felt funny driving home.) Then they stuck me in the MRI, with a mirror in front of my face at a 45 degree angle so I could look past my feet without sitting up (impossible in that tiny tube). Then they performed the tests.
I was in the tube for about 90 minutes, most of it not moving any muscles except for my finger to press the button. If you move any muscles, your whole brain lights up with activity, and it throws off the readings. It was also noisy in there, because I was laying in the middle of a huge electromagnet being bombarded with radio waves. After it was over, they showed me a 3D brain scan, and I got to see a 2D plot of my brain waves by color (blue for theta waves, green for alpha, red for gamma, etc etc).
Back to the topic at hand. Unless they suddenly find a way to carry around a $1.5M electromagnet, hide it somewhere where no one can see or hear it, convince people to walk through it somehow (Futurama tubes, anyone?), figure out a way to filter out all the extra brain noise from people walking, talking, and doing all the other things we normally do, and somehow interpret the data in a time-relevant manner, there's no way anyone is going to make "brain scanning" work. OTOH, maybe there is a way after all.
Mozilla already controls this. Go to Preferences / Advanced / Scripts & Plugins. I haven't seen a pop-up ad in over a year now. I expect this will be no different.
I was burned that the price kept going up -- and I don't take nicely to automated withdrawls from my accounts going up anytime the source decides to reinvent their business logic. I should either have to sign up again at the higher price, or sign a document authorizing the higher price.
Just call up your credit card company and ask for a chargeback. Tell them you didn't authorize that amount of debit. Merchants hate that. It costs them money, and if it happens enough they can get investigated for fraud. If more people did it, Netflix would think twice before trying crap like that again.
but can we work towards the elimination of STORAGE as RAM before we get to RAM as storage?
I mean, why *DO* we still have pagefiles?
You've obviously never done any real computing. There are some computational problems that are still too big to do entirely in RAM, hence pagefiles.
Actually, Beowulf clusters are spot on topic here. Ever wonder why the concept of a Beowulf cluster was such a breakthrough? (Hint: have you ever tried to crunch 100GB of data from a heat transfer problem?) Beowulfs allowed the huge amount of necessary RAM to be farmed out to lots of boxes, driving down costs, among other advantages.
Executive summary: our card swipers are secure, as long as you don't break into them.
Reality check for Blackboard: people who want to steal financial data from your users are criminals, and probably won't have any compunctions about breaking into your swipers.
In the case of signing up a spammer or other unscrupulous individiual to catalogs and other physical mail, the companies that are sending these items are directly bearing the cost of your DoS.
Usually, the practice of sending out items without asking for payment is known as "Marketing". Giving out promo materials is something dreamed up by those guys you've heard about, but never actually seen, who live in the fancy offices while you're stuck in a cube. Strangely enough, they usually get lots and lots of money, and every company seems to have them. Coke spent $837 million on marketing in 2002 (it's down there on page 81). Believe me, they don't care if some spammer in West Bloomfield, Michigan suddenly wants to get a soda fountain catalog. If 50% of their marketing leads were bogus, they'd care.
I don't know how many of you keep up on the DMCA, but you really need to read Title 17, Sec. 1201 again. I'm not sure when they changed it, but there are a lot more exemptions in there than there were last time I looked. Paragraphs (f), (g), (i), and (j) in particular are promising (but whoever has better lawyer$ will win). WTH is the deal with paragraph (k)? They're trying to phase out VCRs, for crying out loud.
You know a C&D letter may stop people from disclosing exploits, but will not stop people from disclosing that their are exploits. That's enough for lots of poor, enterprising college students.
My friend, you are brilliant. Here's why:
All that now needs to be done to destroy any company X's reputation is to wildly (and speculatively) claim that Product Y is full of lots of security flaws. You don't have to prove your claim, just say "US law (DMCA) doesn't allow me to discuss the vulnerability". Doesn't matter if there is one or not, all you have to do is claim it, early and often. Your credibility is unimpeachable, since no one can prove you wrong. The only way company X can prove you wrong is to let someone release a third party security audit. Anything less can be made to look like a Corporate Coverup (think Enron, etc).
Therefore, I hereby state that there are serious security flaws with the whole Blackboard system, both in design and implementation. Let me reiterate, serious security flaws. Don't use it. Don't let anyone you know use it. Don't let schools use it. Don't let your kids use it. For heaven's sake, won't someone think of the children? In conclusion, don't use Blackboard.
What are the chances of a Java Bit Torrent actually happening, with me organizing it? Well, it's being worked on, one way or another. I've got the original author on board, if that's good enough for you. And as far as completing anything, since when is any open source project ever really finished? I won't claim that I'll be with the project forever, since that's a silly thing to say, but I seem to be organizing things now. I also won't claim that it will be easy, or that I'm the best person for the job. All I know is that I'm working on it, and people seem to be using me to project manage because I'm the one going around making sure things get done.
Coding is fun if you like coding. I like coding. There are a lot of other things I'm doing that aren't as fun, but need to get done: setting up discussion fora, mailing lists, and the like; releasing news alerts; administering CVS and associated scripts and permissions; performing pre-public-CVS code merges from lots of eager submitters, all of whom want to see their code in the final release; managing developer expectations; making publicity posts on slashdot; trying to gather support from curious developers... you get the idea.
It's a lot of work, but I've got two advantages: I know what has to get done, and I'm going to make sure it happens. I think that's good enough.
I'm announcing that I'm coordinating the Java port of Bit Torrent. Everyone has been yelling about it, so it's going to get done. Look for SourceForge CVS this weekend under the JTorrent project name. The project page is already there. (Note to developers: this is your chance to sign up on the ground floor!)
All feature requests still go thru Bram at bitconjurer.org to be included in the official Python release, but if you'll wait a few days and add it to the SF feature request/bug tracker, we'll get around to it too.
If I haven't mentioned it already, the original Python client is utterly awesome.
Being a programmer myself, I don't feel that
programming something so that it can perform extremely well in a specific test is necessarily indicative of Artificial Intelligence or Intelligence in general.
I agree, and that's why I want to go to grad school for hard AI. I've seen so many expert systems guys call their products 'AI' that I've lost count. It's not, and I wish they'd stop confusing people. Just because a system 'learns' doesn't mean it's intelligent.
I tend to think the goal of AI research is to produce systems that can learn and react appropriately in different situations that they were never programmed to handle or necessarily anticipate. If that isn't the goal of AI research, what separates it from writing programs on a large scale?
Yeah, you've got it right. Most 'AI' programs out there are your typical Starcraft AIs, the various vision-, speech- and face-recognition software out there, and programs that drive those cool robots around without bumping things. Each program was designed for a specific task, and cannot (by design) grow any larger than that task. This means that none of these programs is really a significant step toward true AI. Some bits and pieces may be salvageable, to be sure.
I happen to agree with the general attitude here, so let me clarify the position for your benefit.
Seems like everybody is saying this guy has no rights because he a spammer(the lowest life form).
Not that he has no rights, but this guy is infringing on my personal property (by actively causing me to spend money to read his advertisements). Therefore, he is a criminal, and criminals shouldn't have the same freedoms as others because they have demonstrated a lack of responsibility. Freedom and responsibility go hand-in-hand, and that's especially true on the Internet. Some people have chosen to restrict this spammer's freedom by spamming him back, directly or indirectly. While not claiming the moral high ground, this technique at least attempts to demonstrate the proverb "If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen".
What if this guy spoke harshly about the government, would you feel the same? If he was an abortion doctor would he feel the same? If he was a communist would you feel the same?
None of these people are costing me money. The First Amendment gives you the right to stand on a street corner and blather away about whatever the hell you want. It doesn't give you the right to waltz into my house and blather, at my expense, which is essentially what spam is. Spammers don't usually understand this fine point, which is why they always claim "First Amendment rights" that they don't have.
Good for Uy, and "Shame On You" to everyone who called this poor loser's house or threatened him physically. You might think it's OK to break a law or two to enforce Justice, but you're gonna end up in a world of hurt if you try.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard complaints about and requests for "advanced" features, on the mailing lists, on IRC, and of course here. As far as the P2P protocol is concerned, I trust Bram's judgment. There are no plans to include any advanced features like upload bandwidth throttling. Instead, what I'm hoping will differentiate the Java port will be the GUI and ease-of-use, the ability of testers familiar with Java (leading to great security and QA), and code cleanliness.
If you're at all interested in seeing a (mostly) working Java implementation, and the only feature-for-feature 'official' version, check out JTorrent, and drop me a line. If you're curious about other language ports, or other ports with different goals, check out the "btports" Yahoo group. For general questions, or questions about the original Python, use the "bittorrent" Yahoo group, or go to #bittorrent on irc.freenode.net.
Go one better, and make the code Public Domain. Then watch as the MPAA attack the Public Domain code on one hand, while spouting lies about how copyrights protect the Public Domain on the other.
To introduce copyright into your analogy, when SCO distributed Linux (as Caldera) under the GPL, they hung a great big "Free shit inside!" sign on their front door. Can't go blaming the robber after pulling a stunt like that, now can you?
Capitalism is a system designed to best allocate scarce (finite) resources amongst a group of cooperative participants (a market). To that end it has been wildly successful, resulting in creating a massive superpower out of the one country to embrace it as a fundamental, national principle. On the other hand, capitalism works only when allocating scarce resources. The immediate corollary is that you can't apply capitalism to ideas, which aren't finite and controllable, like a chair or a CD.
CDs can be controlled, sheet music can be controlled, the sale of instruments can be controlled, but the music itself, in pure form, cannot be controlled through capitalism. It isn't that the RIAA abused the capitalist system (of bribing politicians and fixing prices) to exploit its customers, its that they never really had control in the first place. They just had superior technology. Now, that lack of control is becoming apparent due to two very recent advances in cheap-and-easy consumer technology: conversion of physical music (CDs, etc) to and from virtual music (MP3s), and a way to distribute the virtual music (Internet).
Capitalism isn't broken. It's forcing older, more expensive trade models (RIAA now, and the MPAA within a few more years) out of the way for newer, cheaper, more efficient ones (Internet distribution), just like it's supposed to.
I never said I wanted the shuttle fleet grounded, I just said they couldn't be retrofitted to make the trip to Mars. I agree that we need a LEO infrastructure, but I don't see it getting built any time soon. As far as profitable endeavors in space, there aren't too many in LEO per se. Nothing up there to harvest except radiation and hard vacuum. Maybe someone can put microgravity to commercial use, but I can't think of any manufacturing process using it that has any decent (say, less than 20 years) ROI with current space technology. If someone comes up with one, you can bet NASA won't be able to stand in their way.
A good idea, but unfortunately impractical from an engineering standpoint. See the NASA STS overview for why.
Here are a few more practical reasons why we can't use shuttles for trips to Mars:
- Radiation. Shuttles fly in LEO, inside the Earth's protective radiation shield. When we leave it for Mars, we'll need heavy lead shielding somewhere on the ship to protect astronauts against sudden sun flares. Where does it go? (On the Apollo missions, the astronauts reported seeing flashes, which were caused by cosmic radiation. Even jaunts to the Moon are dangerous.)
- Food. There isn't nearly enough food capacity on the shuttle for a trip to Mars. We're talking launch windows only every 18 months, and best technology puts us at 3-6 months to get there. Where are you gonna grow (or store??) 2 years worth of food on the shuttle?
- Water. The average person should consume daily a number of ounces of water equal to half their weight in pounds (sorry for the Imperial units). A 176 pound (80 kg) astronaut needs to consume 88 ounces (2.5 kg / 2.5 L) of water per day (from whatever source). Multiply that by an 800-day mission and by the number of crewmembers and you see very quickly that you need a water reclamation system on board. Where does that go?
- Psychology. NASA is undergoing extensive research into a problem which has been known in space for decades and on the ground for centuries: cabin fever. The shuttle is too small for extended missions.
- Energy. The amount of fuel required to get to Mars (or the moon) is considerable. Yes, it's a lot easier to go from orbit to another celestial body, assuming you've got the fuel up there. That's a HUGE assumption. Tell me how you propose to get the fuel up there, and where it goes on the shuttle. Remember that the shuttle is going to be literally tons heavier than it is now, due to all the extra systems I've listed above (and many I've omitted) being included.
Here's the executive summary: shuttles were designed for 2 week missions in low earth orbit, with some extra slack for unforeseen problems. There is no way on (or off) God's green Earth that they can be modified for a trip to Mars.Sorry, that's the whole point behind C/R. I show you an image of a bicycle (or a teepee or a mountain or a list of numbers, etc etc) and ask you 'what is this image'. If you can show me an image processing program that responds correctly in all cases, let me know, I've got $1 million for you. And don't tell anyone else I asked.
Editor at Financial Times encounters social problem, proposes economic solution. Did anyone else see this coming? Mod this article (-1, Overrated). Nothing to see here, folx.
In SOVIET RUSSIA, Tetris plays YOU!
Let me explain the experiment, for those of you who are curious about the state of the art in neuro research. The purpose of the experiment was to determine the location in the brain of areas which are active during certain tasks. The task I was given was a memory / reflex test. I was given a button, and shown a sequence of letters at varying rates. I was supposed to press the button when I saw a letter that was identical to the letter shown two letters earlier. So if I saw E-C-E-C-C, I'd press the button on the second E, and again on the second C, but not the third C. (This is a hard enough test without being a medical experiment!)
First, they wired me up for an EEG. This involved sitting still for about 45 minutes while two people stood over me, put a skullcap with wires on my head, and went over each electrical contact with some grease and a little wooden dowel to move the hair out of the way so the electrodes would have good contact with the skin. (The goop washed out in the shower, but it felt funny driving home.) Then they stuck me in the MRI, with a mirror in front of my face at a 45 degree angle so I could look past my feet without sitting up (impossible in that tiny tube). Then they performed the tests.
I was in the tube for about 90 minutes, most of it not moving any muscles except for my finger to press the button. If you move any muscles, your whole brain lights up with activity, and it throws off the readings. It was also noisy in there, because I was laying in the middle of a huge electromagnet being bombarded with radio waves. After it was over, they showed me a 3D brain scan, and I got to see a 2D plot of my brain waves by color (blue for theta waves, green for alpha, red for gamma, etc etc).
Back to the topic at hand. Unless they suddenly find a way to carry around a $1.5M electromagnet, hide it somewhere where no one can see or hear it, convince people to walk through it somehow (Futurama tubes, anyone?), figure out a way to filter out all the extra brain noise from people walking, talking, and doing all the other things we normally do, and somehow interpret the data in a time-relevant manner, there's no way anyone is going to make "brain scanning" work. OTOH, maybe there is a way after all.
Mozilla already controls this. Go to Preferences / Advanced / Scripts & Plugins. I haven't seen a pop-up ad in over a year now. I expect this will be no different.
Just call up your credit card company and ask for a chargeback. Tell them you didn't authorize that amount of debit. Merchants hate that. It costs them money, and if it happens enough they can get investigated for fraud. If more people did it, Netflix would think twice before trying crap like that again.
I mean, why *DO* we still have pagefiles?
You've obviously never done any real computing. There are some computational problems that are still too big to do entirely in RAM, hence pagefiles.
Actually, Beowulf clusters are spot on topic here. Ever wonder why the concept of a Beowulf cluster was such a breakthrough? (Hint: have you ever tried to crunch 100GB of data from a heat transfer problem?) Beowulfs allowed the huge amount of necessary RAM to be farmed out to lots of boxes, driving down costs, among other advantages.
or did anyone else go through that looking for links they regularly click on?
Reality check for Blackboard: people who want to steal financial data from your users are criminals, and probably won't have any compunctions about breaking into your swipers.
My, um, friend is interested. Yeah, that's it. He's standing right next to me. Send me those numbers, will ya?
Usually, the practice of sending out items without asking for payment is known as "Marketing". Giving out promo materials is something dreamed up by those guys you've heard about, but never actually seen, who live in the fancy offices while you're stuck in a cube. Strangely enough, they usually get lots and lots of money, and every company seems to have them. Coke spent $837 million on marketing in 2002 (it's down there on page 81). Believe me, they don't care if some spammer in West Bloomfield, Michigan suddenly wants to get a soda fountain catalog. If 50% of their marketing leads were bogus, they'd care.
I don't know how many of you keep up on the DMCA, but you really need to read Title 17, Sec. 1201 again. I'm not sure when they changed it, but there are a lot more exemptions in there than there were last time I looked. Paragraphs (f), (g), (i), and (j) in particular are promising (but whoever has better lawyer$ will win). WTH is the deal with paragraph (k)? They're trying to phase out VCRs, for crying out loud.
My friend, you are brilliant. Here's why:
All that now needs to be done to destroy any company X's reputation is to wildly (and speculatively) claim that Product Y is full of lots of security flaws. You don't have to prove your claim, just say "US law (DMCA) doesn't allow me to discuss the vulnerability". Doesn't matter if there is one or not, all you have to do is claim it, early and often. Your credibility is unimpeachable, since no one can prove you wrong. The only way company X can prove you wrong is to let someone release a third party security audit. Anything less can be made to look like a Corporate Coverup (think Enron, etc).
Therefore, I hereby state that there are serious security flaws with the whole Blackboard system, both in design and implementation. Let me reiterate, serious security flaws. Don't use it. Don't let anyone you know use it. Don't let schools use it. Don't let your kids use it. For heaven's sake, won't someone think of the children? In conclusion, don't use Blackboard.
Coding is fun if you like coding. I like coding. There are a lot of other things I'm doing that aren't as fun, but need to get done: setting up discussion fora, mailing lists, and the like; releasing news alerts; administering CVS and associated scripts and permissions; performing pre-public-CVS code merges from lots of eager submitters, all of whom want to see their code in the final release; managing developer expectations; making publicity posts on slashdot; trying to gather support from curious developers... you get the idea.
It's a lot of work, but I've got two advantages: I know what has to get done, and I'm going to make sure it happens. I think that's good enough.
All feature requests still go thru Bram at bitconjurer.org to be included in the official Python release, but if you'll wait a few days and add it to the SF feature request/bug tracker, we'll get around to it too.
If I haven't mentioned it already, the original Python client is utterly awesome.
I agree, and that's why I want to go to grad school for hard AI. I've seen so many expert systems guys call their products 'AI' that I've lost count. It's not, and I wish they'd stop confusing people. Just because a system 'learns' doesn't mean it's intelligent.
I tend to think the goal of AI research is to produce systems that can learn and react appropriately in different situations that they were never programmed to handle or necessarily anticipate. If that isn't the goal of AI research, what separates it from writing programs on a large scale?
Yeah, you've got it right. Most 'AI' programs out there are your typical Starcraft AIs, the various vision-, speech- and face-recognition software out there, and programs that drive those cool robots around without bumping things. Each program was designed for a specific task, and cannot (by design) grow any larger than that task. This means that none of these programs is really a significant step toward true AI. Some bits and pieces may be salvageable, to be sure.
Check out the SAGE site. They've already done everything you suggest.
I vote for adding Microsoft to the Axis of Evil.
Seems like everybody is saying this guy has no rights because he a spammer(the lowest life form).
Not that he has no rights, but this guy is infringing on my personal property (by actively causing me to spend money to read his advertisements). Therefore, he is a criminal, and criminals shouldn't have the same freedoms as others because they have demonstrated a lack of responsibility. Freedom and responsibility go hand-in-hand, and that's especially true on the Internet. Some people have chosen to restrict this spammer's freedom by spamming him back, directly or indirectly. While not claiming the moral high ground, this technique at least attempts to demonstrate the proverb "If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen".
What if this guy spoke harshly about the government, would you feel the same? If he was an abortion doctor would he feel the same? If he was a communist would you feel the same?
None of these people are costing me money. The First Amendment gives you the right to stand on a street corner and blather away about whatever the hell you want. It doesn't give you the right to waltz into my house and blather, at my expense, which is essentially what spam is. Spammers don't usually understand this fine point, which is why they always claim "First Amendment rights" that they don't have.
Good for Uy, and "Shame On You" to everyone who called this poor loser's house or threatened him physically. You might think it's OK to break a law or two to enforce Justice, but you're gonna end up in a world of hurt if you try.