QoS: The wider use of quality-of-service metrics to regulate bandwidth/latency/drop-rate will spread from backbone to the backplane. QoS will be assigned not just to packets or network streams, but extended to applications, processes, and threads.
authentication-intensive network: Anti-spam, anti-phish, anti-piracy initiatives will deanonymize the network. Expanding liability may force commercial providers of network infrastructure to adopt so-called trusted computing initiatives. Counterfeiting a header may become crime similar to counterfeiting money because both crimes degrade the public trust in the system.
militarization of networks: When will network security become so important to the national interest that the government deploys.mil computers to DDoS offending servers. If the economy runs on the net, someone will become the defender of that infrastructure.
physical layer/application layer dichotomy: Currently the value of the network is in the application, but the cost is in the physical layer. This lead to the problem of price wars among infrastructure service provider or the war over municipal wifi. Perhaps an alternate approach would more closely link the value and costs of networking.
Multiple IPs per device: I wonder if the move to multiple cores will push systems toward multiple IPv6 addys per machine. Technologies such as IBM's cell architecture support the potential for multiple OSes running on a single hardware platform. With such a large IPv6 address space, it may be easier to give each running OS instance its own IP address, rather than try to share an address and try to use a meta OS to share network resources. This, in turn, may lead to a proliferation of addresses that fill the larger space.
The demand for ever more sophisticated plots, depth-of-gaming-worlds, realism, and whiz-bang physics/graphics engines seems to be pushing gaming into a bad place. Fortunately, gaming will always have room for simple, but innovative, games (of the Tetris-style) that don't demand Hollywood-style budgets and Hollywood-style realism. Perhaps what is really happening is that the gaming world will fragment into a high-budget FPS market (run by a risk-averse management) and a low-budget, high-concept gaming market.
IANAG, but I wonder if open source will be able to create a rich online FPS game/MMORG that offers the rich world-depth of a big-budget game without the need for millions of dollars in development labor.
I wish them luck, but they have a ways to go. This Information Week survey ranked IBM last among the top 12 big outsourcing service providers. The article suggests that IBM's customers are not that happy with the service yet.
With IBMs large resources and historical expertise in service, they may be able to turn it around. We shall see.
As much as U.S. IT folks hate outsourcing (actually it's offshoring that they dislike), it is a way for Linux to penetrate those mid-sized business that don't have the IT to handle OSS themselves. If a mid-sized company outsources customer care, finance & accounting, HR, etc. , then they don't care about the "source" of the underlying software at the provider as long as the service provider does a good job at a decent price. I would suspect that some outsourcing service providers -- IBM certainly -- leverage Linux for its low-cost per seat and economies once you have the scale to support it. The rapidly growing outsourcing providers also offer a greenfield opportunity for Linux -- if you are starting an outsourcing company from scratch then you have the opportunity to pick whichever OS works best without as much an issue of retraining and entrenched workforce.
Once Linux builds up a competent portfolio of business software (some outsourcing service providers also sell their software), that software will attract non-outsourcing businesses to Linux
Spam tracks current events too
on
Mapping Google News
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I've noticed an upsurge in "Living Willing" spam since the Terry Schiavo story and even a few Pope-related offers.
Conflicts of Interest & a House of Cards
on
Our Ratings, Ourselves
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
So many aspects of marketing are so squishy that it is easy for everyone to fool themselves into thinking that the ads are effective. All of the participants have a vested interest in spinning the impact of ads -- TV stations, ad agencies have obvious conflicts of interest in promoting TV ads. But even the marketing execs at companies do to as they judge their personal "size" by how many millions they spend on big ad campaigns.
I have no idea if TV ads are really seen or not or if they really work or not - they may well create some subliminal warm fuzzy about some heavily promoted product or brand.
I do know that ads can backfire. When a major (potato) chip maker launched a multi-million dollar "taste-test" TV ad campaign against its biggest competitor, the competitor's sales went up because the campaign got people thinking about the chips and they bought more of the competitor's brand. This anecdote suggests that ads are seen, but may not have the intended effect.
I suspect that the real problem is that companies are so desperate to reach and influence buyers that they will try anything.
What would make the technology even cooler is a speech channel segmentation system that directs out-loud speech to one conversation/phone circuit and silent/sub-vocalized speech to another conversation. That way someone could really have two conversations at once without putting people on hold/swapping lines.
To avoid collisions, the receiver could use a buffer and sound accelerator that alternates the streams from the other side of the conversation. The only challenge would be the latency heard on the other end between your replies. Even this could be covered by stretching each spoken reply so that the recipient hears you speak for slower/longer than you actually do.
This is a great idea until you mutter some expletive under your breath while talking to your boss. I can also foresee some embarrassments for those that can't read without moving their lips.
I wasn't doable on high end equipment then, it still isn't doable today.
Thanks for the insight. I'd always suspected that they were using gross approximations for the field force calculations. Its one thing to compute the forces on a point charge in a uniform field. Its another thing to compute all the quantum mechanical effects of interacting electron shells in a real molecule.
Unfortunately, with the advent of fancy graphics workstations came the belief that these methods worked - after all, people could see pictures, on a computer at that. These new methods make things even worse, people will feel forces generated by a fictional simulation and be even more convinced that what they are experiencing really does reflect reality.
You are preaching to the choir on that one. I have first hand experience with deluding oneself through the power of simulations. It is too easy for an incorrect assumption or approximation to corrupt the results. And when the complexity of models or the beauty of the output are taken as indicators of truth, we are all in trouble.
Sometimes I worry if atmospheric sims used to predict global warming are just as bad - not not having worked in atmospheric science I've no evidence to back it up
I've not looked into this in a while, but I know that early simulations failed to predict the current weather situation, leading me to question whether they will be any good with the future. And even if the new generation of simulations can predict recent weather trends, I have to wonder about the potential for excessive post hoc curve-fitting. The Earth is one big sample-size-of-one experiment and that makes doing true science nearly impossible.
In preslashdot days, there was a segment of the VR community working on force-feedback (haptic) interfaces. In one application, a 6-DOF, 3-D mouse let a researcher "hold" a simulated molecule and "feel" how that molecule fit into a receptor site of an enzyme. Computing the forces required high-end equipment at the time, but should be very doable today if one had the specialized interface hardware.
Not specific enough for safety (yet)
on
Precision Gene Editing
·
· Score: 3, Informative
TFA noted that the zinc fingers cue in on two sets of 6 base pairs to find the site that needs correction. Assuming randomness in the base-pair sequences, this 12 base-pair key will bind with approximately 1 out of every 16.8 million (actually 1 out of every 8.4 million due to complementarity of the base pairs). Given that the human genome has about 3.2 billion base pairs, this means that the modifier will match in 381 positions more or less.
Thus, this method will fix the error in one place and introduce an error in 380 other locations. The key needs more than 16 base pairs to be statistically assured of homing in on a unique mutation (depending on the statistics of DNA, it may need more or less).
The entire basis of copyright is that information should not be free and that the creator/owner of information should have the right to charge what they want for copies of their creation. In contrast, the OSS movement argues against this on the basis of moral error (information should be free/not owned), impracticality (technology means that information wants to be free despite owner's wishes), or alternative business model (information is offered for free, but service is not).
I can see that Google and others have gotten tremendous value from the labor of others and GPL would like a cut of the action. But GPL can't have it both ways. Either the information is free (including Google's freedom to earn great profits from it) or information is not free and information has owners who can use copyright/licenses to extract profits from the information.
It's only bad news for the hardware side of telecom. The services side would like nothing better than cheap equipment that boosts adoption and use of telecom. The cheaper the infrastructure, the higher the profits in service and/or the greater the adoption of services if they become less expensive to roll out.
In some ways this becomes a battle between the best interests of the infrastructure makers (a small segment) and the infrastructure users (all the rest of the economy).
The long-term impact is far less clear, however. The effect of cheap Chinese goods will depend on how the U.S. economy uses the less-costly telecom gear. If we only use it to download ring-tones while standing in the unemployment line, then it will be bad. But if businesses find growth-generating new innovations in business processes, services, and products that make use of cheap telecom infrastructure, then it will be a good thing.
When Wallace and Gromit had their Grand Day Out they inadvertently took a few stowaway mice with them (it was Wallace's basement, after all). Every since 1991, the mice have been consuming the cheese at an exponentially growing rate.
No matter how carefully tested, any big OS release is a public beta. Until a large number of people have tried the software with a real-world array of hardware configurations, applications, and patterns of usage, nobody knows the hidden gotchas (such as an incompatibility with some old firewire bridge chip that corrupts FW HDs!).
10.4.1 should fix most of the glaring bugs of 10.4, but a two week, watch-the-forums-for-problems period for 10.4.1 will ensure that bug-fix release is stable and does not add yet another major glitch.
I realize this strategy of waiting until the dust settles is cowardly and that I am shirking my duty to help Apple debug its OS. But I run production systems and downtime/corruption is something I prefer to avoid even if it means not staying on the bleeding edge of cool software.
Initiatives such as this one are part of a move toward an internet immune system -- active systems that watch for and halt undesirable activities. But like the mammalian immune system, it will doubtless be subject to false positives. This raises the potential for auto-immune diseases such as when someone's IP is inappropriately blacklisted.
The core of the problem will be a disconnect between the fast response time required for properly halting fast-spreading malware (e.g., a compact worm that attacks even just 1% of hosts will probably double its infected base every second and saturate the entire net within a minute) and the slower response times of human-mediated due-process procedures. The need to quickly halt infections will lead to a hair-trigger system that may shutdown innocent hosts or kill legitimate activity.
Internet auto-immune diseases are potentially quite serious as that actually create a serious new vulnerability. Criminals could try to trigger an immune response on a target and trigger an immunity-DOS response on the target by using the system against itself.
At 10 GHz and an index of refraction of 1.5, each 2 centimeters of light pipe adds 1 clock cycle to the latency to the system (2 clock cycles to the round-trip). Put a optically-connected device a foot (30 cm) from the processor and you have 15 clock cycles of data (or a 30 clock cycle response time) just due to the fiber, let alone any in the devices at either end of the fiber-optic pipe.
Its always interesting to see what happens when the relative speeds of processor, memory, and interconnects change.
pursuing collective goals that individuals can't (or won't) accomplish.
At that level the internet needs "a" government for handing spam, blacklists, DDoS attacks, malware, phishing, standards creation, infrastructure development, etc. What is less clear is which government.
The prerequisite for a good government would seem to be: 1) an understanding of the governed system and 2) a confluence of interests that align with the governed system. These prerequisites are the basis for democracy -- who, within limits, better understands the people and is interested (at least self-interested) in the people's welfare, than the people themselves.
The rationale, heretofore, for rejecting traditional, meatspace governments (e.g., the UN) is that these groups neither understand the internet nor have the internet's interest at heart. Until someone can convince me that these other governments will do a good job, they should remain on the sidelines.
Yet I doubt that meatspace governments will remain on the sidelines because the internet is becoming too important in the real-world. Thus, I wonder how the internet community can guide the transition from self-regulation to traditional government regulation with an eye toward helping governments understand the internet and internalize the best-interests of the internet.
As appealing as a proposed video iPod might be, I doubt it would sell in large numbers. The difference between music and video is that music can be a background activity. One can work, read/., jog, talk with friends, drive a car, etc. whilst music is playing. In contrast, video requires too much visual engagement -- some super-multitaskers might disagree, but even that small group is unlikely to watch video as much as they might listen to music.
Whereas large numbers of people can imagine themselves using an iPod everyday and at many times of day, much fewer people can see themselves using a vPod and for much fewer hours per day.
Several years ago the Tech Museum in San Jose had a revolving 3-D scanner that would scan people's heads. After you got scanned, it created a 3-D model of your head with a full-color texture map (which looks really strange when flattened on a monitor because you discover that your face is only a very small part of your head). You then were given an URL that would work in other exhibits and let you download your face.
I wonder if its still there.... I wonder if I still have that file.....
I see this all the time in errors in newspapers and magazines. Its obvious that someone ran a checker and just clicked "OK" at whatever was suggested. Spelling and grammar checkers have taken the place of actual knowledge of the language.
I suspect that, in the long run, this will change usage so that Microsoft English becomes considered acceptable. But the trend does frighten me, given the recent issue with open standards in Massachusetts. In a dystopian future, open source eye-balls will only be allowed to read, not write, the language.
A refined version of this would be a good tool for the space shuttle for exterior inspection without requiring a space walk. A small robotic webcam could peruse the wings for damage and relay video to the shuttle or ground crew. And at 11 pounds (less if they create a mini-version), the impact on the mass budget is not too bad.
And, as with people, when it gets it wrong it's worse than if it was just a dumb but obedient tool
This is so very true. I suspect that primitive (= worse than useless) incarnations of the intentional stance were built into much maligned "intelligent assistants" such as Microsoft Office's Clippy. Perhaps one of the needed breakthroughs is some type of internal feedback -- if the "smart" software notices that it is getting things wrong too often, it will turn itself off or revert to "dumb" settings. When the software notices that the user's behavior has become more predictable, it might attempt to interact more.
I totally agree that the worst possible trait in a computer is unpredictability. The computer should never grab control from the user or behave in non-obvious ways. Rather, a competent "smart" system would earn the user's trust and the user would choose to delegate more tasks to the automated system. I can imagine a background interface that lets the computer signal when it thinks it knows what is next and whether it got it right. The UI would offer several modes that: 1) let the user take full control when doing hard-to-anticipate activities, 2) run with a mix of user-input and automated task completion, 3) run semi-automated with light oversight, and 4) run near-fully automated for longer batch jobs (with post-task QA).
Again, I fear that this will take far longer than 10 years to perfect and unless its near perfect, it will not be accepted for the reasons you allude to.
Why not use two VOIPs half-duplex?
on
VoIP Wiretapping
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
One could always use two VOIP providers. Call on one, have the other party call back on a second VOIP, and run two simultaneous half-duplex conversations. VOIP 1 would handle voice from A to B and VOIP 2 would handle B to A. Unless the wire tap is on the ISP (and the feds can merge the two separate streams) they would only get to listen to half the conversation.
To hell with patching. Stop using stupid software.
You and I are in total agreement on that one. Sadly, 96% or so of everyone else disagrees.
There's also the problem of stupid users, especially where emailed malware is concerned. All it takes is one idiot to open the attachment and all their friends get an "Cool game!" email from that infected person -- viruses are good at social engineering.
Slashdot Mirror
The demand for ever more sophisticated plots, depth-of-gaming-worlds, realism, and whiz-bang physics/graphics engines seems to be pushing gaming into a bad place. Fortunately, gaming will always have room for simple, but innovative, games (of the Tetris-style) that don't demand Hollywood-style budgets and Hollywood-style realism. Perhaps what is really happening is that the gaming world will fragment into a high-budget FPS market (run by a risk-averse management) and a low-budget, high-concept gaming market.
IANAG, but I wonder if open source will be able to create a rich online FPS game/MMORG that offers the rich world-depth of a big-budget game without the need for millions of dollars in development labor.
I wish them luck, but they have a ways to go. This Information Week survey ranked IBM last among the top 12 big outsourcing service providers. The article suggests that IBM's customers are not that happy with the service yet.
With IBMs large resources and historical expertise in service, they may be able to turn it around. We shall see.
As much as U.S. IT folks hate outsourcing (actually it's offshoring that they dislike), it is a way for Linux to penetrate those mid-sized business that don't have the IT to handle OSS themselves. If a mid-sized company outsources customer care, finance & accounting, HR, etc. , then they don't care about the "source" of the underlying software at the provider as long as the service provider does a good job at a decent price. I would suspect that some outsourcing service providers -- IBM certainly -- leverage Linux for its low-cost per seat and economies once you have the scale to support it. The rapidly growing outsourcing providers also offer a greenfield opportunity for Linux -- if you are starting an outsourcing company from scratch then you have the opportunity to pick whichever OS works best without as much an issue of retraining and entrenched workforce.
Once Linux builds up a competent portfolio of business software (some outsourcing service providers also sell their software), that software will attract non-outsourcing businesses to Linux
I've noticed an upsurge in "Living Willing" spam since the Terry Schiavo story and even a few Pope-related offers.
So many aspects of marketing are so squishy that it is easy for everyone to fool themselves into thinking that the ads are effective. All of the participants have a vested interest in spinning the impact of ads -- TV stations, ad agencies have obvious conflicts of interest in promoting TV ads. But even the marketing execs at companies do to as they judge their personal "size" by how many millions they spend on big ad campaigns.
I have no idea if TV ads are really seen or not or if they really work or not - they may well create some subliminal warm fuzzy about some heavily promoted product or brand.
I do know that ads can backfire. When a major (potato) chip maker launched a multi-million dollar "taste-test" TV ad campaign against its biggest competitor, the competitor's sales went up because the campaign got people thinking about the chips and they bought more of the competitor's brand. This anecdote suggests that ads are seen, but may not have the intended effect.
I suspect that the real problem is that companies are so desperate to reach and influence buyers that they will try anything.
What would make the technology even cooler is a speech channel segmentation system that directs out-loud speech to one conversation/phone circuit and silent/sub-vocalized speech to another conversation. That way someone could really have two conversations at once without putting people on hold/swapping lines.
To avoid collisions, the receiver could use a buffer and sound accelerator that alternates the streams from the other side of the conversation. The only challenge would be the latency heard on the other end between your replies. Even this could be covered by stretching each spoken reply so that the recipient hears you speak for slower/longer than you actually do.
This is a great idea until you mutter some expletive under your breath while talking to your boss. I can also foresee some embarrassments for those that can't read without moving their lips.
I wasn't doable on high end equipment then, it still isn't doable today.
Thanks for the insight. I'd always suspected that they were using gross approximations for the field force calculations. Its one thing to compute the forces on a point charge in a uniform field. Its another thing to compute all the quantum mechanical effects of interacting electron shells in a real molecule.
Unfortunately, with the advent of fancy graphics workstations came the belief that these methods worked - after all, people could see pictures, on a computer at that. These new methods make things even worse, people will feel forces generated by a fictional simulation and be even more convinced that what they are experiencing really does reflect reality.
You are preaching to the choir on that one. I have first hand experience with deluding oneself through the power of simulations. It is too easy for an incorrect assumption or approximation to corrupt the results. And when the complexity of models or the beauty of the output are taken as indicators of truth, we are all in trouble.
Sometimes I worry if atmospheric sims used to predict global warming are just as bad - not not having worked in atmospheric science I've no evidence to back it up
I've not looked into this in a while, but I know that early simulations failed to predict the current weather situation, leading me to question whether they will be any good with the future. And even if the new generation of simulations can predict recent weather trends, I have to wonder about the potential for excessive post hoc curve-fitting. The Earth is one big sample-size-of-one experiment and that makes doing true science nearly impossible.
In preslashdot days, there was a segment of the VR community working on force-feedback (haptic) interfaces. In one application, a 6-DOF, 3-D mouse let a researcher "hold" a simulated molecule and "feel" how that molecule fit into a receptor site of an enzyme. Computing the forces required high-end equipment at the time, but should be very doable today if one had the specialized interface hardware.
TFA noted that the zinc fingers cue in on two sets of 6 base pairs to find the site that needs correction. Assuming randomness in the base-pair sequences, this 12 base-pair key will bind with approximately 1 out of every 16.8 million (actually 1 out of every 8.4 million due to complementarity of the base pairs). Given that the human genome has about 3.2 billion base pairs, this means that the modifier will match in 381 positions more or less.
Thus, this method will fix the error in one place and introduce an error in 380 other locations. The key needs more than 16 base pairs to be statistically assured of homing in on a unique mutation (depending on the statistics of DNA, it may need more or less).
The entire basis of copyright is that information should not be free and that the creator/owner of information should have the right to charge what they want for copies of their creation. In contrast, the OSS movement argues against this on the basis of moral error (information should be free/not owned), impracticality (technology means that information wants to be free despite owner's wishes), or alternative business model (information is offered for free, but service is not).
I can see that Google and others have gotten tremendous value from the labor of others and GPL would like a cut of the action. But GPL can't have it both ways. Either the information is free (including Google's freedom to earn great profits from it) or information is not free and information has owners who can use copyright/licenses to extract profits from the information.
It's only bad news for the hardware side of telecom. The services side would like nothing better than cheap equipment that boosts adoption and use of telecom. The cheaper the infrastructure, the higher the profits in service and/or the greater the adoption of services if they become less expensive to roll out.
In some ways this becomes a battle between the best interests of the infrastructure makers (a small segment) and the infrastructure users (all the rest of the economy).
The long-term impact is far less clear, however. The effect of cheap Chinese goods will depend on how the U.S. economy uses the less-costly telecom gear. If we only use it to download ring-tones while standing in the unemployment line, then it will be bad. But if businesses find growth-generating new innovations in business processes, services, and products that make use of cheap telecom infrastructure, then it will be a good thing.
When Wallace and Gromit had their Grand Day Out they inadvertently took a few stowaway mice with them (it was Wallace's basement, after all). Every since 1991, the mice have been consuming the cheese at an exponentially growing rate.
No matter how carefully tested, any big OS release is a public beta. Until a large number of people have tried the software with a real-world array of hardware configurations, applications, and patterns of usage, nobody knows the hidden gotchas (such as an incompatibility with some old firewire bridge chip that corrupts FW HDs!).
10.4.1 should fix most of the glaring bugs of 10.4, but a two week, watch-the-forums-for-problems period for 10.4.1 will ensure that bug-fix release is stable and does not add yet another major glitch.
I realize this strategy of waiting until the dust settles is cowardly and that I am shirking my duty to help Apple debug its OS. But I run production systems and downtime/corruption is something I prefer to avoid even if it means not staying on the bleeding edge of cool software.
Initiatives such as this one are part of a move toward an internet immune system -- active systems that watch for and halt undesirable activities. But like the mammalian immune system, it will doubtless be subject to false positives. This raises the potential for auto-immune diseases such as when someone's IP is inappropriately blacklisted.
The core of the problem will be a disconnect between the fast response time required for properly halting fast-spreading malware (e.g., a compact worm that attacks even just 1% of hosts will probably double its infected base every second and saturate the entire net within a minute) and the slower response times of human-mediated due-process procedures. The need to quickly halt infections will lead to a hair-trigger system that may shutdown innocent hosts or kill legitimate activity.
Internet auto-immune diseases are potentially quite serious as that actually create a serious new vulnerability. Criminals could try to trigger an immune response on a target and trigger an immunity-DOS response on the target by using the system against itself.
At 10 GHz and an index of refraction of 1.5, each 2 centimeters of light pipe adds 1 clock cycle to the latency to the system (2 clock cycles to the round-trip). Put a optically-connected device a foot (30 cm) from the processor and you have 15 clock cycles of data (or a 30 clock cycle response time) just due to the fiber, let alone any in the devices at either end of the fiber-optic pipe.
Its always interesting to see what happens when the relative speeds of processor, memory, and interconnects change.
- adjudicating disputes between individuals,
- defining/forestalling unwanted behavior,
- pursuing collective goals that individuals can't (or won't) accomplish.
At that level the internet needs "a" government for handing spam, blacklists, DDoS attacks, malware, phishing, standards creation, infrastructure development, etc. What is less clear is which government.The prerequisite for a good government would seem to be: 1) an understanding of the governed system and 2) a confluence of interests that align with the governed system. These prerequisites are the basis for democracy -- who, within limits, better understands the people and is interested (at least self-interested) in the people's welfare, than the people themselves.
The rationale, heretofore, for rejecting traditional, meatspace governments (e.g., the UN) is that these groups neither understand the internet nor have the internet's interest at heart. Until someone can convince me that these other governments will do a good job, they should remain on the sidelines.
Yet I doubt that meatspace governments will remain on the sidelines because the internet is becoming too important in the real-world. Thus, I wonder how the internet community can guide the transition from self-regulation to traditional government regulation with an eye toward helping governments understand the internet and internalize the best-interests of the internet.
As appealing as a proposed video iPod might be, I doubt it would sell in large numbers. The difference between music and video is that music can be a background activity. One can work, read /., jog, talk with friends, drive a car, etc. whilst music is playing. In contrast, video requires too much visual engagement -- some super-multitaskers might disagree, but even that small group is unlikely to watch video as much as they might listen to music.
Whereas large numbers of people can imagine themselves using an iPod everyday and at many times of day, much fewer people can see themselves using a vPod and for much fewer hours per day.
Several years ago the Tech Museum in San Jose had a revolving 3-D scanner that would scan people's heads. After you got scanned, it created a 3-D model of your head with a full-color texture map (which looks really strange when flattened on a monitor because you discover that your face is only a very small part of your head). You then were given an URL that would work in other exhibits and let you download your face.
I wonder if its still there.... I wonder if I still have that file.....
I see this all the time in errors in newspapers and magazines. Its obvious that someone ran a checker and just clicked "OK" at whatever was suggested. Spelling and grammar checkers have taken the place of actual knowledge of the language.
I suspect that, in the long run, this will change usage so that Microsoft English becomes considered acceptable. But the trend does frighten me, given the recent issue with open standards in Massachusetts. In a dystopian future, open source eye-balls will only be allowed to read, not write, the language.
A refined version of this would be a good tool for the space shuttle for exterior inspection without requiring a space walk. A small robotic webcam could peruse the wings for damage and relay video to the shuttle or ground crew. And at 11 pounds (less if they create a mini-version), the impact on the mass budget is not too bad.
And, as with people, when it gets it wrong it's worse than if it was just a dumb but obedient tool
This is so very true. I suspect that primitive (= worse than useless) incarnations of the intentional stance were built into much maligned "intelligent assistants" such as Microsoft Office's Clippy. Perhaps one of the needed breakthroughs is some type of internal feedback -- if the "smart" software notices that it is getting things wrong too often, it will turn itself off or revert to "dumb" settings. When the software notices that the user's behavior has become more predictable, it might attempt to interact more.
I totally agree that the worst possible trait in a computer is unpredictability. The computer should never grab control from the user or behave in non-obvious ways. Rather, a competent "smart" system would earn the user's trust and the user would choose to delegate more tasks to the automated system. I can imagine a background interface that lets the computer signal when it thinks it knows what is next and whether it got it right. The UI would offer several modes that: 1) let the user take full control when doing hard-to-anticipate activities, 2) run with a mix of user-input and automated task completion, 3) run semi-automated with light oversight, and 4) run near-fully automated for longer batch jobs (with post-task QA).
Again, I fear that this will take far longer than 10 years to perfect and unless its near perfect, it will not be accepted for the reasons you allude to.
One could always use two VOIP providers. Call on one, have the other party call back on a second VOIP, and run two simultaneous half-duplex conversations. VOIP 1 would handle voice from A to B and VOIP 2 would handle B to A. Unless the wire tap is on the ISP (and the feds can merge the two separate streams) they would only get to listen to half the conversation.
To hell with patching. Stop using stupid software.
You and I are in total agreement on that one. Sadly, 96% or so of everyone else disagrees.
There's also the problem of stupid users, especially where emailed malware is concerned. All it takes is one idiot to open the attachment and all their friends get an "Cool game!" email from that infected person -- viruses are good at social engineering.