Sometimes I think that our brains are too elegant for our own good. We tend to underestimate the difficulties in achieving even a percentage of the functionalities of the brain. I'm often reminded of the story about some students at MIT being asked by their professor to solve the problem of vision in a single summer. Decades later, we still haven't figured it all out. Our brain makes all these tasks seem so simple. If you consider the act of talking more deeply, it is absolutely amazing. I mean, think about this: I make some vibrations in the air and you pick it up through your ears. Then "BOOM", a picture or an idea pops up in your head. We marvel about telepaths in sci-fi books but never the difference here is only the medium.
The article cited flying as a kind of a measuring stick. However, that is somewhat misleading. To be able to replace humans on a large scale would require us to solve many different problems and do them all very well. Flying, by comparison, is relatively simple. At the beginner level, you have 4 forces acting on an object and you build on that. In neuroscience/cognitive science, this kind of simplicity does not exist. While I'm not trying to say that flight is easy, it seems more comparable to perhaps one or two aspects of the human brain.
We can and have made robots that replaced humans but they are all very specialized and not nearly as flexible as humans. Future has always been faster and dynamic than the past. Information technology is making time an even more critical element. While we can move humans around and retrain them over a relatively short period of time, the same cannot be said for robots. Essentially, I do not forsee such a large scale change in the future. Perhaps in the distant future, but 2050 is a very optimistic estimate. The disagreement here is in the scale. However, never underestimate the power of the human brain and our own ingenuity.
I can't forsee any pleasant outcome for the rest of us. If MS wins, they aren't going to say, "We've learned our lesson, let's lobby for change in the patent system". DRM will keep going and MS will be more careful in the future, probably trying to file for as many patents as possible in the future. If they lose, I'm sure Sony and Philips will push for their own brand of DRM. I think I would hate to have Sony driving DRM even more than MS.
Essentially, I doubt anyone involved is going to see the light and push for change in our patent system.
Finally, Joe Barr writes "I just filed a complaint against The SCO Group with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It was easy. I used their online complaint form at:
www.sec.gov/complaint/cf942sec9570.htm.
The basis for my complaint is that SCO is using false and unsubstantiated claims of IP rights to UNIX and Linux in order to manipulate its stock price and force consumers to purchase SCO licenses.
Maybe someone else would like to do the same."
The SEC is about to be Slashdotted and suddenly all the CEOs will go on a rampage with their misdeeds!
I wonder if there will ever come a day when we're so short on resources that we start mining all own landfill to stuff to "refine" into raw material again.
How is that fantasy? Because my experience doesn't match yours?
The licenses we had to hunt for were the little certificates manuals or the jewel cases the CDs came with. I don't know what you guys showed MS but that's what we did.
I've already admitted that it was poorly managed. Good for you that you guys had it better managed. Congratulations, feel good about yourself.
Stopping the sale of Office 97 licenses simutaneously with the start of the audit along with the push of Office XP was simply a way of making us buy what we didn't need. We needed Office 97, not XP.
I'm sure the reasons for those decisions weren't singular. Probably a combination of what you've mentioned and current events brought them to these decisions.
I can't think of a more heavy-handed marketing tactic than MS's licenses audit. I worked as an intern one summer, just before MS launched Office XP. They decided that it was a good idea to audit my company. They sent us a letter and ask us for the licenses. Being a bank, we had branches all over the place. Simply finding the licenses was time consuming, thus costly to the company. The interns usually had to drive out to the branches and examine each computer for Office and then hunt for the licenses at the branches.
After it was all over, we came up short. We called MS to asked them how we could buy the missing Office 97 licenses. They tell us that it was no longer on sale and that we must buy the new Office XP licenses. Therefore, we shelled out the money for the new licenses. Now, seeing how we were running Office 97 not too long ago, you can imagine what kind of computer we had to run Office XP on. In other words, we pay for a new product, which we couldn't use, to cover for an old product, which we lost the licenses for.
It was our fault for not keeping a better track of licenses to start with. However, these heavy-handed ways of pushing for a new product doesn't endearing any customer to MS. We briefly considered Linux and Star Office for a while. All of us in the tech department knew that was the way to go. Not only was it free but no future legal hassles. However, we knew that management would have refused and the bank workers like to complain about even the most minor change and blame everything on the tech. department.
Then again, we were also dumb enough to rename "French fries" to "Freedom fries" (Thank God, we have a Senate to put a lid on the stupidity that might otherwise come out of the House). Not to mention how infantile that was, but it was also handing the French a victory on a silver platter. I'm sure before then the misnomer was a thorn in the side. Now, it's one of those things they point and laugh at us about.
I'm not sure how recent your data or information is but it runs contradictory to what I've learn just 2 years ago in my psychology class while I was still a psychology major.
Languages DO NOT INFLUENCE THE WAY YOU THINK! Being a trilingual myself, I can assure you that my way of thinking have changed since becoming more fluent in English than Chinese. My values may have changed from living in the US for so long but my mental representation is still the same -- it's done almost entirely in "pictures". In fact, there have been psychological studies where the participants were asked to rotate the letter "F" in their heads. While one group was shown a picture of it and told to rotate it, another group was given a verbal description of it and told to do the same. The visual group was far more accurate and much faster at answering what the results were in the end. In other words, people don't think in terms of words. If we did, I can't imagine how deaf people can avoid being classified as mentally challenged.
As for the number of words remark, that too is outdated. That idea originally came from a study of the Intuit language which supposedly had more words for snow. However, if you really think about it, we have almost as much. Words such as blizzard and sleet[sp?] are variations of snow. Suppose that we don't have a SINGLE word that can describe an object, it doesn't mean that we cannot convey the same idea. We'll just have to do it with more words. One way or another, all languages are equivalent.
This move by the French government is silly and unnatural. Languages evolve and change. This rings of some silly nationalistic move to prevent Anglicizing French, even though English has a strong French heritage.
I never thought I would cheer for big corporations but "Go Big Blue!".
Come to think of it, Big Blue hasn't really been that evil of all the major computer corporations. They've been dumb at times but I can't think of any instances when they were evil.
What would happen if the case was directed at Linux instead of IBM instead? Would we have the resources and coordination to fight it off?
Wait a minute! They can't sell the Eiffel Tower because I already brought it from this sketchy French dude I met over the Internet. I PayPal'ed him $10,000 for it and plan on making $2 million on it when I scrap it for metal.
Any kid that would someday be an engineer probably played and was obsessed with Lego some point in their early life. In some ways, I can see a correlation between my Lego age and the start of my programming age (as a matter of fact, they overlapped). They both satisfied an innate desire to simply create things, whether there was any purpose or not. Furthermore, some of us never followed the instructions and just wanted the pieces to build and challenge ourselves to make something complex out of something simple. That's the beauty of Legos. Then there was the times of endless tweaking to make the creations stronger, more stable, or more complex... Good times.
Is there even a point to making disc RW and burners that can do RW? From my experience with CDs, RW are slower to burn, more expensive, and not as compatible. With CDRs costing less than what floppies used to sell for, RW capabilities are pointless. Just pop a new disc in instead. I can see DVDs going the same route as it matures. So why bother wasting the money for RW.
I think SMTP is fine as it is. If we add something on top of it, we will end up violating the end-to-end principle. In other words, if we want to add extra functionality, do it at the end points and higher up on the stack. I think Bayesian filters are a step in the right direction. If you truly care about the identity of the sender, use public key to verify it before accepting it. We might as well all adopt cryptography as part of our Internet life as more and more of our life gets move onto the Internet.
Back in elementary school I was taught that the government can't name things after living people. Maybe the rules have changed since then. We all know how up-to-date public education is. Or maybe Reagan is kind of a grey area. One cannot say with honesty that he is really alive.
Anyhow, I really can't see the justification for naming a carrier after Reagan and elevating him to the ranks of Lincoln and Roosevelt. Say what you will about his presidency but I doubt many people would place him on the same level as Lincoln or even Nimitz.
I own the patent to the double helix. It was granted to me in 1999 by the US Patent office among patents for other very obvious ideas. Therefore, everyone alive today owes me licensing fees and must pay a fine of $1 for infringment. Any future use of this device must be specifically approved by me on a case by case basis. Use of the double helix includes but is not limited to DNA/genetics studies, cell replication, and, of course, reproduction, aka sex. In the coming months I will send letters to everyone who are of legal age to warn them not to have sex because it is based on patent infringment. In the meantime, do not procreate without my consent.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes I think that our brains are too elegant for our own good. We tend to underestimate the difficulties in achieving even a percentage of the functionalities of the brain. I'm often reminded of the story about some students at MIT being asked by their professor to solve the problem of vision in a single summer. Decades later, we still haven't figured it all out. Our brain makes all these tasks seem so simple. If you consider the act of talking more deeply, it is absolutely amazing. I mean, think about this: I make some vibrations in the air and you pick it up through your ears. Then "BOOM", a picture or an idea pops up in your head. We marvel about telepaths in sci-fi books but never the difference here is only the medium.
The article cited flying as a kind of a measuring stick. However, that is somewhat misleading. To be able to replace humans on a large scale would require us to solve many different problems and do them all very well. Flying, by comparison, is relatively simple. At the beginner level, you have 4 forces acting on an object and you build on that. In neuroscience/cognitive science, this kind of simplicity does not exist. While I'm not trying to say that flight is easy, it seems more comparable to perhaps one or two aspects of the human brain.
We can and have made robots that replaced humans but they are all very specialized and not nearly as flexible as humans. Future has always been faster and dynamic than the past. Information technology is making time an even more critical element. While we can move humans around and retrain them over a relatively short period of time, the same cannot be said for robots. Essentially, I do not forsee such a large scale change in the future. Perhaps in the distant future, but 2050 is a very optimistic estimate. The disagreement here is in the scale. However, never underestimate the power of the human brain and our own ingenuity.
I can't forsee any pleasant outcome for the rest of us. If MS wins, they aren't going to say, "We've learned our lesson, let's lobby for change in the patent system". DRM will keep going and MS will be more careful in the future, probably trying to file for as many patents as possible in the future. If they lose, I'm sure Sony and Philips will push for their own brand of DRM. I think I would hate to have Sony driving DRM even more than MS.
Essentially, I doubt anyone involved is going to see the light and push for change in our patent system.
I think "Bass Tard Sse" would do just fine. ;-)
How is PCB made of and how toxic is it?
I wonder if there will ever come a day when we're so short on resources that we start mining all own landfill to stuff to "refine" into raw material again.
At the time this seem true, which was the summer of 2000 I believe.
How is that fantasy? Because my experience doesn't match yours? The licenses we had to hunt for were the little certificates manuals or the jewel cases the CDs came with. I don't know what you guys showed MS but that's what we did. I've already admitted that it was poorly managed. Good for you that you guys had it better managed. Congratulations, feel good about yourself. Stopping the sale of Office 97 licenses simutaneously with the start of the audit along with the push of Office XP was simply a way of making us buy what we didn't need. We needed Office 97, not XP.
I'm sure the reasons for those decisions weren't singular. Probably a combination of what you've mentioned and current events brought them to these decisions.
I can't think of a more heavy-handed marketing tactic than MS's licenses audit. I worked as an intern one summer, just before MS launched Office XP. They decided that it was a good idea to audit my company. They sent us a letter and ask us for the licenses. Being a bank, we had branches all over the place. Simply finding the licenses was time consuming, thus costly to the company. The interns usually had to drive out to the branches and examine each computer for Office and then hunt for the licenses at the branches. After it was all over, we came up short. We called MS to asked them how we could buy the missing Office 97 licenses. They tell us that it was no longer on sale and that we must buy the new Office XP licenses. Therefore, we shelled out the money for the new licenses. Now, seeing how we were running Office 97 not too long ago, you can imagine what kind of computer we had to run Office XP on. In other words, we pay for a new product, which we couldn't use, to cover for an old product, which we lost the licenses for. It was our fault for not keeping a better track of licenses to start with. However, these heavy-handed ways of pushing for a new product doesn't endearing any customer to MS. We briefly considered Linux and Star Office for a while. All of us in the tech department knew that was the way to go. Not only was it free but no future legal hassles. However, we knew that management would have refused and the bank workers like to complain about even the most minor change and blame everything on the tech. department.
Then again, we were also dumb enough to rename "French fries" to "Freedom fries" (Thank God, we have a Senate to put a lid on the stupidity that might otherwise come out of the House). Not to mention how infantile that was, but it was also handing the French a victory on a silver platter. I'm sure before then the misnomer was a thorn in the side. Now, it's one of those things they point and laugh at us about.
I meant to say, "my way of thinking have NOT changed"
I'm not sure how recent your data or information is but it runs contradictory to what I've learn just 2 years ago in my psychology class while I was still a psychology major. Languages DO NOT INFLUENCE THE WAY YOU THINK! Being a trilingual myself, I can assure you that my way of thinking have changed since becoming more fluent in English than Chinese. My values may have changed from living in the US for so long but my mental representation is still the same -- it's done almost entirely in "pictures". In fact, there have been psychological studies where the participants were asked to rotate the letter "F" in their heads. While one group was shown a picture of it and told to rotate it, another group was given a verbal description of it and told to do the same. The visual group was far more accurate and much faster at answering what the results were in the end. In other words, people don't think in terms of words. If we did, I can't imagine how deaf people can avoid being classified as mentally challenged. As for the number of words remark, that too is outdated. That idea originally came from a study of the Intuit language which supposedly had more words for snow. However, if you really think about it, we have almost as much. Words such as blizzard and sleet[sp?] are variations of snow. Suppose that we don't have a SINGLE word that can describe an object, it doesn't mean that we cannot convey the same idea. We'll just have to do it with more words. One way or another, all languages are equivalent. This move by the French government is silly and unnatural. Languages evolve and change. This rings of some silly nationalistic move to prevent Anglicizing French, even though English has a strong French heritage.
I never thought I would cheer for big corporations but "Go Big Blue!". Come to think of it, Big Blue hasn't really been that evil of all the major computer corporations. They've been dumb at times but I can't think of any instances when they were evil. What would happen if the case was directed at Linux instead of IBM instead? Would we have the resources and coordination to fight it off?
Wait a minute! They can't sell the Eiffel Tower because I already brought it from this sketchy French dude I met over the Internet. I PayPal'ed him $10,000 for it and plan on making $2 million on it when I scrap it for metal.
Any kid that would someday be an engineer probably played and was obsessed with Lego some point in their early life. In some ways, I can see a correlation between my Lego age and the start of my programming age (as a matter of fact, they overlapped). They both satisfied an innate desire to simply create things, whether there was any purpose or not. Furthermore, some of us never followed the instructions and just wanted the pieces to build and challenge ourselves to make something complex out of something simple. That's the beauty of Legos. Then there was the times of endless tweaking to make the creations stronger, more stable, or more complex... Good times.
Is there even a point to making disc RW and burners that can do RW? From my experience with CDs, RW are slower to burn, more expensive, and not as compatible. With CDRs costing less than what floppies used to sell for, RW capabilities are pointless. Just pop a new disc in instead. I can see DVDs going the same route as it matures. So why bother wasting the money for RW.
I think SMTP is fine as it is. If we add something on top of it, we will end up violating the end-to-end principle. In other words, if we want to add extra functionality, do it at the end points and higher up on the stack. I think Bayesian filters are a step in the right direction. If you truly care about the identity of the sender, use public key to verify it before accepting it. We might as well all adopt cryptography as part of our Internet life as more and more of our life gets move onto the Internet.
There is no spam here, absolutely none at all. God will roast the spammers' stomach in hell.
Back in elementary school I was taught that the government can't name things after living people. Maybe the rules have changed since then. We all know how up-to-date public education is. Or maybe Reagan is kind of a grey area. One cannot say with honesty that he is really alive. Anyhow, I really can't see the justification for naming a carrier after Reagan and elevating him to the ranks of Lincoln and Roosevelt. Say what you will about his presidency but I doubt many people would place him on the same level as Lincoln or even Nimitz.
You're SO wrong.
I own the patent to the double helix. It was granted to me in 1999 by the US Patent office among patents for other very obvious ideas. Therefore, everyone alive today owes me licensing fees and must pay a fine of $1 for infringment. Any future use of this device must be specifically approved by me on a case by case basis. Use of the double helix includes but is not limited to DNA/genetics studies, cell replication, and, of course, reproduction, aka sex. In the coming months I will send letters to everyone who are of legal age to warn them not to have sex because it is based on patent infringment. In the meantime, do not procreate without my consent.