I expect mobile TV will take off once either 1) the image can be projected directly onto your retina, doing away with a screen altogether, or 2) you get non-bulky glasses with built-in screens (ala Sony Glasstron) that can be varied from 0% to 100% transparency.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems that it's not really worth it.
Even if this is the case and even if the poor people who might love the chance to do this don't actually have the computer equipment required, consider this: People have been spending all their spare time - and lots of non-spare time - for years on end, missing sleep, losing significant others, dropping out of contact with friends and family, dying from exhaustion even, on playing online games ever since the first MUD went on the air. And what is it that draws people to these games? They're all really only about watching numbers grow - even after someone has fully mastered a MUD, I've seen them spend months on end going through the exact same routines, killing the same monsters in the same areas over and over again, just to increase their XP and level. With no real benefit other than, perhaps bragging rights.
Mturk does all this, but with the additional benefit that you can actually cash in afterwards. It has XP (performance stats, or "Qualifications"), it has a varied set of missions (or probably will have once this starts taking off), it gives you different missions as you advance in "level", and I am sure it will be possible for you to display your achievements to other playe^H^H^H^H^HProviders for the bragging rights.
Just an advanced warning: you will NOT be able to board flights using a passport that has no RFID response and thus has been tampered with. You are assuming that there will actually be readers installed at all aircraft terminals. Is there a reason to believe that this is actually going to happen any time in the next 10-20 years?
Coca Cola company *never* got a patent on cola; in fact their recipe is a closely guarded company secret. Why is that?
That is probably because a well-kept secret lasts way way longer than a patent ever will. If they took out a patent, their competitors could starting churning out exact Coca-Cola replicas 20 years later.
It would be better for society at large if Coca-Cola did patent their recipe because if they did, then by now I could be making the stuff in my own kitchen if I were so inclined. Since they kept it a secret, however, I need to go to the store and buy it at highly inflated prices in stead.
I can assure you that if the A. Hole law is passed in the US, they will waste no time in strongarming it through international treaties. Take a quick peek at the history of copyright legislation for a demonstration of the technique.
Your magnet examples demonstrates a deeply flawed understanding of evolution. This may be the basis of your current delusion. A better experiment would be more like this: Take one million boxes with magnets inside them. Shake them. Inspect them all and discard any that show no progress whatsoever into becoming house-shaped. Of the remaining, duplicate them so that you again have one million boxes. In each of these boxes, make some small, random modification to the layout of the magnets. Inspect again, remove those that made the least progress towards a house shape, etc. Repeat this a million times. Chances are that eventually, the box interiors would evolve towards looking like houses.
There is nothing in science to preclude local decreases in entropy so long as they are accompanied by corresponding increases elsewhere. This is what DNA and life is - we continually burn enormous amounts of energy in order to maintain our order, and this burning consists of increasing the entropy of the world. This can go on for quite some time, so long as there are reasonably high-order sources of energy left for us to entrope (yeah, I know, verbing weirds language). Apparantly, the universe must somehow have started with very low entropy (which is reasonable if all energy was originally organised into one single point) and we are now in the process of burning it all off until, eventually, all energy will be equally distributed across all space. The laws of entropy specifically do NOT say that "there can be no order in the universe" nor do they say "there must be little order in the universe". Order is perfectly ok, even lots and lots of it is ok. It is the _direction of change_ in universal order that is covered.
There will always be parts of science that are unknown, and scientists who are probing those far edges of our knowledge. They will come up with hypotheses and even theories in an attempt to explain these phenomena, and they will invent names for them. Dark Matter is widely accepted as a part of science that is young, poorly understood, and wide open for more research. Some day, we will figure out what it really is, what properties it really has, and how this affects all of our other theories about nature. Until then, we are quite content to live with some uncertainty on the matter. (What we will not do, incidentally, is sit down and worship Dark Matter as some sort of divine revelation, write it in stone, encase it in titanium and declare that its sanctity must never be violated.) Dark Matter is only a problem if you have some sort of compulsive need to feel that you always have an answer for everything. It seems to me that ID is a rather feeble attempt at regaining confidence in oneself after realising that scientific theories don't yet quite cover 100.00% of what is happening to life over time. After all, with ID, one can eventually convince oneself that one "understands" how life has come to be and I am sure such a delusion can be very comforting . . .
All species are "half-way mutated". Sample a species at any given point in time, and you're looking at a species that is midway between some previous version and some future version. Modern humans are "half-way mutated". In the past, we have some sort of ape creature, and in the future, we have something else that we don't yet know what is. Find a person today that has a gene that protects him from HIV (which I understand has been reported), and you may be looking at a representative of Future Man: two generations down the line, all humans may have that gene.
You are assuming that all ads are aimed at making you directly buy something. This isn't necessarily the case - some ads might be there for spreading a message, or rallying people, or whatever. And much of the point with having very clever AI behind this is to recognize, e.g., that you never buy anything from ads and so show you different ads in stead. If their system is sufficiently clever and they have gathered enough information about you, then this might be successful. If so, then you'd get ads that are relevant to you. Perhaps you'd get an ad for an online comics site, or news site. Or one for the upcoming Toyota owners' convention near you (even if your search didn't specify Toyota), etc. Done right, the ad AI could become something like your own personal assistant who notifies you whenever something you might be interested in is happening.
But then, the same objections can be raised against 90% of the actual search hits you'd be getting from such a set of keywords. If your interest was more narrow, then you'd run a more specific search. Your hits, and your targeted ads, would likely grow all the more relevant.
But that is beside the point. The original question was why one would ever want to click on an ad. It is trivial to come up with an example of someone who would quite happy to do so, and my own example can, also trivially, be shown to do so in the face of your objection simply by changing "GM" in my text to "Ford" or "Toyota", or "4wd" to "ATV".
The story is about targeted advertising, and if you're searching on, say, "rugged 4wd" and you get ads from GM, then why would you not want to see if they have something that interests you?
In a way, getting targeted ads when you search on something can, at times, be more useful than the regular search hits. The sites they point at are more likely than not to have professional products and teams behind them, as well as stuff you can actually order there and then.
Disclaimer: I ignore ads, have disabled javascript, cookies and flash, and always force my own style sheet on everything.
Blah blah. RFID has it's place, but it's a terrible idea in this context. Does anyone want a passport than can be read without your knowledge, by a random stranger?
Or by a random wayside bomb. The time is past when only the anti-terrorists could do surgical strikes . . .
40% of scientists believe in theistic evolution? You mean, there are people with higher degrees in education that believe in a supernatural god? How can that be true when everything I have read indicates that anyone who does is an uneducated bigot with no interest in science?
You are joking, right? But for the record, ever since St Thomas of Aquinas presented his works in the 13th century, Christianity and science have gone hand in hand. He explained exactly how, why and to what extent science might overrule religious dogma - leaving only a few central pillars of the Christian faith as untouchable by science. By and large, these pillars are of a nature that doesn't conflict with science anyway, so there has been little trouble in this regard.
Any conflict that might exist between Christianity and science isn't philosophical or religious in nature - it's political. And bad politics can screw up anything.
I don't think such patents should be allowed. It's like a company owning a piece of me -- and I wasn't even paid for it!
I don't know . . . with just a little legislation, this can turn out alright. We need to start making patent holders responsible for the correct functioning of their inventions. Then we can sue them for all of our genetic defects:-)
. . . DECNET . . . There's a reason people stopped doing that. It is ineffecient and you get interfacing problems when the two different networks use slightly different protocol elements with slightly different meanings. While the US _could_ hang on to what it had, it would be an unsatisfactory solution and commercial pressure within the US would soon see such a solution obsolete in favour of a wholesale adoption of the world-wide network. . . . gives them absolutely no right to now demand the US internationalize . . . What they're saying is that if the US doesn't internationalize, then the rest of the world will make sure that the internet becomes an exclusively national US enterprise. It would no longer be a world-wide internet so much as it would be a US intranet. Such a network would soon pale in importance compared to a new world-wide network sponsored by non-US nations. If this is what the US wants, then I am sure it can come to be, but there exists a more ideal solution for both parties, and that's what these talks are all about.
The wealthiest people in the country run the corporations, who run everything.
In western democracies, to the extent this happens, it's because the people is letting it happen. The system is not yet so corrupted that a massive effort of the people couldn't turn things around. And if the people is happy to let the corps do the ruling for now, then that's the people's choice to make.
I truly believe that a welfare-bound family who chooses to pump out 8 or 10 babies rather than having a reasonable amount of children and preserving their ability to to support their family is of less value to society than the latter.
In a purely utilitarian view on things, it is quite clear that some people are more worth than others, simply because they produce or contribute more. Such a view, however, inevitably leads to conclusions along the lines of tyranny and so have been politically incorrect for a number of decades now:-)
After all, if, using generally accepted moral standards, the state concludes that a given person is worthless (or, even, a net cost), then this person should be eliminated for the greater good. Only by applying a non-utilitarian moral standard can this be avoided.
The U.S. shouldn't not to justify anything. It is U.S. innovation.
What makes the internet so useful isn't the innovation that lies behind it. Innovation is useless if noone uses it. What makes the internet so useful is that everyone is using it. If people stopped using it, it would become useless regardless of what innovation was behind it and who did the innovating.
A number of nations now seem to be saying that they are no longer interested in using an internet that is US dominated. If they do, indeed, stop using it, then the value of the internet will drop so low it will be useless to the US. The US may certainly hang on to it, but it is not clear why they would want to. They would in stead want to get themselves onto the "UN-net" bandwagon so that amazon and google can start making money again.
If the US is interested in stopping this from happening, then what they need is _exactly_ a good justification for remaining in charge of things. Arguments along the lines of "it's ours and we're keeping it" will only cause others to bail out and the US internet to become worthless.
Unless, of course, this is all just empty posturing from various non-US nations. That remains to be seen.
Slashdot Mirror
"Annus" means "year" and "dominus" means "master" or "lord". "Anno domini" means "in the year of our lord".
I expect mobile TV will take off once either 1) the image can be projected directly onto your retina, doing away with a screen altogether, or 2) you get non-bulky glasses with built-in screens (ala Sony Glasstron) that can be varied from 0% to 100% transparency.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems that it's not really worth it.
:-)
Even if this is the case and even if the poor people who might love the chance to do this don't actually have the computer equipment required, consider this: People have been spending all their spare time - and lots of non-spare time - for years on end, missing sleep, losing significant others, dropping out of contact with friends and family, dying from exhaustion even, on playing online games ever since the first MUD went on the air. And what is it that draws people to these games? They're all really only about watching numbers grow - even after someone has fully mastered a MUD, I've seen them spend months on end going through the exact same routines, killing the same monsters in the same areas over and over again, just to increase their XP and level. With no real benefit other than, perhaps bragging rights.
Mturk does all this, but with the additional benefit that you can actually cash in afterwards. It has XP (performance stats, or "Qualifications"), it has a varied set of missions (or probably will have once this starts taking off), it gives you different missions as you advance in "level", and I am sure it will be possible for you to display your achievements to other playe^H^H^H^H^HProviders for the bragging rights.
The only question is: will it have PKing?
Just an advanced warning: you will NOT be able to board flights using a passport that has no RFID response and thus has been tampered with.
You are assuming that there will actually be readers installed at all aircraft terminals. Is there a reason to believe that this is actually going to happen any time in the next 10-20 years?
Coca Cola company *never* got a patent on cola; in fact their recipe is a closely guarded company secret. Why is that?
That is probably because a well-kept secret lasts way way longer than a patent ever will. If they took out a patent, their competitors could starting churning out exact Coca-Cola replicas 20 years later.
It would be better for society at large if Coca-Cola did patent their recipe because if they did, then by now I could be making the stuff in my own kitchen if I were so inclined. Since they kept it a secret, however, I need to go to the store and buy it at highly inflated prices in stead.
I take it you don't remember taking Econ 101, then?
It is rather the car dealer who hasn't studied game theory (or missed the chapter on the shadow of the future).
I can assure you that if the A. Hole law is passed in the US, they will waste no time in strongarming it through international treaties. Take a quick peek at the history of copyright legislation for a demonstration of the technique.
Your magnet examples demonstrates a deeply flawed understanding of evolution. This may be the basis of your current delusion.
A better experiment would be more like this: Take one million boxes with magnets inside them. Shake them. Inspect them all and discard any that show no progress whatsoever into becoming house-shaped. Of the remaining, duplicate them so that you again have one million boxes. In each of these boxes, make some small, random modification to the layout of the magnets. Inspect again, remove those that made the least progress towards a house shape, etc. Repeat this a million times. Chances are that eventually, the box interiors would evolve towards looking like houses.
Actually, the probability of this having happened is 100%
There is nothing in science to preclude local decreases in entropy so long as they are accompanied by corresponding increases elsewhere. This is what DNA and life is - we continually burn enormous amounts of energy in order to maintain our order, and this burning consists of increasing the entropy of the world. This can go on for quite some time, so long as there are reasonably high-order sources of energy left for us to entrope (yeah, I know, verbing weirds language).
Apparantly, the universe must somehow have started with very low entropy (which is reasonable if all energy was originally organised into one single point) and we are now in the process of burning it all off until, eventually, all energy will be equally distributed across all space.
The laws of entropy specifically do NOT say that "there can be no order in the universe" nor do they say "there must be little order in the universe". Order is perfectly ok, even lots and lots of it is ok. It is the _direction of change_ in universal order that is covered.
Well, you know, they have to start _somewhere_ . . .
There will always be parts of science that are unknown, and scientists who are probing those far edges of our knowledge. They will come up with hypotheses and even theories in an attempt to explain these phenomena, and they will invent names for them. Dark Matter is widely accepted as a part of science that is young, poorly understood, and wide open for more research.
Some day, we will figure out what it really is, what properties it really has, and how this affects all of our other theories about nature. Until then, we are quite content to live with some uncertainty on the matter.
(What we will not do, incidentally, is sit down and worship Dark Matter as some sort of divine revelation, write it in stone, encase it in titanium and declare that its sanctity must never be violated.)
Dark Matter is only a problem if you have some sort of compulsive need to feel that you always have an answer for everything. It seems to me that ID is a rather feeble attempt at regaining confidence in oneself after realising that scientific theories don't yet quite cover 100.00% of what is happening to life over time. After all, with ID, one can eventually convince oneself that one "understands" how life has come to be and I am sure such a delusion can be very comforting . . .
All species are "half-way mutated". Sample a species at any given point in time, and you're looking at a species that is midway between some previous version and some future version. Modern humans are "half-way mutated". In the past, we have some sort of ape creature, and in the future, we have something else that we don't yet know what is.
Find a person today that has a gene that protects him from HIV (which I understand has been reported), and you may be looking at a representative of Future Man: two generations down the line, all humans may have that gene.
You are assuming that all ads are aimed at making you directly buy something. This isn't necessarily the case - some ads might be there for spreading a message, or rallying people, or whatever.
And much of the point with having very clever AI behind this is to recognize, e.g., that you never buy anything from ads and so show you different ads in stead. If their system is sufficiently clever and they have gathered enough information about you, then this might be successful. If so, then you'd get ads that are relevant to you. Perhaps you'd get an ad for an online comics site, or news site. Or one for the upcoming Toyota owners' convention near you (even if your search didn't specify Toyota), etc.
Done right, the ad AI could become something like your own personal assistant who notifies you whenever something you might be interested in is happening.
But then, the same objections can be raised against 90% of the actual search hits you'd be getting from such a set of keywords. If your interest was more narrow, then you'd run a more specific search. Your hits, and your targeted ads, would likely grow all the more relevant.
But that is beside the point. The original question was why one would ever want to click on an ad. It is trivial to come up with an example of someone who would quite happy to do so, and my own example can, also trivially, be shown to do so in the face of your objection simply by changing "GM" in my text to "Ford" or "Toyota", or "4wd" to "ATV".
I always considered the basic premise of the old C64 game "Impossible Mission" to be pretty lame. I'm not so sure any more . . . :-)
Is the world really THAT gullible?
The story is about targeted advertising, and if you're searching on, say, "rugged 4wd" and you get ads from GM, then why would you not want to see if they have something that interests you?
In a way, getting targeted ads when you search on something can, at times, be more useful than the regular search hits. The sites they point at are more likely than not to have professional products and teams behind them, as well as stuff you can actually order there and then.
Disclaimer: I ignore ads, have disabled javascript, cookies and flash, and always force my own style sheet on everything.
Blah blah. RFID has it's place, but it's a terrible idea in this context. Does anyone want a passport than can be read without your knowledge, by a random stranger?
Or by a random wayside bomb. The time is past when only the anti-terrorists could do surgical strikes . . .
There needs to be more discussion of the possibility that natural selection is not the only driving factor in evolution.
Not only is it a possibility, it is a long-known fact. To mention only one additional driving factor of evolution: random mutation.
40% of scientists believe in theistic evolution? You mean, there are people with higher degrees in education that believe in a supernatural god? How can that be true when everything I have read indicates that anyone who does is an uneducated bigot with no interest in science?
You are joking, right? But for the record, ever since St Thomas of Aquinas presented his works in the 13th century, Christianity and science have gone hand in hand. He explained exactly how, why and to what extent science might overrule religious dogma - leaving only a few central pillars of the Christian faith as untouchable by science. By and large, these pillars are of a nature that doesn't conflict with science anyway, so there has been little trouble in this regard.
Any conflict that might exist between Christianity and science isn't philosophical or religious in nature - it's political. And bad politics can screw up anything.
I don't think such patents should be allowed. It's like a company owning a piece of me -- and I wasn't even paid for it!
:-)
I don't know . . . with just a little legislation, this can turn out alright. We need to start making patent holders responsible for the correct functioning of their inventions. Then we can sue them for all of our genetic defects
To seek power is to corrupt. To seek office is to corrupt.
Then vote for someone who does not seek to become a politician.
. . . DECNET . . .
There's a reason people stopped doing that. It is ineffecient and you get interfacing problems when the two different networks use slightly different protocol elements with slightly different meanings. While the US _could_ hang on to what it had, it would be an unsatisfactory solution and commercial pressure within the US would soon see such a solution obsolete in favour of a wholesale adoption of the world-wide network.
. . . gives them absolutely no right to now demand the US internationalize . . .
What they're saying is that if the US doesn't internationalize, then the rest of the world will make sure that the internet becomes an exclusively national US enterprise. It would no longer be a world-wide internet so much as it would be a US intranet. Such a network would soon pale in importance compared to a new world-wide network sponsored by non-US nations. If this is what the US wants, then I am sure it can come to be, but there exists a more ideal solution for both parties, and that's what these talks are all about.
The wealthiest people in the country run the corporations, who run everything.
:-)
In western democracies, to the extent this happens, it's because the people is letting it happen. The system is not yet so corrupted that a massive effort of the people couldn't turn things around. And if the people is happy to let the corps do the ruling for now, then that's the people's choice to make.
I truly believe that a welfare-bound family who chooses to pump out 8 or 10 babies rather than having a reasonable amount of children and preserving their ability to to support their family is of less value to society than the latter.
In a purely utilitarian view on things, it is quite clear that some people are more worth than others, simply because they produce or contribute more. Such a view, however, inevitably leads to conclusions along the lines of tyranny and so have been politically incorrect for a number of decades now
After all, if, using generally accepted moral standards, the state concludes that a given person is worthless (or, even, a net cost), then this person should be eliminated for the greater good. Only by applying a non-utilitarian moral standard can this be avoided.
The U.S. shouldn't not to justify anything. It is U.S. innovation.
What makes the internet so useful isn't the innovation that lies behind it. Innovation is useless if noone uses it. What makes the internet so useful is that everyone is using it. If people stopped using it, it would become useless regardless of what innovation was behind it and who did the innovating.
A number of nations now seem to be saying that they are no longer interested in using an internet that is US dominated. If they do, indeed, stop using it, then the value of the internet will drop so low it will be useless to the US. The US may certainly hang on to it, but it is not clear why they would want to. They would in stead want to get themselves onto the "UN-net" bandwagon so that amazon and google can start making money again.
If the US is interested in stopping this from happening, then what they need is _exactly_ a good justification for remaining in charge of things. Arguments along the lines of "it's ours and we're keeping it" will only cause others to bail out and the US internet to become worthless.
Unless, of course, this is all just empty posturing from various non-US nations. That remains to be seen.