Hrm -- I thought the "single-topic" criterion was specific to the limited version of the TT that this project is using. Most reasonably long human conversations do cover several different topics.
The Turing Test doesn't test intelligence per se, but what we *mean* by intelligence -- lateral thinking, creativity, ability to understand conceptual metaphor, etc. I mean, beavers are intelligent; they're just not intelligent like us, and that's what it's really about.
Nope; you've mistaken the Turing Test with intelligence.
I was talking about how the Turing Test is impossible to pass, in effect because it's phrased in a way that measures humanity, not intelligence, and AIs (by dint of their lack of real human experience) are necessarily not human. Or at least, impossible to pass without some very convincing lying through your teeth.
I think you underestimate the capabilities of a good liar. Ahh, but now we're going to the point of assuming that the AI can process information from a number of different (and often mutually contradictory) sources about human experience, and then synthesize a human character that can tell coherent/consistent lies about them. Frankly, that sounds way beyond a Turing Test in impressiveness.
In my opinion it is absolutely necessary that an AI develop complex moral reasoning. Hopefully better than much of human history indicates the average human has.
See, all that stuff in human history is less evidence that we haven't developed complex moral reasoning, and more that we'll gleefully ignore it if the payoff is big enough. History is full of (and probably mostly made by) people knowingly doing the wrong thing....of course, it's probably also true that any sufficiently complex moral reasoning will provide some justification for all of the available options.
Most four-year-olds wouldn't pass a Turing Test.;)
Seriously, though, the point holds -- they'll be able to describe, in some novel way, answers to questions which are based directly on experience. This can be aped by a computer, but can't be generated authentically, because the AI doesn't actually have experiences.
That'll change once we have AIs that are capable of perceiving things and having experiences. But um... I'm thinking that's a looooong way off.
Look, the Turing Test is impossible to pass if the human part of the conversation is sufficiently motivated. Why? Because we don't judge others' humanity based on their reasoning abilities, we judge it based on common shared human experiences.
Show me an AI that passes the Turing Test. I'll ask it what coffee tastes like, or what sex feels like, or what it felt when its mother died. Sure, somebody could program answers for those questions into it, but then it isn't an AI -- it's just a canned response simulating a human, incapable of having new experiences, incapable of perceiving the human world with human senses, and thus transparently lacking in humanity. At that point it's nothing but a computer puppet, with a programmer somewhere pulling the strings.
Once that "other guy" is found though, word will spread rapidly and the market will shift to support him. His job is maintained provided that he supplies what the public wants, and as long as they want the truth, he will want to give it to them.
*And* provided he can afford to supply it to them. Someone attempting to start a truly independent paper providing "the truth" under those circumstances would need to charge an exorbitant amount per issue (or run an all-volunteer business -- not a model that tends to produce good results, judging from the examples of it I've seen in indy papers.) You'll have to win readership despite MedCorp's consistent smearing of your efforts as irrational rantings. Even then it would all last only until the place or its staff got bought out by MedCorp (unless you assume that the paper is being run by a fanatic who'll never sell, which doesn't bode well for its objectivity).
But look, that's just a rough sketch. The fact of the matter is, independent papers *are being* driven out of business -- indeed, mostly *have been* -- primarily through economic means. The marketplace has already rejected the better mousetrap (and we can mainly blame the readership for that).
How can a company "dick with liberties" if they have no political power. They cannot physically hold you at gunpoint, because you could call the police - the enforcers maintaining your rights. The enforcers maintaining your rights, very narrowly defined (and surely even a Libertarian state could suffer from police corruption?). Certain demands cannot be affordably met if the power imbalance between suppliers is too great, but never mind that. Instead, consider researching the polluting effects of mining in Nevada and what they've done to the health and economic values of communities around them. But there's nothing to be done unless you establish legal limits on what another private actor can do with his own property.
But you could say, sure, health isn't a protected liberty; or perhaps you'll countenance laws governing the negative environmental impacts of a business on its community (though that's already a rare stance from a Libertarian perspective; smacks of gov't regulation and all). Suppose, then, that you want to put up a website talking about how the CEO of Warnercast (a fictitous monopolist ISP) is having an extramarital affair. Suddenly you can't find a hosting company, because nobody wants their hosting business torpedoed when their content gets blackballed. Okay, you set up your own webserver. Suddenly your internet access is cut off. Well that's fine, you can just... what? Buy and install your own entire Internet? You'll say "some competing internet provider will emerge to provide the services for me." Using what resources? Warnercast can buy out any attempts to get it started, by driving up the price of the land on which you'd lay your cable, say, or paying to drown out your broadband frequency, or any other number of methods. Because of the tremendous imbalance in economic power, it is very difficult -- probably impossible -- to provide an affordable alternative service, so even if the demand is there at a reasonable price, the monopolist can ensure that the price would have to be unreasonable. In short, while your right of free speech still exists, you can be prevented from exercising that right in any kind of affordable fashion.
You would need a large-scale cooperative enterprise with central organization, willing to make economic sacrifices for the common good, in order to put together enough economic power to act as a counterweight to this. But that's just another way of saying you'd need a government... so if regulation did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.
You know, I forgot about the WSJ. They're more of a national-financial paper though... but yeah, we have that too. Maybe you're thinking the Financial Times? I think they're NYC-based, though to be honest I've never read a copy.
Hrm... actually we have the Times (mouthpiece of the bourgeoisie -- have you/read/ the articles in their lifestyle section? -- but generally okay), the NY Post and Daily News (tabloid rags = good sports coverage and funny headlines), the Village Voice (your local conglomerate-owned "Independent"), a couple free dailies that basically reprint the AP feed, and some local micropapers dedicated to highly specific segments (e.g. the Amsterdam News for Black issues). If we're considered good, the rest of you guys must be/really/ screwed.
The FCC does what it does because its members are influenced by friends and financiers. Sorry, I think you missed my point -- there's no reason that we should encourage the FCC to go out of its way to make media consolidation a reality. As to whether a hundred flowers would bloom in the absence of "natural monopoly" rulings, I respect the logic of your position, but I think it's naive about the power of an entrenched going concern which owns the wires.
It is only because politics (laws, regulations) are tied to money (donations from companies) are they able to restrict my access. If the local newspaper refuses to print news from outside the city, I will drop them and subscribe to another paper offering more news. I will tell my friends and neighbors to do the same, and they will willingly choose to either keep or drop their subscription as well.
No, really it's just the money. If they own every local newspaper and all the ones outside the city (or their equivalents do), then you're hosed; your dollar vote goes to Kodos or to Kang. The "I'll choose the other guy" response is how it's supposed to work, idealistically; unfortunately the reality is that finding your trustworthy independent news source is very difficult, and finding it in a conventional print or televised medium is approaching impossible.*
And in a world without Net Neutrality, when Comcast owns your cable access, your internet access, your local newspaper, and half the national newspapers, you will surf the websites Comcast has a stake in. Not because they desire to be totalitarian overlords (though I guess it's a perk), but because they desire to make a buck off everything that you do.
* This is the problem with libertarianism generally. Yes, private enterprise and competition are supposed to ensure these things don't happen; but initial imbalances enable firms to snowball their existing success, to the point that they approach and surpass governments in their power to dick with individual liberties. It's a nice idea in theory, but in practice it just can't hold up with the cheaters.
A newspaper is only as strong as its readership base.
Remind me again where the problem is?
It's in the readership base -- when was the last time the average American actually looked at (say) a foreign newspaper? Let alone a foreign-language one.
That said, there's no reason for the FCC to go out of their way to enable Information Domination. And do you seriously think that any of these companies would be happy to leave the Internet as an unsullied source of pure truth from outside their grip? No, they'll try to monetize that, and (as collateral damage) limit citizens' access to external sources of information. Not out of a Vast Conspiracy necessarily, but when your business model is predicated on grabbing as many eyeballs as possible, you don't want them looking at other networks, ja?
this topic is about residents of Sderot taking completely non-violent, legal action
Without getting into any kind of debate over whether the action is justified, you're whitewashing a bit to describe this as a "completely non-violent... action." I mean, I can think of little use for a GIANT LASER CANNON other than to enable some rather violent future actions.
(Yes, deterrence, blah blah blah. Possible incursions by the IDF don't seem to have had a deterrent effect, so I'm not automatically convinced that James Bond weaponry will.)
1. The interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects. 2. Cooperative interaction among groups, especially among the acquired subsidiaries or merged parts of a corporation, that creates an enhanced combined effect.
As I'm using it here, "serendipity" would probably be a better word, or "happy coincidence" -- instead of two forces working together to produce more than the sum of their parts, it's one force that turns out to be effective in two surprisingly separate areas.
The the current iteration is rough and inaccurate, and the user must undergo training to the device, but I'd hope that the promise of provision and the simplicity of design in form and function will make this a real winner with further development. Reverse it: once the device can be trained to the user, we have a deployable thought-control system that uses our favorite external neural pathway, speech.
No matter what your brain is connected to, it takes it some time to figure out how to work it. That's why little kids are so clumsy -- they're developing neural pathways and fine nerve networks, sure, but they also have to learn what the brain has to do to produce desired body response.
Unlikely that you'll be able to eliminate the training component, but really it'll probably be something like learning to ride a bicycle. Or learning to grasp apples with your bionic third arm, whichever comparison seems more apt to you:)
Yawn. Very little about MS-Linux collaboration here (except that Linux is willing but MS is weak); bad article summaries are no surprise.
But since that's what the summary says, that's what everybody will be talking about, so:
I'd love to see MS bury the hatchet as much as anybody. But where's the Windows Genuine Advantage in that?
MS is obviously not going to give away filesystem specs or the other interoperability roadblocks that collectively create the best argument to businesses for continuing to pay the Windows tax. So the most collaboration we might see is in getting MS Office to run on Linux. In other words, if Redmond bit at all, it'd be at the chance to stomp on OpenOffice to prevent future competition in its core business desktop market.
***
Anyway, besides that, the article was surprisingly content-free. Yes, there are interesting synergies between extending battery life on mobile devices vs. saving energy in the data center. We get that, no need to repeat.
The interviewee promotes this thesis: these synergies are possible primarily through the collaborative Linux environment, which is Linux's great strength. However, I would argue that those synergies are equally possible in closed-source shops, but it's just that management has to learn to listen to them differently -- and that that is only a matter of time. For instance, I used to work in a company that made document-management databases for law firms. I think there's a huge market for (appropriately crippled and cheapened) versions of this product in the private desktop market, for promoting "paperless offices" in non-law businesses, and for aiding academic research: three huge markets that would be very happy to get rid of their physical files and add markup and search if you have enterprise-reliability document management database software. Nobody listened, though; in an Open Source environment, I could've just forked and/done it/, and then proved my suggestions with their success. Closed shops can't take those kinds of risks, so they're missing out on opportunities; however, once the management does learn to do more lateral thinking like this, the lessons of F/OSS and Linux' collaborative model will probably become integrated into more mainstream business thinking.
Critical thinking isn't a class you can complete and say, "oh I've got critical thinking V and enconomics IV", it is more of an attitude and worldview, one which should be, I agree, presented early in education, possibly at early highschool level.
By the early high school level, most students have already received years of indoctrination -- nothing explicit, but a how-to-get-along, don't-rock-the-boat understanding whose main effect is to reinforce their apathy and feelings of dispossession/disenfranchisement. This is especially true in poorer schools and more densely attended ones (no surprises that there's overlap there).
Critical thinking skills are something that should be expected of students from early grade school. I began logic and critical thinking courses in 4th grade, and I cannot think of any single aspect of my education that has been more important.
But, like any educational reform in America, there are two big barriers. The first is class size: one teacher cannot effectively teach thirty students. We need three times as many teachers as we have. The second is the culture-wide disconnect of adults from learning; parents don't help kids with their homework, they don't even understand high-school-level geometry any more. Politicians pander to this ignorance by promoting Standards, while no one in the culture unpacks what that means (its rhetorical function is different from the reality of "Skill 5.3.21: Student recognizes and can manipulate the concept of subtraction using graphical aids.")
All of which ultimately comes down to the fundamental question, qui bono? The Bush Administration's educational staff is on record as saying that in the future, we won't need critical thinkers, we'll just need people who are able to follow instructions, and this should be the function of education. Policy is set in ways that promote a placid, easily manipulated population, even though that's directly against the national interest and the human mind's natural grasping towards knowledge. Who wants critical thinking when curiosity has been burnt out years ago?
the biggest victims of book piracy, like _Harry Potter_'s publishers, attract the equivalent of "sell-out" crowds the first day the book is released. Harry Potter is a unique phenomenon in the history of publishing. Seriously, if you could see a chart of the Nielsen Bookscan numbers (they track sales of books the same way they track TV popularity) there is this HUGE spike when HP7 came out, which is basically the equivalent of an anthill that's visible from outer space. There is NOTHING like this anywhere else in the publishing world. That aside, even perennial bestsellers, like Dave Barry or Terry Goodkind (to pick a few random names), don't really generate much revenue. Their appearances generate buzz (and that's why they go on book tours), but they're not a revenue stream of themselves, and therefore really wouldn't help conventional publishers. Can you seriously imagine someone paying the same price to hear, like, Clive Griffin speak, as they currently do to go to Stones concerts? The live-performance revenue stream just isn't there, and that's the strongest argument for the "recorded-music-should-be-free" folks. And can you really imagine your favorite author being able to write so many good books if he were busy travelling the country doing readings all the time? Musicians do it, but they're making a totally different product.
You mention cross-marketing in movies etc. also -- actually, given how much creative ownership authors maintain over their books, I'm pretty sure that publishing houses don't see a huge cut from this (but don't quote me on that). Regardless, you're saying that books should be free (pirated or not) because it'll drive up the cost of the movie rights; that doesn't seem like a very good bet to me. If nothing else, the studios are going to say "Look, you have a huge audience that's used to not expecting to pay anything for this; they're just going to pirate our movies!" Although I suppose if movies were also free, we could then fund the movies with ad sales and live performances... there's tons of profitability in live theatre, right?
The more people in that market, which again is grown at no cost to the legitimate publisher by pirated copies, the more other audiobooks can be sold to them
"No cost" is more a sunk cost to piracy, which publishers acknowledge is unaffected by DRM. Publishers are being more mature about it probably because they're used to people loaning books to each other and borrowing them from the libraries; but because of those current means of free access, piracy has fewer "unrecognized positive benefits" for the book market than for the music market. Piracy may be growing the market, but my instinct says that when somebody pirates a book (audio or no) despite the other free means of getting ahold of it, they're more likely to pirate more books (which isn't so true for music). Besides, publishers already do this by giving out free chapters of books online.
Physical book publishing is in trouble. But that's an entirely different problem that has nothing to do with DRM. It's the fundamental problem: where does the content for those audiobooks come from? I agree that the DRM is stupid and should be removed; but I disagree that the same "there-are-other-revenue-streams" logic that I'll happily apply to music production will work with book (or audiobook) publishing. I just think that these two types of products are substantially different in their purpose and consumption patterns, and I don't think that the arguments from one realm of copyright apply to the other.
What it comes down to is that for music, recordings are effectively epiphenomena; for books, they're pretty much the whole ballgame.
Or perhaps it's just that I'm perfectly happy in a world without corporate music, but I rather like good books, and a world without editors sounds a bit too much like wading through google looking for diamonds in slime. All the crap the RIAA feeds us about music is self-interested smoke; but for publishers, it's actually true.
If we first assume that the human brain has a pretty interesting organization, then we should try to emulate it.
Well, gopher colonies have a pretty interesting organization too, but I don't think we need to be emulating those.
The takeaway is this: each cortex does not just do more of the same thing. Instead, it does a refinement of the level below it. This type of hierarchical processing is how multicore processors should be built.
You are correct that having specialized tools which are efficient at doing specialized things and then providing a summary is a good way to go. However, there is a much greater benefit to doing this for a human (or animal) brain, that needs to interpret stimulus from a real environment, identify a situation, apply several different heuristics, keep its heart beating, figure out if it needs to pee, etc. That's a lot of parallel processing needs that simply aren't there for the average computer application, because computers don't interact with the "real environment" so to speak.
No, the earlier poster had it right -- most of the tasks that the Common User uses a computer for are pretty inherently serial, and require continued interaction. Outside of some specialized fields, the extra power simply isn't useful, so people won't pay for it, and a business strategy that stakes profitability on their willingness to do so is a flawed one. We're approaching the shores of "good enough."
This is book publishing, not music. The kind of tie-ins you're talking about are not and have never been a major revenue stream in this industry. Kiss will sell out stadiums' worth of tickets; when was the last time you or anyone you know paid more than a moderate venue cost to go to a book reading?
Book publishing is seriously in trouble, because the Internet is already great competition for text-based information. Making books is expensive. Making good books is even more expensive. Good books are much easier to justify paying for than mediocre crap that you can hear on the radio anyway.
Now, what WOULD reduce piracy is if all content industries required credit cards for online downloads or purchase of originally-digital media, and then watermarked the result with the credit card number such that you couldn't reproduce copies without handing out your credit information. That would be a big deterrent to some types of piracy, though it'd hardly fix it.
The problem with this is that publishers are already operating on very thin margins (I know, I work with them and have friends in the industry). This is because so many books that get published totally flop, and because authors actually get a fair shake with royalties (unlike music artists). That $8 paperback is cheap already, but the physical production costs are going to be around a dollar. Selling online at a $5 discount would probably push the profit-per-sale into the red.
If you want to start an online-only publishing business that does away with physical copies and a lot of the expense of layout/composition etc, and can actually afford to spend money helping developing authors improve (the way editors did fifty years ago) and publishing lots of stuff that's not crap, you'll have a world-beating business. But meanwhile, all the experienced real-world publishers are consolidating because they already struggle to stay afloat.
Slashdot Mirror
Turing Test (New Yorker version):
Human: Pardon me, can you --
AI: F*** off, can't you see I'm busy?
.
.
.
Result: Pass
Good point!
:)
I guess I'd just say that I would begin to question the social worth of AI research if the best we can do is generate synthetic sociopaths
Hrm -- I thought the "single-topic" criterion was specific to the limited version of the TT that this project is using. Most reasonably long human conversations do cover several different topics.
The Turing Test doesn't test intelligence per se, but what we *mean* by intelligence -- lateral thinking, creativity, ability to understand conceptual metaphor, etc. I mean, beavers are intelligent; they're just not intelligent like us, and that's what it's really about.
Nope; you've mistaken the Turing Test with intelligence.
I was talking about how the Turing Test is impossible to pass, in effect because it's phrased in a way that measures humanity, not intelligence, and AIs (by dint of their lack of real human experience) are necessarily not human. Or at least, impossible to pass without some very convincing lying through your teeth.
I think you underestimate the capabilities of a good liar.
Ahh, but now we're going to the point of assuming that the AI can process information from a number of different (and often mutually contradictory) sources about human experience, and then synthesize a human character that can tell coherent/consistent lies about them. Frankly, that sounds way beyond a Turing Test in impressiveness.
In my opinion it is absolutely necessary that an AI develop complex moral reasoning. Hopefully better than much of human history indicates the average human has.
...of course, it's probably also true that any sufficiently complex moral reasoning will provide some justification for all of the available options.
See, all that stuff in human history is less evidence that we haven't developed complex moral reasoning, and more that we'll gleefully ignore it if the payoff is big enough. History is full of (and probably mostly made by) people knowingly doing the wrong thing.
Most four-year-olds wouldn't pass a Turing Test. ;)
Seriously, though, the point holds -- they'll be able to describe, in some novel way, answers to questions which are based directly on experience. This can be aped by a computer, but can't be generated authentically, because the AI doesn't actually have experiences.
That'll change once we have AIs that are capable of perceiving things and having experiences. But um... I'm thinking that's a looooong way off.
Look, the Turing Test is impossible to pass if the human part of the conversation is sufficiently motivated.
Why? Because we don't judge others' humanity based on their reasoning abilities, we judge it based on common shared human experiences.
Show me an AI that passes the Turing Test. I'll ask it what coffee tastes like, or what sex feels like, or what it felt when its mother died. Sure, somebody could program answers for those questions into it, but then it isn't an AI -- it's just a canned response simulating a human, incapable of having new experiences, incapable of perceiving the human world with human senses, and thus transparently lacking in humanity. At that point it's nothing but a computer puppet, with a programmer somewhere pulling the strings.
Once that "other guy" is found though, word will spread rapidly and the market will shift to support him. His job is maintained provided that he supplies what the public wants, and as long as they want the truth, he will want to give it to them.
*And* provided he can afford to supply it to them.
Someone attempting to start a truly independent paper providing "the truth" under those circumstances would need to charge an exorbitant amount per issue (or run an all-volunteer business -- not a model that tends to produce good results, judging from the examples of it I've seen in indy papers.) You'll have to win readership despite MedCorp's consistent smearing of your efforts as irrational rantings. Even then it would all last only until the place or its staff got bought out by MedCorp (unless you assume that the paper is being run by a fanatic who'll never sell, which doesn't bode well for its objectivity).
But look, that's just a rough sketch. The fact of the matter is, independent papers *are being* driven out of business -- indeed, mostly *have been* -- primarily through economic means. The marketplace has already rejected the better mousetrap (and we can mainly blame the readership for that).
How can a company "dick with liberties" if they have no political power. They cannot physically hold you at gunpoint, because you could call the police - the enforcers maintaining your rights.
The enforcers maintaining your rights, very narrowly defined (and surely even a Libertarian state could suffer from police corruption?). Certain demands cannot be affordably met if the power imbalance between suppliers is too great, but never mind that. Instead, consider researching the polluting effects of mining in Nevada and what they've done to the health and economic values of communities around them. But there's nothing to be done unless you establish legal limits on what another private actor can do with his own property.
But you could say, sure, health isn't a protected liberty; or perhaps you'll countenance laws governing the negative environmental impacts of a business on its community (though that's already a rare stance from a Libertarian perspective; smacks of gov't regulation and all). Suppose, then, that you want to put up a website talking about how the CEO of Warnercast (a fictitous monopolist ISP) is having an extramarital affair. Suddenly you can't find a hosting company, because nobody wants their hosting business torpedoed when their content gets blackballed. Okay, you set up your own webserver. Suddenly your internet access is cut off. Well that's fine, you can just... what? Buy and install your own entire Internet? You'll say "some competing internet provider will emerge to provide the services for me." Using what resources? Warnercast can buy out any attempts to get it started, by driving up the price of the land on which you'd lay your cable, say, or paying to drown out your broadband frequency, or any other number of methods. Because of the tremendous imbalance in economic power, it is very difficult -- probably impossible -- to provide an affordable alternative service, so even if the demand is there at a reasonable price, the monopolist can ensure that the price would have to be unreasonable.
In short, while your right of free speech still exists, you can be prevented from exercising that right in any kind of affordable fashion.
You would need a large-scale cooperative enterprise with central organization, willing to make economic sacrifices for the common good, in order to put together enough economic power to act as a counterweight to this. But that's just another way of saying you'd need a government... so if regulation did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.
You know, I forgot about the WSJ. They're more of a national-financial paper though... but yeah, we have that too. Maybe you're thinking the Financial Times? I think they're NYC-based, though to be honest I've never read a copy.
New York has a couple of good ones.
/read/ the articles in their lifestyle section? -- but generally okay), the NY Post and Daily News (tabloid rags = good sports coverage and funny headlines), the Village Voice (your local conglomerate-owned "Independent"), a couple free dailies that basically reprint the AP feed, and some local micropapers dedicated to highly specific segments (e.g. the Amsterdam News for Black issues). If we're considered good, the rest of you guys must be /really/ screwed.
Hrm... actually we have the Times (mouthpiece of the bourgeoisie -- have you
The FCC does what it does because its members are influenced by friends and financiers.
Sorry, I think you missed my point -- there's no reason that we should encourage the FCC to go out of its way to make media consolidation a reality.
As to whether a hundred flowers would bloom in the absence of "natural monopoly" rulings, I respect the logic of your position, but I think it's naive about the power of an entrenched going concern which owns the wires.
It is only because politics (laws, regulations) are tied to money (donations from companies) are they able to restrict my access. If the local newspaper refuses to print news from outside the city, I will drop them and subscribe to another paper offering more news. I will tell my friends and neighbors to do the same, and they will willingly choose to either keep or drop their subscription as well.
No, really it's just the money. If they own every local newspaper and all the ones outside the city (or their equivalents do), then you're hosed; your dollar vote goes to Kodos or to Kang. The "I'll choose the other guy" response is how it's supposed to work, idealistically; unfortunately the reality is that finding your trustworthy independent news source is very difficult, and finding it in a conventional print or televised medium is approaching impossible.*
And in a world without Net Neutrality, when Comcast owns your cable access, your internet access, your local newspaper, and half the national newspapers, you will surf the websites Comcast has a stake in. Not because they desire to be totalitarian overlords (though I guess it's a perk), but because they desire to make a buck off everything that you do.
* This is the problem with libertarianism generally. Yes, private enterprise and competition are supposed to ensure these things don't happen; but initial imbalances enable firms to snowball their existing success, to the point that they approach and surpass governments in their power to dick with individual liberties. It's a nice idea in theory, but in practice it just can't hold up with the cheaters.
A newspaper is only as strong as its readership base.
Remind me again where the problem is?
It's in the readership base -- when was the last time the average American actually looked at (say) a foreign newspaper? Let alone a foreign-language one.
That said, there's no reason for the FCC to go out of their way to enable Information Domination. And do you seriously think that any of these companies would be happy to leave the Internet as an unsullied source of pure truth from outside their grip? No, they'll try to monetize that, and (as collateral damage) limit citizens' access to external sources of information. Not out of a Vast Conspiracy necessarily, but when your business model is predicated on grabbing as many eyeballs as possible, you don't want them looking at other networks, ja?
this topic is about residents of Sderot taking completely non-violent, legal action
Without getting into any kind of debate over whether the action is justified, you're whitewashing a bit to describe this as a "completely non-violent... action." I mean, I can think of little use for a GIANT LASER CANNON other than to enable some rather violent future actions.
(Yes, deterrence, blah blah blah. Possible incursions by the IDF don't seem to have had a deterrent effect, so I'm not automatically convinced that James Bond weaponry will.)
From dictionary.com:
1. The interaction of two or more agents or forces so that their combined effect is greater than the sum of their individual effects.
2. Cooperative interaction among groups, especially among the acquired subsidiaries or merged parts of a corporation, that creates an enhanced combined effect.
As I'm using it here, "serendipity" would probably be a better word, or "happy coincidence" -- instead of two forces working together to produce more than the sum of their parts, it's one force that turns out to be effective in two surprisingly separate areas.
*sigh* I think I missed the joke... that's not anything funny encoded in ASCII, so...? Is it just about digg folks not getting computers?
The the current iteration is rough and inaccurate, and the user must undergo training to the device, but I'd hope that the promise of provision and the simplicity of design in form and function will make this a real winner with further development. Reverse it: once the device can be trained to the user, we have a deployable thought-control system that uses our favorite external neural pathway, speech.
:)
No matter what your brain is connected to, it takes it some time to figure out how to work it. That's why little kids are so clumsy -- they're developing neural pathways and fine nerve networks, sure, but they also have to learn what the brain has to do to produce desired body response.
Unlikely that you'll be able to eliminate the training component, but really it'll probably be something like learning to ride a bicycle. Or learning to grasp apples with your bionic third arm, whichever comparison seems more apt to you
Yawn. Very little about MS-Linux collaboration here (except that Linux is willing but MS is weak); bad article summaries are no surprise.
/done it/, and then proved my suggestions with their success. Closed shops can't take those kinds of risks, so they're missing out on opportunities; however, once the management does learn to do more lateral thinking like this, the lessons of F/OSS and Linux' collaborative model will probably become integrated into more mainstream business thinking.
But since that's what the summary says, that's what everybody will be talking about, so:
I'd love to see MS bury the hatchet as much as anybody. But where's the Windows Genuine Advantage in that?
MS is obviously not going to give away filesystem specs or the other interoperability roadblocks that collectively create the best argument to businesses for continuing to pay the Windows tax. So the most collaboration we might see is in getting MS Office to run on Linux. In other words, if Redmond bit at all, it'd be at the chance to stomp on OpenOffice to prevent future competition in its core business desktop market.
***
Anyway, besides that, the article was surprisingly content-free. Yes, there are interesting synergies between extending battery life on mobile devices vs. saving energy in the data center. We get that, no need to repeat.
The interviewee promotes this thesis: these synergies are possible primarily through the collaborative Linux environment, which is Linux's great strength. However, I would argue that those synergies are equally possible in closed-source shops, but it's just that management has to learn to listen to them differently -- and that that is only a matter of time. For instance, I used to work in a company that made document-management databases for law firms. I think there's a huge market for (appropriately crippled and cheapened) versions of this product in the private desktop market, for promoting "paperless offices" in non-law businesses, and for aiding academic research: three huge markets that would be very happy to get rid of their physical files and add markup and search if you have enterprise-reliability document management database software. Nobody listened, though; in an Open Source environment, I could've just forked and
Here.
Now I'm back to RingTFA before posting. (Yes, I'm new here).
Without dipping into the bigger waters here --
Critical thinking isn't a class you can complete and say, "oh I've got critical thinking V and enconomics IV", it is more of an attitude and worldview, one which should be, I agree, presented early in education, possibly at early highschool level.
By the early high school level, most students have already received years of indoctrination -- nothing explicit, but a how-to-get-along, don't-rock-the-boat understanding whose main effect is to reinforce their apathy and feelings of dispossession/disenfranchisement. This is especially true in poorer schools and more densely attended ones (no surprises that there's overlap there).
Critical thinking skills are something that should be expected of students from early grade school. I began logic and critical thinking courses in 4th grade, and I cannot think of any single aspect of my education that has been more important.
But, like any educational reform in America, there are two big barriers. The first is class size: one teacher cannot effectively teach thirty students. We need three times as many teachers as we have. The second is the culture-wide disconnect of adults from learning; parents don't help kids with their homework, they don't even understand high-school-level geometry any more. Politicians pander to this ignorance by promoting Standards, while no one in the culture unpacks what that means (its rhetorical function is different from the reality of "Skill 5.3.21: Student recognizes and can manipulate the concept of subtraction using graphical aids.")
All of which ultimately comes down to the fundamental question, qui bono? The Bush Administration's educational staff is on record as saying that in the future, we won't need critical thinkers, we'll just need people who are able to follow instructions, and this should be the function of education. Policy is set in ways that promote a placid, easily manipulated population, even though that's directly against the national interest and the human mind's natural grasping towards knowledge. Who wants critical thinking when curiosity has been burnt out years ago?
the biggest victims of book piracy, like _Harry Potter_'s publishers, attract the equivalent of "sell-out" crowds the first day the book is released.
Harry Potter is a unique phenomenon in the history of publishing. Seriously, if you could see a chart of the Nielsen Bookscan numbers (they track sales of books the same way they track TV popularity) there is this HUGE spike when HP7 came out, which is basically the equivalent of an anthill that's visible from outer space. There is NOTHING like this anywhere else in the publishing world.
That aside, even perennial bestsellers, like Dave Barry or Terry Goodkind (to pick a few random names), don't really generate much revenue. Their appearances generate buzz (and that's why they go on book tours), but they're not a revenue stream of themselves, and therefore really wouldn't help conventional publishers. Can you seriously imagine someone paying the same price to hear, like, Clive Griffin speak, as they currently do to go to Stones concerts? The live-performance revenue stream just isn't there, and that's the strongest argument for the "recorded-music-should-be-free" folks. And can you really imagine your favorite author being able to write so many good books if he were busy travelling the country doing readings all the time? Musicians do it, but they're making a totally different product.
You mention cross-marketing in movies etc. also -- actually, given how much creative ownership authors maintain over their books, I'm pretty sure that publishing houses don't see a huge cut from this (but don't quote me on that). Regardless, you're saying that books should be free (pirated or not) because it'll drive up the cost of the movie rights; that doesn't seem like a very good bet to me. If nothing else, the studios are going to say "Look, you have a huge audience that's used to not expecting to pay anything for this; they're just going to pirate our movies!" Although I suppose if movies were also free, we could then fund the movies with ad sales and live performances... there's tons of profitability in live theatre, right?
The more people in that market, which again is grown at no cost to the legitimate publisher by pirated copies, the more other audiobooks can be sold to them
"No cost" is more a sunk cost to piracy, which publishers acknowledge is unaffected by DRM. Publishers are being more mature about it probably because they're used to people loaning books to each other and borrowing them from the libraries; but because of those current means of free access, piracy has fewer "unrecognized positive benefits" for the book market than for the music market.
Piracy may be growing the market, but my instinct says that when somebody pirates a book (audio or no) despite the other free means of getting ahold of it, they're more likely to pirate more books (which isn't so true for music). Besides, publishers already do this by giving out free chapters of books online.
Physical book publishing is in trouble. But that's an entirely different problem that has nothing to do with DRM.
It's the fundamental problem: where does the content for those audiobooks come from? I agree that the DRM is stupid and should be removed; but I disagree that the same "there-are-other-revenue-streams" logic that I'll happily apply to music production will work with book (or audiobook) publishing. I just think that these two types of products are substantially different in their purpose and consumption patterns, and I don't think that the arguments from one realm of copyright apply to the other.
What it comes down to is that for music, recordings are effectively epiphenomena; for books, they're pretty much the whole ballgame.
Or perhaps it's just that I'm perfectly happy in a world without corporate music, but I rather like good books, and a world without editors sounds a bit too much like wading through google looking for diamonds in slime. All the crap the RIAA feeds us about music is self-interested smoke; but for publishers, it's actually true.
If we first assume that the human brain has a pretty interesting organization, then we should try to emulate it.
Well, gopher colonies have a pretty interesting organization too, but I don't think we need to be emulating those.
The takeaway is this: each cortex does not just do more of the same thing. Instead, it does a refinement of the level below it. This type of hierarchical processing is how multicore processors should be built.
You are correct that having specialized tools which are efficient at doing specialized things and then providing a summary is a good way to go. However, there is a much greater benefit to doing this for a human (or animal) brain, that needs to interpret stimulus from a real environment, identify a situation, apply several different heuristics, keep its heart beating, figure out if it needs to pee, etc. That's a lot of parallel processing needs that simply aren't there for the average computer application, because computers don't interact with the "real environment" so to speak.
No, the earlier poster had it right -- most of the tasks that the Common User uses a computer for are pretty inherently serial, and require continued interaction. Outside of some specialized fields, the extra power simply isn't useful, so people won't pay for it, and a business strategy that stakes profitability on their willingness to do so is a flawed one. We're approaching the shores of "good enough."
This is book publishing, not music. The kind of tie-ins you're talking about are not and have never been a major revenue stream in this industry. Kiss will sell out stadiums' worth of tickets; when was the last time you or anyone you know paid more than a moderate venue cost to go to a book reading?
Book publishing is seriously in trouble, because the Internet is already great competition for text-based information. Making books is expensive. Making good books is even more expensive. Good books are much easier to justify paying for than mediocre crap that you can hear on the radio anyway.
Now, what WOULD reduce piracy is if all content industries required credit cards for online downloads or purchase of originally-digital media, and then watermarked the result with the credit card number such that you couldn't reproduce copies without handing out your credit information. That would be a big deterrent to some types of piracy, though it'd hardly fix it.
well if then how did they trace it, nothing to trace on overridden encryption and nothing to track from a CD ripped.
The watermarks survive.
Even if they didn't, the existence of copies online that aren't scans would prove that the digital versions were getting into the wild somehow.
The problem with this is that publishers are already operating on very thin margins (I know, I work with them and have friends in the industry). This is because so many books that get published totally flop, and because authors actually get a fair shake with royalties (unlike music artists). That $8 paperback is cheap already, but the physical production costs are going to be around a dollar. Selling online at a $5 discount would probably push the profit-per-sale into the red.
If you want to start an online-only publishing business that does away with physical copies and a lot of the expense of layout/composition etc, and can actually afford to spend money helping developing authors improve (the way editors did fifty years ago) and publishing lots of stuff that's not crap, you'll have a world-beating business. But meanwhile, all the experienced real-world publishers are consolidating because they already struggle to stay afloat.