To reiterate: in none of this are we talking about "generalized AI". We're not even talking about "learning AI". We're talking about "AI pre-trained to specific tasks". Which are things we already use in our everyday lives.
Really? How the hell do you know what "we" are talking about? People throw this term around as though it had a simple and direct meaning. In actuality, when someone mentions "AI" without explaining what he means, then we have no clue what he is talking about, and it's foolish to engage in any sort of dialogue. Maybe the person thinks an "AI" is a super god-like intelligence that can "replace" us (as though we were useful, and could be replaced!), or it could be program behind a computer game that models a (more or less) credible opponent.
If we're talking about an automated missile guidance system, then that's just some more damn software. But if you call it "AI", then a lot of people who have no idea what is being discussed will hyperventilate about it. So referring to "AI" does get you attention. Hmmm. Maybe that's the point.
If you say in a proposal for an academic research project that you plan to mumble mumble AI mumble mumble, someone will throw money at you.
Zuckerberg told the Senate that his all-powerful AIs will be in charge soon, faultlessly discriminating between Truth and Hate Speech, and no one said diddly. So "AI" is also good for dodging questions...sort of like "I can do magic".
I don't know what to make of Elon Musk. He seems like a smart enough chap, but he keeps moaning about those horrible horrible "AIs" that are going to take over everything. I guess it's advertising: keeps his name in the news.
I would prefer people stopped using that silly two letter acronym altogether, but there are so many dishonest people around who find it indispensable, that I don't think there's much chance I can put an end to it.
EVE Online:
Pros: player-driven game, space!, huge selection of ships, skills, development paths.
Cons: subscription-driven, scammers galore, some RMT, mandating long gaming sessions, a destroyed ship is a lost ship, steep learning curve.
Some of us don't regard those last two as "Cons".
I don't regard the first one as a "con". What's wrong with paying for goods or services, with giving value for value in an honest transaction? If you want free stuff, you will either get something that is worth what you paid for it, or you will pay in some other way you weren't expecting, and probably won't like.
You're doing it wrong. It's an MMO. If you aren't making it on your own, *JOIN* one of those corporations (or get a bunch of people together and create your own).
Or go solo. It's entirely possible. It's risky and requires a lot of skill, and you'll get blown up a lot at first... but if you're actually good (and combat is Eve is much more skill-based than a casual observer might think) you can easily find, and win, small fights all day long. Yeah, you'll need a good ship (which means money and training time), but the risks are also lower when you're starting out. Be a pirate. Be a mercenary. Take over a wormhole.
You make the rules, man. That's the essence of the game. It's like libertarian paradise. Would I want to live there for real? Hell no! But it's a fun thing, to go out and fight, solo or with a small gang or with a massive battle fleet.
The problem with any kind of grouping or joining a corp in EVE is that it would require you to trust another EVE player, and that is just plain dumb. The first time around, I had people ask me to join them in a mission, then ambush me with their friends to kill my ship and take my stuff. I've heard lots of stories about corporate execs running off with the member's money (how much more real life can you get?). No, these days I play strictly alone, I talk to no one, and I trust no one. It stands for "Everyone Versus Everyone, you know!
Libertarian paradise? I don't think there's anything in the libertarian credo that says you should rip off everyone who's weaker than you are, but that's the rule in EVE. The EVE universe is one of untrammeled barbarism; it's a sort of anti-society because there is no basis for trust or lasting cooperation.
The best review I ever heard of EvE Online was from a guy who said that he wasn't going to pay $15 a month to be chased down and killed by some teenager with daddy issues in the Battlestar Galactica. Pretty much summed it up for me.
When I tried it out, it seemed like their were basically two modes to the game: either incredible boredom in safe space or getting constantly jumped and butt-raped in unsafe space. I guess there was some appeal in trading (kind of a much less satisfying version of the old trading routes in Elite), but it seemed like all the good routes were owned by the corporations and all that was left for the little guys were the scraps. In the end, it's even less rewarding than mining.
In short, EvE Online reminds me way too much of real life. And that's what I play videogames to avoid.
I may have been the guy who wrote that review—I certainly have passed up no opportunities to damn the game whenever the subject was brought up. Yet now I'm playing the thing again. Why?
Well, the number one reason is probably lack of something better to do. Also, I'm retired and now have a surplus of hostility that I can no longer vent on my boss. I had been playing the original Everquest from the day it started until about 9 months ago, except for the 3 or 4 year break I took to play Eve, World of Warcraft, and Aion. None of them held my interest, so I went back to EQ. Then one day, I just had my fill of EQ again. There's no attempt to keep the game improving or growing; Sony just wants to keep hold of the same few thousand players they have who stick around for the sake of nostalgia. I doubt whether Sony has more than one developer assigned to EQ, and his job is to create cut-and-paste "expansions" where the only differences are armor with higher stats that you have to do the same crap missions to get as every other expansions. Oh, and new spell levels that do basically the same thing as the old spells. Nostalgia is a powerful force, but it can only take you so far. Maybe some day I will feel nostalgic for EQ again.
So I popped back into EVE again just to remember how awful it was. And indeed, the awfulness is still there. To judge by the language people use, by the stuff they put in their character bios, etc. the players are still a bunch of 12 year old sociopaths with a fixation on anal rape. About half of them pretend to be girls, but you know they're not. Girls are too smart to play a game like this. (Besides, most females I've met have had a fairly limited interest in anal rape.) But I've been playing the game since early this year. Why in the world would I do that?
There are some very good things that have to be said about the game design of EVE and about the way it's run. First of all, the game is continually being improved, and the expansions are free. To get a new expansion, you just have to pay your monthly fee to pay, and that's it. There's no "free to play" BS where you get nickle and dimed to death for better sword models or whatever; you just pay your fee and you get the service you pay for. Some of the improvements have made the game more playable for me than it was before.
Eve has got a complex and fairly realistic economic simulation going (if you ignore the fact that the economy is propped up by the nightly re-seeding of minerals and NPC drops), so if you are one of those obsessive people with no other life who draw up complicated spreadsheets and calculate how to make money off manufacturing, and spend many, many hours buying and selling at the best prices, then you can be an EVE tycoon. I'm not one of those: I never did spreadsheets for work, and I'm certainly not doing them for a game. Still, it's a role some people like to play. The spaceship tech is well-thought out and complex enough to keep you working at coming up with a perfect "fit" for that cruiser or battleship you're flying. There's a lot of different kinds of things you can do in EVE, and the game doesn't force you to play one
...
No matter the "percentage" why is the USA backing any group supporting the aims of "rebel forces"?
That's a very good question, one that I've been asking myself. I'd say that the pressure to intervene probably originates with special interest groups that are pressuring the western governments to "do something". Such interest groups operate as "nonpartisan" or "neutral" NGOs that want to do nothing but help "civilians" who are being killed, maimed, starved, and driven from their homes into refugee camps. I'm thinking of groups like Doctors Without Borders, Catholic Relief Services, Save the Children, etc. Are these groups evil? Well, how can saving children, providing medical aid to wounded "civilians", and feeding refugees be wrong?
Maybe it can't be evil to do these things, but it can sure skew your perspective. What's happening in Syria is a civil war. The whole notion of "civilians" has become ephemeral in these days of irregular warfare, but this is especially true in a civil war: in a civil war, nobody is a civilian. Someone can be a fighter one day, and an "injured civilian" on the next. So when such charitable NGOs provide humanitarian aid to one side in the war, they are taking sides. Even medical treatment and food are weapons in a war; in addition, anyone who is involved in such work is going to see the people they are dealing with as the good guys, and the other side as evil oppressors. So they start churning out press releases and videos of mutilated children; these media carry the implicit or explicit message that the "other side" —and only the other side—is doing evil. And of course we must stop evil.
That's how we arrived at the moral logic that was driving the Obama administration until the Secretary of State accidentally short-circuited the official policy with his off-hand remark that the Syrian government has the option of giving up its chemical weapons. That moral logic, as far as I can tell, was as follows: "The Bad People have killed innocent civilians with cruel weapons of which we disapprove. We must now kill an indefinite number of Bad People with approved weapons so that the moral ledger will once again be balanced." This is, of course, nuts.
It is often hard to accept—especially for Americans—that there is evil in the world that cannot be stopped without doing more evil. That sometimes, the right thing to do is nothing.
What stupid terrorist is using the Internet to coordinate these days?
I mean the NSA and most governments are trying to monitor all internet traffic, and this is widely known, so I mean are their ANY terrorists out their dumb enough to be using the internet still to coordinate their attacks?
Why arrange actual attacks when you can just call your buddy and tell him "the attack on the American nest of spies in Yemen is a go"? You know that the NSA will suck up this "chatter", and evacuate every embassy in the region amid much hyperventilation, thus making the U.S. look like cowards and fools, without costing you more than the price of a throwaway cell phone. Such "surveillance" is completely worthless—in fact, it is a cheap weapon in the hands of our enemies.
This ain't exactly a secret.... So all the NSA is doing is wasting billions of dollars monitoring the benign traffic of innocents using FUD to continue to fund program.
Right. The organs of the State are self-perpetrating. Their main purpose is to justify their existence and to expand their size and power. One could hope that Congress would institute radical budget cuts on such agencies, but that's a bit like hoping that the Mississippi will start flowing toward Canada. My own hope is that the entire apparatus will become so complex that it collapses of its own weight, but maybe that's just another form of self-deception.
I can't remember the last time I entered a URL manually. What is this, 1994?
I often type in a single letter and the browser autocompletes it for me.
If I don't know the exact URL, I type something in anyway and Google will look it up for me, at which point it will be saved in my browser history.
I guess you don't log in to your router or your WAPs to change the parameters, huh? Oh yeah, you probably set your wifi security using the button on the WAP. In fact, you're probably the guy with WEP and the default router password from which I'm leeching bandwith right now!
I've got an old iPhone 3GS that won't start up all the way. I dunno why—can't really be bothered with trying to fix it. I've been thinking of selling it (I probably won't trade it in to Apple), but I worry about private data from back when my wife was using the phone still being on it. Is this something I should worry about, or should I just sell the phone? Is there some way to wipe the phone just to make sure, given it's inoperable?
Did you manage to log in? I tried, but couldn't get an account. I gave it an email address (one of my throwaways, natch) and password, and it did nothing but ask me to log in again. No email seems to have been sent. The login I had created didn't work, and trying to create one again produced the same non-result. I gave permissions for that web site to run scripts, but there was a lot of other crap that wanted permissions, so for now I'm not bothering.
No it wasn't. Orwell wrote 1984 after beeing delusional on how the communists behaved during the Spanish civil war, where he inititially fought for the communists.
Partly correct,
If I ignore the "beeing delusional" part of the quote, there's nothing right about it. (Was Orwell deluded? Disillusioned, perhaps? Who knows.)
In any case, the assertion that Orwell "fought for the Communists" is an outright falsehood that cries out for correction. As we know, Orwell fought with POUM, which called itself "Marxist" and socialist. However, POUM was in no way part of the Communist International (that is, the Moscow-controlled Stalinist Communist Party), and was in fact screwed over by the Communists—along with every other Spanish Republican force that was not Communist-controlled. In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell made clear just what he thought of the Stalinist rat-bastards.
In his essay Why I Write, Orwell clearly explains that all the "serious work" he had written since the Spanish Civil War in 1936 was "written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism". [1] Therefore, one can look at Nineteen Eighty-Four as a cautionary tale against totalitarianism and in particular the betrayal of a revolution by those claiming to defend or support it. However, as many reviewers and critics have stated, it should not be read as an attack on socialism as a whole, but on totalitarianism and potential totalitarianism.
Also partly incorrect
Really? The guy seems to be making sense here.
His work for the overseas service of the BBC, which at the time was under the control of the Ministry of Information, also played a significant role as the basis for his Ministry of Truth (as he later admitted to Malcolm Muggeridge). The Ministry of Information building, Senate House (University of London), was the Ministry of Truth's architectural inspiration.
Sure, in Nineteen EIghty Four, Minitrue is the official propaganda organ of the Oceanian state. Any official propaganda...er news organization could serve as a model for Orwell's fictional "truth" factory. Are you saying that Minitrue is the BBC, or that the BBC is no better than Minitrue? What an odd thought.
The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four also reflects various aspects of the social and political life of both the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Orwell is reported to have said that the book described what he viewed as the situation in the United Kingdom in 1948, when the British economy was poor, the British Empire was dissolving at the same time as newspapers were reporting its triumphs, and wartime allies such as the USSR were rapidly becoming peacetime foes ('Eurasia is the enemy. Eurasia has always been the enemy').
I'm not following you here. You want me to think that Nineteen Eighty Four is in some way like the Britain of 1948? Well yes...in some ways it is, and it some ways it isn't. What's your point? Are you saying that the book is nothing more than some sort of social critique of 1948 Britain? If so, then you're quite wrong, and I'm sure Orwell never meant to say anything of the sort. The society of Nineteen EIghty Four is indeed impoverished, but material impoverishment is the least of it. Orwell addresses the impoverishment and enslavement of the spirit.
In many ways, Oceania is indeed a future metamorphosis of the British Empire (although Orwell is careful to state that, geographically, it also includes the United States, and that the currency is the dollar). It is, as its name suggests, an essentially naval power. Much of its militarism is focused on veneration for sailors and seafarers, serving on board "floating fortresses" which Orwell evidently conceived of as the next stage in the growth of ever-bigger warships, after the Dreadnoughts of WWI and the aircraft ca
...On the subject of 1984 people often don't realise that the book wasn't George Orwells vision of the future, it was his view of Britain at that time i.e 1948, he just reversed the last two numbers of the year.
How enlightening; I'm afraid I was among the ignorant before reading your insightful contribution. I didn't realize that Britain has really been "Airstrip One", a forward base of Oceania, since 1948. Presumably the United States hasn't existed since then either, because it's part of Oceania, and we've been engaged in perpetual warfare with two mega-states called Eastasia and Eurasia all along. Damn, how could my attention have slipped so much. Or maybe your post is just thoughtless twaddle.
If you are:
A. In a technical field
B. At all competent at your job
Understanding basic kinds of metadata like tags, links, and keys is an incredibly basic part of your job.
Sure, and if you have such an understanding—and any real-world experience at all—you will also comprehend that the chances of a useful result being achieved by random people "tagging" an unspecified universe of data objects with a nonstandard meta-data vocabulary are nil.
A tremendous amount of organized effort has been put into creating meta-data structures that can be used to make documents more useful (in one sense or another) over the last 60 years or so. These efforts have certainly not all resulted in failure, but insofar as they have been useful, they have also caused a great amount of pain. I can't prove it any more than I can prove the sun will rise tomorrow, but I'm certain that metadata will always be hard, and that it will involve pain on the part of its creators and users. Based on my knowledge and experience, I say that it's not bloody likely that somebody is going to invent a metadata scheme that is as easy as "tagging" and is also more than marginally useful. I don't say "impossible". I never say that word. But "not bloody likely" is pretty damn close.
Not technical enough for you? Not feeling the pain yet? Let us depart for a short historic stroll down meta-data lane; if you are so inclined, you may follow along, dear reader.
In the days of yore just after the invention of fire, someone came up with the idea that we could make documents more useful by marking them up with standardized generic tags that would help authors structure what they write, and help readers search documents and maybe even do some automated processing. (This involved rapidly riffling stacks of cards with holes punched in them until you could see moving images.) And behold! SGML actually worked fine within certain niches in highly structured environments (read IBM and The Government). If you were ever so unfortunate as to have to work with SGML, you know that these benefits were purchased by the infliction of acute pain—but these organizations have a very high agonic tolerance, so long as the pain is inflicted only on those who do the actual work. But SGML was a standardgeneralized markup language sort of like the way the Holy Roman Empire was holy, Roman, and an empire. It wasn't just SGML's extreme lawyerly complexity that prevented a rush to public adoption, but that the vocabularies used by it (as specified in the various Document Type Definitions) were arcane, narrow, and specific to a given set of documents, purposes, and institutions. In short, making it useful involved too much bloody pain to tolerate unless you were someone like Caligula, possessing unlimited freedom to impose suffering on others.
Thus matters stood until something came along that intruded into the cozy conferences of the Document Standards Community and caused its members to feel a cold wind up their shorts: HTML. Hypertext Markup Language was simple, and everyone was starting to use it as the new thing called the World Wide Web came out of nowhere and took over. Maybe I'm making this up, but I saw a genuine fear on the part of the advocates of document metadata standards that everyone would just settle on HTML as the universal markup language. That would, of course, have been an Abomination and a Dreadful Mistake, for HTML wasn't invented by a committee. The galloping of the Four Horsemen could be heard in the distance.
To be fair, there were better reasons for alarm. While HTML sort of looked like a document markup language, it wasn't terribly meaningful as far as document metadata goes. (For some reason, I feel a shudder of revulsion whenever I am tempted to use the word "semantic", so I don't, but it's probably not out of place around about here.) HTML was meta-data on whi
I'm glad that this submission amuses all you trekkies. Of course it's nothing but total crap, but who cares as long as it gets eyeballs on the ads, right? The article consists of a statement of the problem (radiation is bad for people in space), some spastic hand-waving informing us that a solution to the problem will require us to "utilise many cutting edge technologies, such as superconductors and the magnetic confinement techniques used in nuclear fusion", and then employs a thought-terminating cliché: look, Star Trek!
My favorite part is the series of Powerpoint slides under the heading "How it works". This is the kind of crap people email you when you missed a meeting. You can't tell squat from the slides, they don't even mention radiation or high velocity particles, they talk about "plasma" and show colored stuff that is (I must suppose) bumping into other colored stuff. The resolution of the slides is too poor to read a lot of the writing, though I can make out a tiny Enterprise on one of them. (Is the whole thing a joke? Am I the victim of a whoosh?) But hell, you've seen the slides, they must have made sense to everyone at the meeting, so who's going to admit that they appear to be gibberish. Besides, now you can tell everyone you meet that "we have a Star Trek shield and our competitors don't!". You could even post it to Slashdot.
I think "the end of the desktop" thing is over the top myself. There will be some who are happy just using tablets and phones, but there will still be plenty of people who need the capabilities of a desktop. This includes anyone with serious business or technical and creative needs (word processing, spreadsheets, graphics creation, sound processing, and dozens of other things I can't think of in 3 seconds). Probably, whoever thought of the "desktop is going away" slogan was a developer on the Windows 8 team at the time.
That being said, I think that Android on the desktop is a great idea. Right now, the number of Android apps I'd want to use on the desktop is pretty limited, but I see enormous promise here for simple computing. Simple computing that even normal grandpas and grandmas can use without having conniption fits. (I'm actually a triple grandpa, but nobody ever said I was normal.)
Now, consider the opportunity such an OS on the desktop presents to app developers. Please, please, somebody write a word composition program that's so simple normal people will want to use it, and be able to use it correctly. (MS Word fails on both counts.). Something that doesn't have its own programming language built into it so it's not a notorious virus vector. Something like an up-to-date MacWrite. And that's just the start. A simple drawing and painting program. A simple spreadsheet. And dozens of more things I can't think of in 3 seconds.
In other words, we have here a chance to start over and learn from the mistakes of the past. And also, a chance to return to the past, when people liked their computers.
I'd want it to be a dual-boot proposition: Android and Windows 7. (Hmm. Could Windows be run inside Android on a virtual machine? Somehow, this seems like a deliciously evil idea, though I have no idea if it's technically feasible.) I do expect that Android will be adapted so that it can be operated with a mouse. I spent a couple of weeks sick in bed recently with nothing but my Nexus tablet for company, and I got really really fed up with the touch interface. Every time I move my hands near the damn thing, it does something random. It was such a relief to get my mouse back.
Desktop Android is an idea whose time has come. Though the desktop is not nearly dead, Windows is dead—in the sense that Windows 7 is the last Microsoft OS that matters. There's simply no reason to ever have another one. MS has demonstrated the truth of this by releasing Windows 8.
Of course, the NSA probably can figure out your SS#, birthdate, birthplace, and similar information without going to any trouble. But the point is that you can often be significantly profiled on a social network even if you never post anything and only accept friend requests from people you know.
The NSA can have anything it wants. First of all, they are not in the habit of asking permission, and they simply don't tell anyone what they are doing. Second, there have been perfectly legal ways for the government to buy your data for as long as marketing data has been kept and sold. It's perfectly legal for a private corp to buy your purchase history (via a credit card), the data that Google has mined out of your "free" email service, your transactions with any vendor who has a low integrity threshold (who doesn't?) So what keeps the government from buying it also? Nothing at all. If I were doing it, I'd set up a front corporation (like "Air America" of CIA fame) to buy the data so I don't get screaming headlines.
The reason for all the hyperventilation is that three things have happened: agencies who lack the subtlety of NSA have gotten into the market, and they've done it directly—that is, they've outright seized the data instead of using the kinder gentler approach of greasing corporate palms. Third, the amount of data they have sucked has gotten so huge that it is impossible to manage without an army of low-level clerks. This is why an Army private and a contracted data massager can give the whole show away. With this many people involved, you are going to have leaks. I am surprised that there have been only two.
I wonder. In order to fully capitalize on the amount of data they are collecting on us, will it be necessary for all of us to be employed by the US government as DB admins? Welcome to the new Greece.
Actually, privacy isn't mentioned in the Bill of Rights at all. It has been inferred though not explicitly mentioned.
The "right to privacy" is indeed an inference not supported by the letter of the law. Freedom from unreasonable search and seizure is mentioned. But you all seem to have forgotten that our dear congress have given away that right—along with habeas corpus in the frenzy of legislation that follow 9-11. So why are you surprised when the government makes use of its duly legislated powers?
Other than astronauts and zombie bunkers, I don't see the appeal....
I'm afraid the zombie bunker market is non-viable. Why buy an expensive food printer and cartridges when you can buy my recently published 101 Ways to Cook a Zombie for $90 at any reputable book store? Trust me, it's a bargain!
People need to stop looking down on blue collar jobs, and stop treating "going to college" as the highest honor they can bestow upon on themselves. There are way, way, way too many people going to college and doing pointless and ultimately useless degrees....
You're completely right. It's one fundamental failure of our society: not only is our primary educational system broken because it is adjusted so that everyone can be successful, it is broken because success is defined as sending everyone to college. The colleges and universities are broken because everyone is expected to get at least a B.A. in psychology—and Institutions of Higher Learning can only continue to collect their exorbitant tuition if most students are successful, at least in this limited sense. The result is a general failure to educate, a tremendous waste of time and resources. Students aren't taught what they need to know, they are guided around an obstacle course that will get them certified as...well, someone who has navigated the obstacle course.
Yes, there are students who have a serious purpose for attending college (and it's not just getting a paper that says "MBA: Pay me lots of money" on it). In the past, one such purpose was to study one of the traditional "humanities" fields, such as philosophy, history, or literature. I don't know if anybody goes to college any more for such a reason—that is, because they recognize learning as having a value all its own. I don't think universities or our society even pretend to believe this anymore. That's a pity; for there are a few, a very few, people who are born to be scholars. A healthy culture values scholars almost as much as plumbers. Our present culture values neither. Maybe it values nothing of worth.
Today, the few exceptions to the general practice of just navigating the four year academic obstacle course are people who go to college to study physics or another science, or a branch of engineering. If they succeed, it is because they understood that they learning involves work, and that because a B.A. or B.S. is worthless, they must get an advanced degree in their specialty, maybe even a Ph.D. On the other hand, there are also community colleges that have programs that teach a trade—such as electrician, beautician, welder, or auto mechanic. Some students buck the "four year degree" pressure, and learn something useful—useful both to them and to society. But all these are exceptions: in most cases, "going to college" is all about having been to college. It's about being able to say you've gone through the correct motions, and now you deserve a prestigious job.
I had a wonderful handyman who can do just about anything, but has a terrible self-image partly because he never went to college. He thinks he's an idiot. Due to his low self estimation, he made some serious errors in judgment in his life. (He just got sent to jail for something he did in 2004. Long story.) While he was working for me, he opened up to me and told me about how he felt. I told him that there are many different kinds of intelligence; one man is good at academic study, another has smart hands. "Your brain controls your hands", I told him. "You have smart hands, so your brain is smart too." It seemed to help. And I didn't just say it to make him feel better; I said it because it's true.
I remember it in the 1960s. Robots (or machines) have certainly replaced some jobs, or changed them - we no longer have the office typing pool for instance. However for some jobs it is going to be hard to replace humans: hospital nurses, kindergarten teachers for instance.
Congratulations—my memory of the 60s is remarkably vague. True, we don't have typing pools anymore—we have lots of drones sitting in front of computers making PowerPoint slides. Judging from the past, automation causes certain types of work to become obsolete, but it creates new categories of work. And the new jobs aren't necessarily any more meaningful than the ones they replaced. I don't think that is going to change, even if you say "AI" over and over again.
This was predicted back in the 1930s, too. How did that work out for them?
It was predicted in the 1960s too. I don't know which idiot futurists were pushing the notion, but I believed it. I was sure that the big problem of the future (the 1970s, I guess) would be an excess of leisure time, foisted upon us by automation. Didn't happen though, did it?
Anybody can write an article like this. And convince anyone who smokes enough weed.
and they're slashing workforce? wtf? Is this a sudden dive in quality or is the better tech being used to reduce the number of developers/artists needed? They guy that did the meshes for Metroid Prime spent a month on optimization for the final boss alone. That's not really needed when you've got 8 gigs of ram I suppose.
Ah, young grasshoper, thou hast evidently not learned the subtleties of Scientific Management. Members of this group use a very special sort of language. That is, it's sort of a language, composed of technical terms (a.k.a. "jargon"). To quote TFA:
In recent weeks, EA has aligned all elements of its organizational structure behind priorities in new technologies and mobile.
The terms in bold are technical terms that thou might mistake for English. I shall translate them into normal English for thee, so you can fully understand that they are not English:
aligned: "to break"; ex: "Stalin aligned the party's thinking by killing every member who disagreed with him."
elements: people, but with the connotation of "objects", or perhaps "resources"; ex: "The Battle of Black Mountain was the outcome of a long series of injustices inflicted by the coal mine bosses on their elements".
organizational structure: A way to stupefy people until their collective intelligence is roughly equal to a cubic kilometer of crayfish, while making them believe it's the only way to get things done; alternate meaning: a sort of meat grinder; ex: Attila the Hun dominated by means of a very flat but effective organizational structure.
priorities: Anything that the elite of the organizational structure think is important; ex: "Chickens do not understand the farmer's priorities—until it's too late.
new technologies: vague; refers to anything considered by the heads of a power structure to be a priority; ex: "Well just keep promising them new technologies and raking in their money until they catch on".
mobile: They have a getaway strategy.
By the way, I did not comprehend your references to "Metroid Prime" and "8 gigs". Perhaps I am missing one of your little jokes again, ha ha?
The only thing that could doom Microsoft (not Windows) is the lack of necessity for a new operating system. Microsoft makes money selling Windows, so they NEED to release new versions every few years. The need for a new operating system might not be a pressing issue for the end user and this will slow down the demand for new versions of Windows, not Windows itself.
What necessity to sell new OSs? MS has gotten us to the point where we will pay for a new OS whenever we buy (or make) a new PC. Wouldn't it be an advantage to them to keep charging the same amount of money for Windows 7 for the next 20 years? Think of the development and support savings! There's more than simple sales revenue behind the release of Windows 8. There is a deep, incredibly complex marketing scheme that no one will ever understand—including the million monkeys in Steve Ballmer's basement who invented it.
Slashdot Mirror
To reiterate: in none of this are we talking about "generalized AI". We're not even talking about "learning AI". We're talking about "AI pre-trained to specific tasks". Which are things we already use in our everyday lives.
Really? How the hell do you know what "we" are talking about? People throw this term around as though it had a simple and direct meaning. In actuality, when someone mentions "AI" without explaining what he means, then we have no clue what he is talking about, and it's foolish to engage in any sort of dialogue. Maybe the person thinks an "AI" is a super god-like intelligence that can "replace" us (as though we were useful, and could be replaced!), or it could be program behind a computer game that models a (more or less) credible opponent.
If we're talking about an automated missile guidance system, then that's just some more damn software. But if you call it "AI", then a lot of people who have no idea what is being discussed will hyperventilate about it. So referring to "AI" does get you attention. Hmmm. Maybe that's the point.
If you say in a proposal for an academic research project that you plan to mumble mumble AI mumble mumble, someone will throw money at you.
Zuckerberg told the Senate that his all-powerful AIs will be in charge soon, faultlessly discriminating between Truth and Hate Speech, and no one said diddly. So "AI" is also good for dodging questions...sort of like "I can do magic".
I don't know what to make of Elon Musk. He seems like a smart enough chap, but he keeps moaning about those horrible horrible "AIs" that are going to take over everything. I guess it's advertising: keeps his name in the news.
I would prefer people stopped using that silly two letter acronym altogether, but there are so many dishonest people around who find it indispensable, that I don't think there's much chance I can put an end to it.
Some of us don't regard those last two as "Cons".
I don't regard the first one as a "con". What's wrong with paying for goods or services, with giving value for value in an honest transaction? If you want free stuff, you will either get something that is worth what you paid for it, or you will pay in some other way you weren't expecting, and probably won't like.
You're doing it wrong. It's an MMO. If you aren't making it on your own, *JOIN* one of those corporations (or get a bunch of people together and create your own).
Or go solo. It's entirely possible. It's risky and requires a lot of skill, and you'll get blown up a lot at first... but if you're actually good (and combat is Eve is much more skill-based than a casual observer might think) you can easily find, and win, small fights all day long. Yeah, you'll need a good ship (which means money and training time), but the risks are also lower when you're starting out. Be a pirate. Be a mercenary. Take over a wormhole.
You make the rules, man. That's the essence of the game. It's like libertarian paradise. Would I want to live there for real? Hell no! But it's a fun thing, to go out and fight, solo or with a small gang or with a massive battle fleet.
The problem with any kind of grouping or joining a corp in EVE is that it would require you to trust another EVE player, and that is just plain dumb. The first time around, I had people ask me to join them in a mission, then ambush me with their friends to kill my ship and take my stuff. I've heard lots of stories about corporate execs running off with the member's money (how much more real life can you get?). No, these days I play strictly alone, I talk to no one, and I trust no one. It stands for "Everyone Versus Everyone, you know!
Libertarian paradise? I don't think there's anything in the libertarian credo that says you should rip off everyone who's weaker than you are, but that's the rule in EVE. The EVE universe is one of untrammeled barbarism; it's a sort of anti-society because there is no basis for trust or lasting cooperation.
The best review I ever heard of EvE Online was from a guy who said that he wasn't going to pay $15 a month to be chased down and killed by some teenager with daddy issues in the Battlestar Galactica. Pretty much summed it up for me.
When I tried it out, it seemed like their were basically two modes to the game: either incredible boredom in safe space or getting constantly jumped and butt-raped in unsafe space. I guess there was some appeal in trading (kind of a much less satisfying version of the old trading routes in Elite), but it seemed like all the good routes were owned by the corporations and all that was left for the little guys were the scraps. In the end, it's even less rewarding than mining.
In short, EvE Online reminds me way too much of real life. And that's what I play videogames to avoid.
I may have been the guy who wrote that review—I certainly have passed up no opportunities to damn the game whenever the subject was brought up. Yet now I'm playing the thing again. Why?
Well, the number one reason is probably lack of something better to do. Also, I'm retired and now have a surplus of hostility that I can no longer vent on my boss. I had been playing the original Everquest from the day it started until about 9 months ago, except for the 3 or 4 year break I took to play Eve, World of Warcraft, and Aion. None of them held my interest, so I went back to EQ. Then one day, I just had my fill of EQ again. There's no attempt to keep the game improving or growing; Sony just wants to keep hold of the same few thousand players they have who stick around for the sake of nostalgia. I doubt whether Sony has more than one developer assigned to EQ, and his job is to create cut-and-paste "expansions" where the only differences are armor with higher stats that you have to do the same crap missions to get as every other expansions. Oh, and new spell levels that do basically the same thing as the old spells. Nostalgia is a powerful force, but it can only take you so far. Maybe some day I will feel nostalgic for EQ again.
So I popped back into EVE again just to remember how awful it was. And indeed, the awfulness is still there. To judge by the language people use, by the stuff they put in their character bios, etc. the players are still a bunch of 12 year old sociopaths with a fixation on anal rape. About half of them pretend to be girls, but you know they're not. Girls are too smart to play a game like this. (Besides, most females I've met have had a fairly limited interest in anal rape.) But I've been playing the game since early this year. Why in the world would I do that?
There are some very good things that have to be said about the game design of EVE and about the way it's run. First of all, the game is continually being improved, and the expansions are free. To get a new expansion, you just have to pay your monthly fee to pay, and that's it. There's no "free to play" BS where you get nickle and dimed to death for better sword models or whatever; you just pay your fee and you get the service you pay for. Some of the improvements have made the game more playable for me than it was before.
Eve has got a complex and fairly realistic economic simulation going (if you ignore the fact that the economy is propped up by the nightly re-seeding of minerals and NPC drops), so if you are one of those obsessive people with no other life who draw up complicated spreadsheets and calculate how to make money off manufacturing, and spend many, many hours buying and selling at the best prices, then you can be an EVE tycoon. I'm not one of those: I never did spreadsheets for work, and I'm certainly not doing them for a game. Still, it's a role some people like to play. The spaceship tech is well-thought out and complex enough to keep you working at coming up with a perfect "fit" for that cruiser or battleship you're flying. There's a lot of different kinds of things you can do in EVE, and the game doesn't force you to play one
... No matter the "percentage" why is the USA backing any group supporting the aims of "rebel forces"?
That's a very good question, one that I've been asking myself. I'd say that the pressure to intervene probably originates with special interest groups that are pressuring the western governments to "do something". Such interest groups operate as "nonpartisan" or "neutral" NGOs that want to do nothing but help "civilians" who are being killed, maimed, starved, and driven from their homes into refugee camps. I'm thinking of groups like Doctors Without Borders, Catholic Relief Services, Save the Children, etc. Are these groups evil? Well, how can saving children, providing medical aid to wounded "civilians", and feeding refugees be wrong?
Maybe it can't be evil to do these things, but it can sure skew your perspective. What's happening in Syria is a civil war. The whole notion of "civilians" has become ephemeral in these days of irregular warfare, but this is especially true in a civil war: in a civil war, nobody is a civilian. Someone can be a fighter one day, and an "injured civilian" on the next. So when such charitable NGOs provide humanitarian aid to one side in the war, they are taking sides. Even medical treatment and food are weapons in a war; in addition, anyone who is involved in such work is going to see the people they are dealing with as the good guys, and the other side as evil oppressors. So they start churning out press releases and videos of mutilated children; these media carry the implicit or explicit message that the "other side" —and only the other side—is doing evil. And of course we must stop evil.
That's how we arrived at the moral logic that was driving the Obama administration until the Secretary of State accidentally short-circuited the official policy with his off-hand remark that the Syrian government has the option of giving up its chemical weapons. That moral logic, as far as I can tell, was as follows: "The Bad People have killed innocent civilians with cruel weapons of which we disapprove. We must now kill an indefinite number of Bad People with approved weapons so that the moral ledger will once again be balanced." This is, of course, nuts.
It is often hard to accept—especially for Americans—that there is evil in the world that cannot be stopped without doing more evil. That sometimes, the right thing to do is nothing.
What stupid terrorist is using the Internet to coordinate these days?
I mean the NSA and most governments are trying to monitor all internet traffic, and this is widely known, so I mean are their ANY terrorists out their dumb enough to be using the internet still to coordinate their attacks?
Why arrange actual attacks when you can just call your buddy and tell him "the attack on the American nest of spies in Yemen is a go"? You know that the NSA will suck up this "chatter", and evacuate every embassy in the region amid much hyperventilation, thus making the U.S. look like cowards and fools, without costing you more than the price of a throwaway cell phone. Such "surveillance" is completely worthless—in fact, it is a cheap weapon in the hands of our enemies.
This ain't exactly a secret. ... So all the NSA is doing is wasting billions of dollars monitoring the benign traffic of innocents using FUD to continue to fund program.
Right. The organs of the State are self-perpetrating. Their main purpose is to justify their existence and to expand their size and power. One could hope that Congress would institute radical budget cuts on such agencies, but that's a bit like hoping that the Mississippi will start flowing toward Canada. My own hope is that the entire apparatus will become so complex that it collapses of its own weight, but maybe that's just another form of self-deception.
I can't remember the last time I entered a URL manually. What is this, 1994? I often type in a single letter and the browser autocompletes it for me. If I don't know the exact URL, I type something in anyway and Google will look it up for me, at which point it will be saved in my browser history.
I guess you don't log in to your router or your WAPs to change the parameters, huh? Oh yeah, you probably set your wifi security using the button on the WAP. In fact, you're probably the guy with WEP and the default router password from which I'm leeching bandwith right now!
I've got an old iPhone 3GS that won't start up all the way. I dunno why—can't really be bothered with trying to fix it. I've been thinking of selling it (I probably won't trade it in to Apple), but I worry about private data from back when my wife was using the phone still being on it. Is this something I should worry about, or should I just sell the phone? Is there some way to wipe the phone just to make sure, given it's inoperable?
Did you manage to log in? I tried, but couldn't get an account. I gave it an email address (one of my throwaways, natch) and password, and it did nothing but ask me to log in again. No email seems to have been sent. The login I had created didn't work, and trying to create one again produced the same non-result. I gave permissions for that web site to run scripts, but there was a lot of other crap that wanted permissions, so for now I'm not bothering.
No it wasn't. Orwell wrote 1984 after beeing delusional on how the communists behaved during the Spanish civil war, where he inititially fought for the communists.
Partly correct,
If I ignore the "beeing delusional" part of the quote, there's nothing right about it. (Was Orwell deluded? Disillusioned, perhaps? Who knows.) In any case, the assertion that Orwell "fought for the Communists" is an outright falsehood that cries out for correction. As we know, Orwell fought with POUM, which called itself "Marxist" and socialist. However, POUM was in no way part of the Communist International (that is, the Moscow-controlled Stalinist Communist Party), and was in fact screwed over by the Communists—along with every other Spanish Republican force that was not Communist-controlled. In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell made clear just what he thought of the Stalinist rat-bastards.
In his essay Why I Write, Orwell clearly explains that all the "serious work" he had written since the Spanish Civil War in 1936 was "written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism". [1] Therefore, one can look at Nineteen Eighty-Four as a cautionary tale against totalitarianism and in particular the betrayal of a revolution by those claiming to defend or support it. However, as many reviewers and critics have stated, it should not be read as an attack on socialism as a whole, but on totalitarianism and potential totalitarianism.
Also partly incorrect
Really? The guy seems to be making sense here.
His work for the overseas service of the BBC, which at the time was under the control of the Ministry of Information, also played a significant role as the basis for his Ministry of Truth (as he later admitted to Malcolm Muggeridge). The Ministry of Information building, Senate House (University of London), was the Ministry of Truth's architectural inspiration.
Sure, in Nineteen EIghty Four, Minitrue is the official propaganda organ of the Oceanian state. Any official propaganda...er news organization could serve as a model for Orwell's fictional "truth" factory. Are you saying that Minitrue is the BBC, or that the BBC is no better than Minitrue? What an odd thought.
The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four also reflects various aspects of the social and political life of both the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Orwell is reported to have said that the book described what he viewed as the situation in the United Kingdom in 1948, when the British economy was poor, the British Empire was dissolving at the same time as newspapers were reporting its triumphs, and wartime allies such as the USSR were rapidly becoming peacetime foes ('Eurasia is the enemy. Eurasia has always been the enemy').
I'm not following you here. You want me to think that Nineteen Eighty Four is in some way like the Britain of 1948? Well yes...in some ways it is, and it some ways it isn't. What's your point? Are you saying that the book is nothing more than some sort of social critique of 1948 Britain? If so, then you're quite wrong, and I'm sure Orwell never meant to say anything of the sort. The society of Nineteen EIghty Four is indeed impoverished, but material impoverishment is the least of it. Orwell addresses the impoverishment and enslavement of the spirit.
In many ways, Oceania is indeed a future metamorphosis of the British Empire (although Orwell is careful to state that, geographically, it also includes the United States, and that the currency is the dollar). It is, as its name suggests, an essentially naval power. Much of its militarism is focused on veneration for sailors and seafarers, serving on board "floating fortresses" which Orwell evidently conceived of as the next stage in the growth of ever-bigger warships, after the Dreadnoughts of WWI and the aircraft ca
...On the subject of 1984 people often don't realise that the book wasn't George Orwells vision of the future, it was his view of Britain at that time i.e 1948, he just reversed the last two numbers of the year.
How enlightening; I'm afraid I was among the ignorant before reading your insightful contribution. I didn't realize that Britain has really been "Airstrip One", a forward base of Oceania, since 1948. Presumably the United States hasn't existed since then either, because it's part of Oceania, and we've been engaged in perpetual warfare with two mega-states called Eastasia and Eurasia all along. Damn, how could my attention have slipped so much. Or maybe your post is just thoughtless twaddle.
Metadata isn't a buzzword. It's a basic feature of schema design.
I thought metadata was the stuff the government is sucking from the data fire hose. Oh, you're feeling the front of the elephant?
If you are: A. In a technical field B. At all competent at your job Understanding basic kinds of metadata like tags, links, and keys is an incredibly basic part of your job.
Sure, and if you have such an understanding—and any real-world experience at all—you will also comprehend that the chances of a useful result being achieved by random people "tagging" an unspecified universe of data objects with a nonstandard meta-data vocabulary are nil.
A tremendous amount of organized effort has been put into creating meta-data structures that can be used to make documents more useful (in one sense or another) over the last 60 years or so. These efforts have certainly not all resulted in failure, but insofar as they have been useful, they have also caused a great amount of pain . I can't prove it any more than I can prove the sun will rise tomorrow, but I'm certain that metadata will always be hard, and that it will involve pain on the part of its creators and users. Based on my knowledge and experience, I say that it's not bloody likely that somebody is going to invent a metadata scheme that is as easy as "tagging" and is also more than marginally useful. I don't say "impossible". I never say that word. But "not bloody likely" is pretty damn close.
Not technical enough for you? Not feeling the pain yet? Let us depart for a short historic stroll down meta-data lane; if you are so inclined, you may follow along, dear reader.
In the days of yore just after the invention of fire, someone came up with the idea that we could make documents more useful by marking them up with standardized generic tags that would help authors structure what they write, and help readers search documents and maybe even do some automated processing. (This involved rapidly riffling stacks of cards with holes punched in them until you could see moving images.) And behold! SGML actually worked fine within certain niches in highly structured environments (read IBM and The Government). If you were ever so unfortunate as to have to work with SGML, you know that these benefits were purchased by the infliction of acute pain—but these organizations have a very high agonic tolerance, so long as the pain is inflicted only on those who do the actual work. But SGML was a standard generalized markup language sort of like the way the Holy Roman Empire was holy, Roman, and an empire. It wasn't just SGML's extreme lawyerly complexity that prevented a rush to public adoption, but that the vocabularies used by it (as specified in the various Document Type Definitions) were arcane, narrow, and specific to a given set of documents, purposes, and institutions. In short, making it useful involved too much bloody pain to tolerate unless you were someone like Caligula, possessing unlimited freedom to impose suffering on others.
Thus matters stood until something came along that intruded into the cozy conferences of the Document Standards Community and caused its members to feel a cold wind up their shorts: HTML. Hypertext Markup Language was simple, and everyone was starting to use it as the new thing called the World Wide Web came out of nowhere and took over. Maybe I'm making this up, but I saw a genuine fear on the part of the advocates of document metadata standards that everyone would just settle on HTML as the universal markup language. That would, of course, have been an Abomination and a Dreadful Mistake, for HTML wasn't invented by a committee. The galloping of the Four Horsemen could be heard in the distance.
To be fair, there were better reasons for alarm. While HTML sort of looked like a document markup language, it wasn't terribly meaningful as far as document metadata goes. (For some reason, I feel a shudder of revulsion whenever I am tempted to use the word "semantic", so I don't, but it's probably not out of place around about here.) HTML was meta-data on whi
I'm glad that this submission amuses all you trekkies. Of course it's nothing but total crap, but who cares as long as it gets eyeballs on the ads, right? The article consists of a statement of the problem (radiation is bad for people in space), some spastic hand-waving informing us that a solution to the problem will require us to "utilise many cutting edge technologies, such as superconductors and the magnetic confinement techniques used in nuclear fusion", and then employs a thought-terminating cliché: look, Star Trek!
My favorite part is the series of Powerpoint slides under the heading "How it works". This is the kind of crap people email you when you missed a meeting. You can't tell squat from the slides, they don't even mention radiation or high velocity particles, they talk about "plasma" and show colored stuff that is (I must suppose) bumping into other colored stuff. The resolution of the slides is too poor to read a lot of the writing, though I can make out a tiny Enterprise on one of them. (Is the whole thing a joke? Am I the victim of a whoosh?) But hell, you've seen the slides, they must have made sense to everyone at the meeting, so who's going to admit that they appear to be gibberish. Besides, now you can tell everyone you meet that "we have a Star Trek shield and our competitors don't!". You could even post it to Slashdot.
I think "the end of the desktop" thing is over the top myself. There will be some who are happy just using tablets and phones, but there will still be plenty of people who need the capabilities of a desktop. This includes anyone with serious business or technical and creative needs (word processing, spreadsheets, graphics creation, sound processing, and dozens of other things I can't think of in 3 seconds). Probably, whoever thought of the "desktop is going away" slogan was a developer on the Windows 8 team at the time.
That being said, I think that Android on the desktop is a great idea. Right now, the number of Android apps I'd want to use on the desktop is pretty limited, but I see enormous promise here for simple computing. Simple computing that even normal grandpas and grandmas can use without having conniption fits. (I'm actually a triple grandpa, but nobody ever said I was normal.)
Now, consider the opportunity such an OS on the desktop presents to app developers. Please, please, somebody write a word composition program that's so simple normal people will want to use it, and be able to use it correctly. (MS Word fails on both counts.). Something that doesn't have its own programming language built into it so it's not a notorious virus vector. Something like an up-to-date MacWrite. And that's just the start. A simple drawing and painting program. A simple spreadsheet. And dozens of more things I can't think of in 3 seconds.
In other words, we have here a chance to start over and learn from the mistakes of the past. And also, a chance to return to the past, when people liked their computers.
I'd want it to be a dual-boot proposition: Android and Windows 7. (Hmm. Could Windows be run inside Android on a virtual machine? Somehow, this seems like a deliciously evil idea, though I have no idea if it's technically feasible.) I do expect that Android will be adapted so that it can be operated with a mouse. I spent a couple of weeks sick in bed recently with nothing but my Nexus tablet for company, and I got really really fed up with the touch interface. Every time I move my hands near the damn thing, it does something random. It was such a relief to get my mouse back. Desktop Android is an idea whose time has come. Though the desktop is not nearly dead, Windows is dead—in the sense that Windows 7 is the last Microsoft OS that matters. There's simply no reason to ever have another one. MS has demonstrated the truth of this by releasing Windows 8.
Of course, the NSA probably can figure out your SS#, birthdate, birthplace, and similar information without going to any trouble. But the point is that you can often be significantly profiled on a social network even if you never post anything and only accept friend requests from people you know.
The NSA can have anything it wants. First of all, they are not in the habit of asking permission, and they simply don't tell anyone what they are doing. Second, there have been perfectly legal ways for the government to buy your data for as long as marketing data has been kept and sold. It's perfectly legal for a private corp to buy your purchase history (via a credit card), the data that Google has mined out of your "free" email service, your transactions with any vendor who has a low integrity threshold (who doesn't?) So what keeps the government from buying it also? Nothing at all. If I were doing it, I'd set up a front corporation (like "Air America" of CIA fame) to buy the data so I don't get screaming headlines.
The reason for all the hyperventilation is that three things have happened: agencies who lack the subtlety of NSA have gotten into the market, and they've done it directly—that is, they've outright seized the data instead of using the kinder gentler approach of greasing corporate palms. Third, the amount of data they have sucked has gotten so huge that it is impossible to manage without an army of low-level clerks. This is why an Army private and a contracted data massager can give the whole show away. With this many people involved, you are going to have leaks. I am surprised that there have been only two.
I wonder. In order to fully capitalize on the amount of data they are collecting on us, will it be necessary for all of us to be employed by the US government as DB admins? Welcome to the new Greece.
South America South Africa
Why would you move to San Antonio, do you think it's exempt from the NSA or something? lol
Joining sexaholics... well that might distract them for while and provide you with pleasant unintentional consequences.
You think those places are "safe" from the NSA? You are naive. This is global surveillance.
Actually, privacy isn't mentioned in the Bill of Rights at all. It has been inferred though not explicitly mentioned.
The "right to privacy" is indeed an inference not supported by the letter of the law. Freedom from unreasonable search and seizure is mentioned. But you all seem to have forgotten that our dear congress have given away that right—along with habeas corpus in the frenzy of legislation that follow 9-11. So why are you surprised when the government makes use of its duly legislated powers?
Other than astronauts and zombie bunkers, I don't see the appeal. ...
I'm afraid the zombie bunker market is non-viable. Why buy an expensive food printer and cartridges when you can buy my recently published 101 Ways to Cook a Zombie for $90 at any reputable book store? Trust me, it's a bargain!
People need to stop looking down on blue collar jobs, and stop treating "going to college" as the highest honor they can bestow upon on themselves. There are way, way, way too many people going to college and doing pointless and ultimately useless degrees. ...
You're completely right. It's one fundamental failure of our society: not only is our primary educational system broken because it is adjusted so that everyone can be successful, it is broken because success is defined as sending everyone to college. The colleges and universities are broken because everyone is expected to get at least a B.A. in psychology—and Institutions of Higher Learning can only continue to collect their exorbitant tuition if most students are successful, at least in this limited sense. The result is a general failure to educate, a tremendous waste of time and resources. Students aren't taught what they need to know, they are guided around an obstacle course that will get them certified as...well, someone who has navigated the obstacle course.
Yes, there are students who have a serious purpose for attending college (and it's not just getting a paper that says "MBA: Pay me lots of money" on it). In the past, one such purpose was to study one of the traditional "humanities" fields, such as philosophy, history, or literature. I don't know if anybody goes to college any more for such a reason—that is, because they recognize learning as having a value all its own. I don't think universities or our society even pretend to believe this anymore. That's a pity; for there are a few, a very few, people who are born to be scholars. A healthy culture values scholars almost as much as plumbers. Our present culture values neither. Maybe it values nothing of worth.
Today, the few exceptions to the general practice of just navigating the four year academic obstacle course are people who go to college to study physics or another science, or a branch of engineering. If they succeed, it is because they understood that they learning involves work, and that because a B.A. or B.S. is worthless, they must get an advanced degree in their specialty, maybe even a Ph.D. On the other hand, there are also community colleges that have programs that teach a trade—such as electrician, beautician, welder, or auto mechanic. Some students buck the "four year degree" pressure, and learn something useful—useful both to them and to society. But all these are exceptions: in most cases, "going to college" is all about having been to college. It's about being able to say you've gone through the correct motions, and now you deserve a prestigious job.
I had a wonderful handyman who can do just about anything, but has a terrible self-image partly because he never went to college. He thinks he's an idiot. Due to his low self estimation, he made some serious errors in judgment in his life. (He just got sent to jail for something he did in 2004. Long story.) While he was working for me, he opened up to me and told me about how he felt. I told him that there are many different kinds of intelligence; one man is good at academic study, another has smart hands. "Your brain controls your hands", I told him. "You have smart hands, so your brain is smart too." It seemed to help. And I didn't just say it to make him feel better; I said it because it's true.
I remember it in the 1960s. Robots (or machines) have certainly replaced some jobs, or changed them - we no longer have the office typing pool for instance. However for some jobs it is going to be hard to replace humans: hospital nurses, kindergarten teachers for instance.
Congratulations—my memory of the 60s is remarkably vague. True, we don't have typing pools anymore—we have lots of drones sitting in front of computers making PowerPoint slides. Judging from the past, automation causes certain types of work to become obsolete, but it creates new categories of work. And the new jobs aren't necessarily any more meaningful than the ones they replaced. I don't think that is going to change, even if you say "AI" over and over again.
You've been smoking too much weed again.
This was predicted back in the 1930s, too. How did that work out for them?
It was predicted in the 1960s too. I don't know which idiot futurists were pushing the notion, but I believed it. I was sure that the big problem of the future (the 1970s, I guess) would be an excess of leisure time, foisted upon us by automation. Didn't happen though, did it?
Anybody can write an article like this. And convince anyone who smokes enough weed.
and they're slashing workforce? wtf? Is this a sudden dive in quality or is the better tech being used to reduce the number of developers/artists needed? They guy that did the meshes for Metroid Prime spent a month on optimization for the final boss alone. That's not really needed when you've got 8 gigs of ram I suppose.
Ah, young grasshoper, thou hast evidently not learned the subtleties of Scientific Management. Members of this group use a very special sort of language. That is, it's sort of a language, composed of technical terms (a.k.a. "jargon"). To quote TFA:
In recent weeks, EA has aligned all elements of its organizational structure behind priorities in new technologies and mobile.
The terms in bold are technical terms that thou might mistake for English. I shall translate them into normal English for thee, so you can fully understand that they are not English:
By the way, I did not comprehend your references to "Metroid Prime" and "8 gigs". Perhaps I am missing one of your little jokes again, ha ha?
The only thing that could doom Microsoft (not Windows) is the lack of necessity for a new operating system. Microsoft makes money selling Windows, so they NEED to release new versions every few years. The need for a new operating system might not be a pressing issue for the end user and this will slow down the demand for new versions of Windows, not Windows itself.
What necessity to sell new OSs? MS has gotten us to the point where we will pay for a new OS whenever we buy (or make) a new PC. Wouldn't it be an advantage to them to keep charging the same amount of money for Windows 7 for the next 20 years? Think of the development and support savings! There's more than simple sales revenue behind the release of Windows 8. There is a deep, incredibly complex marketing scheme that no one will ever understand—including the million monkeys in Steve Ballmer's basement who invented it.