How about we still vote for people, but instead of voting for people to represent geographical areas, we vote for people to sit on committees for specific issues. This eliminates the current problem that lobbyists have more influence on small issues which are below the noise floor of votes.
How are you sure there's choice in human intelligence? Yes, you can 'decide' to touch fire anyway if you want. But why did you want to? To put out the fire? To make a point? All you've shown is that your program is more complex than "fire == pain"; that whatever is static in your program is at a higher level*. Granted, the static parts of game AIs are usually far less general, but it's a difference of amount, not kind.
* Though in some sense the only invariant in the human brain is physics, it's probably not necessary to simulate intelligence at such a low level to be convincing. You could go at least as high as neurons and their interactions, and possibly even to the level of subsystems like vision, motor coordination, etc. Much of the structure and function of your brain is static.
Those patents which wholly define the market that you're in do in fact grant a monopoly over the entire market you're in. If I got a patent on "a method for offsetting the cost of bread manufacture, by locating a plurality of interested humans, conveying the bread to the aforementioned humans, receiving from each in return a token or tokens of generally recognized value, and entreating the owners of bread manufacturing equipment and supplies and bread manufacturing laborers to transfer their ownership to, or perform their labor on behalf of, some legally recognized entity in return for pluralities of the aforementioned tokens." then I would have a de jure monopoly on bread manufacture. The same applies if I get a patent for online video rental. And in the case of Netflix, they probably have a de facto monopoly as well.
Limiting the discussion to software patents, here's how I'd fix the USPTO:
First, I'd increase the amount of detail required in software patents. Basically you'd need an actual implementation, in source or binary form. There would be a corresponding increase in the similarity required for an act of patent infringement. Only very limited, fair use of the patent would be allowed.
To address the problem of independent inventions of the same thing, I'd limit the definition patent infringement to instances where the implementation itself was copied, almost verbatim, though even a small amount of copying would be infringement. This would also make it very difficult to unknowingly infringe, and thus feasible to protect yourself legally.
To make the patent system more accessible to small players (and cut costs), I'd reduce the filing fees and simplify the process. I'd automate the examination process, so that all patents were granted by default. And I would grant patents to everyone, as soon as they fixed their implementation into durable media. Actually filing for patent protection would only be necessary to bring suit.
I'd change the term of patents to 14 years. Hopefully I could prevent Congress from later retroactively expanding the term to 28 years, inventor's life + 50 years, inventor's life + 70 years, etc. Maybe a more strict interpretation of "limited times" should apply.
Finally, I'd change the name of software patents to something that more closely reflects the exclusive right they grant. Something like "copy-ability" or "duplicate-right".
Yes, showing that something is prior art is difficult and expensive. Which is a huge problem: There's no incentive for the inventor to find prior art, as it would limit his patent. There's no incentive for the USPTO to find prior art, as it makes them less "productive" (fewer patents / dollar). Which means that the burden of proof is on every programmer. We all must be able to prove in court at any time that any of the probably thousands of patents we unknowingly violate are invalid due to prior art. Do we really want to give U.S. programmers such a heavy burden? If this keeps up, we'll need more insurance than doctors.
Well the patent doesn't tell you how to do the client-server part either. All it says is that client and server code is needed (duh), and that if you actually do figure out how to write it, you're SOL, because the government granted Amazon a monopoly on it.
In other words, in practice, software patents really only protect the obvious part. Any idiot could look at one-click shopping and think, "I bet the browser is displaying it, and sending a request to the server with an identifier, etc." In contrast to physical objects, for software, the block diagram is self-evident, but useless, because the hard part is what's inside the boxes. You don't disclose the hard part in software patents.
I'd be far less opposed to software patents if they required a working implementation, as source code, that would be made public. Then they would actually succeed at their goal of bringing the knowledge out into the open, and they would automatically become less broad. Of course in that case they would be just like copyright, but with a requirement for public release and government storage of source code, so we ought to just ditch them in favor of copyright. Or we could take a shortcut, and instead of reforming software patents, abolish them, leaving copyright in force.
To take the paranoid view: maybe they want you using the built-in audio because then you need to disassemble your television to get an analog but not acoustic copy.
I'd venture a guess that chess is like Tic-Tac-Toe, in that optimal players would always draw. Since "mate in X" means there's no possible way to escape, I doubt the computer could show a count until you make your first mistake (probably in one or two moves).
Most things in the real world don't fit neatly into a discrete state space with a low branching factor. Board games are an exception. I fully admit this is heuristic, but I think it's somewhat unlikely to achieve an intelligence we would recognize as human with such a drastically different implementation. I'm not saying we can't do it, I'm saying I doubt we can do it with really fast graph search.
A key distinction between Linus's comments and most Slashdot comments is that Linus's comments get quoted in mainstream news articles about Linux, while most of ours won't get read by anyone who hasn't already learned about the situation and formed an opinion.
The EETimes article is an identical copy of the Information Week one. But I am getting pretty sick and tired of online news sources not linking to their sources. Yes, it means I'll leave your site for the primary source, but I'm much more likely to come back later.
Well if they succeed in calling it DCE, I propose the backronym "Digital Consumer Extortion". He's saying HBO will hold back entertainment from people unless they let HBO take a proverbial baseball bat to their MythTV boxes, put rootkits on their PCs, cripple their DVD players, etc. Granted it's not really extortion, but if the game is to spin terms as much as humanly possible, we can play too. It's certainly closer to extortion than enablement.
Hmm, couldn't you just give the simulator a source of entropy, such as a hardware random number generator? Or perhaps implement the simulator in an FPGA, and then overclock it to the point where it's just a little finicky?
Given the difficulty of distinguishing between pseudo-random and truly random numbers, I don't think that would even be necessary. I would be very surprised if we made a brain simulator with a real entropy source, which was creative, and then replaced that with a pseudo-random number generator, and the creativity evaporated.
The idea that a system which can describe arithmetic on the natural numbers can't "describe itself" has a very precise mathematical meaning. In essence, such a system can't prove every true statement about itself, without being inconsistent. This is very distant from the human concept of understanding something. Every true statement about even the smallest fleck of dust would take lifetimes to say. So in some sense, we may not be able to know every true statement about the human brain. But that does not place a practical limit on our ability to "understand" it, in the everyday sense of the word.
It's unlikely in the extreme that Goedel's theorem is wrong; for a good 10 years after it was published, half the mathematicians in the world were trying to disprove it, because it was a proof that their ultimate goal was impossible. It is, however, highly likely that in many of the instances where it has been extended to talk about things other than formal logic systems, it has been misapplied.
Unlikely, given that we are really no where close to even understanding completely everything about our complex brains.
Do we even want to, wouldn't that take away some of the mystery behind humans. Afterall if we can figure ourselves out then doesn't that mean that we aren't really all that complex?
wouldn't that also give us perfect explanations of people's actions making situations predictable violating free will?
afterall if society is ultimately chaotic in terms of our understanding, then wouldn't this be the ultimate control? No, even a "perfect" simulation of a human brain wouldn't be very useful in predicting actions. The brain is a chaotic system. If someone scanned your brain into a computer, even the tiniest imperfection in the scan would cause the thoughts to diverge quickly. And our current understanding of physics is that a "perfect" scan would be impossible. So your "free will" is safe in practice, and even may be protected by theory. Even if it is just an illusory concept with no ability to explain any experimental result.
That's ignoring senses, as well. A simulation of your brain would not have exactly the same sensory input as you do, once you left the clinic, so it's predictive power would be extremely limited. Not much better than if I were to simply ask you what you would do in some hypothetical situation: your prediction wouldn't be very accurate to what you would actually do if the situation occurred.
And this certainly wouldn't pave the way for some sort of Orwellian control of society. Let's face it, even if you could build brain simulators that could perfectly predict everyone's actions, and found a way to exploit this, it would certainly be cheaper to just buy a bunch of guns and control societies the old-fashioned way.
As for taking away mystery and making us seem less complex, that's the whole point of science, and yes, we want to do it. If you want to feel like some mysterious being at the center of the universe, you're in the wrong place. Religion is down the hall to your left.
The benefit per simultaneous operations is not necessarily monotonically decreasing.
Consider a loop with a medium-sized body, and iterations mostly independent. If there are enough simultaneous operations allowed to schedule multiple iterations through the loop at once, the loop could potentially run that many times faster. Now, with current designs, there aren't that many slots, and even if there were, the ISA makes it difficult to express this in a way that's useful to the processor. All we can do is OpenMP-like stuff where the programmer explicitly tells the runtime system to try to divide the loop between multiple threads. There's a lot of overhead, both in terms of context switching and programmer time.
If, however, a different paradigm for an ISA can make it easier for compilers to communicate the dependencies to the processors, then the processors will be able to take advantage of that parallelism much more.
Yes. Clearly that would be morally wrong, but it's not illegal unless the ex signed an NDA (breach of contract) or the person in question wasn't provably gay (libel, and the truth defense would fail). There's no law against being an asshole or telling secrets, and that's probably for the best.
Actually, it's pretty trivial to prove there is no slowest algorithm. Given any algorithm, you could run it on an emulator that would make it slower. (I wonder how may recursions of that it takes to get a 1 Hz CPU?)
Google can hardly be blamed that the privacy rights for corporations (trade secret protection) are (in some cases, e.g. not financial) more strongly codified in law than those for humans.
I'd really love to see a Firefox extension that organizes bookmarks in this way. Within every bookmark folder, every subfolder and then every bookmark would be sorted in order of descending use count. Optional, of course, to allow for people who remember exactly where each bookmark is in the list. This would also be a good idea for the Start menu, which is currently about as ugly as it gets (programs are alphabetically by company name, followed by more programs arranged by date of install, still hidden behind their company name, ugh).
Actually, the first stage of the Falcon is intended to be reusable. Granted it doesn't have a quick turnaround time, but if you have lots of them in the queue, that doesn't matter very much.
Saying SpaceShipOne succeeded in being reusable while the shuttle failed is a bit like saying my Prius is more fuel-efficient than an M-1 tank. Well yes, but the tank has to do a lot more.
Slashdot Mirror
How about we still vote for people, but instead of voting for people to represent geographical areas, we vote for people to sit on committees for specific issues. This eliminates the current problem that lobbyists have more influence on small issues which are below the noise floor of votes.
How are you sure there's choice in human intelligence? Yes, you can 'decide' to touch fire anyway if you want. But why did you want to? To put out the fire? To make a point? All you've shown is that your program is more complex than "fire == pain"; that whatever is static in your program is at a higher level*. Granted, the static parts of game AIs are usually far less general, but it's a difference of amount, not kind.
* Though in some sense the only invariant in the human brain is physics, it's probably not necessary to simulate intelligence at such a low level to be convincing. You could go at least as high as neurons and their interactions, and possibly even to the level of subsystems like vision, motor coordination, etc. Much of the structure and function of your brain is static.
Those patents which wholly define the market that you're in do in fact grant a monopoly over the entire market you're in. If I got a patent on "a method for offsetting the cost of bread manufacture, by locating a plurality of interested humans, conveying the bread to the aforementioned humans, receiving from each in return a token or tokens of generally recognized value, and entreating the owners of bread manufacturing equipment and supplies and bread manufacturing laborers to transfer their ownership to, or perform their labor on behalf of, some legally recognized entity in return for pluralities of the aforementioned tokens." then I would have a de jure monopoly on bread manufacture. The same applies if I get a patent for online video rental. And in the case of Netflix, they probably have a de facto monopoly as well.
Limiting the discussion to software patents, here's how I'd fix the USPTO:
First, I'd increase the amount of detail required in software patents. Basically you'd need an actual implementation, in source or binary form. There would be a corresponding increase in the similarity required for an act of patent infringement. Only very limited, fair use of the patent would be allowed.
To address the problem of independent inventions of the same thing, I'd limit the definition patent infringement to instances where the implementation itself was copied, almost verbatim, though even a small amount of copying would be infringement. This would also make it very difficult to unknowingly infringe, and thus feasible to protect yourself legally.
To make the patent system more accessible to small players (and cut costs), I'd reduce the filing fees and simplify the process. I'd automate the examination process, so that all patents were granted by default. And I would grant patents to everyone, as soon as they fixed their implementation into durable media. Actually filing for patent protection would only be necessary to bring suit.
I'd change the term of patents to 14 years. Hopefully I could prevent Congress from later retroactively expanding the term to 28 years, inventor's life + 50 years, inventor's life + 70 years, etc. Maybe a more strict interpretation of "limited times" should apply.
Finally, I'd change the name of software patents to something that more closely reflects the exclusive right they grant. Something like "copy-ability" or "duplicate-right".
Heh, let's do it like we do jury duty. Joe Schmoe for President!
Yes, showing that something is prior art is difficult and expensive. Which is a huge problem: There's no incentive for the inventor to find prior art, as it would limit his patent. There's no incentive for the USPTO to find prior art, as it makes them less "productive" (fewer patents / dollar). Which means that the burden of proof is on every programmer. We all must be able to prove in court at any time that any of the probably thousands of patents we unknowingly violate are invalid due to prior art. Do we really want to give U.S. programmers such a heavy burden? If this keeps up, we'll need more insurance than doctors.
Well the patent doesn't tell you how to do the client-server part either. All it says is that client and server code is needed (duh), and that if you actually do figure out how to write it, you're SOL, because the government granted Amazon a monopoly on it.
In other words, in practice, software patents really only protect the obvious part. Any idiot could look at one-click shopping and think, "I bet the browser is displaying it, and sending a request to the server with an identifier, etc." In contrast to physical objects, for software, the block diagram is self-evident, but useless, because the hard part is what's inside the boxes. You don't disclose the hard part in software patents.
I'd be far less opposed to software patents if they required a working implementation, as source code, that would be made public. Then they would actually succeed at their goal of bringing the knowledge out into the open, and they would automatically become less broad. Of course in that case they would be just like copyright, but with a requirement for public release and government storage of source code, so we ought to just ditch them in favor of copyright. Or we could take a shortcut, and instead of reforming software patents, abolish them, leaving copyright in force.
Presumably he means the wireless communication is over the 2.4GHz band.
To take the paranoid view: maybe they want you using the built-in audio because then you need to disassemble your television to get an analog but not acoustic copy.
I'd venture a guess that chess is like Tic-Tac-Toe, in that optimal players would always draw. Since "mate in X" means there's no possible way to escape, I doubt the computer could show a count until you make your first mistake (probably in one or two moves).
Most things in the real world don't fit neatly into a discrete state space with a low branching factor. Board games are an exception. I fully admit this is heuristic, but I think it's somewhat unlikely to achieve an intelligence we would recognize as human with such a drastically different implementation. I'm not saying we can't do it, I'm saying I doubt we can do it with really fast graph search.
A key distinction between Linus's comments and most Slashdot comments is that Linus's comments get quoted in mainstream news articles about Linux, while most of ours won't get read by anyone who hasn't already learned about the situation and formed an opinion.
The EETimes article is an identical copy of the Information Week one. But I am getting pretty sick and tired of online news sources not linking to their sources. Yes, it means I'll leave your site for the primary source, but I'm much more likely to come back later.
Well if they succeed in calling it DCE, I propose the backronym "Digital Consumer Extortion". He's saying HBO will hold back entertainment from people unless they let HBO take a proverbial baseball bat to their MythTV boxes, put rootkits on their PCs, cripple their DVD players, etc. Granted it's not really extortion, but if the game is to spin terms as much as humanly possible, we can play too. It's certainly closer to extortion than enablement.
Hmm, couldn't you just give the simulator a source of entropy, such as a hardware random number generator? Or perhaps implement the simulator in an FPGA, and then overclock it to the point where it's just a little finicky?
Given the difficulty of distinguishing between pseudo-random and truly random numbers, I don't think that would even be necessary. I would be very surprised if we made a brain simulator with a real entropy source, which was creative, and then replaced that with a pseudo-random number generator, and the creativity evaporated.
The idea that a system which can describe arithmetic on the natural numbers can't "describe itself" has a very precise mathematical meaning. In essence, such a system can't prove every true statement about itself, without being inconsistent. This is very distant from the human concept of understanding something. Every true statement about even the smallest fleck of dust would take lifetimes to say. So in some sense, we may not be able to know every true statement about the human brain. But that does not place a practical limit on our ability to "understand" it, in the everyday sense of the word.
It's unlikely in the extreme that Goedel's theorem is wrong; for a good 10 years after it was published, half the mathematicians in the world were trying to disprove it, because it was a proof that their ultimate goal was impossible. It is, however, highly likely that in many of the instances where it has been extended to talk about things other than formal logic systems, it has been misapplied.
Do we even want to, wouldn't that take away some of the mystery behind humans. Afterall if we can figure ourselves out then doesn't that mean that we aren't really all that complex?
wouldn't that also give us perfect explanations of people's actions making situations predictable violating free will?
afterall if society is ultimately chaotic in terms of our understanding, then wouldn't this be the ultimate control? No, even a "perfect" simulation of a human brain wouldn't be very useful in predicting actions. The brain is a chaotic system. If someone scanned your brain into a computer, even the tiniest imperfection in the scan would cause the thoughts to diverge quickly. And our current understanding of physics is that a "perfect" scan would be impossible. So your "free will" is safe in practice, and even may be protected by theory. Even if it is just an illusory concept with no ability to explain any experimental result.
That's ignoring senses, as well. A simulation of your brain would not have exactly the same sensory input as you do, once you left the clinic, so it's predictive power would be extremely limited. Not much better than if I were to simply ask you what you would do in some hypothetical situation: your prediction wouldn't be very accurate to what you would actually do if the situation occurred.
And this certainly wouldn't pave the way for some sort of Orwellian control of society. Let's face it, even if you could build brain simulators that could perfectly predict everyone's actions, and found a way to exploit this, it would certainly be cheaper to just buy a bunch of guns and control societies the old-fashioned way.
As for taking away mystery and making us seem less complex, that's the whole point of science, and yes, we want to do it. If you want to feel like some mysterious being at the center of the universe, you're in the wrong place. Religion is down the hall to your left.
The benefit per simultaneous operations is not necessarily monotonically decreasing.
Consider a loop with a medium-sized body, and iterations mostly independent. If there are enough simultaneous operations allowed to schedule multiple iterations through the loop at once, the loop could potentially run that many times faster. Now, with current designs, there aren't that many slots, and even if there were, the ISA makes it difficult to express this in a way that's useful to the processor. All we can do is OpenMP-like stuff where the programmer explicitly tells the runtime system to try to divide the loop between multiple threads. There's a lot of overhead, both in terms of context switching and programmer time.
If, however, a different paradigm for an ISA can make it easier for compilers to communicate the dependencies to the processors, then the processors will be able to take advantage of that parallelism much more.
Yes. Clearly that would be morally wrong, but it's not illegal unless the ex signed an NDA (breach of contract) or the person in question wasn't provably gay (libel, and the truth defense would fail). There's no law against being an asshole or telling secrets, and that's probably for the best.
Actually, it's pretty trivial to prove there is no slowest algorithm. Given any algorithm, you could run it on an emulator that would make it slower. (I wonder how may recursions of that it takes to get a 1 Hz CPU?)
Could you design an airplane without a basic knowledge of sheet metal fabrication? I think not.
Google can hardly be blamed that the privacy rights for corporations (trade secret protection) are (in some cases, e.g. not financial) more strongly codified in law than those for humans.
I'd really love to see a Firefox extension that organizes bookmarks in this way. Within every bookmark folder, every subfolder and then every bookmark would be sorted in order of descending use count. Optional, of course, to allow for people who remember exactly where each bookmark is in the list. This would also be a good idea for the Start menu, which is currently about as ugly as it gets (programs are alphabetically by company name, followed by more programs arranged by date of install, still hidden behind their company name, ugh).
Actually, the first stage of the Falcon is intended to be reusable. Granted it doesn't have a quick turnaround time, but if you have lots of them in the queue, that doesn't matter very much.
Saying SpaceShipOne succeeded in being reusable while the shuttle failed is a bit like saying my Prius is more fuel-efficient than an M-1 tank. Well yes, but the tank has to do a lot more.
No, it's not quick, in the sense that it may take a few launches before it becomes reliable and cheap.