I know, I was just saying that what here in US sounds ridiculous in some parts of the world is just everyday business. Americans are outraged that the guy got arrested but someone from China or Russia is probably wondering why this is even on the news...
I was looked down upon Slashdot, they modded me to 0. In U.S. people grow up with the certain expectations, one them is that the U.S. military is noble/good/righteous. Talking about GIs blowing civilians up will end up making you a troll, a U.S. hater, a traitor and so on in most circles...
I think one has to be prepared to deal with reality and look at it as objectively as possible. In other words those videos shown are true, they are not computer simulations, those are not actors, those things are happening. Trying to hide them is like trying to hide abuse and lies, it comes up eventually one way or the other, in this case the Internet makes it happen very easy. Does this mean that all the soldiers are bad evil monsters - of course not. But some of them are and we have to face it.
They do that in my country. They also use torture there. Would you really want the police to wear masks, because they would love the idea. "Oh, look who came into the doughnut shop? Is it the robbers or is it the police, the black ski masks just look so similar..."
What the military wants is robots. They want the soldiers to kill well when told and not think a second about it, but they also want them not kill too much and not get too excited. The training is supposed to instill just the right kind of discipline.
Also, what we have here is the Pentagon faced with the uncontrollable media such as blogs and the Internet. Traditionally someone always controls the media (it could be just the media bosses themselves or the government) at no time in the past could a regular Joe broadcast his videos, ideas or other work to anyone in the world. That has changed and the government doesn't know how to deal with it (kidnapping everyone and putting them on an air-CIA flight to Romania might not work as well).
Good point. The videos are really shattering the image of the "brave and noble U.S. GI". The fact that a lot of saddists who have no feelings or any regard for human suffering are attracted to the volunteer armed forces is no surprise. The military ever since the Vietnam era has been a dumping ground for troubled teenagers. It used to be the case that the teenage boys who would get into trouble with the law in small towns would be given the choice of "army or jail". The discipline and boot camp can only do so much, if the core is rotten, no boot camp is going to change that. I think that besides loosing support for the war, the Pentagon is afraid that these video will actually attract more people like that into the Army.
Where else could a saddist have chance to get their hands on a large caliber machine gun, fly through the air and blow peoples' heads off, while getting cheered by comarades -- "Oh fuck! Good job, hehe, you completely dismembered him!"
There is no specific policy that bans troops from posting graphic material.
But they are paying all these people money to monitor what has been posted...? If they are honest in saying that such stuff is not banned what are they doing when they find the next video with U.S. soldiers blowing up Iraqis? Send them threats? Kidnap them, drug them, put them on a plane and fly them to Romania for torture?
The goverment is used to controlling the media (directly or indirectly) but when faced with blogging and YouTube it is fighting a losing battle.../sorry Uncle Sam...;-(
Yeah right, technical "mumbo jumbo" doesn't matter in a potential million dollar suit that deal with BT (technology), internet (technology), ISPs and DHCP (oh wow! more technologies) and so on. We are not talking about stealing oranges from the produce section here...
When it comes to trial it is the "technical mumbo jumbo" that makes all the difference. One cannot show intent just by looking at the IP and the computer, one has to get into someone's head which is impossible. Therefore it will come down to "mumbo jumbo" like "let's see who had this IP at such and such a time", "let's see how MPAA determined what exact file was being uploaded?", "how reliable is that?" and so on...
What does it matter if I think copying stuff is okay. Why get so personal all of the sudden, I am not on trial here, Mr. Hogan is, ask him what he thinks...
How much of the file does one have to upload to be "guilty". The range goes from a byte to the full size. Will
uploading 1 byte do it, how about 1MB, or 10MB? Just wondering what chunk of the mpeg stream which is itself compressed using some archive is enough for them to point to and say "we have a record of you uploading this movie, pay us teh money".
If there is a hard limit there are probably ways to distribute the downloading such that no single client will ever upload anything except the smallest possible chunk of any file. They might download it, but will only advertise that specific chunk for uploading. To start with, the initial upload will obviously have to provide the whole file but then at the next level the file can be chunked into progressively smaller pieces until quickly the cut-off chunk size is achieved...
I second that, my friend who is a tech support guy fixes his own transmission. Just rents all the expensive tools for a day and goes at it. His car works fine and he saves big bucks on it. Would I trust my car to him? - probably not. But it works well enough for him.
Solar pannels might just work better. Besides with solar if you have an excess you can pump it back into the grid which is just the perfect cure during the high power demand scorching heat weather.
I agree with the hardware limitations and funding but only up to a point. I think today, even if you give enough funding and or give group of leading AI researchers a supercomputer, they will probably not produce anything qualitatively different than what can be produced with a workstation. In other words if you dream up a super computer that is 10x faster and bigger than what we have, I don't think we'll know how to go about simulating a brain. We know very well how a neuron works but simply putting together billions and billions of them won't make a brain, they have to already be connected somehow. In other words a child's brain is not a random bunch of neurons, there is already a very complicated organization. We still don't know for example how the brain stores long term memories, or what consciousness is and so on.
If you read my post I was comparing the current state of affairs in AI to what was predicted in the 60s and I was just saying that nothing close to those expectations materialized.
What does the lightbulb has to do with it? I would consider the LED as a pretty important improvement on the lightbulb. It consumes a lot less power but it is just too expensive of a technology now. Nothing similar to that kind of achievemnt in AI yet.
Our definition of what constitutes AI changes as we solve AI problems I would disagree with that. The Turing test in is a pretty good benchmark of AI. In general an AI system can be of 4 types:
I. Systems that _think_ like humans
II. Systems that _act_ like humans
III. Systems that _think_ rationally
IV. Systems that _act_ rationally
At least that's what I learned in school. So we do have a pretty good understanding of what AI should be. Some of these types are more attainable than others but none have been attained. By any definition we are still very far from having AI.
Yeah they are all pretty bad but after enough tries I "learned" the system of my grocery store of choice and now I can move pretty quickly through self-checkout. Send me to a different store and I'll probably be lost again...
No need to worry. In the 60's they were sure that by 2006 robots would have surpassed humans and enslaved us all. So how many human-like robots have you seen on your way to work lately? I'll help -- None! That was my question to this professor who wanted to tell me that AI is really really exciting and I should work in that field. AI reseach is still pretty much stuck in the 80s. Nothing earth shattering has occurred since then, just small improvement here and there.
The problem is also mostly with the expectations people have of computers. Everyone wants computers to return deterministic and easily tracable results. For example if I want a value from a database I want to issue a query and have the value returned. I don't want a system that would return it faster but only with 80% of correctness, I don't want any "fuzziness" only exact numbers. In other words people would rather have computers do what computers are doing - calculating stuff fast and exactly, they don't want computers to really act like humans. I think subconsciously we will just never allow computers to reach a human level of soffistication and thus they will probably never surpass us.
On the other hand, what would rather happen is that we will slowly integrate machines into ourselves - litteraly. As soon as the baby is born we will tag it with an RFID, we will implant sensors for infrared vision, ultrasound, we will inject nanoparticles to boost the immune system. In other words I see a cyborg future were we become one with the machines. If anything or anyone will destroy us it will only by ourselves, at the same time if anything helps us prosper, it will also be ourselves. The future is (mostly - short of a big meteorite hitting us) in our hands...
"I would spend more time descussing other options. Going one way or the other. Not 2 products that do the same thing but differently." It seems that unless Matlab has some sort of relatively cheap VM for their code (don't think they do) then this company should just switch to C++ right way if they want to release a product and make money off of it. But I don't think that's the right answer. You mentioned how there will be different bugs and how one group will get a fast change and the other will get a slow change. But it will not be random (as in %50 of the time C++ team get something done fast and 50% Matlab team gets something done faster)! In reality the Matlab team will always be ahead of the C++ team. According to the post it already is! That means that C++ will just have to catch up to the Matlab team. Which is not too bad. The Matlab team will always be in charge of implementing new features, testing the concept, verifying the Math. They will spit out the results then the C++ team will just have to match it. Besides Matlab is common enough of a skill if you know where to look for those people
"nobody would buy or create a botnet of a thousand machines or more simply to vandalize Wikipedia."
Unless you happen to run for Senate and Wikipedia contains true (or false) embarrasing details from your past and your competitor is quoting it and using links to Wikipedia to prove their point. Buying a botnet distributed over a large # of random IPs just to vandalize Wikipedia now wouldn't sound too bad...
Ok, now how about this -- edits can be automated, inserting random crap that isn't meaningful is a perfect job for a thousands zobmie machines all from different IPs.
Step 1 - buy a network of zombies,
Step 2 - get a large set of links to Wiki pages,
Step 3 - have each one of the bots alternatevely insert obsenities into each one of the pages at pre-determined times. Easy to do, minimum ammount of effort, maximum damage! It would took increasingly more and more volunteers to reverse the changes. Once in a while a new set of wiki pages would be targeted ans so on.
Step 4 - ?
Step 5 - Profit?!
//sorry couldn't resist the cliche South Park reference...
So there is nothing wrong with having 12 year olds insert obsenities into an encyclopedia [Pronunciation (n-skl-pd- ) n. A comprehensive reference....etc. etc. blah. blah] -- right!
I got modded down on Slashdot by not praising and worshiping Wikipedia! What a surprise...! Ok, how about this 'LInUS is TeH BestESt!" - will I get modded backup now I wonder...
But can 12 year old insert the word 'fuck' or 'blah blah I like pizza' randomly in the Britannica's pages (both new and already bought) all over the world with a single click of the mouse? Oh, and the kid _will_ wait enough time to create an account, he's just one of those persistent vandals that just doesn't give up. Will someone catch it? Maybe, or maybe not...
The bottom line is that Wikipedia should _not_ be called an encyclopedia, rather it should be a "collection of facts contributed by anyone from around the world".
Google doesn't do anything if it doesn't benefit Google. They in fact will gain access to everyone's bookmarks. That is one of the most valuable pieces of information they can get, because now they can do very focused, targeting advertising. Also, they will get another way "to pagerank" web pages. If a million people bookmarked Slashdot, SourceForge and PizzaHut, they'll have a good reason to increase the rank of those sites. It seems like a win-win situation to me and smart move on the part of Google.
Well I think you said it pretty well - it is the "common sense" thing. Common sense should be "common" but is becoming extinct for some reason. Sure there are legitimate dating sites that verify identities and such, but for any one of those there are 20 that will do anything to get that $39.99/month fee from you. I just don't see why people need to be babied and protected if they don't have common sense. Just like in the Nigerian scams, if people would just not be so greedy and really believe that "king Ahmed's son will give you $40,000,000" they would be fine.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I was reading about Project Orion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclea r_propulsion)/ a while ago. Pretty interesting stuff...
But can you polish a turd, that's the real question...
I know, I was just saying that what here in US sounds ridiculous in some parts of the world is just everyday business. Americans are outraged that the guy got arrested but someone from China or Russia is probably wondering why this is even on the news...
That was before seeing this Slashdot article...
I think one has to be prepared to deal with reality and look at it as objectively as possible. In other words those videos shown are true, they are not computer simulations, those are not actors, those things are happening. Trying to hide them is like trying to hide abuse and lies, it comes up eventually one way or the other, in this case the Internet makes it happen very easy. Does this mean that all the soldiers are bad evil monsters - of course not. But some of them are and we have to face it.
They do that in my country. They also use torture there. Would you really want the police to wear masks, because they would love the idea.
"Oh, look who came into the doughnut shop? Is it the robbers or is it the police, the black ski masks just look so similar..."
Also, what we have here is the Pentagon faced with the uncontrollable media such as blogs and the Internet. Traditionally someone always controls the media (it could be just the media bosses themselves or the government) at no time in the past could a regular Joe broadcast his videos, ideas or other work to anyone in the world. That has changed and the government doesn't know how to deal with it (kidnapping everyone and putting them on an air-CIA flight to Romania might not work as well).
Where else could a saddist have chance to get their hands on a large caliber machine gun, fly through the air and blow peoples' heads off, while getting cheered by comarades -- "Oh fuck! Good job, hehe, you completely dismembered him!"
But they are paying all these people money to monitor what has been posted...? If they are honest in saying that such stuff is not banned what are they doing when they find the next video with U.S. soldiers blowing up Iraqis? Send them threats? Kidnap them, drug them, put them on a plane and fly them to Romania for torture?
The goverment is used to controlling the media (directly or indirectly) but when faced with blogging and YouTube it is fighting a losing battle.../sorry Uncle Sam... ;-(
What does it matter if I think copying stuff is okay. Why get so personal all of the sudden, I am not on trial here, Mr. Hogan is, ask him what he thinks...
If there is a hard limit there are probably ways to distribute the downloading such that no single client will ever upload anything except the smallest possible chunk of any file. They might download it, but will only advertise that specific chunk for uploading. To start with, the initial upload will obviously have to provide the whole file but then at the next level the file can be chunked into progressively smaller pieces until quickly the cut-off chunk size is achieved...
I second that, my friend who is a tech support guy fixes his own transmission. Just rents all the expensive tools for a day and goes at it. His car works fine and he saves big bucks on it. Would I trust my car to him? - probably not. But it works well enough for him.
Solar pannels might just work better. Besides with solar if you have an excess you can pump it back into the grid which is just the perfect cure during the high power demand scorching heat weather.
I agree with the hardware limitations and funding but only up to a point. I think today, even if you give enough funding and or give group of leading AI researchers a supercomputer, they will probably not produce anything qualitatively different than what can be produced with a workstation. In other words if you dream up a super computer that is 10x faster and bigger than what we have, I don't think we'll know how to go about simulating a brain. We know very well how a neuron works but simply putting together billions and billions of them won't make a brain, they have to already be connected somehow. In other words a child's brain is not a random bunch of neurons, there is already a very complicated organization. We still don't know for example how the brain stores long term memories, or what consciousness is and so on.
What does the lightbulb has to do with it? I would consider the LED as a pretty important improvement on the lightbulb. It consumes a lot less power but it is just too expensive of a technology now. Nothing similar to that kind of achievemnt in AI yet.
Our definition of what constitutes AI changes as we solve AI problems I would disagree with that. The Turing test in is a pretty good benchmark of AI. In general an AI system can be of 4 types:
I. Systems that _think_ like humans
II. Systems that _act_ like humans
III. Systems that _think_ rationally
IV. Systems that _act_ rationally
At least that's what I learned in school. So we do have a pretty good understanding of what AI should be. Some of these types are more attainable than others but none have been attained. By any definition we are still very far from having AI.
Yeah they are all pretty bad but after enough tries I "learned" the system of my grocery store of choice and now I can move pretty quickly through self-checkout. Send me to a different store and I'll probably be lost again...
The problem is also mostly with the expectations people have of computers. Everyone wants computers to return deterministic and easily tracable results. For example if I want a value from a database I want to issue a query and have the value returned. I don't want a system that would return it faster but only with 80% of correctness, I don't want any "fuzziness" only exact numbers. In other words people would rather have computers do what computers are doing - calculating stuff fast and exactly, they don't want computers to really act like humans. I think subconsciously we will just never allow computers to reach a human level of soffistication and thus they will probably never surpass us.
On the other hand, what would rather happen is that we will slowly integrate machines into ourselves - litteraly. As soon as the baby is born we will tag it with an RFID, we will implant sensors for infrared vision, ultrasound, we will inject nanoparticles to boost the immune system. In other words I see a cyborg future were we become one with the machines. If anything or anyone will destroy us it will only by ourselves, at the same time if anything helps us prosper, it will also be ourselves. The future is (mostly - short of a big meteorite hitting us) in our hands...
"I would spend more time descussing other options. Going one way or the other. Not 2 products that do the same thing but differently."
It seems that unless Matlab has some sort of relatively cheap VM for their code (don't think they do) then this company should just switch to C++ right way if they want to release a product and make money off of it. But I don't think that's the right answer. You mentioned how there will be different bugs and how one group will get a fast change and the other will get a slow change. But it will not be random (as in %50 of the time C++ team get something done fast and 50% Matlab team gets something done faster)! In reality the Matlab team will always be ahead of the C++ team. According to the post it already is! That means that C++ will just have to catch up to the Matlab team. Which is not too bad. The Matlab team will always be in charge of implementing new features, testing the concept, verifying the Math. They will spit out the results then the C++ team will just have to match it. Besides Matlab is common enough of a skill if you know where to look for those people
Unless you happen to run for Senate and Wikipedia contains true (or false) embarrasing details from your past and your competitor is quoting it and using links to Wikipedia to prove their point. Buying a botnet distributed over a large # of random IPs just to vandalize Wikipedia now wouldn't sound too bad...
Step 1 - buy a network of zombies,
Step 2 - get a large set of links to Wiki pages,
Step 3 - have each one of the bots alternatevely insert obsenities into each one of the pages at pre-determined times. Easy to do, minimum ammount of effort, maximum damage! It would took increasingly more and more volunteers to reverse the changes. Once in a while a new set of wiki pages would be targeted ans so on.
Step 4 - ?
Step 5 - Profit?!
So there is nothing wrong with having 12 year olds insert obsenities into an encyclopedia [Pronunciation (n-skl-pd- ) n. A comprehensive reference ....etc. etc. blah. blah] -- right!
I got modded down on Slashdot by not praising and worshiping Wikipedia! What a surprise...! Ok, how about this 'LInUS is TeH BestESt!" - will I get modded backup now I wonder...
The bottom line is that Wikipedia should _not_ be called an encyclopedia, rather it should be a "collection of facts contributed by anyone from around the world".
Well I think you said it pretty well - it is the "common sense" thing. Common sense should be "common" but is becoming extinct for some reason. Sure there are legitimate dating sites that verify identities and such, but for any one of those there are 20 that will do anything to get that $39.99/month fee from you. I just don't see why people need to be babied and protected if they don't have common sense. Just like in the Nigerian scams, if people would just not be so greedy and really believe that "king Ahmed's son will give you $40,000,000" they would be fine.