You are under the commonly held impression that intelligence requires some special magical ingredient.
I don't see how you can come to this conclusion given what the GP has written.
The statement that somehow because the technology uses "lookup tables" or some other mundane algorithms as part of it's logic disqualifies it from being intelligent implies that it has to perform it's task in some "special" way. For example, any reasonable person would consider the AI in modern speech recognition systems to be far more sophisticated and advanced than it was 40 years ago. The GGP indicates that he/she would not consider this intelligence because it's "Top Down AI", by which I assume he/she means that it is implemented by performing some combination of lookups and rule processing. While speech recognition is actually a lot more sophisticated than the GGP is giving credit for (combining frequency, formant, semantic and context analysis with neural networks, support vector machines and/or bayesian networks), even if it did it's job using a massive set of "if" statements it is still considered intelligent if it's behavior is intelligent. My smartphone is far superior at speech recognition than my dog. I would agree that in general, a dog is more intelligent than a smartphone, but it is a matter of degree and of context.
Also, the ability to learn is not a prerequisite to intelligence. It's definitely a "nice to have" feature so that the existing intelligence can be enhanced but it's not a requirement. Even an amoeba has a certain amount of intelligence imparted to it through genetics. It has the ability to sense where more nutrition is in it's environment and then use it rudimentary locomotion to move to the area of higher nutritional concentration. It has no ability to learn, but it does exhibit this very basic intelligent behavior.
AI is far more advanced than you realize and advancing at an accelerating pace
For this, a citation is necessary.
You need a citation for this? Have you navigated though any voice response phone systems recently? They're still far from perfect, but compared to what they were just a couple of years ago they are pretty amazing. I've followed speech recognition for over 30 years and it took about 20 of these to just get speaker independent systems over about 80% accuracy. Five years ago these systems did a pretty good job if you spoke clearly and were up into the 90-95% accuracy range. Now I can just blurt a few words for a Google search on my smartphone in a noisy car and damn if it doesn't get it right almost all the time.
It took up until recently to get face recognition systems to be able to recognize a particular face while sitting right in front of the camera. Now these systems can pick a face out in a crowd. Smartphone will soon be coming out with the ability to recognize the user's face and configure it's preferences accordingly.
Medical diagnostic systems powered using AI technologies have long been able to exceed real doctors in the accuracy of their diagnosis (on an average basis), but they were not widely used because they could only achieve somewhere in the 90% range, and when dealing with lives that's just not good enough. However recent developments have produced systems that are so far superior to real doctors, it's getting more and more difficult for doctors to blow them off and many are turning to these systems if for no other reason than to get a second opinion.
The military is using sophisticated UAVs that navigate on their own and perform all sorts of complicated maneuvers without any human intervention.
Companies (e.g. Google, Apple, Amazon, etc.) use sophisticated AI to determine what you might like to see or hear or read ahead of your asking for it.
I could go on but you get the point. AI is in use everywhere.
Everytime the topic of AI comes up on/., there are always the
You are under the commonly held impression that intelligence requires some special magical ingredient. It does not. The human brain works within the laws of physics. It is simply a machine, albeit built out of organic material. While we don't fully understand all the details, we have made great leaps in the understanding of the mechanisms that drive it over the years. We haven't managed to create a machine with a generalized "intelligence" on par with a complete human brain yet, but we have been nibbling at the edges with vision, voice recognition, logic inference and other areas.
I suspect we won't just wake up one morning and hear on the news that someone has created an intelligent machine. It will creep into all the devices we interact with on a daily basis (maybe even embedded in our bodies) and at some point the question of whether a device is intelligent or not will be mote. If you can have an intelligent conversation with your device (maybe even more intelligent than with one of your friends) will it even matter whether it's a person or a device you are conversing with. If it can understand you and reply with a reasoned response, do you care how much "brute force" is employed under the covers?
AI is far more advanced than you realize and advancing at an accelerating pace, partly due to hardware, miniturization, software and communications.
I have no idea how much experience you have in enterprise development, but your comments are consistent with someone who hasn't spent much time in this area.
Contrary to what many small time hackers and code monkeys think, most enterprise architects and CTOs are not complete idiots (though I'm sure some are). They are well aware of the additional complexity that powerful frameworks introduce. However, this complexity is a small price to pay when compared to the complexity of a thousand different applications all doing things their own way and trying to get them all to talk together. Today's frameworks make systems integrations that were a pipe dream a few years ago standard fare. Tools such as EAI (Enterprise Architecture Integration), ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), BPM (Business Process Modeling) and others are necessary tools in a modern enterprise today. Custom logic can easily (if you know what you are doing) be implemented in these systems using frameworks such as OSGi, EJB and others.
No doubt (as was seen in EJB 2.x) the configuration maintenance can become unwieldy. However, this is a fault of the implementation, not the concept and as EJB 3.0 showed, improvements can be made without losing the "goodness" of earlier versions. Over time the tooling improves and the implementations smooth the sharp edges.
OSGi certainly has it's thorns as do most complex frameworks, but it attempts to tackle some pretty complex problems.
You can find fault in just about any set of source code and Open Source projects are no exception, although the quality of code (and architecture) I've seen in popular Java Open Source projects is pretty high. While I'm sure you are a legend in you own mind, most of the code that gets committed in these high-visibility enterprise projects is produced by some really smart folks.
Your application would run within an application framework, which runs on an Application Server, which runs on a JVM, which runs on an OS, which then gets deployed into a node in some cloud. All to solve some problem that's already been solved.
Sometimes I look at the crap that is most java enterprise development, and wonder what the hell is preventing the load of manure from collapsing under its own weight - then I realise that that is why it takes a minimum of a dev-team of at least 6 people to do *anything* at all, within this app-framework, within the app-server, within the jvm....
Is someone forcing you to use these frameworks? These various frameworks hold much value to those that have need of them (such as enterprises, for which it was intended), otherwise they wouldn't exist. Just because you don't need them to for your particular app space doesn't mean they are "crap". It's easy to "dis" a technology that you don't understand. Generally, true appreciation (or educated criticism) of a given technology only comes with at least a rudimentary understanding of why things are the way they are.
The review failed to mention that OSGi is the basis of Eclipse;
In much the same way that a book on Oracle P/L fails to mention anything about MSSQL.
In principal that's true, but because Eclipse is, by a very wide margin, the largest adopter of OSGi it does seem that it would have been mentioned at least as a side note.
It would be like a review of a book on using Objective-C for mobile development and never mentioning Apple.
It is (as of 2.3 - Gingerbread) possible to implement apps completely in C/C++ without writing any Java.
But the C++ application still runs under Java so somebody is still stupid.
That somebody is beginning to sound a lot like you.
Sorry, it's not. I quote: "Of course, access to the regular Android API still requires Dalvik, and the VM is still present in native applications, operating behind the scenes".
So, months after being sued by Oracle, C++ is still joined at the hip to Java on Android. It should have been set free the next day. Stupid. Or more accurately, fucking stupid.
I don't know why I'm wasting my time responding to this because you're obviously don't know what you are talking about.
First, the NDK compiles the C/C++ code down to native ARM binaries. Yes, the VM is still in control, but the binaries run at the full speed of the processor. Accessing the standard Android API obviously still has to go through the VM via JNI for now, but as I stated, the direction of the NDK is to expose more and more services without going through the Android API. For instance, NDK r5 exposes the input subsystem, the sensors (accelerator, compass, gyro, etc), window and surface subsystem and audio subsystem directly to native C/C++.
Second, the entire Android OS is built on the Dalvik VM running on top of a linux kernel so the idea that they could just dump the Dalvik VM willy-nilly is just ludicrous. The thousands of Android apps depend on this API. You may think this is stupid, but considering the entire OS went from zero to competing head-to-head with iOS (some would say "surpassing" it) in less than 5 years is a testament to the wisdom of this decision. If the decision to keep everything native linux would have been made, you would have wound up with MeeGo, and we know where it stacks up against iOS and Android in terms of market share.
Lastly, your argument against Java is bogus. While Java is not the correct choice for ALL applications, for the vast majority of apps being produced today it's a very sound platform. In all but some special niche cases, the performance of Java is more than adequate and the productivity gains to be had by developing in Java over C/C++ are so overwhelming that no one who knows what they are talking about (and has a limited budget for application development) even questions it anymore. I've been developing in C and C++ for over 30 years and Java for over 15, so I'm very comfortable in both. For getting real work done under tight deadlines there is just no comparison. Anyone who tells you they can produce quality C++ code as quickly as quality Java code is either a lier, or they don't know Java well enough.
It is (as of 2.3 - Gingerbread) possible to implement apps completely in C/C++ without writing any Java.
But the C++ application still runs under Java so somebody is still stupid.
That somebody is beginning to sound a lot like you.
The C++ applications run natively (as in, not on top of Java). In NDK v5, ONLY when services provided by the Dalvik JVM are needed do they go through the JNI layer. C++ apps have full native access to the linux kernel services and in effect, run ALONGSIDE the Dalvik JVM. This really provides the best of both worlds. Apps with simple user interaction that don't require high performance can stick with the simpler Java APIs, while apps that require high performance can run natively and even utilize existing high performance C++ libraries.
Additional, the direction of the NDK is to allow more and more of the core functionality of Android to be directly exposed to native C/C++ applications.
That said, the stupidest thing of all would be for Google to continue to rely solely on Java for Android while C++ is significantly more efficient and significantly less of a patent minefield. Of course there are stupid people at Google, or more accurately, people who consistently do stupid things for whatever reason (as far as I'm concerned, a stupid person) and it comes down to, who calls the shots and how stupid is he?
IMO, using Java and Linux was a brilliant strategy to get Android off the ground quickly and to have a critical mass of experienced developers from the start. However, now that it's established, Google can begin damping down the significance of Java and allow it to be more language neutral.
We are also beginning to see ports of Python, Ruby and other languages to the Android platform. Since Android is open, all of this is possible which is a major distinguishing factor from iOS.
Suppose I grab a copy of some of Oracle's propriety licensed source code, and change the header to attribute the copyright to me and change the date to a prior date. How can Oracle conclusively prove that they didn't steal the code from me?
For that matter, who's to say that some of Oracle's source code wasn't lifted from some other OSS project with the headers changed?
The idea that simply placing "Copyright (c) 1995, mswhippingboy" in the header of a file seems like pretty flimsy evidence either way to me.
with these new tools, applications targeted at Gingerbread or later can be implemented entirely in C++; you can now build an entire Android application without writing a single line of Java.
First, my comment was tongue-in-cheek - I like Crichton's stuff and seriously doubt he actually stole it.
From what I can tell, Carlin first performed a shorter version of his "The Planet is fine, the people are f^cked" in 1990, however he expanded it into a full skit for his 1992 HBO special.
In reality, most weathermen that pawn themselves off as meteorologists are just anchormen in waiting. They know how to read a teleprompter, maybe a little about the pretty pictures coming off their Doppler radar, probably check out what the weather channel has to say just prior to their "show", and generally engage in mindless banter with the anchor and sports reporter. Scientists? GMAFB.
Congratulations, the fact that you concede GW (anthropogenic or naturally occuring) is real puts you far above most GW deniers who simply look out the window and see snow and conclude that GW is a hoax. As to whether AGW is real or not, there really is no significant debate (among people who actually know a bit about what their discussing).
The last figures I saw, 97% of recognized scientists in this field agree that AGW is real. Of the top 100 scientists (as determined by their peers as well as the number of papers published in scientific journals), only 3.0% questioned the impact of anthropization. Of the top 200, the figure was about 2.5% and of the top 500 it was 3.0%. 97% by any measure is a pretty sound majority opinion.
However, I'm sure that none of this has any sway on your opinion, but if you are a thinking person, consider the following. I'd be interested in which of the following points you disagree with, and if you don't disagree with them, how you can hold the opinion you do?
You learned in basic chemistry that the process of burning hydrocarbons (oil, coal) produces CO2 which is released into the atmosphere. This is not conjecture, this is fact and I'm not aware of any debate about this from credible sources.
CO2 (along with methane, nitrous oxide, ozone and water vapor) is a green house gas (GHG). GHGs absorb heat generated by the sun. This heat is then re-radiated in all directions, some of this energy is re-radiated back to the surface of the planet and lower atmosphere. As a result, the surface and lower atmosphere are warmer than they would have been without the effect of the GHG. I know of no credible scientists that deny the effect of GHG and know it as factually as it can be determined, to be the reason the earth is not a giant ball of ice (Snowball Earth).
We all learned in grade school that (green) plants take in CO2 during photosynthesis and produce Oxygen as a waste product. Respiration by plants (including plankton) provides the most important check on proliferation of CO2 we have. However, since the late 1800's, over 50% of the worlds forests have been cleared. Perhaps even more significant is that phytoplankton (most significant source for removing CO2), instead of increasing in number in response to increased CO2, begin to die off because of the increased acidification caused by the diffusion of CO2 into the water, lowering pH levels to the point that the phytoplankton are unable to take up the disolved iron, a key nutrient required for their growth.
A lot has been learned in the last 100 years or so about weather patterns. We know that one of the largest factors in producing violent and/or extreme weather patterns is the amount of energy (in the form of heat) a weather system contains.
I could go on and on, but then, this is/. and my intent is not to write a term paper.
If you concede that the green house effect is real and you concede that man made activity has increased the amount of GHGs produced, I don't see how you cannot conclude that anthropization is conributing to the green house effect. You may be on somewhat firmer ground to argue the "degree" to which anthropization is affecting GW and the resultant natural effects, but to deny it has any affect is incomprehensible to me.
Can I "prove" that AGW caused any of the disasters I point out? No. On the other hand, can you prove it didn't? If you can't prove it, and you concede that too much GW = bad, less GW = good, then why not try to do what can be done to diminish it's impact?
That's basically in the range of minimal ram requirements of Contiki (and not the only one for sure);
While Contiki has a minimal RAM requirement of 2K, it also occupies 40K of ROM. The EDSAC had a total architectural maximum of 1024 words (albeit 18 bit words), but only 512 words were actually implemented. Still, I recall when I had a TRS-80 Model I that had a pretty functional version of BASIC implemented in only 4K of ROM and 4K of RAM. It's amazing what can be done in such constrained environments.
With 650 IPS and 512 18 bit words of memory I doubt much of any kind of monitor, much less OS could be implemented. Still, if anyone would like to give it a shot, there is an emulator available at
Slashdot Mirror
You are under the commonly held impression that intelligence requires some special magical ingredient.
I don't see how you can come to this conclusion given what the GP has written.
The statement that somehow because the technology uses "lookup tables" or some other mundane algorithms as part of it's logic disqualifies it from being intelligent implies that it has to perform it's task in some "special" way. For example, any reasonable person would consider the AI in modern speech recognition systems to be far more sophisticated and advanced than it was 40 years ago. The GGP indicates that he/she would not consider this intelligence because it's "Top Down AI", by which I assume he/she means that it is implemented by performing some combination of lookups and rule processing. While speech recognition is actually a lot more sophisticated than the GGP is giving credit for (combining frequency, formant, semantic and context analysis with neural networks, support vector machines and/or bayesian networks), even if it did it's job using a massive set of "if" statements it is still considered intelligent if it's behavior is intelligent. My smartphone is far superior at speech recognition than my dog. I would agree that in general, a dog is more intelligent than a smartphone, but it is a matter of degree and of context.
Also, the ability to learn is not a prerequisite to intelligence. It's definitely a "nice to have" feature so that the existing intelligence can be enhanced but it's not a requirement. Even an amoeba has a certain amount of intelligence imparted to it through genetics. It has the ability to sense where more nutrition is in it's environment and then use it rudimentary locomotion to move to the area of higher nutritional concentration. It has no ability to learn, but it does exhibit this very basic intelligent behavior.
AI is far more advanced than you realize and advancing at an accelerating pace
For this, a citation is necessary.
You need a citation for this? Have you navigated though any voice response phone systems recently? They're still far from perfect, but compared to what they were just a couple of years ago they are pretty amazing. I've followed speech recognition for over 30 years and it took about 20 of these to just get speaker independent systems over about 80% accuracy. Five years ago these systems did a pretty good job if you spoke clearly and were up into the 90-95% accuracy range. Now I can just blurt a few words for a Google search on my smartphone in a noisy car and damn if it doesn't get it right almost all the time.
It took up until recently to get face recognition systems to be able to recognize a particular face while sitting right in front of the camera. Now these systems can pick a face out in a crowd. Smartphone will soon be coming out with the ability to recognize the user's face and configure it's preferences accordingly.
Medical diagnostic systems powered using AI technologies have long been able to exceed real doctors in the accuracy of their diagnosis (on an average basis), but they were not widely used because they could only achieve somewhere in the 90% range, and when dealing with lives that's just not good enough. However recent developments have produced systems that are so far superior to real doctors, it's getting more and more difficult for doctors to blow them off and many are turning to these systems if for no other reason than to get a second opinion.
The military is using sophisticated UAVs that navigate on their own and perform all sorts of complicated maneuvers without any human intervention.
Companies (e.g. Google, Apple, Amazon, etc.) use sophisticated AI to determine what you might like to see or hear or read ahead of your asking for it.
I could go on but you get the point. AI is in use everywhere.
Everytime the topic of AI comes up on /., there are always the
You are under the commonly held impression that intelligence requires some special magical ingredient. It does not. The human brain works within the laws of physics. It is simply a machine, albeit built out of organic material. While we don't fully understand all the details, we have made great leaps in the understanding of the mechanisms that drive it over the years. We haven't managed to create a machine with a generalized "intelligence" on par with a complete human brain yet, but we have been nibbling at the edges with vision, voice recognition, logic inference and other areas.
I suspect we won't just wake up one morning and hear on the news that someone has created an intelligent machine. It will creep into all the devices we interact with on a daily basis (maybe even embedded in our bodies) and at some point the question of whether a device is intelligent or not will be mote. If you can have an intelligent conversation with your device (maybe even more intelligent than with one of your friends) will it even matter whether it's a person or a device you are conversing with. If it can understand you and reply with a reasoned response, do you care how much "brute force" is employed under the covers?
AI is far more advanced than you realize and advancing at an accelerating pace, partly due to hardware, miniturization, software and communications.
That the 61% nearly matches the earlier story about the percentage of undergraduate cheaters?
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/02/08/1527251/619-of-Undergraduates-Cybercheat#comments
Maybe it's because 61% of any general population are simply liars.
I've seen some hateful posts on this thread, but none as hateful, misinformed or bigoted as yours.
Right. Thank God (or would that be Allah?) we have the level head of Ayatollah Khamenei in charge.
I have no idea how much experience you have in enterprise development, but your comments are consistent with someone who hasn't spent much time in this area.
Contrary to what many small time hackers and code monkeys think, most enterprise architects and CTOs are not complete idiots (though I'm sure some are). They are well aware of the additional complexity that powerful frameworks introduce. However, this complexity is a small price to pay when compared to the complexity of a thousand different applications all doing things their own way and trying to get them all to talk together. Today's frameworks make systems integrations that were a pipe dream a few years ago standard fare. Tools such as EAI (Enterprise Architecture Integration), ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), BPM (Business Process Modeling) and others are necessary tools in a modern enterprise today. Custom logic can easily (if you know what you are doing) be implemented in these systems using frameworks such as OSGi, EJB and others.
No doubt (as was seen in EJB 2.x) the configuration maintenance can become unwieldy. However, this is a fault of the implementation, not the concept and as EJB 3.0 showed, improvements can be made without losing the "goodness" of earlier versions. Over time the tooling improves and the implementations smooth the sharp edges.
OSGi certainly has it's thorns as do most complex frameworks, but it attempts to tackle some pretty complex problems.
You can find fault in just about any set of source code and Open Source projects are no exception, although the quality of code (and architecture) I've seen in popular Java Open Source projects is pretty high. While I'm sure you are a legend in you own mind, most of the code that gets committed in these high-visibility enterprise projects is produced by some really smart folks.
Your application would run within an application framework, which runs on an Application Server, which runs on a JVM, which runs on an OS, which then gets deployed into a node in some cloud. All to solve some problem that's already been solved. Sometimes I look at the crap that is most java enterprise development, and wonder what the hell is preventing the load of manure from collapsing under its own weight - then I realise that that is why it takes a minimum of a dev-team of at least 6 people to do *anything* at all, within this app-framework, within the app-server, within the jvm ....
Is someone forcing you to use these frameworks? These various frameworks hold much value to those that have need of them (such as enterprises, for which it was intended), otherwise they wouldn't exist. Just because you don't need them to for your particular app space doesn't mean they are "crap". It's easy to "dis" a technology that you don't understand. Generally, true appreciation (or educated criticism) of a given technology only comes with at least a rudimentary understanding of why things are the way they are.
The review failed to mention that OSGi is the basis of Eclipse;
In much the same way that a book on Oracle P/L fails to mention anything about MSSQL.
In principal that's true, but because Eclipse is, by a very wide margin, the largest adopter of OSGi it does seem that it would have been mentioned at least as a side note.
It would be like a review of a book on using Objective-C for mobile development and never mentioning Apple.
It is (as of 2.3 - Gingerbread) possible to implement apps completely in C/C++ without writing any Java.
But the C++ application still runs under Java so somebody is still stupid.
That somebody is beginning to sound a lot like you.
Sorry, it's not. I quote: "Of course, access to the regular Android API still requires Dalvik, and the VM is still present in native applications, operating behind the scenes".
So, months after being sued by Oracle, C++ is still joined at the hip to Java on Android. It should have been set free the next day. Stupid. Or more accurately, fucking stupid.
I don't know why I'm wasting my time responding to this because you're obviously don't know what you are talking about.
First, the NDK compiles the C/C++ code down to native ARM binaries. Yes, the VM is still in control, but the binaries run at the full speed of the processor. Accessing the standard Android API obviously still has to go through the VM via JNI for now, but as I stated, the direction of the NDK is to expose more and more services without going through the Android API. For instance, NDK r5 exposes the input subsystem, the sensors (accelerator, compass, gyro, etc), window and surface subsystem and audio subsystem directly to native C/C++.
Second, the entire Android OS is built on the Dalvik VM running on top of a linux kernel so the idea that they could just dump the Dalvik VM willy-nilly is just ludicrous. The thousands of Android apps depend on this API. You may think this is stupid, but considering the entire OS went from zero to competing head-to-head with iOS (some would say "surpassing" it) in less than 5 years is a testament to the wisdom of this decision. If the decision to keep everything native linux would have been made, you would have wound up with MeeGo, and we know where it stacks up against iOS and Android in terms of market share.
Lastly, your argument against Java is bogus. While Java is not the correct choice for ALL applications, for the vast majority of apps being produced today it's a very sound platform. In all but some special niche cases, the performance of Java is more than adequate and the productivity gains to be had by developing in Java over C/C++ are so overwhelming that no one who knows what they are talking about (and has a limited budget for application development) even questions it anymore. I've been developing in C and C++ for over 30 years and Java for over 15, so I'm very comfortable in both. For getting real work done under tight deadlines there is just no comparison. Anyone who tells you they can produce quality C++ code as quickly as quality Java code is either a lier, or they don't know Java well enough.
It is (as of 2.3 - Gingerbread) possible to implement apps completely in C/C++ without writing any Java.
But the C++ application still runs under Java so somebody is still stupid.
That somebody is beginning to sound a lot like you.
The C++ applications run natively (as in, not on top of Java). In NDK v5, ONLY when services provided by the Dalvik JVM are needed do they go through the JNI layer. C++ apps have full native access to the linux kernel services and in effect, run ALONGSIDE the Dalvik JVM. This really provides the best of both worlds. Apps with simple user interaction that don't require high performance can stick with the simpler Java APIs, while apps that require high performance can run natively and even utilize existing high performance C++ libraries.
Additional, the direction of the NDK is to allow more and more of the core functionality of Android to be directly exposed to native C/C++ applications.
That said, the stupidest thing of all would be for Google to continue to rely solely on Java for Android while C++ is significantly more efficient and significantly less of a patent minefield. Of course there are stupid people at Google, or more accurately, people who consistently do stupid things for whatever reason (as far as I'm concerned, a stupid person) and it comes down to, who calls the shots and how stupid is he?
IMO, using Java and Linux was a brilliant strategy to get Android off the ground quickly and to have a critical mass of experienced developers from the start. However, now that it's established, Google can begin damping down the significance of Java and allow it to be more language neutral.
Movement away from total reliance on Java (or the Dalvik JVM) is already underway. It is (as of 2.3 - Gingerbread) possible to implement apps completely in C/C++ without writing any Java. http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/01/gingerbread-ndk-awesomeness.html
We are also beginning to see ports of Python, Ruby and other languages to the Android platform. Since Android is open, all of this is possible which is a major distinguishing factor from iOS.
Suppose I grab a copy of some of Oracle's propriety licensed source code, and change the header to attribute the copyright to me and change the date to a prior date. How can Oracle conclusively prove that they didn't steal the code from me?
For that matter, who's to say that some of Oracle's source code wasn't lifted from some other OSS project with the headers changed?
The idea that simply placing "Copyright (c) 1995, mswhippingboy" in the header of a file seems like pretty flimsy evidence either way to me.
Sorry. Old argument. Next.
with these new tools, applications targeted at Gingerbread or later can be implemented entirely in C++; you can now build an entire Android application without writing a single line of Java.
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/01/gingerbread-ndk-awesomeness.html
With the instrument I can induce the worm to stop, accelerate, lay eggs or experience the illusion of touch.
Can you make'em dance? http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=dancing+worms
First, my comment was tongue-in-cheek - I like Crichton's stuff and seriously doubt he actually stole it.
From what I can tell, Carlin first performed a shorter version of his "The Planet is fine, the people are f^cked" in 1990, however he expanded it into a full skit for his 1992 HBO special.
In reality, most weathermen that pawn themselves off as meteorologists are just anchormen in waiting. They know how to read a teleprompter, maybe a little about the pretty pictures coming off their Doppler radar, probably check out what the weather channel has to say just prior to their "show", and generally engage in mindless banter with the anchor and sports reporter. Scientists? GMAFB.
Congratulations, the fact that you concede GW (anthropogenic or naturally occuring) is real puts you far above most GW deniers who simply look out the window and see snow and conclude that GW is a hoax. As to whether AGW is real or not, there really is no significant debate (among people who actually know a bit about what their discussing).
The last figures I saw, 97% of recognized scientists in this field agree that AGW is real. Of the top 100 scientists (as determined by their peers as well as the number of papers published in scientific journals), only 3.0% questioned the impact of anthropization. Of the top 200, the figure was about 2.5% and of the top 500 it was 3.0%. 97% by any measure is a pretty sound majority opinion.
However, I'm sure that none of this has any sway on your opinion, but if you are a thinking person, consider the following. I'd be interested in which of the following points you disagree with, and if you don't disagree with them, how you can hold the opinion you do?
You learned in basic chemistry that the process of burning hydrocarbons (oil, coal) produces CO2 which is released into the atmosphere. This is not conjecture, this is fact and I'm not aware of any debate about this from credible sources.
CO2 (along with methane, nitrous oxide, ozone and water vapor) is a green house gas (GHG). GHGs absorb heat generated by the sun. This heat is then re-radiated in all directions, some of this energy is re-radiated back to the surface of the planet and lower atmosphere. As a result, the surface and lower atmosphere are warmer than they would have been without the effect of the GHG. I know of no credible scientists that deny the effect of GHG and know it as factually as it can be determined, to be the reason the earth is not a giant ball of ice (Snowball Earth).
We all learned in grade school that (green) plants take in CO2 during photosynthesis and produce Oxygen as a waste product. Respiration by plants (including plankton) provides the most important check on proliferation of CO2 we have. However, since the late 1800's, over 50% of the worlds forests have been cleared. Perhaps even more significant is that phytoplankton (most significant source for removing CO2), instead of increasing in number in response to increased CO2, begin to die off because of the increased acidification caused by the diffusion of CO2 into the water, lowering pH levels to the point that the phytoplankton are unable to take up the disolved iron, a key nutrient required for their growth.
A lot has been learned in the last 100 years or so about weather patterns. We know that one of the largest factors in producing violent and/or extreme weather patterns is the amount of energy (in the form of heat) a weather system contains.
I could go on and on, but then, this is /. and my intent is not to write a term paper.
If you concede that the green house effect is real and you concede that man made activity has increased the amount of GHGs produced, I don't see how you cannot conclude that anthropization is conributing to the green house effect. You may be on somewhat firmer ground to argue the "degree" to which anthropization is affecting GW and the resultant natural effects, but to deny it has any affect is incomprehensible to me.
Can I "prove" that AGW caused any of the disasters I point out? No. On the other hand, can you prove it didn't? If you can't prove it, and you concede that too much GW = bad, less GW = good, then why not try to do what can be done to diminish it's impact?
Very little is truly "designed-from-scratch" today. Android has a Linux kernel as it's base OS, iOS has BSD Unix as it's base OS.
Oops, sorry. Looks like they are already pursuing this.
http://www.androidguys.com/2010/06/24/intel-android-x86-netbooks-tablets-summer/
Seems to me it would make more sense for Intel to pursue supporting the port of Android to x86 hardware.
http://www.android-x86.org/
That's basically in the range of minimal ram requirements of Contiki (and not the only one for sure);
While Contiki has a minimal RAM requirement of 2K, it also occupies 40K of ROM. The EDSAC had a total architectural maximum of 1024 words (albeit 18 bit words), but only 512 words were actually implemented. Still, I recall when I had a TRS-80 Model I that had a pretty functional version of BASIC implemented in only 4K of ROM and 4K of RAM. It's amazing what can be done in such constrained environments.
With 650 IPS and 512 18 bit words of memory I doubt much of any kind of monitor, much less OS could be implemented. Still, if anyone would like to give it a shot, there is an emulator available at
http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~edsac/
Yea, they fixed it alright. They got rid of it.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2375719,00.asp
No, not broken. Removed. And Microsoft is pissed about it!
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2375719,00.asp
There's no reason that Google couldn't include rules like "No DRM" or "Upgrades must be allowed." That would certainly make it more open.
But they didn't do that.
There is a BIG reason. It's called the Apache license. The problem is not Google, or Android. The problem is the carrier and/or the manufacturer.