Actually, in most states you need to go to the police station and get finger printed to bartend. They then run a background check to make sure you aren't a felon or have warrants out for your arrest, while you wait.
This, to see if you are "fit" enough to serve people a beer.
Kind of like the idea of checking some of this stuff for the people who will have unfettered access to my financial information.
Now, if we were talking about something out of Gattaca.....
While I might be missing something, this sounds kind of like Adobe's Apollo software idea.
This would be like having a version of Google Docs that actually was installed on your computer, but communicated with a server in order to store your data. For an organization the end user wouldn't be able to tell the difference, besides the speed of the software.
I think the closest thing that this would resemble are Microsoft's roaming profiles, but in a way that actually worked.
By having a copy on the machine for speed and a golden copy on a server for backup purposes, there would be the ability to move away from the idea of "my desktop" so that no matter what machine the user was on, they would have all of the same programs and info that they normally had on their personal computer.
Another thing to remember (when comparing this to "services" as we know them now) if this was an Open Source project, it would be easier for individual organizations (or even individuals) to setup their own servers to store this information.
The thing I don't get is how you are able to sit on your high horse with you head up your ass.
Now, would you read the rest of my post? Or, would you write me off?
I've worked in IT for several years now, and have had no small hand in getting a mid size business to use FF and Tbird on about 90% of the machines in house. Why not 100%? Simple, we don't force people to. They ask my opinion and I give it in as non passionate way possible (not "Microsoft is the devil"). I point out the pros of using OSS (security is usually the easiest) and the cons of any proprietary implementation.
In the last few years I've gotten to the point of being one of the people talking to customers on site development and I use the same approach. I don't tell them that they are idiots for only wanting IE compatibility (or any M$ products) Usually a joke about an Apple commercial is enough to get them thinking.
You are a prime example of why upper-management does what they want (and often the opposite of what IT says). You act confrontational, with a "I'm better than you" attitude, they usually just write you off, because they can. Their decisions matter, not yours.
Want to know the easiest way to get people to accept alternatives? Give them one, and don't get all pissy when they take credit for it when sales go up and cost go down. Simply because every time someone tells them how great they are, they will be reminded of you and will probably want to hears some of your other ideas.
P.S. Don't worry, management is usually kind of weary when someone suddenly gets smarter and will usually want to know where they are getting their great ideas from.
Actually, this is what Franker Herbert eluded to with the Bureau of Sabotage. An organization that sprang forth as a means to slow down an frighteningly efficient government.
While I might argue about the relationship between efficiency and oppressiveness, Herbert talks of a universe where the government became extremely efficient, and because of this had become reactionary. Here laws were passed as soon as a need for them was seen (with little regard to social repercussions) and so others laws would be passed when new problems arose because of the earlier laws.
A modern (and non-science fiction) example would be the USA Patriot Act where the government drafted, voted and enacted, a huge number of laws and regulations before most people were finished reading the intro. Now, years later, were are finally understanding the extent of some of those laws.
I think you bring up an excellent point. While most of the posts look at it as having either a)A college Degree b)Certifications or c)Experience, it is actually the combination that employers are looking for.
While certs are nice because they show that you have completed and expanded on your base knowledge (and show the initiative of wanting to go through the pain of certification) Again, they are useless without any real world experience. I've worked with too many people over the years that had a long list of certs (MCSE,MCDBA,CCNA, etc) and have no idea how to do anything in the real world, were your OSs are not 100% MS, not all of your networking equipment is from Cisco, and your end users actually have some level of intelligence.
To many people think that if they get a great degree from a well renowned college, they are a shoe in to get a high paying job. They forget that this is only the first part of the learning experience. You have to be able to show an employer that you are able to implement this book learning in a real world situation (and I would think that with military experience you can add the tag line "Works well under pressure").
This was originally tagged "Off Topic", but they failed to remember history and the use of animals to wage war. Theoretically, this could be used like germ warfare of dumping plague rats on a ship, but with even more control.
My personal favorite is project X-Ray from WWII. Here the US military figured out how to deliver thousands of bats to Japan, with each bat carrying an incendiary bomb.
Now, they had no direct way of controlling where they went, they just used the bats instincts to their advantage.
Drop a couple thousand bats in an area during the day
Bats look for nice dark places to hide (i.e. under roofs, in attics, etc)
The reason no alien race has found us is simply because they aren't looking.
Billions of years ago, the Progenitors figured out space travel and mapped the universe.
They uplifted (genetically modified) other species until they were smart enough to fly space ships, created galactic civilization, made the rules, then left.
Every couple hundred-thousand years someone comes by to update the map and to do a survey.
Besides, our soloar system was left fallow after a war destroyed the life on Mars and Venus 80 million years ago.
Pdfs are great because you can lock them so that people can't cut and past.
Study on the:
Economic impact of open source software
on innovation and the competitiveness of the
Information and Communication Technologies
(ICT) sector in the EU
The main problem that we run into with AI isn't just the ability to understand the semantic meaning of the word, but to also understand the syntax of a group of words and the context of a sentence.
Take a look at Shakespear's famous quote of "To be or not to be, that is the question."
Breaking "To be or not to be, that is the question" into it's constituent parts, the words
themselves are very simplistic with only one word with two syllables. Looking at it semantically, we
can understand the individual words, but even these have a plethora of meanings. "Be" itself presents us
with a list of meanings. Dictionary.com gives us eleven different meanings, and the top one actually
uses the quote itself as an example. Now if we look at the syntax of the words and begin to look at them
in more meaningful groupings we extract even more meaning from them. Semantics gives us what the
meaning of "to" and "be" and syntax lets us understand that this combination gives us a meaning of
life; "to be" is "to be alive". Syntax also gives us more meaning of "the question" as "the most
important question" or "the only question that truly matters". Now if we take everything together and
place it in the proper context, we are finally looking at this as questioning of weather or not Hamlet
should continue to go on with life, or if he should just end it all by committing suicide.
This is where the idea of useing Wikipedia to understand any text becomes usefull. It gives programmers a huge database of information for an AI to draw upon. But, it would also be required to draw it's own conclusions to actually be considered "intelligent".
So, by using Wikipedia to understand the meaning of individual words to build a library of syntactic meaning, relationships like those found on Wordnet http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ would be created. From there it should have a better understanding of the context of a message. This would prevent Spamers from using the technique of grouping a half dozen sentences together that individually make sence and get past a filter. The AI would learn that the context for each individual sentence is out of range for each proceding sentence and block it.
"What they are really afraid of is Musicians bypassing the record companies entirely and selling their music directly to consumers online."
This is what really scares the RIAA, not having control over the medium. The worst thing that can happen to the major record labels is for artist to find another means of distributing their music. Years ago record labels made sense if you wanted thousands of people to buy your record, the up-front cost of recording and then distributing your music was just too prohibitively expensive for any band to do alone. But who needs them when any band can now record their music to their computer, edit it, and then burn a hundred copies?
Back in the sixties and seventies we saw a huge amount of music that dealt with social issues. There wasn't this idea of becoming rich, just insanely popular, but with the advent of the multi-million dollar record label and then we see the amount of control those labels are able to exert over what is broadcast. In a way begin to control the masses themselves, what's "in" and what isn't.
When the major labels control who is making music, they are able to create all of the "one-hit-wonders" we've seen over the years. They are completely in control of the old distribution models (Record Stores, Radio, etc) but when you have bands that are able to create a huge buzz on MySpace and then give them a cheap alternative to be able to distribute that music, they loose control.
Remember, that's all it is really about; They fear loosing that control and no longer having that monopoly that they enjoyed for so long.
Hell yeah, some friends of mine and I were thinking along those lines when we were camping in Yellowstone and were thinking of ways for the park to make money, go to some remote part, setup a couple of cameras and stream it to whoever. The best is if you could take time zones into consideration so the sun doesn't rise on my Hawaii view at 11 am in my Wisconsin Office.
Someone please do this so I don't have to keep looking at tan walls!!
Haveing worked in retail for a number of years, you hear about tons of this type of thing happening; the key being that you need to question "normal" behavior. While you always have to watch out for people being sneeky, a good chunck of theft is really just someone walking in, grabbing a bunch of stuff, and walking out like they didn't have a care in the world. If they act like they know what they're doing, most people will just asume they're legit.
My dad's favorite story: Kid he knew wanted a new hocky stick, couldn't figure out how to get one out of the store. Finally, right in the middle of the day he just walked in, grabbed 20 sticks and just walked out the front door. Not one person tried to stop him and a clerk even opend the door for him (since his hands were full). When my dad asked him why he grabbed 20 of them, he replied "Who in their right mind would steel 20 hockey sticks" and just started laughing.
Once these types of operations become more prevalent it would become a simple matter of incorporating other "Waste Products" into the system. How difficult would it be a few years down the line to just shred most of our trash and mix it in with the cow crap (and human too), let it sit for a while and then take the leftover and use it like fertilizer? Even if you had a small amount on non-biodegradable mass spread over the fields, this would still be a lot better than just making huge piles of it and then covering it with dirt.
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Actually, in most states you need to go to the police station and get finger printed to bartend. They then run a background check to make sure you aren't a felon or have warrants out for your arrest, while you wait.
This, to see if you are "fit" enough to serve people a beer.
Kind of like the idea of checking some of this stuff for the people who will have unfettered access to my financial information.
Now, if we were talking about something out of Gattaca.....
While I might be missing something, this sounds kind of like Adobe's Apollo software idea.
This would be like having a version of Google Docs that actually was installed on your computer, but communicated with a server in order to store your data. For an organization the end user wouldn't be able to tell the difference, besides the speed of the software.
I think the closest thing that this would resemble are Microsoft's roaming profiles, but in a way that actually worked.
By having a copy on the machine for speed and a golden copy on a server for backup purposes, there would be the ability to move away from the idea of "my desktop" so that no matter what machine the user was on, they would have all of the same programs and info that they normally had on their personal computer.
Another thing to remember (when comparing this to "services" as we know them now) if this was an Open Source project, it would be easier for individual organizations (or even individuals) to setup their own servers to store this information.
The thing I don't get is how you are able to sit on your high horse with you head up your ass.
Now, would you read the rest of my post? Or, would you write me off?
I've worked in IT for several years now, and have had no small hand in getting a mid size business to use FF and Tbird on about 90% of the machines in house. Why not 100%? Simple, we don't force people to. They ask my opinion and I give it in as non passionate way possible (not "Microsoft is the devil"). I point out the pros of using OSS (security is usually the easiest) and the cons of any proprietary implementation.
In the last few years I've gotten to the point of being one of the people talking to customers on site development and I use the same approach. I don't tell them that they are idiots for only wanting IE compatibility (or any M$ products) Usually a joke about an Apple commercial is enough to get them thinking.
You are a prime example of why upper-management does what they want (and often the opposite of what IT says). You act confrontational, with a "I'm better than you" attitude, they usually just write you off, because they can. Their decisions matter, not yours.
Want to know the easiest way to get people to accept alternatives? Give them one, and don't get all pissy when they take credit for it when sales go up and cost go down. Simply because every time someone tells them how great they are, they will be reminded of you and will probably want to hears some of your other ideas.
P.S. Don't worry, management is usually kind of weary when someone suddenly gets smarter and will usually want to know where they are getting their great ideas from.
Actually, this is what Franker Herbert eluded to with the Bureau of Sabotage. An organization that sprang forth as a means to slow down an frighteningly efficient government.
While I might argue about the relationship between efficiency and oppressiveness, Herbert talks of a universe where the government became extremely efficient, and because of this had become reactionary. Here laws were passed as soon as a need for them was seen (with little regard to social repercussions) and so others laws would be passed when new problems arose because of the earlier laws.
A modern (and non-science fiction) example would be the USA Patriot Act where the government drafted, voted and enacted, a huge number of laws and regulations before most people were finished reading the intro. Now, years later, were are finally understanding the extent of some of those laws.
I think you bring up an excellent point. While most of the posts look at it as having either a)A college Degree b)Certifications or c)Experience, it is actually the combination that employers are looking for.
While certs are nice because they show that you have completed and expanded on your base knowledge (and show the initiative of wanting to go through the pain of certification) Again, they are useless without any real world experience. I've worked with too many people over the years that had a long list of certs (MCSE,MCDBA,CCNA, etc) and have no idea how to do anything in the real world, were your OSs are not 100% MS, not all of your networking equipment is from Cisco, and your end users actually have some level of intelligence.
To many people think that if they get a great degree from a well renowned college, they are a shoe in to get a high paying job. They forget that this is only the first part of the learning experience. You have to be able to show an employer that you are able to implement this book learning in a real world situation (and I would think that with military experience you can add the tag line "Works well under pressure").
This was originally tagged "Off Topic", but they failed to remember history and the use of animals to wage war. Theoretically, this could be used like germ warfare of dumping plague rats on a ship, but with even more control.
My personal favorite is project X-Ray from WWII. Here the US military figured out how to deliver thousands of bats to Japan, with each bat carrying an incendiary bomb.
Now, they had no direct way of controlling where they went, they just used the bats instincts to their advantage.
The reason no alien race has found us is simply because they aren't looking.
Billions of years ago, the Progenitors figured out space travel and mapped the universe.
They uplifted (genetically modified) other species until they were smart enough to fly space ships, created galactic civilization, made the rules, then left.
Every couple hundred-thousand years someone comes by to update the map and to do a survey.
Besides, our soloar system was left fallow after a war destroyed the life on Mars and Venus 80 million years ago.
Ahhh... Actaully.
Pdfs are great because you can lock them so that people can't cut and past.
Fortunatly they didn't in this one.
The main problem that we run into with AI isn't just the ability to understand the semantic meaning of the word, but to also understand the syntax of a group of words and the context of a sentence.
Take a look at Shakespear's famous quote of "To be or not to be, that is the question."
Breaking "To be or not to be, that is the question" into it's constituent parts, the words themselves are very simplistic with only one word with two syllables. Looking at it semantically, we can understand the individual words, but even these have a plethora of meanings. "Be" itself presents us with a list of meanings. Dictionary.com gives us eleven different meanings, and the top one actually uses the quote itself as an example. Now if we look at the syntax of the words and begin to look at them in more meaningful groupings we extract even more meaning from them. Semantics gives us what the meaning of "to" and "be" and syntax lets us understand that this combination gives us a meaning of life; "to be" is "to be alive". Syntax also gives us more meaning of "the question" as "the most important question" or "the only question that truly matters". Now if we take everything together and place it in the proper context, we are finally looking at this as questioning of weather or not Hamlet should continue to go on with life, or if he should just end it all by committing suicide.
This is where the idea of useing Wikipedia to understand any text becomes usefull. It gives programmers a huge database of information for an AI to draw upon. But, it would also be required to draw it's own conclusions to actually be considered "intelligent".
So, by using Wikipedia to understand the meaning of individual words to build a library of syntactic meaning, relationships like those found on Wordnet http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ would be created. From there it should have a better understanding of the context of a message. This would prevent Spamers from using the technique of grouping a half dozen sentences together that individually make sence and get past a filter. The AI would learn that the context for each individual sentence is out of range for each proceding sentence and block it.
This is what really scares the RIAA, not having control over the medium. The worst thing that can happen to the major record labels is for artist to find another means of distributing their music. Years ago record labels made sense if you wanted thousands of people to buy your record, the up-front cost of recording and then distributing your music was just too prohibitively expensive for any band to do alone. But who needs them when any band can now record their music to their computer, edit it, and then burn a hundred copies?
Back in the sixties and seventies we saw a huge amount of music that dealt with social issues. There wasn't this idea of becoming rich, just insanely popular, but with the advent of the multi-million dollar record label and then we see the amount of control those labels are able to exert over what is broadcast. In a way begin to control the masses themselves, what's "in" and what isn't.
When the major labels control who is making music, they are able to create all of the "one-hit-wonders" we've seen over the years. They are completely in control of the old distribution models (Record Stores, Radio, etc) but when you have bands that are able to create a huge buzz on MySpace and then give them a cheap alternative to be able to distribute that music, they loose control.
Remember, that's all it is really about; They fear loosing that control and no longer having that monopoly that they enjoyed for so long.
Isn't this what MS usually does? Build a product that is exactly like someone elses (or just steal it) and then let their lawyers have some fun.
If they have the balls to patent double clicking (with just a little prior art out there) I don't think they are going to be to worried about Google.
Hell yeah, some friends of mine and I were thinking along those lines when we were camping in Yellowstone and were thinking of ways for the park to make money, go to some remote part, setup a couple of cameras and stream it to whoever. The best is if you could take time zones into consideration so the sun doesn't rise on my Hawaii view at 11 am in my Wisconsin Office.
Someone please do this so I don't have to keep looking at tan walls!!
Haveing worked in retail for a number of years, you hear about tons of this type of thing happening; the key being that you need to question "normal" behavior. While you always have to watch out for people being sneeky, a good chunck of theft is really just someone walking in, grabbing a bunch of stuff, and walking out like they didn't have a care in the world. If they act like they know what they're doing, most people will just asume they're legit.
My dad's favorite story: Kid he knew wanted a new hocky stick, couldn't figure out how to get one out of the store. Finally, right in the middle of the day he just walked in, grabbed 20 sticks and just walked out the front door. Not one person tried to stop him and a clerk even opend the door for him (since his hands were full). When my dad asked him why he grabbed 20 of them, he replied "Who in their right mind would steel 20 hockey sticks" and just started laughing.
Once these types of operations become more prevalent it would become a simple matter of incorporating other "Waste Products" into the system. How difficult would it be a few years down the line to just shred most of our trash and mix it in with the cow crap (and human too), let it sit for a while and then take the leftover and use it like fertilizer? Even if you had a small amount on non-biodegradable mass spread over the fields, this would still be a lot better than just making huge piles of it and then covering it with dirt.