Whenever I see stories like this and the usual negative rebuttals that follow, I wonder if I am the only person who read Asimov, Clarke, Crichton, Roddenberry, Heinlein and many others. I am starting to believe that it is because we feel we have "dealt" with the bogeyman of "truly aware" A.I., now that it has been confronted handily by Hollywood via The Terminator and its ilk. In the same way that it was almost comforting to embrace the dark specter of biological terrorism as a pleasant relief from the more real and closer danger of nuclear destruction; focusing on the dawn of A.I. is a relief from the true technological tsunami heading our way.
In the midst of all this talk of pure A.I. is the real steady progress being made in hooking mammalian brains to computers. So far it is in the safe yet icky domain of direct control over robots and other advanced technical based prosthetics, but it is the door to the bigger more powerful scenario that may await us compared to the "birth of A.I." to reference The Matrix. What people fail to understand is that we will make huge progress in this area, much faster than in solely silicon A.I. Why? Because we don't have to understand how the mind works to reap powerful benefits from hybrid A.I. like we do with pure A.I. Neurons by their very nature analyze and adapt to patterns and signals, they just need to be connected and protected.
The most disruptive mind-numbing change heading our way is when human brains can connect with each other over a digital conduit like the Internet. What happens when I can expand my consciousness to be able to maintain far more than the average capacity of 4 to 7 active symbols in my mind, by harnessing the brain capacity of others on a shared peer to peer neuronal network? What powerful meta-consciousness will form when your mind can directly alter a visualization held in real time by another, group dreaming as it were? Or perhaps 10 minds, or a thousand? When we unplug, if we ever do, will we feel as if we woke up from a greater more powerful and majestic dream that evaporates as soon as we disconnect because our minds, by themselves and in comparison, are too tiny to hold the more complex patterns a mind cloud can handle? Perhaps feeling like a butterfly who was dreaming that he was a man, now awake and relegated back to simple thoughts of procreation and feeding, to paraphrase Zen?
In closing, what problems which are now intractable to any single human due to their complexity and scope will fall astonishingly quickly to the power of a million minds focused like a laser on their solution? Please don't take the laser analogy lightly. Right now all of us, and any computer programmer knows this all too well, are recomputing and resolving billions of thought problems which are complete duplicates of each other. What happens when all that duplication is virtually eliminated and our minds in unison all take one small slice of a much larger problem and tear it to pieces? Heaven or hell, you decide, but coming a lot sooner than any of us think.
Along with the plumbing connection, Google has added a new web page ranking system called PipeRank. Where as Google's original PageRank algorithm worked to boost pages to the top of their search engine results, PipeRank penalizes pages. PipeRank is measured by counting the number of people that flush the toilet while visiting a web site equipped with Google's plumbing based wi-fi system. Using Google Toolbar enabled laptops as they sit perched on the throne, Google has announced that this is their best new weapon in preventing crap on the Internet from affecting their search results.
Yes that's true. On that topic, wasn't there some lawyers a few years back that were trying to copyright special signature moves by basketball players? I guess it never went anywhere since I never saw any stories of litigation, but I guess they would have played the choreography angle. What a mess.
When YouTube/Google turn on their revenue sharing plan for video makers, this is going to get ugly. One of the tenets for "fair use" is whether or not the use of the copyrighted material was whether the intent was of a commercial nature or not. Once revenue sharing starts, millions of legally "naive" video uploaders are suddenly going to find themselves thrown into the nasty side of the fair use litmus test. Watch how the DMCA takedowns and litigation filings skyrocket once money is involved (as it always does).
As another reply points out, Google does use redirects one search results to track clicks. Also, don't forget that millions of webmasters use Google Analytics to track web page traffic, and in those cases Google tracks ALL the clicks on the page itself. They don't need to be on the foreign server, they just need to have their Javascript injected into the page by the webmaster, which is exactly what Google Analytics does. There's even an overlay page in Google Analytics where Google shows the web master the click counts for various items on any particular page.
Whew! That explains it! I was really tired of getting all that porn from The Smithsonian Institute showing Neanderthal couples doing the nasty with a Woolly Mammoth. I never opened any of it of course!
As humans that dominate that earth, except for war and crime, we forget that survival is at the heart of it all. The developing human mind, a child's, is desperately and rapidly trying to absorb as much social knowledge as it can. Not because it's fun. It's only fun because our brains are programmed to give us pleasure for practicing necessary survival skills. For social animals like us, social skills aren't just a good or bad mark on a report card; at one time it was life or death.
What does that preamble have to do with the topic? Simple. Kids are developing "too fast" because they are directly absorbing social skills from TV and movies, frequently in an unmoderated manner. Their poor minds are trying to integrate and internalize media, that for the most part, is poorly written or is only there to entertain using unrealistic situations and far-fetched personal interactions. But their minds are trying to use that knowledge as real data on how they should interface with others in the real world.
I await eagerly the second renaissance of mankind when we stop pretending that TV and video, at least for young minds that are not fully developerd, aren't *programming* of the truest and most far reaching kind. You and I know that the silly or dangerous manner with which one or more actors are interacting is only a joke or a cheap thrill, but to a 5 year it's real data. Then we wonder why we have adults trying to react to so many unimportant and irrelevant media created pressures, that they can't find happiness or make good decisions. We're still asleep it seems.
This is why I believe in the future there will be two Internets. The one we have now which is wild and wooly where you can remain anonymous, and one where you can't do anything without a Reputation ID that is tied to a biometric identification method (fingerprint, voiceprint, etc.). There will be third party companies like Google that have Reputation ID accounts and will handle the authentication. The Reputation ID based Interent is where eCommerce, government and medical records, etc. based web sites will live.
I hope to heaven that instead of a biometric authentication, someone can come up with a card reader for driver's licenses or some other ID method, but current events seem to indicate biometric authentication will prevail. Even in that case, I hope it is a "authenticated-user" token passing scheme so that the web site that you want to visit never knows who you are, just that you are a valid user that owns the account ID you claim to own (the Reputation ID web site acts as middleman and privacy shield, pray they are never hacked).
By the way, I don't like the thought of privacy problems and Reputation ID spoofing scenarios this implies. I just don't see any other way way to build an Internet with a high degree of trust. As I type this I am looking at the SlashDot captcha box for comments.
Badware, badware
What'cha gonna do?
What'cha gonna do when they deinstall you?
Badware, badware
What'cha gonna do?
What'cha gonna do when they deinstall you?
On Windows boxes there's an added complication. A lot of apps do their Internet access through another application. Then, for example, with ZoneAlarm, you get a message that something like "Services and Controller" application wants to access the Internet, which doesn't help you make a good decision. If you disallow it, you might end up breaking an application and not know why.
Windows has a lot of similar problems like this where authority passes through processes in a confusing and unaudited manner. Like when you are trying to delete or rename a file and the only error message you get from Windows is "that file is locked by another application". Unless you have an obscure power user utility from a site such as SysInternals/WinInternals which can tell you who has the file lock, you have no idea which app or apps(s) is holding the file lock.
I have three fears with every line of code I write:
- It is buggy - A better block of code already exists in SourceForge or somewhere else on the Internet - It is stepping on one or more patents for completely obvious or barely novel ideas
I believe at this point paranoia is not only rational but optimistic and gin and tonic are my only defense since I can't afford lawyers, guns, and money.
There is a new variant of the WMF exploit that affects all Mac users running OS X. When a Mac user browses a web page that is displaying a banner ad with the WMF exploit, malicious code is run that silently installs Windows Vista on to the Mac users computer thereby completely replacing OS X with Vista.
Here is a parody of the Numa Numa dance song (Dragostea Din Tei) that makes fun of the song using the topic of the exploding Dell laptop. It's called "My PC Is On Fire":
Somebody PLEASE mod the comment I'm replying to, up to the top. The poster is exactly right and his post needs to be heard, LOUDLY. The problem is that the Windows core was never designed to be connected to other computers. LAN's and then the Internet came later and Microsoft injected the necessary code to handle either of those new networking technologies in a quick and (very) dirty fashion. Heck, Windows XP is finally using memory write protection (NX technology) to stop at least some programs from writing to executable memory. It is astounding how long it took them to do that when you consider that the 80386, a chip well more than a decade old, had write-protection features for executable memory. When saddens me the most is the statement in the original post that Vista can be subject to a rootkit attack. What did they really learn?
IANAL, but patents don't have to be defended to avoid losing your rights. In fact they frequently are used selectively to target only the richest and/or most likely to settle companies. Trademarks do have to be defended in the manner you mention or you will lose the right to it.
Any IP lawyers care to jump in here?
It's too bad it carries the "No Derivative" attribute of the CC license. If it didn't, the fans could have had fun remixing it.:)
Note, I'm not saying they should have; kudos to them for using the CC at all. I'm just saying it would have been fun.
Kind of. If you are so small you can't afford to produce your product, you probably can't afford to pay the legal fees to file a proper patent; let alone the huge sums of money needed to pursue infringers or to defend the viability of the patent if you do get it.
As I said in a reply to another poster, it's not that he left out the patent trolls that I object to, which he didn't. I did see his comments on them. It's that he states that patent "lawsuits" are usually by big companies going under and which I believe is wishful thinking and optimistic. He later states that patent trolls don't hamper innovation much which I also take issue with. So it's not the point he makes that I say is wrong, but his overall weighting of the primay reason for patent lawsuits that I find difficult.
Yes I did see where he mentioned "patent trolls". But he does make the point:
"When you read of big companies filing patent suits against smaller ones, it's usually a big company on the way down, grasping at straws."
He says "usually" here so even though he mentions the companies I have highlighted in my post, I disagree that "usually" it's just big companies on the way out. About patent trolls he says:
I will only address one point of the optimistic idealism I saw in several parts of the article, there are others:
"A company that sues competitors for patent infringement is like a a defender who has been beaten so thoroughly that he turns to plead with the referee."
This point is made in the context of other statements that indicate this is the main reason that a company starts suing for patent infringement. The reality is there are companies that have no developers at all, just lawyers, whose sole purpose is to seek out and buy patents and pressure other companies for licensing fees. There are other companies/people who do nothing but try to think of patentable ideas to lay claim to, and never intend to build a product; only to extort license fees from others.
There are other examples of what the author would like to believe that gloss over the terrible realities of software patents; despite the many good points he does make.
Slashdot Mirror
How about Google Web Toolkit?
Whenever I see stories like this and the usual negative rebuttals that follow, I wonder if I am the only person who read Asimov, Clarke, Crichton, Roddenberry, Heinlein and many others. I am starting to believe that it is because we feel we have "dealt" with the bogeyman of "truly aware" A.I., now that it has been confronted handily by Hollywood via The Terminator and its ilk. In the same way that it was almost comforting to embrace the dark specter of biological terrorism as a pleasant relief from the more real and closer danger of nuclear destruction; focusing on the dawn of A.I. is a relief from the true technological tsunami heading our way.
In the midst of all this talk of pure A.I. is the real steady progress being made in hooking mammalian brains to computers. So far it is in the safe yet icky domain of direct control over robots and other advanced technical based prosthetics, but it is the door to the bigger more powerful scenario that may await us compared to the "birth of A.I." to reference The Matrix. What people fail to understand is that we will make huge progress in this area, much faster than in solely silicon A.I. Why? Because we don't have to understand how the mind works to reap powerful benefits from hybrid A.I. like we do with pure A.I. Neurons by their very nature analyze and adapt to patterns and signals, they just need to be connected and protected.
The most disruptive mind-numbing change heading our way is when human brains can connect with each other over a digital conduit like the Internet. What happens when I can expand my consciousness to be able to maintain far more than the average capacity of 4 to 7 active symbols in my mind, by harnessing the brain capacity of others on a shared peer to peer neuronal network? What powerful meta-consciousness will form when your mind can directly alter a visualization held in real time by another, group dreaming as it were? Or perhaps 10 minds, or a thousand? When we unplug, if we ever do, will we feel as if we woke up from a greater more powerful and majestic dream that evaporates as soon as we disconnect because our minds, by themselves and in comparison, are too tiny to hold the more complex patterns a mind cloud can handle? Perhaps feeling like a butterfly who was dreaming that he was a man, now awake and relegated back to simple thoughts of procreation and feeding, to paraphrase Zen?
In closing, what problems which are now intractable to any single human due to their complexity and scope will fall astonishingly quickly to the power of a million minds focused like a laser on their solution? Please don't take the laser analogy lightly. Right now all of us, and any computer programmer knows this all too well, are recomputing and resolving billions of thought problems which are complete duplicates of each other. What happens when all that duplication is virtually eliminated and our minds in unison all take one small slice of a much larger problem and tear it to pieces? Heaven or hell, you decide, but coming a lot sooner than any of us think.
Along with the plumbing connection, Google has added a new web page ranking system called PipeRank. Where as Google's original PageRank algorithm worked to boost pages to the top of their search engine results, PipeRank penalizes pages. PipeRank is measured by counting the number of people that flush the toilet while visiting a web site equipped with Google's plumbing based wi-fi system. Using Google Toolbar enabled laptops as they sit perched on the throne, Google has announced that this is their best new weapon in preventing crap on the Internet from affecting their search results.
Yes that's true. On that topic, wasn't there some lawyers a few years back that were trying to copyright special signature moves by basketball players? I guess it never went anywhere since I never saw any stories of litigation, but I guess they would have played the choreography angle. What a mess.
When YouTube/Google turn on their revenue sharing plan for video makers, this is going to get ugly. One of the tenets for "fair use" is whether or not the use of the copyrighted material was whether the intent was of a commercial nature or not. Once revenue sharing starts, millions of legally "naive" video uploaders are suddenly going to find themselves thrown into the nasty side of the fair use litmus test. Watch how the DMCA takedowns and litigation filings skyrocket once money is involved (as it always does).
As another reply points out, Google does use redirects one search results to track clicks. Also, don't forget that millions of webmasters use Google Analytics to track web page traffic, and in those cases Google tracks ALL the clicks on the page itself. They don't need to be on the foreign server, they just need to have their Javascript injected into the page by the webmaster, which is exactly what Google Analytics does. There's even an overlay page in Google Analytics where Google shows the web master the click counts for various items on any particular page.
Whew! That explains it! I was really tired of getting all that porn from The Smithsonian Institute showing Neanderthal couples doing the nasty with a Woolly Mammoth. I never opened any of it of course!
As humans that dominate that earth, except for war and crime, we forget that survival is at the heart of it all. The developing human mind, a child's, is desperately and rapidly trying to absorb as much social knowledge as it can. Not because it's fun. It's only fun because our brains are programmed to give us pleasure for practicing necessary survival skills. For social animals like us, social skills aren't just a good or bad mark on a report card; at one time it was life or death.
What does that preamble have to do with the topic? Simple. Kids are developing "too fast" because they are directly absorbing social skills from TV and movies, frequently in an unmoderated manner. Their poor minds are trying to integrate and internalize media, that for the most part, is poorly written or is only there to entertain using unrealistic situations and far-fetched personal interactions. But their minds are trying to use that knowledge as real data on how they should interface with others in the real world.
I await eagerly the second renaissance of mankind when we stop pretending that TV and video, at least for young minds that are not fully developerd, aren't *programming* of the truest and most far reaching kind. You and I know that the silly or dangerous manner with which one or more actors are interacting is only a joke or a cheap thrill, but to a 5 year it's real data. Then we wonder why we have adults trying to react to so many unimportant and irrelevant media created pressures, that they can't find happiness or make good decisions. We're still asleep it seems.
This is why I believe in the future there will be two Internets. The one we have now which is wild and wooly where you can remain anonymous, and one where you can't do anything without a Reputation ID that is tied to a biometric identification method (fingerprint, voiceprint, etc.). There will be third party companies like Google that have Reputation ID accounts and will handle the authentication. The Reputation ID based Interent is where eCommerce, government and medical records, etc. based web sites will live.
I hope to heaven that instead of a biometric authentication, someone can come up with a card reader for driver's licenses or some other ID method, but current events seem to indicate biometric authentication will prevail. Even in that case, I hope it is a "authenticated-user" token passing scheme so that the web site that you want to visit never knows who you are, just that you are a valid user that owns the account ID you claim to own (the Reputation ID web site acts as middleman and privacy shield, pray they are never hacked).
By the way, I don't like the thought of privacy problems and Reputation ID spoofing scenarios this implies. I just don't see any other way way to build an Internet with a high degree of trust. As I type this I am looking at the SlashDot captcha box for comments.
Badware, badware What'cha gonna do? What'cha gonna do when they deinstall you? Badware, badware What'cha gonna do? What'cha gonna do when they deinstall you?
On Windows boxes there's an added complication. A lot of apps do their Internet access through another application. Then, for example, with ZoneAlarm, you get a message that something like "Services and Controller" application wants to access the Internet, which doesn't help you make a good decision. If you disallow it, you might end up breaking an application and not know why. Windows has a lot of similar problems like this where authority passes through processes in a confusing and unaudited manner. Like when you are trying to delete or rename a file and the only error message you get from Windows is "that file is locked by another application". Unless you have an obscure power user utility from a site such as SysInternals/WinInternals which can tell you who has the file lock, you have no idea which app or apps(s) is holding the file lock.
I have three fears with every line of code I write:
- It is buggy
- A better block of code already exists in SourceForge or somewhere else on the Internet
- It is stepping on one or more patents for completely obvious or barely novel ideas
I believe at this point paranoia is not only rational but optimistic and gin and tonic are my only defense since I can't afford lawyers, guns, and money.
There is a new variant of the WMF exploit that affects all Mac users running OS X. When a Mac user browses a web page that is displaying a banner ad with the WMF exploit, malicious code is run that silently installs Windows Vista on to the Mac users computer thereby completely replacing OS X with Vista.
Here is a parody of the Numa Numa dance song (Dragostea Din Tei) that makes fun of the song using the topic of the exploding Dell laptop. It's called "My PC Is On Fire":
On YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPejYdBM11I
High quality downloadable version:
http://www.spokenring.com/numa-numa-english.php
Enjoy!
Somebody PLEASE mod the comment I'm replying to, up to the top. The poster is exactly right and his post needs to be heard, LOUDLY. The problem is that the Windows core was never designed to be connected to other computers. LAN's and then the Internet came later and Microsoft injected the necessary code to handle either of those new networking technologies in a quick and (very) dirty fashion. Heck, Windows XP is finally using memory write protection (NX technology) to stop at least some programs from writing to executable memory. It is astounding how long it took them to do that when you consider that the 80386, a chip well more than a decade old, had write-protection features for executable memory. When saddens me the most is the statement in the original post that Vista can be subject to a rootkit attack. What did they really learn?
That's what I thought, thanks. Yes, "submarine patents" are another problem that needs to be addressed and soon.
IANAL, but patents don't have to be defended to avoid losing your rights. In fact they frequently are used selectively to target only the richest and/or most likely to settle companies. Trademarks do have to be defended in the manner you mention or you will lose the right to it. Any IP lawyers care to jump in here?
It's too bad it carries the "No Derivative" attribute of the CC license. If it didn't, the fans could have had fun remixing it. :)
Note, I'm not saying they should have; kudos to them for using the CC at all. I'm just saying it would have been fun.
Kind of. If you are so small you can't afford to produce your product, you probably can't afford to pay the legal fees to file a proper patent; let alone the huge sums of money needed to pursue infringers or to defend the viability of the patent if you do get it.
shorgs,
As I said in a reply to another poster, it's not that he left out the patent trolls that I object to, which he didn't. I did see his comments on them. It's that he states that patent "lawsuits" are usually by big companies going under and which I believe is wishful thinking and optimistic. He later states that patent trolls don't hamper innovation much which I also take issue with. So it's not the point he makes that I say is wrong, but his overall weighting of the primay reason for patent lawsuits that I find difficult.
Yes I did see where he mentioned "patent trolls". But he does make the point:
"When you read of big companies filing patent suits against smaller ones, it's usually a big company on the way down, grasping at straws."
He says "usually" here so even though he mentions the companies I have highlighted in my post, I disagree that "usually" it's just big companies on the way out. About patent trolls he says:
"I don't think they hamper innovation much"
And I disagree with that, hence my post.
I will only address one point of the optimistic idealism I saw in several parts of the article, there are others:
"A company that sues competitors for patent infringement is like a a defender who has been beaten so thoroughly that he turns to plead with the referee."
This point is made in the context of other statements that indicate this is the main reason that a company starts suing for patent infringement. The reality is there are companies that have no developers at all, just lawyers, whose sole purpose is to seek out and buy patents and pressure other companies for licensing fees. There are other companies/people who do nothing but try to think of patentable ideas to lay claim to, and never intend to build a product; only to extort license fees from others.
There are other examples of what the author would like to believe that gloss over the terrible realities of software patents; despite the many good points he does make.
Yes, it's the first robot to come with special Lite detection sensors that automatically throw the beer out if it's a Lite beer.
If you put four of them together you can actually run the first full second of the trailer for the next version of Doom.
Who wants to be the first to beta test it?