There is no evidence that that is possible even if you look directly into fairly powerful laser pointers (many milliwatts). In order to harm someone's eyesight in the cockpit of a moving aircraft from miles away, you would need a fairly powerful laser and you would need to aim it accurately. I would guess that there are a lot simpler and cheaper ways to interfere with aircraft operations.
However, even though there is no evidence of actual injury, people still report getting injured by laser pointers all the time. That suggests that there is a kind of fear and hysteria about these devices (maybe caused by too much SciFi) that now seems to be cross-breeding with the terrorism scares.
Unions seem to believe that society owes them a living.
So do corporations, apparently.
The only thing management could have done would be to have rejected the union contracts earlier.
If management made contracts that they couldn't keep, they screwed up and their companies should go out of business. That's the way the free market works.
In fact, in reality, big airlines are screwing up not only on their labor contracts, they are poorly run, heavily government subsidized businesses offering mostly uncompetitive transportation options. The sooner the big airlines go out of business, the better off we all are.
Unions work by artificially limiting labor supply - but that doesn't work if there is not enough work.
Unions are a free market mechanism by which employees get together and bargain collectively. That's not very different from shareholders forming corporations in order to make collective contracts. Unions "artificially limits the labor supply" about as much as car makers "artificially limits the car supply" when they set a price for their new SUVs.
What it comes down to is that you want intrusive government: you want government to prop up failing, uncompetitive businesses, you want government to protect management from the consequences of their bad decisions, and you want government to prevent employees from associating freely and making a free-market choice to bargain collectively. Come on, admit it to yourself: you are just another one of those typical intrusive-government Republicans.
First of all, the idea is as old as moving pictures: using sequentially triggered multiple cameras was the first approach for capturing motion sequences ever used. This work, using digital cameras, doesn't actually seem to do much about the problems that arise from such an arrangement.
CYC comprises an utterly huge amount of data. The captured semantic relationships will be useful to future AI researchers no matter what happens.
Not if it turns out that the approach to representations and reasoning used by CYC is fundamentally wrong. In different words, you can collect gigabytes of Roman multiplication tables and still not be able to solve a differential equation.
the news is out and suddenly newspapers are claiming that it's costing them money (50-65 million U.S. dollars a year)
Yup, that's how the free market is supposed to work: cheaper, more efficient technologies are taking away revenue from older, less efficient technologies.
I'm surprised newspapers are still going as strong as they are; except for a lot of arrogance, attitude, and the ability to line the cat litter box, they don't offer much over web-based news.
There are several nice disk-based MP3/ogg players out there that already run Linux out of the box. You can save yourself a lot of trouble, get a more functional device, and support FOSS by buying one of those. Apple's iPod just isn't built for Linux and Apple clearly doesn't want you to run a FOSS OS on it (otherwise they would have shipped it with one).
you'd expect the largest group of nerds on the net to embrace technology rather than bash it.
They do, when something is actually new and useful. But when old, inferior, or gimmicky stuff gets hyped up as "new", then you can expect the largest groups of nerds on the net to show little mercy.
eg the iPod, which he described as "lame" when it was first released.
The iPod was lame when it was first released: a late "me too" product with poor battery life, Macintosh-only connectivity, and no recharging through USB. (After several product cycles, it has now become a credible, if still somewhat overpriced, MP3 player.)
It's not entirely his fault though - most new technologies and techniques get slammed here.
That's probably because most technologies that are advertised as "new" aren't actually new (Apple is a particularly frequent offender in that department, but it's an industry disease).
If you directly impact a hard surface, then you are going to decelerate from free fall of approx. 120 mph to 0 mph in a distance of approx a foot (the width of your body).
If you fall flat on your belly, yes, you will be dead. But landing correctly means falling feet first, decelerating over the entire length of your body, and not reaching a zero final velocity (by rolling), which shaves off some more speed. Also, terminal velocity may be smaller for some passengers.
It might have been good for this to come out 1-2 years later. Why? Because then HDTV and digital radio broadcasters would have had more time to get sloppy on the encryption and DRM under the (false) assumption that the need to have their hardware radios in order to receive the signal is protection enough.
With software radios widely and inexpensively available during the initial deployment of the next generation of radio and television broadcasts, broadcasters may recognize too soon the need for bullet-proof cryptographic methods and may not screw it up again like they did before.
as no one has ever survived a landing attempt without a parachute.
I don't know whether people have survived "attempts", but you can certainly survive falls from airplanes without a parachute: hitting brushes, trees, water, or snow can break your fall sufficiently so that you don't die. Theoretically, even hitting a solid, hard surface is survivable if you break the fall correctly (but I don't know of any actual cases).
Professionals buy new $3k Macs when there's a new model out if there is even 2-3 seconds difference in how long a task takes. Why should they "save" $650 on something that will take them ten times as long? [...] If the GIMP team wants Photoshop market share(which I don't think they do), then repeat after me: productivity, productivity, productivity. They'd do well to sit down with a bunch of pros and write down everything they say, and weigh it very heavily into future plans.
You are quite right that there is a subculture of vociferous Mac and Photoshop users. You are quite wrong if you think that those people are synonymous with imaging "professionals"; they are at best a small subculture with a specific user profile.
I think it would be pointless for the Gimp developers to waste any time on sitting down with Mac and Photoshop users--those people will never switch to the Gimp and they will never stop complaining, so listening to their concerns is a waste of time.
I hope the Gimp will remain an alternative to Photoshop, something that genuinely works differently and has a different UI.
Re:Seriously... Why would you use this?
on
GIMP 2.2 Released
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· Score: 1
If GIMP was not open source, would you use it?
Compared to Photoshop? You bet.
Does it have anything over Photoshop in terms of Functionality or Ease of USe?
Photoshop has one of the crappiest UIs I have ever had the misfortune to encounter, but, then, photographers seem to be perversely drawn to bad user interfaces (viz Hasselblad and Nikon). And most of the features in Photoshop are no more than bloat. In fact, even the Gimp has too much junk in it for my taste; for day-to-day imaging work, one needs much less than what either of those applications provide out of the box.
In any case, the Gimp has two serious limitations: lack of CMYK support and lack of 16bit support. That's what the Gimp developers should focus on fixing. They can leave the UI alone for now--it is far from perfect, but it sure beats the alternatives.
For marketing purposes, the manufacturers lead the public to believe that they derive part of their energy from combustion of petrol and part "from electricity", which is meaningless but impressive to the average consumer, who doesn't stop to ask why, if that is so, he is not having to charge up his car every night.
Fortunately, most consumers know that the "from electricity" part is far from meaningless. Quite to the contrary: it enables regenerative braking, low-end torque, and instant startup/shutdown.
Our local newspaper recently published a glowing 'news story' [...]
Well, so the quality of your local newspaper reporting matches the quality of its readers--readers like you. But just because both you and a reporter got it wrong doesn't mean the rest of the world doesn't understand it.
CYC is being developed without much grounding in particular applications; chances are that its developers have made so many mistakes in its development that it will turn out to be useless. Time will tell.
Actually the critical component of AI is conceptual processing. Semantic processing cannot possibly succeed without the construction and representation of concepts.
I agree, but many people (myself included) view "conceptual processing" simply as a part of semantics, not as a separate field.
Many of the big names who used to work on it, like Roger Schank, have moved on to other things because it was so hard.
That's not surprising: Schank's approach was naive and unworkable.
the first program to take advantage of its new strategy for solving search problems. This approach, which it calls unstructured information management architecture, or UIMA, will, according to I.B.M., lead to a third generation in the ability to retrieve computerized data.
IBM researchers are right that AI techniques are getting powerful enough to allow unstructured information retrieval based on semantic content. But what IBM researchers are trying to do here is take credit for technologies and ideas developed by thousands of scientists over decades.
I don't know whether this is arrogance on the part of the IBM researchers, dishonesty, or ignorance, but either way, public statements like that on IBM are not a recommendation for the quality of their research or products.
In fact, this seems to be getting more and more common: while this has always been a problem, companies like IBM, Sun, and Microsoft are increasingly trying to take credit for entire fields of research that they contributed, if anything at all, only a miniscule amount of new work to.
I for one, welcome our new semantic web overlords! It's really great to hear that something based on semantic technologies is finally breaking through. This could be the dawn of a new era:)
The term "semantic web" refers to technologies that let authors provide markup indicating the semantics of content. That is, the "semantic web" places a burden on the authors of pages.
What natural language analysis is doing is a completely different approach: instead of burdening authors with marking up their pages to become part of a semantic web, it is taking the existing content and inferring semantics for it.
All knowledge available everywhere, any time, that would be a great thing. Heck, it's even quite scary to think about it.
That's been the AI vision for half a century. But implementing it is still way off (and IBM is only one of many institutions working on it).
The genius being google's success was paying *less* attention to the content of a page when categorizing it, and relying on links *to* the page instead. Why? Because of spammers.
"Genius" would imply some sort of brand new insight, but citation analysis has had a long tradition before Google appeared on the scene as a search engine. Google's biggest achievement is probably in implementing citation analysis on a very large scale, but they didn't break completely new ground in how people search.
And, in the long run, semantics-based analysis, like IBM's Piquant, is probably going to be the better technology: citation analysis for determining relevance to a query is really just a limited substitute for understanding of the content.
Semantic analysis of text has been the holy grail of AI for decades. It's useful for all sorts of things, including information retrieval, translation, speech recognition, and summarization. IBM is hardly the only research lab working on this, or the only company on using it for enhancing search.
Using RSA security tokens (of the hardware variety) is unnecessarily expensive. One-time passwords (strikelists) are cheap and proven technology. US banks should start using them--banks elsewhere already do.
Reasoning about probabilities is pretty tricky stuff and even reputable physicists often get it completely wrong. Does anybody have more details (maybe a pointer to a publication) about how they arrived at these estimates and what assumptions went into it?
Re:Great, 48 versions of Tetris
on
Games Knoppix
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· Score: 1
And this is different from Windows--how? There may be fewer games for Linux overall than for Windows, but the proportions are roughly the same: people write the things that are easy to write over and over again, and you get relatively few good and complex games.
ACPI has been unusable on many laptops (no suspend or faulty suspend on Sony, ASUS, and many others) with kernel versions below 2.6.9. I heard that a lot of work has been done on ACPI recently and that some big patches were going to be integrated.
You know the sad part? I really want to see a FOSS Outlook killer, but conversations like this one tell me it won't happen, because FOSS developers miss the boat on why people use it.
Many FOSS developers know very well why people use Outlook. But they also understand that FOSS can't win on Microsoft's turf: they need to change the rules. And they will succeed because Outlook/Exchange is such a poor system.
As for web apps being the future, the ball is very much still up in the air.
The ball is always "up in the air". Microsoft is a powerful monopoly and they have lots of means at their disposal trying to kill alternatives. Unfortunately, because Sun screwed up with Java, we missed an important opportunity to create an alternative platform.
If coding it remains the prospect of developers only, then no, it is not in the future for the vast majority of small and medium sized buisnesses I know that use Outlook/Exchange.
Improving the ability of non-experts to create applications indeed is important. Fortunately, doing better than Microsoft in that area is aiming low.
I hate to burst your bubble, but thats not even close to the trends I see, except in buisnesses with more than 250 users,
You're not "bursting my bubble" at all; you simply have your nose so close to the shit that you are apparently unable to look ahead.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no evidence that that is possible even if you look directly into fairly powerful laser pointers (many milliwatts). In order to harm someone's eyesight in the cockpit of a moving aircraft from miles away, you would need a fairly powerful laser and you would need to aim it accurately. I would guess that there are a lot simpler and cheaper ways to interfere with aircraft operations.
However, even though there is no evidence of actual injury, people still report getting injured by laser pointers all the time. That suggests that there is a kind of fear and hysteria about these devices (maybe caused by too much SciFi) that now seems to be cross-breeding with the terrorism scares.
Unions seem to believe that society owes them a living.
So do corporations, apparently.
The only thing management could have done would be to have rejected the union contracts earlier.
If management made contracts that they couldn't keep, they screwed up and their companies should go out of business. That's the way the free market works.
In fact, in reality, big airlines are screwing up not only on their labor contracts, they are poorly run, heavily government subsidized businesses offering mostly uncompetitive transportation options. The sooner the big airlines go out of business, the better off we all are.
Unions work by artificially limiting labor supply - but that doesn't work if there is not enough work.
Unions are a free market mechanism by which employees get together and bargain collectively. That's not very different from shareholders forming corporations in order to make collective contracts. Unions "artificially limits the labor supply" about as much as car makers "artificially limits the car supply" when they set a price for their new SUVs.
What it comes down to is that you want intrusive government: you want government to prop up failing, uncompetitive businesses, you want government to protect management from the consequences of their bad decisions, and you want government to prevent employees from associating freely and making a free-market choice to bargain collectively. Come on, admit it to yourself: you are just another one of those typical intrusive-government Republicans.
First of all, the idea is as old as moving pictures: using sequentially triggered multiple cameras was the first approach for capturing motion sequences ever used. This work, using digital cameras, doesn't actually seem to do much about the problems that arise from such an arrangement.
CYC comprises an utterly huge amount of data. The captured semantic relationships will be useful to future AI researchers no matter what happens.
Not if it turns out that the approach to representations and reasoning used by CYC is fundamentally wrong. In different words, you can collect gigabytes of Roman multiplication tables and still not be able to solve a differential equation.
the news is out and suddenly newspapers are claiming that it's costing them money (50-65 million U.S. dollars a year)
Yup, that's how the free market is supposed to work: cheaper, more efficient technologies are taking away revenue from older, less efficient technologies.
I'm surprised newspapers are still going as strong as they are; except for a lot of arrogance, attitude, and the ability to line the cat litter box, they don't offer much over web-based news.
There are several nice disk-based MP3/ogg players out there that already run Linux out of the box. You can save yourself a lot of trouble, get a more functional device, and support FOSS by buying one of those. Apple's iPod just isn't built for Linux and Apple clearly doesn't want you to run a FOSS OS on it (otherwise they would have shipped it with one).
you'd expect the largest group of nerds on the net to embrace technology rather than bash it.
They do, when something is actually new and useful. But when old, inferior, or gimmicky stuff gets hyped up as "new", then you can expect the largest groups of nerds on the net to show little mercy.
eg the iPod, which he described as "lame" when it was first released.
The iPod was lame when it was first released: a late "me too" product with poor battery life, Macintosh-only connectivity, and no recharging through USB. (After several product cycles, it has now become a credible, if still somewhat overpriced, MP3 player.)
It's not entirely his fault though - most new technologies and techniques get slammed here.
That's probably because most technologies that are advertised as "new" aren't actually new (Apple is a particularly frequent offender in that department, but it's an industry disease).
If you directly impact a hard surface, then you are going to decelerate from free fall of approx. 120 mph to 0 mph in a distance of approx a foot (the width of your body).
If you fall flat on your belly, yes, you will be dead. But landing correctly means falling feet first, decelerating over the entire length of your body, and not reaching a zero final velocity (by rolling), which shaves off some more speed. Also, terminal velocity may be smaller for some passengers.
It might have been good for this to come out 1-2 years later. Why? Because then HDTV and digital radio broadcasters would have had more time to get sloppy on the encryption and DRM under the (false) assumption that the need to have their hardware radios in order to receive the signal is protection enough.
With software radios widely and inexpensively available during the initial deployment of the next generation of radio and television broadcasts, broadcasters may recognize too soon the need for bullet-proof cryptographic methods and may not screw it up again like they did before.
as no one has ever survived a landing attempt without a parachute.
I don't know whether people have survived "attempts", but you can certainly survive falls from airplanes without a parachute: hitting brushes, trees, water, or snow can break your fall sufficiently so that you don't die. Theoretically, even hitting a solid, hard surface is survivable if you break the fall correctly (but I don't know of any actual cases).
Professionals buy new $3k Macs when there's a new model out if there is even 2-3 seconds difference in how long a task takes. Why should they "save" $650 on something that will take them ten times as long? [...] If the GIMP team wants Photoshop market share(which I don't think they do), then repeat after me: productivity, productivity, productivity. They'd do well to sit down with a bunch of pros and write down everything they say, and weigh it very heavily into future plans.
You are quite right that there is a subculture of vociferous Mac and Photoshop users. You are quite wrong if you think that those people are synonymous with imaging "professionals"; they are at best a small subculture with a specific user profile.
I think it would be pointless for the Gimp developers to waste any time on sitting down with Mac and Photoshop users--those people will never switch to the Gimp and they will never stop complaining, so listening to their concerns is a waste of time.
I hope the Gimp will remain an alternative to Photoshop, something that genuinely works differently and has a different UI.
If GIMP was not open source, would you use it?
Compared to Photoshop? You bet.
Does it have anything over Photoshop in terms of Functionality or Ease of USe?
Photoshop has one of the crappiest UIs I have ever had the misfortune to encounter, but, then, photographers seem to be perversely drawn to bad user interfaces (viz Hasselblad and Nikon). And most of the features in Photoshop are no more than bloat. In fact, even the Gimp has too much junk in it for my taste; for day-to-day imaging work, one needs much less than what either of those applications provide out of the box.
In any case, the Gimp has two serious limitations: lack of CMYK support and lack of 16bit support. That's what the Gimp developers should focus on fixing. They can leave the UI alone for now--it is far from perfect, but it sure beats the alternatives.
For marketing purposes, the manufacturers lead the public to believe that they derive part of their energy from combustion of petrol and part "from electricity", which is meaningless but impressive to the average consumer, who doesn't stop to ask why, if that is so, he is not having to charge up his car every night.
Fortunately, most consumers know that the "from electricity" part is far from meaningless. Quite to the contrary: it enables regenerative braking, low-end torque, and instant startup/shutdown.
Our local newspaper recently published a glowing 'news story' [...]
Well, so the quality of your local newspaper reporting matches the quality of its readers--readers like you. But just because both you and a reporter got it wrong doesn't mean the rest of the world doesn't understand it.
CYC is being developed without much grounding in particular applications; chances are that its developers have made so many mistakes in its development that it will turn out to be useless. Time will tell.
Actually the critical component of AI is conceptual processing. Semantic processing cannot possibly succeed without the construction and representation of concepts.
I agree, but many people (myself included) view "conceptual processing" simply as a part of semantics, not as a separate field.
Many of the big names who used to work on it, like Roger Schank, have moved on to other things because it was so hard.
That's not surprising: Schank's approach was naive and unworkable.
IBM researchers are right that AI techniques are getting powerful enough to allow unstructured information retrieval based on semantic content. But what IBM researchers are trying to do here is take credit for technologies and ideas developed by thousands of scientists over decades.
I don't know whether this is arrogance on the part of the IBM researchers, dishonesty, or ignorance, but either way, public statements like that on IBM are not a recommendation for the quality of their research or products.
In fact, this seems to be getting more and more common: while this has always been a problem, companies like IBM, Sun, and Microsoft are increasingly trying to take credit for entire fields of research that they contributed, if anything at all, only a miniscule amount of new work to.
I for one, welcome our new semantic web overlords! It's really great to hear that something based on semantic technologies is finally breaking through. This could be the dawn of a new era :)
The term "semantic web" refers to technologies that let authors provide markup indicating the semantics of content. That is, the "semantic web" places a burden on the authors of pages.
What natural language analysis is doing is a completely different approach: instead of burdening authors with marking up their pages to become part of a semantic web, it is taking the existing content and inferring semantics for it.
All knowledge available everywhere, any time, that would be a great thing. Heck, it's even quite scary to think about it.
That's been the AI vision for half a century. But implementing it is still way off (and IBM is only one of many institutions working on it).
The genius being google's success was paying *less* attention to the content of a page when categorizing it, and relying on links *to* the page instead. Why? Because of spammers.
"Genius" would imply some sort of brand new insight, but citation analysis has had a long tradition before Google appeared on the scene as a search engine. Google's biggest achievement is probably in implementing citation analysis on a very large scale, but they didn't break completely new ground in how people search.
And, in the long run, semantics-based analysis, like IBM's Piquant, is probably going to be the better technology: citation analysis for determining relevance to a query is really just a limited substitute for understanding of the content.
Semantic analysis of text has been the holy grail of AI for decades. It's useful for all sorts of things, including information retrieval, translation, speech recognition, and summarization. IBM is hardly the only research lab working on this, or the only company on using it for enhancing search.
Using RSA security tokens (of the hardware variety) is unnecessarily expensive. One-time passwords (strikelists) are cheap and proven technology. US banks should start using them--banks elsewhere already do.
Reasoning about probabilities is pretty tricky stuff and even reputable physicists often get it completely wrong. Does anybody have more details (maybe a pointer to a publication) about how they arrived at these estimates and what assumptions went into it?
And this is different from Windows--how? There may be fewer games for Linux overall than for Windows, but the proportions are roughly the same: people write the things that are easy to write over and over again, and you get relatively few good and complex games.
ACPI has been unusable on many laptops (no suspend or faulty suspend on Sony, ASUS, and many others) with kernel versions below 2.6.9. I heard that a lot of work has been done on ACPI recently and that some big patches were going to be integrated.
So, does ACPI work better in 2.6.10?
You know the sad part? I really want to see a FOSS Outlook killer, but conversations like this one tell me it won't happen, because FOSS developers miss the boat on why people use it.
Many FOSS developers know very well why people use Outlook. But they also understand that FOSS can't win on Microsoft's turf: they need to change the rules. And they will succeed because Outlook/Exchange is such a poor system.
As for web apps being the future, the ball is very much still up in the air.
The ball is always "up in the air". Microsoft is a powerful monopoly and they have lots of means at their disposal trying to kill alternatives. Unfortunately, because Sun screwed up with Java, we missed an important opportunity to create an alternative platform.
If coding it remains the prospect of developers only, then no, it is not in the future for the vast majority of small and medium sized buisnesses I know that use Outlook/Exchange.
Improving the ability of non-experts to create applications indeed is important. Fortunately, doing better than Microsoft in that area is aiming low.
I hate to burst your bubble, but thats not even close to the trends I see, except in buisnesses with more than 250 users,
You're not "bursting my bubble" at all; you simply have your nose so close to the shit that you are apparently unable to look ahead.