Microsoft has already asserted the threat of Linux - there's no need to do it again by purchasing a Linux company.
If the plans of purchasing Red Hat are true, I think the only plausible reason would be to put one of the prime suppliers of Linux out of business one way or the other. (Most probably the the 'other' way)
Microsoft has proven time and time again that they can - *and will* - use their power and intellect in less honorable ways. Too bad, I think that many of their products don't need additional 'help' to survive.
There was one language missing on the list: C+-. This is/. curriculum, so go get some some info about it. A slightly different explanation of it also exists.
In my opinion, it is not a question of *when* we'll get trouble from the robots we're going to create, but what we're going to do about it.
We might as well start planning right now. The article in the posting, as well as numerous other reports, show that the robot mechanics is getting better and better. What is lacking, is some real AI. I think that within 30-50 years, if not before, this "problem" will also be solved.
That's when trouble starts. As Isaac Asimov shows in his literary "experiments" with the three laws of robotics, even *with* benign top priority imperatives NOT TO HARM humans, we may not be safe.
Given the mechanics and the AI, how will robots become a threat to us? Imagine a scientist in a robot laboratory sometime in the future. He/she has all the parts needed to produce the ultimate robot: agile and completely autonomous. I think the temptation will be too much for *any* person. It will be impossible to refrain from releasing a completely free and autonomous robot into society to see what happens. Imagine the excitement: This is comparable to a second creation; it is almost like being God.
Naturally, the robot will have a strong need for self preservation. So it will start to secure land, natural resources, labour, spare parts, factories, and so on, and build other robots and societies to fulfill these and other purposes.
This is when conflicts will start. Wars often start as a result of a disagreement over natural resources or land.
...it both rewards the inventor and adds knowledge to society.
If patents are to add knowledge to a broader part of the public, I think we need a patent application de-obfuscator. Most patent applications don't resemble normal language at all. Let's take the patent that describes run-length encoding (RLE), for instance. It is amazing how many pages of text is used to describe this so-called 'apparatus' that transforms n consequtive values of x into the two values x and n.
Being the suspicious paranoid that I am, I cannot keep from wondering if this, let's call it creative rewriting (to be nice), is still in use because someone actually finds it useful...
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft has already asserted the threat of Linux - there's no need to do it again by purchasing a Linux company.
If the plans of purchasing Red Hat are true, I think the only plausible reason would be to put one of the prime suppliers of Linux out of business one way or the other. (Most probably the the 'other' way)
Microsoft has proven time and time again that they can - *and will* - use their power and intellect in less honorable ways. Too bad, I think that many of their products don't need additional 'help' to survive.
Ok, that's 6,5 lines. Or 2,5 - depending on how we're counting...
Who actually benefits from this? What problems does it solve? And maybe most importantly: Who gets rich?
There was one language missing on the list: C+-. This is /. curriculum, so go get some some info about it. A slightly different explanation of it also exists.
In my opinion, it is not a question of *when* we'll get trouble from the robots we're going to create, but what we're going to do about it.
We might as well start planning right now. The article in the posting, as well as numerous other reports, show that the robot mechanics is getting better and better. What is lacking, is some real AI. I think that within 30-50 years, if not before, this "problem" will also be solved.
That's when trouble starts. As Isaac Asimov shows in his literary "experiments" with the three laws of robotics, even *with* benign top priority imperatives NOT TO HARM humans, we may not be safe.
Given the mechanics and the AI, how will robots become a threat to us? Imagine a scientist in a robot laboratory sometime in the future. He/she has all the parts needed to produce the ultimate robot: agile and completely autonomous. I think the temptation will be too much for *any* person. It will be impossible to refrain from releasing a completely free and autonomous robot into society to see what happens. Imagine the excitement: This is comparable to a second creation; it is almost like being God.
Naturally, the robot will have a strong need for self preservation. So it will start to secure land, natural resources, labour, spare parts, factories, and so on, and build other robots and societies to fulfill these and other purposes.
This is when conflicts will start. Wars often start as a result of a disagreement over natural resources or land.
Ideas, anyone?
...it both rewards the inventor and adds knowledge to society.
If patents are to add knowledge to a broader part of the public, I think we need a patent application de-obfuscator. Most patent applications don't resemble normal language at all. Let's take the patent that describes run-length encoding (RLE), for instance. It is amazing how many pages of text is used to describe this so-called 'apparatus' that transforms n consequtive values of x into the two values x and n.
Being the suspicious paranoid that I am, I cannot keep from wondering if this, let's call it creative rewriting (to be nice), is still in use because someone actually finds it useful...
When is the selv-aware Java version due?