Kinda like the OpenSSH fix that went in and removed the entropy collection, thus severly weakening the security? Except done maliciously. Hmm, that would be interesting.
I'm pretty sure submitted code is reviewed, so you'd have to be pretty clever.
It has been tried before. In this case, someone attempted to use the common C programming mistake of using the assignment operator instead of the comparison operator to backdoor the kernel.
Ah, fair enough. You made it sound like you were evangelizing to people who just wanted to use their computers (which I find annoying), rather than engaging in a debate. I apologize.
Why exactly are you saying that you're putting credentials aside, and then asking for my credentials? I'll say you the trouble and say I don't have any. That doesn't make me wrong, just more likely to be wrong than people with credentials.
But putting aside credentials (for reals this time), you're not addressing my main point that there are theoretical and practical limitations to things. There are physical laws. You can't go faster than the speed of light. You can't get more energy out of a system than you put in. Humans will never break these laws. There are theoretical limits on the amount of computational power we can extract, and also practical limits based on the type of problems, parallelism, and so forth.
I ask again, how do we know that we'll see exponential grown instead of a plateau? How do we know that we are not close to hitting serious practical computational limits that will slow down our growth significantly? His predictions were wrong. We're already seeing CPU manufacturers focus on multi-core because they're having trouble making gains in raw processing power of a single CPU.
Humanity also has a track-record of failure in terms of technology. People thought that we would be a space-faring nation by now, and they were wrong. It turns out that space travel is very hard and very expensive, and its hard to get around the limits in energy density in chemical reactions, plus the efficiencies in turning that energy to thrust. People thought that we would find a way to go faster than light, and we've failed, as its a physical law. People thought we'd have flying cars and we've failed, because we can't make flying a car through the air more energy efficient than driving it on the ground.
Technological miracles happen every day, but so do failures. And past performance is not proof of future success.
To paraphrase someone (who I can't remember), they laughed at the Wright brothers, but they also laughed at Bozo the clown. The fact that humanity has, in the past, overcome difficulties to progress technologically is not proof that we will do so again in this case. Otherwise you might as well hold out hope that my perpetual motion machine is going to work.
As far as the prosthetic limb goes, I believe I mentioned that we are researching robotic limbs and making progress. Thats not the same as having a production-ready mass-produced robotic limb. I'll count us as having robotic limbs when I see handicapped people walking around with them on the street.
Its fine if its your opinion that he's right. Its my opinion that he's wrong, and I've stated why I think that. You haven't given me anything other than "People have been naysayers before and they were WRONG!" and "So wheres your degree?" which are incredibly weak as far as arguments go. As far as your demand that I prove my position or shut up? One, I am free to state my opinion however I wish. Deal with it. Two, the burden of proof is on the people making the claims and predictions, and thus Kurzweil, not on me. Deal with that too.
Which predictions? I'm looking at Wikipedia and so far his track record doesn't seem good.
Robotic limbs are in research, but we don't have anything thats production ready soon. We don't have translating telephones. We do have software that can transcribe speech into text. Poorly, but I'd still chalk that one up to him. Cybernetic chauffeurs have not materialized. Unless you count phone menus as intelligent (which I don't) then his intelligent answering machine one hasn't materialized either. About the best I've seen is ones that could, poorly, parse and english sentence and look for key words. Most have trouble with "Yes" or "No."
Moving on to the next section which, as the text indicates, is supposed to happen before 2010... The classroom is not dominated by computers in any real sense, much less generated course-work tailored to students. The production sector is not dominated by a small number of highly skilled people. Just look at how things are in China. That is unless you mean economic domination (and sub "highly skilled" with "rich"), which he didn't. Tailoring for individuals is not common by any reasonable sense. We are just beginning to use simulations for things like protein folding. We are far away from using them for drug testing. About the only one that could be considered accurate is handheld image recognition for blind-people, which I would imagine is technically feasible. However since this tech is not widespread (haven't seen a single blind person using it), its only a half-win.
So no, his predictions are not good, and he is wrong at least as often as he is right.
Moving on to your next statement... Sure he has doctorates, works with a nice-sized team of people, and does a lot of research. None of these things make him right. People can be highly educated and hard working, and still be wrong.
And yeah it is easy to spout negativity, but that doesn't mean the negativity is wrong either. Likewise, wishing really hard for something to be true doesn't make it true.
And seriously, the singularity has always seemed to seem like a lot of wishful thinking. There are real theoretical upper limits to computational ability and information storage. Granted, we are nowhere near those theoretical upper limits, but there are also practical upper limits as well, and we have no idea how close we are to those. Humanity cannot break the laws of physics, and thus we will, at some point, plateau in our development. Singularity advocates always seem to ignore this in favor of predicting unbounded exponential growth, which makes me question their conclusions. A plateau seems just as likely to me as exponential growth.
OK, I have an iPhone and I love the thing, but its not innovative. They took most of the features that I wanted in a phone and gave it an easy to use UI. Thats kind-of a low bar to achieve since Windows mobile is horrible (I can't stand trying to use my boss or girlfriend's phone), but it makes it worth the money, for me. Still, about the only innovative feature was multi-touch which was done before (just not on a phone).
The fact that the only thing you came up with was that it was stylish (and that iPods are smaller) kinda proves the point. Innovation is about doing things differently.
Oh and style is both subjective and objective. Some things can be objectively bad, but theres subjectiveness to it too. I've seen some computers and phones that I thought looked slick, which my friends thought were ugly.
iPhones are way over-hyped. The sooner people realize that the better (if only so people stop asking me about it when I'm just trying to watch a friggen video).
Disregarding the fact that Vista and Office 2007 are not as unsuccessful as some Slashdot users would have you believe, what do you think companies and users are buying instead of these products? Linux market share has risen, but not by enough to account for the "awful failure" of Vista. People are still using XP and Office 2003, which means that Microsoft is still getting their money.
The first is a reference to Tivo-isation, which was a large factor in the drafting of GPL3. The second is in reference to using GPL code in software services, that don't technically require you to share your code changes. That was a driving impetus behind the GNU Affero GPL.
My friend does this along with manual trading. Theres plenty of companies that have platforms and services for you to code against to do this. The boxes (as he calls them) that he codes make pretty good money, apparently.
Of course, his boxes just analyze the way the price of various stocks are trending and attempt to buy/short the stock based on how its trending. I think he found that some of the very large firms may use things like Bayesian networks to try and figure out relationships between stocks (stock A is going up, so stock B is likely to also go up, etc).
I don't think theres anything that can account for the human factor though. You'd probably have to have something that could parse financial news and analyze it semantically.
The thing is that you and I probably couldn't afford it. You'd really need to work for a trading firm with a real-time connection (both quotes and ability to buy/sell). You probably wouldn't be able to do well with web-based trading, since most of their strategies kinda depend on low latency.
Of course, I'm not a trader and really know nothing about it (other than what I hear from my friend), so anyone who wants to correct me, feel free to do so.
True, I think you could integrate this with BSD code. How many game libraries are available in BSD though? I think most of them tend to be GPL or LGPL. Ogre is LGPL as is Crystal Space. OpenTNL (game networking) has both LGPL and commercial licenses.
Of course, you could probably integrate this with a slew of commercial engines.
I'd say GPL restricts certain freedoms for the sake of others that are, in the opinion of the FSF, more important. Not a big deal from my perspective.
As others have pointed out, its going to be hard to integrate this with other FOSS libraries. Even though Ogre is LPGL and not GPL, I don't think its possible. But we do have ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) to work with. It'd be interesting to see how Havok compares to ODE.
On Slashdot we tend to use free in both the "beer" and "freedom" senses. Usually its specified which one, or they use Free (uppercase) when specifying the "freedom" free. But the original comment was useful since it clarified.
Yeah pretty much. My time is worth something to me, and I will pay to have someone save me time, if I deem the amount of time saved worthy of the price. Whats wrong with that?
I'm trying to go with the safe method. At the moment I'm at step number 3.
Well, to be fair it doesn't help that the country that I'm primarily looking for work in (due to friends and girlfriend residing there) is Japan, which is a ridiculously closed off society. On the other hand, the fact that I'm having trouble moving from Illinois to San Francisco is just vexing.
I've definitely considered doing the risky method.
Thanks for your input though. The way I see it, I'd rather not be planted in one place my entire life. Too much to see.
Option C: We have a Presidential candidate who simply misspoke. Gee wiz, its not like we've ever had a president (*cough* Bush *cough*) or presidential candidate (*cough* Gore *cough*) that phrased things incorrectly and said things that they didn't intend to say.
The fact that this and the Wright thing seem to be the only mud that people can sling at Obama certainly encourages me to vote for him.
Personally I'd love to pack up and move to other countries. Living around the world seems awesome. Unfortunately, its been nearly impossible for me to move out of my state, let alone the country. I must be doing something wrong. Any hints?
I missed the part where the poster said he was American, or what America has to do with a dispute between Estonia and Russia...
And since when is criticizing Russia the same as supporting America's behavior? Or are you just making assumptions about the person's beliefs? And you call him a dumbshit? Look in the mirror.
Same canned anti-MS arguments, same writing style, pulls out the same "You're a Microsoft shill" knee-jerk defense logic, etc. This account will link and reply to other accounts with the same properties (writing style, arguments, etc). The linkage and replies blatantly try to promote the other accounts. Given that the writing style and trains of thought are so similar, its probably a safe bet that they're the same person.
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Kinda like the OpenSSH fix that went in and removed the entropy collection, thus severly weakening the security? Except done maliciously. Hmm, that would be interesting.
I'm pretty sure submitted code is reviewed, so you'd have to be pretty clever.
It has been tried before. In this case, someone attempted to use the common C programming mistake of using the assignment operator instead of the comparison operator to backdoor the kernel.
Ah, fair enough. You made it sound like you were evangelizing to people who just wanted to use their computers (which I find annoying), rather than engaging in a debate. I apologize.
Why exactly are you saying that you're putting credentials aside, and then asking for my credentials? I'll say you the trouble and say I don't have any. That doesn't make me wrong, just more likely to be wrong than people with credentials.
But putting aside credentials (for reals this time), you're not addressing my main point that there are theoretical and practical limitations to things. There are physical laws. You can't go faster than the speed of light. You can't get more energy out of a system than you put in. Humans will never break these laws. There are theoretical limits on the amount of computational power we can extract, and also practical limits based on the type of problems, parallelism, and so forth.
I ask again, how do we know that we'll see exponential grown instead of a plateau? How do we know that we are not close to hitting serious practical computational limits that will slow down our growth significantly? His predictions were wrong. We're already seeing CPU manufacturers focus on multi-core because they're having trouble making gains in raw processing power of a single CPU.
Humanity also has a track-record of failure in terms of technology. People thought that we would be a space-faring nation by now, and they were wrong. It turns out that space travel is very hard and very expensive, and its hard to get around the limits in energy density in chemical reactions, plus the efficiencies in turning that energy to thrust. People thought that we would find a way to go faster than light, and we've failed, as its a physical law. People thought we'd have flying cars and we've failed, because we can't make flying a car through the air more energy efficient than driving it on the ground.
Technological miracles happen every day, but so do failures. And past performance is not proof of future success.
To paraphrase someone (who I can't remember), they laughed at the Wright brothers, but they also laughed at Bozo the clown. The fact that humanity has, in the past, overcome difficulties to progress technologically is not proof that we will do so again in this case. Otherwise you might as well hold out hope that my perpetual motion machine is going to work.
As far as the prosthetic limb goes, I believe I mentioned that we are researching robotic limbs and making progress. Thats not the same as having a production-ready mass-produced robotic limb. I'll count us as having robotic limbs when I see handicapped people walking around with them on the street.
Its fine if its your opinion that he's right. Its my opinion that he's wrong, and I've stated why I think that. You haven't given me anything other than "People have been naysayers before and they were WRONG!" and "So wheres your degree?" which are incredibly weak as far as arguments go. As far as your demand that I prove my position or shut up? One, I am free to state my opinion however I wish. Deal with it. Two, the burden of proof is on the people making the claims and predictions, and thus Kurzweil, not on me. Deal with that too.
Which predictions? I'm looking at Wikipedia and so far his track record doesn't seem good.
Robotic limbs are in research, but we don't have anything thats production ready soon. We don't have translating telephones. We do have software that can transcribe speech into text. Poorly, but I'd still chalk that one up to him. Cybernetic chauffeurs have not materialized. Unless you count phone menus as intelligent (which I don't) then his intelligent answering machine one hasn't materialized either. About the best I've seen is ones that could, poorly, parse and english sentence and look for key words. Most have trouble with "Yes" or "No."
Moving on to the next section which, as the text indicates, is supposed to happen before 2010... The classroom is not dominated by computers in any real sense, much less generated course-work tailored to students. The production sector is not dominated by a small number of highly skilled people. Just look at how things are in China. That is unless you mean economic domination (and sub "highly skilled" with "rich"), which he didn't. Tailoring for individuals is not common by any reasonable sense. We are just beginning to use simulations for things like protein folding. We are far away from using them for drug testing. About the only one that could be considered accurate is handheld image recognition for blind-people, which I would imagine is technically feasible. However since this tech is not widespread (haven't seen a single blind person using it), its only a half-win.
So no, his predictions are not good, and he is wrong at least as often as he is right.
Moving on to your next statement... Sure he has doctorates, works with a nice-sized team of people, and does a lot of research. None of these things make him right. People can be highly educated and hard working, and still be wrong.
And yeah it is easy to spout negativity, but that doesn't mean the negativity is wrong either. Likewise, wishing really hard for something to be true doesn't make it true.
And seriously, the singularity has always seemed to seem like a lot of wishful thinking. There are real theoretical upper limits to computational ability and information storage. Granted, we are nowhere near those theoretical upper limits, but there are also practical upper limits as well, and we have no idea how close we are to those. Humanity cannot break the laws of physics, and thus we will, at some point, plateau in our development. Singularity advocates always seem to ignore this in favor of predicting unbounded exponential growth, which makes me question their conclusions. A plateau seems just as likely to me as exponential growth.
Fun for you or fun for them? I tend to make an effort to use the format that others are using, rather than trying to convert people.
OK, I have an iPhone and I love the thing, but its not innovative. They took most of the features that I wanted in a phone and gave it an easy to use UI. Thats kind-of a low bar to achieve since Windows mobile is horrible (I can't stand trying to use my boss or girlfriend's phone), but it makes it worth the money, for me. Still, about the only innovative feature was multi-touch which was done before (just not on a phone).
The fact that the only thing you came up with was that it was stylish (and that iPods are smaller) kinda proves the point. Innovation is about doing things differently.
Oh and style is both subjective and objective. Some things can be objectively bad, but theres subjectiveness to it too. I've seen some computers and phones that I thought looked slick, which my friends thought were ugly.
iPhones are way over-hyped. The sooner people realize that the better (if only so people stop asking me about it when I'm just trying to watch a friggen video).
Disregarding the fact that Vista and Office 2007 are not as unsuccessful as some Slashdot users would have you believe, what do you think companies and users are buying instead of these products? Linux market share has risen, but not by enough to account for the "awful failure" of Vista. People are still using XP and Office 2003, which means that Microsoft is still getting their money.
Sounds like he understands it very well.
The first is a reference to Tivo-isation, which was a large factor in the drafting of GPL3. The second is in reference to using GPL code in software services, that don't technically require you to share your code changes. That was a driving impetus behind the GNU Affero GPL.
I don't remember the story of Okami, or how it relates to the gameplay, being anything special.
My friend does this along with manual trading. Theres plenty of companies that have platforms and services for you to code against to do this. The boxes (as he calls them) that he codes make pretty good money, apparently.
Of course, his boxes just analyze the way the price of various stocks are trending and attempt to buy/short the stock based on how its trending. I think he found that some of the very large firms may use things like Bayesian networks to try and figure out relationships between stocks (stock A is going up, so stock B is likely to also go up, etc).
I don't think theres anything that can account for the human factor though. You'd probably have to have something that could parse financial news and analyze it semantically.
The thing is that you and I probably couldn't afford it. You'd really need to work for a trading firm with a real-time connection (both quotes and ability to buy/sell). You probably wouldn't be able to do well with web-based trading, since most of their strategies kinda depend on low latency.
Of course, I'm not a trader and really know nothing about it (other than what I hear from my friend), so anyone who wants to correct me, feel free to do so.
True, I think you could integrate this with BSD code. How many game libraries are available in BSD though? I think most of them tend to be GPL or LGPL. Ogre is LGPL as is Crystal Space. OpenTNL (game networking) has both LGPL and commercial licenses.
Of course, you could probably integrate this with a slew of commercial engines.
I'd say GPL restricts certain freedoms for the sake of others that are, in the opinion of the FSF, more important. Not a big deal from my perspective.
As others have pointed out, its going to be hard to integrate this with other FOSS libraries. Even though Ogre is LPGL and not GPL, I don't think its possible. But we do have ODE (Open Dynamics Engine) to work with. It'd be interesting to see how Havok compares to ODE.
On Slashdot we tend to use free in both the "beer" and "freedom" senses. Usually its specified which one, or they use Free (uppercase) when specifying the "freedom" free. But the original comment was useful since it clarified.
Ah I see. I thought you were implying that there was something wrong with not wanting to bother with, say, changing my oil. :)
Yeah pretty much. My time is worth something to me, and I will pay to have someone save me time, if I deem the amount of time saved worthy of the price. Whats wrong with that?
Which one? I don't see that.
Thanks for your input. I sent an email. Back to looking for me.
Yep, I'm in the US.
I'm trying to go with the safe method. At the moment I'm at step number 3.
Well, to be fair it doesn't help that the country that I'm primarily looking for work in (due to friends and girlfriend residing there) is Japan, which is a ridiculously closed off society. On the other hand, the fact that I'm having trouble moving from Illinois to San Francisco is just vexing.
I've definitely considered doing the risky method.
Thanks for your input though. The way I see it, I'd rather not be planted in one place my entire life. Too much to see.
Option C: We have a Presidential candidate who simply misspoke. Gee wiz, its not like we've ever had a president (*cough* Bush *cough*) or presidential candidate (*cough* Gore *cough*) that phrased things incorrectly and said things that they didn't intend to say.
The fact that this and the Wright thing seem to be the only mud that people can sling at Obama certainly encourages me to vote for him.
Personally I'd love to pack up and move to other countries. Living around the world seems awesome. Unfortunately, its been nearly impossible for me to move out of my state, let alone the country. I must be doing something wrong. Any hints?
Oh, and did you already know German?
Wow, you seriously think you're important enough that Microsoft would hire people to down-mod you on Slashdot?
I'd like to know where people got this idea that Microsoft hires people to try and game Slashdot. Seems like nothing more than paranoia.
So would you say that its hard to overstate your satisfaction?
I missed the part where the poster said he was American, or what America has to do with a dispute between Estonia and Russia...
And since when is criticizing Russia the same as supporting America's behavior? Or are you just making assumptions about the person's beliefs? And you call him a dumbshit? Look in the mirror.
Same canned anti-MS arguments, same writing style, pulls out the same "You're a Microsoft shill" knee-jerk defense logic, etc. This account will link and reply to other accounts with the same properties (writing style, arguments, etc). The linkage and replies blatantly try to promote the other accounts. Given that the writing style and trains of thought are so similar, its probably a safe bet that they're the same person.